513: Meet The Man Who Makes Millions Teaching Millennials About Money With Bobby Hoyt

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. Now I’ve been getting a number of questions about whether blogging is a viable business today. And instead of just talking about my own blog over at mywifecouldherjob.com and telling you how well it’s doing, I figured I would invite some of the other bloggers in my mastermind group to share their story. So today I have my friend Bobby Hoyt, who is the founder of Millennial Money Man.

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and the man is killing it online. So is blogging still a viable business model? Well, you’ll find out in this episode. But before we begin, I want to let you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high level BS, is a curriculum based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies

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specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now, I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year,

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We also offer an exclusive Master My experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th. And right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 50 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that does not require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still access my free bonus workshop,

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on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. So go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

02:18
Welcome to the My Wife Quater job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have my good friend and mastermind buddy Bobby Hoyt on the show. Now, Bobby is the founder of Millennial Money Man, where he teaches millennials how to make and save more money. His blog has been featured in Lifehacker, Forbes, MarketWatch, CNBC, US News, Business Insider, countless other publications. Now, a couple of listeners have recently emailed me asking me whether blogging is still a viable business model.

02:47
So instead of just saying yes, I invited Bobby to come on the pod because the man is killing it online. And with that, welcome to show how you doing. Hey man, I’m good. good, man. That’s a, that is a tough question to start out with. Um, I think the answer is yes. Kind of, I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not super bullish on like just starting a blog and that being all that you have anymore. Like I don’t even think that that’s what really people do anymore. I think a blog is just part of your marketing strategy.

03:16
And I think, I mean, we still make really good money with it. I do have some concerns about AI. I’m sure we’ll talk about that. Like, yeah, I have some concerns about that. I’ve just got thoughts about like, maybe how people are consuming content. Like it’s really, it has shifted away from, from blogging quite a bit to video. So I don’t think it’s dead per se, but I don’t feel the same way I felt about it in 2015 when I started when it was like you were a blogger. Now it’s just kind of like part of our marketing strategy.

03:45
I agree. Yeah. Hey, so Bobby, it was, great seeing it. FinCon. I to say a couple of days ago. It was like last week. I don’t know. It feels like it feels like I’ve had, it’s funny. I was on vacation and then we went straight to FinCon and actually like we, brought the team, the Millennium Money Man team. Yeah. We brought all the employees out. Like we did like a planning thing too. So it was like a very hectic week. So I don’t remember how many days ago it was, you know, what’s funny though. And I was telling you this before we hit the record button is that even though we’re in the same mastermind,

04:14
I actually don’t even really know your story. Yeah, yeah, we are what motivated you to start millennial money, man. And I can never pronounce or spell it. I apologize. But yeah, how did you get started with it with the blog first, right? Yeah, so basically, for me, I was a high school band director. And that’s what I thought I was going to do the whole time I was in high school and college and everything. And I was just I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. But I was good at music. And I liked band for whatever reason.

04:44
And so I went into music education, got my degree, had about $40,000 student loan debt. And then I got my first job and like maybe within the first three weeks, I realized like, hate this job. Like I was, I don’t know what it was. I mean, it just, felt trapped like instantly. And it’s probably a lot of entrepreneurs feel that way, but like, um, I just knew like, I can’t do this when I’m 50 years old, like I cannot be a teacher. And so, um,

05:12
really actually the first thing I was going to do started a swimming pool company. I had a friend, a family friend that owned a swimming pool company. And so in the summers for after my first and second year of teaching, I would actually go and like work on pool equipment and like out in the sun, you know, I live in Houston, so it’s like freaking hot here. But that’s, you know, I was trying to figure out like, is this a good business to, to maybe acquire someday or to start my own? And I didn’t, I kind of, there’s a lot of physical labor. was like a lot of manual labor.

05:40
Yeah. And I, but you can make really good money doing it. You could certainly become a millionaire doing that. And, uh, but I just had a conversation with my wife who at the time was my fiance. And I was just like, I think I want to do this. And she basically asked me like, not to like, please don’t do manual labor. Cause her parents did a lot of manual labor growing up. And she was like, it’s, it’s going to have like these really negative consequences on you and you get older, which is true. Like you have surgeries and stuff like that. Like it’s really, you know, it’s not good to do that to your body. So then I kind of went back to the drawing board and,

06:09
I started writing about at the same time I was paying off my student loans and actually ended up paying off my student loans, I think in 18 months, something like that. We did a lot of things like we rented a room from her parents and you know, was very, so yeah, it was really just like, I just decided, you know, I was gonna I paid off my student loans, we kept the expenses low. And really what happened was I just got really excited about money. For some reason, nobody had ever talked about money ever in my entire life, like my parents didn’t talk to me about money. No, I, know, but I had a

06:39
the same guy that on the swimming pool company, he was like, Hey, if you’re not going to start a pool business, like you at least need to like pay off your student loans, like you need to be really aggressive with that and then start saving. And so I started writing about it on medium, just like my story of like how I paid off debt. And then I started doing a little bit of a deep dive. And I was like, Oh, wait, you can actually make money just like writing stuff. Like I had no idea. I found budgets are sexy.com, which actually had Jay money on my podcast the other day. And Aaron, let’s see it again, by the way.

07:09
Yeah, he does. Yeah, he he bought it back. He required it from Motley Fool. And we had a long conversation about that. But yeah, so I just you know, I was like, Oh, these people are making money online. And so I, I created a website, I found the domain name, linear money, man. And I actually made three, I made $3. And then I quit my job. And I don’t think that that’s something I could, like, I was so young, and our expenses were so low. And like, I was so fed up. But I was just like,

07:37
I think I can do this. And so I just, I just went in, you know, and I was like, I’m my job. And from there, I had to like figure out how to actually make money. That’s what, that’s what was the worst. What I, when people say they want to start a blog, it’s like, takes so long to make money. How long did it take you? I don’t think I was making from the blog itself. It probably took me like well over a year and a half to make like what would be maybe

08:04
full time maybe, but I had to start, I started a digital marketing agency to basically like make things work while I was trying to grow the blog. And that’s where I started making money. And so I grew like a small, like local SEO agency. Uh, and then eventually the blog got featured on CNBC and that’s when things kind of started to take off a little bit. Um, and then you fast forward today and it’s like, we’ve, we’re going to have six full-time employees, I think in January, uh, we’re probably going to rebrand the site at some.

08:32
know, at some point, because millennial is hard to spell, hard to say. So yeah, we’re just now we’re just growing more of a like a media company than just a blog. I think it took me two years to make anything meaningful. And I think it took me three years to make six figures. I have all the numbers down for historical purposes. But yeah, you’re right. It does take a long time. Yeah, it’s just slow. And I think it’s it’s one of those things like, if you started a blog now, like

09:00
You know, the competition thing doesn’t really like there’s always competition in every business that you’re going to start. So like that part when people talk about like it’s over saturated or whatever, like doesn’t matter what you do. Like if I had started the pool company, I would have had like 10 competitors in the local area. right, that’s not the issue. But I think that with how Google is changing, and it’s like, I actually was running ads, like that’s, that’s how I grew my audience in the in like the very early days Facebook ads. But they were so cheap, I was spending like a penny, it was like a penny.

09:28
per click, you know, was like, you could get 1000s and 1000s of views for not very much money. you? Yeah, yeah, it’s way more expensive. And you can arbitrage it, like you could put ads on your your landing pages, or you could like have some affiliate offers and maybe not like make a ton of money, but at least break even and grow your audience. So that’s what I did initially. Now, I think it’s like everything so I think actually starting a YouTube channel would probably make more sense for somebody who just starting a blog.

09:56
And that’s our company really has been shifting. I just hired a new head of content that specializes in YouTube and has grown some pretty big channels. And so we’re kind of shifting as a company over to video. And then the blog part of it is going to be, you know, hopefully a secondary source of traffic for us over time. Can we talk about why that’s the case? Do you think it’s because of AI and you mentioned Google, what about Google has changed the way you feel? I think Google kind of sucks. Like, I don’t know, like

10:25
just try to use Google. Like, I don’t know. And it’s what I see all the time. It’s like, we have all these keywords that we rank number one for and are top three and that they drive great traffic. But then like, then you go and you see what Google’s doing and like they’re testing out their, their own features, you know, where it’s like, instead of you being number one else, and they’ve got their own tool that’s number one, and they’re just like, kind of aggregating stuff at the top, you know, and that’s not even the AI stuff. That’s just them. I don’t know. It’s like, it’s like, I just don’t trust that they’re going, I don’t think that they have like the publishers.

10:55
best interest in mind. Um, and I’ve always, what I don’t like with Google too is just, I don’t like the idea of like my business could take a really bad turn at any time based on something that I have no control over. like an algorithm change, or if they decide to implement Bard, um, their AI stuff, like if they decide to really heavily implement that and then all the organic search, like I just don’t like that. Like that freaks me out, especially when you have employees and stuff and you’re like trying to think of like, you know, people’s families and protecting the company and stuff like that. I just feel like,

11:25
I just feel like Google as a product isn’t as good as it used to be. if you look at a lot of results, they’re just not as good as they used to be. There’s a lot of trash content out there. Um, and I just, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s going to just go away, but I’m just not sure that they’re gonna, I think paid is going to become even more important. I think it’s going to be like AI with paid and then some search results. I just don’t think it’s going to be that great. But YouTube on the other hand, isn’t, I don’t think AI impacts YouTube as much right now.

11:52
But I also think it’s just a better product. I think that people like video, it’s easier. We sell courses. And when you sell courses, think video is a much more powerful way to sell than just email copy or especially blog posts. Like it’s very hard to sell courses from just cold traffic that comes in from Google, even if it’s like high search intent. YouTube is different though, because it’s like the trust is there. They can see your face. They know that you’re a person, right? So that’s another reason why we’re kind of shifting to YouTube.

12:22
I mean, some would argue that YouTube has similar problems. I mean, it’s owned by Google and algorithm change has happened many times over the course of YouTube as well. And there’s a bunch of faceless YouTube video crap being pumped out there too. But you’re right. It’s less so than, in the written world. Yeah. think it’s just less bad. Like I think it maybe gets, I don’t know. I think with all the stuff, feel like it just, one of the things that’s interesting, and this was maybe every business, but like, I think that it, things change so much.

12:51
And I, I’ve been doing this for eight years now, eight, nine years. And it’s like, I’ve never been able to feel like we just have a strategy that’s in place and it just works all the time. It’s like everything it’s like, you’re like, everything’s always changing. Like you’re always having to kind of like figure out what the next move is. And, and I feel like, I dunno, I feel like that is if we can build out more video content and, I dunno, I think it’s just a little bit safer that, I agree with you.

13:20
I’m just curious, though. Does the blog generate you more leads or just video? The blog for sure. The blog by far. Like and that’s I mean, that’s where we will be really close to about 2 million in revenue this year. And that’s like almost all from the website. So it’s kind of one of those things. It’s like we make great money from it. But like, I still don’t trust it. And so that’s why we’re kind of diversifying. And we’re making a lot of diversification moves like into video for sure. But we’re also going to do things like a

13:49
we’re going to acquire a bookkeeping firm. That’s one of our goals. And that’s because we have a bookkeeping program that we sell and we feel like it’s a good, it’s good practice to actually own the thing that you’re, you know, that you’re teaching other people. Like we have a great instructor for that program. But if we also on like a boutique bookkeeping firm, then we can stay up to date on everything that’s happening in the industry and we can give it, make it a testing ground for our students. And

14:15
just feels like a good play. But also it’s it’s revenue that’s completely detached from Google or YouTube or anything online, really. I mean, it’s it’s a it’s a service based business, right? So we don’t want the biggest one in the world. But we want something that’s just a good diversification play for protecting salaries and all that kind of stuff. Plus, it’s sticky. Like once you have a bookkeeper, they tend to stick with you forever. So with the with the bookkeeping stuff, when I was talking to my accountant about it, and we were we were like, Okay, we’re to create this this program. It was like,

14:43
the LTV on these customers, like they just stay forever, you know, and it’s like, it is hard to find. went through several bookkeepers before I found a good one. And once you find a good one, it’s like, you don’t really want to mess with it. Like you just kind of let it go. They just do their thing and it’s a super valuable service. And I think it’s one that isn’t AI has already come to bookkeeping, which was a really interesting piece about that. Like, you know, quick books and all of them, like they, they use AI, but it’s a lot.

15:10
less likely that AI is going to completely replace bookkeeping. Right. Because I think you there’s so many different tax strategies, there’s so many different like, kind of nuances to tax and bookkeeping that I think would be difficult to replace having like human review, you know, so it just feels like a really good, you know, diversification diversification play for us. And, and I think it just really supports what we’re doing from a program standpoint, too. I forgot to ask you this in the beginning. How does millennial money man actually make money?

15:40
So we, we sell, we sell courses. So we have a proofreading course called proofreading launchpad. have a bookkeeping course called brilliant bookkeeper. We have a freelance writing course called big money writer. And we have two or three more courses. I’m not going to say the names of them yet, but we have two or three more coming out next year. And then we also have affiliate revenue, like our, by far our, the most of our revenue comes from affiliate revenue. And that’s just from, you know, sending leads to different companies, right? Like we’re, pretty big in the driving space. We’re,

16:09
doing, we’re starting to grow in the survey space too. So yeah, we’re just, you know, we sling leads out, you know, and then we, we don’t do a lot of sponsored stuff in terms of like sponsored content, because I don’t think that we have enough audience to like command, like really big, like enough to make it worth it, because most of our traffic is SEO. And like, a lot of times, like, that’s kind of hard to sell as a sponsored thing. But outside of that, we’re gonna have, we have a high ticket program that’s coming out next year as well. It’s an accounting program.

16:39
for for accounting professionals that want to scale to six figures and beyond. And we’ve got just a whole bunch of stuff. I got this whiteboard here with like the entire business plan, then there’s like a ton of crap on it. But it’s like, you know, we’re just we’re just trying to grow a lot of programs that can help people and try to make like a real impact. I know that sounds a little sappy, but like I just some there’s something like kind of soulless, I think sometimes about affiliate revenue, and affiliate marketing, where you’re sending people to just

17:08
you know, somebody else’s marketing funnel. And I think you can help people for sure. But it’s like, are you really like making a big difference in the world? And I don’t, I don’t know all the time. I don’t think so, depending on the product. But so that’s kind of part of the goal to you mentioned driving programs. Were we talking like Uber and Lyft? Yeah, yeah, just all the driving, all the driving programs. I mean, we’ve, it’s one of those things that I think a lot of people are interested in making money that way. It’s not the best way to make money in the world, like you’re not going to get rich doing it. But

17:37
it does help people in a pinch. And I think that it’s a lot of people’s, the feedback that we get from everybody that’s on our list and everything is like, they enjoy it. It might not be like, not like a second rich, but like they seem to enjoy it.

17:50
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18:19
just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

18:31
You know, one thing, and I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for over a decade now too. One thing I don’t like about it, even though it’s, pretty easy is like I spent all this time ranking a post and search and then they changed their terms. Like, Oh, by the way, we stopped the lifetime payout or by the way, we’re canceling our affiliate program. That always makes me nervous. hate that. And that’s, that’s why we diversified the courses so much. Like that’s why we’re leaning so heavily into it. just, it’s like, I don’t want my revenue to.

19:00
to go away because there’s somebody had a meeting in some place at some time decided to cut their marketing budget. And then I have no, I, and like, that’s, that is frustrating about affiliate marketing too. Like it doesn’t happen in every program, but when, when they get cut, it’s like instant. It’s like, you spend all this time building out these funnels and all this time trying to work with the affiliate to like optimize things and, you have your team working on it you’re working on it. And then you just get an email that’s like, Hey, sorry, this is a, they decided the program’s over. So please remove all your links tomorrow.

19:28
or whatever, know, exactly. And so like, for me, it was like, I could either really diversify from an affiliate standpoint. Or I could diversify to something that we sell in house, like we control our own product, we sell our products. And we just use Google for the traffic, you know, and I think that feels like a safer, better business model to me, or just at least feels like one that freaks me out less, you know, I can sleep at night. you named off a whole bunch of courses.

19:57
I have two and and it’s actually a lot of work just maintaining to what is your philosophy is your philosophy you like find an instructor that just handles that course and they get a cut of it. Like, yeah. Yeah, so we typically we have a couple of different ways that we have done this. The instructor of our proofreading course, her name is Ariel Gardner. She’s actually a full time employee. So we give our employees the opportunity to create programs if they have something they like have expertise in.

20:27
And we do structure it like a royalty agreement with them. And it is also like if they’re an employee, like they get the benefit of like we have profit sharing and we have, you know, equity pathways for some of our employees. So like, they create the program, they kind of manage it as part of becomes part of their job responsibility to like, you know, make sure the content is up to date and be kind of the coach for the community. And then in turn, like, you know, we share revenue back with them and they kind of have the ability to make more money. So

20:54
The other setup that we do is actually like for our brilliant bookkeeper course, we brought in, we interviewed a bunch of different bookkeepers and like we knew we were creating this program, but we wanted to have somebody that actually owned a bookkeeping firm as the instructor. so we brought her name is Kristin Metter, but she came in, she basically like, she interviewed really well. She was awesome. She’s great on camera. She had really, really good ideas for the program. So she became the instructor and then we do have like a royalty agreement with her.

21:22
we’re working we’re working on trying to get her full time as well. So we’ll see what happens with that. But but yeah, it’s basically just finding experts and people that align with the team. And I didn’t want to have something where I was the instructor of every program that we do. Just it’s just not, you know, I can’t do that. I’m not an expert in that many things. But yeah, it’s actually worked really, really well like that. I was it was very experimental thing that we were doing. But now, it’s just worked so well. It’s like, okay, we’re just going to continue to do this model.

21:52
Cool. No, I like that. I like that. It’s the only way to really make it manageable. Yeah. Yeah. So you got the courses, you got affiliate revenue, and I’d imagine you get people to sign up for the classes through email, right? Yeah. Yeah. Primarily. We’re actually rolling out new funnels right now. But primarily, like we have people coming in from search. We also are running paid as well. So Google and Facebook. And we’re it’s just we do like evergreen webinars.

22:21
every evergreen webinar funnels. And so people sign up for time as typically pre recorded, although we’ve done some live webinars as well. I think you do live webinars. I do live. Yeah, can we talk about the automated ones? Yeah. How do they perform compared to the live ones? I don’t think that they’re gonna. So we don’t. We don’t do it at the same scale that you do. I think you’re going to get a much higher conversion rate on a live than you would on the evergreen. But our kind of ideology is like,

22:50
we’ll take a lower conversion rate across the funnel with that if it makes it to where we don’t have to like do the live, like do it live all the time. But we’re, you know, we’re not even really that interested in this is gonna sound a little crazy. But we’re not even interested on making money on the front end with the programs, we have coaching communities on the back end. So that’s where it’s like, if if it costs us, you know, four or $500, if we’re running paid, if it costs us like four or 500 to make a sale for four or 500, we’re totally good with that. Like we love breaking because then you can scale them up.

23:20
Um, and I just think like it’s, don’t think it’s realistic these days to sell low ticket products and expect that they’re going to be very profitable on the front end with the, with how ad costs are, um, and how much, how much you have to do in terms of ads. Like people don’t just buy stuff. Like everybody’s wise to webinars now. Like that’s like we’ve seen webinars, especially the evergreen stuff. We’ve seen that conversion rate pretty steadily drop over the last five years. When I first started selling courses in 2018.

23:48
it was so easy to sell courses. It was like the easiest thing ever. But you know, the consumers, get they get kind of wise and things they know they sign up for a webinar and they’re going to get pitched. And so what we’ve done is we’re taking a much more transparent approach to all of that. We’re redoing all of our evergreen webinar, webinar funnels to basically say like at the beginning of the webinar, like you’re going to get pitched like we have a product we sell things we’re going to try to sell you something. But we’re also going to try to give you as much value as we possibly can up front. And then if you don’t buy cool, but you know, hopefully you learn something and then we

24:17
you know, do a lot of follow up as well. But yeah, so I think it’s it’s not the most efficient funnel. But it’s, I feel like it’s more scalable for us as we move forward. And it just like you talked about, like manpower and like, what do want my employees doing? Like, I don’t want them doing lives all the time. Just because I think that if we can automate it, actually, I mean, if you’re breaking even from the ad costs, and that’s just like free email subs, essentially, right? Yeah, it’s free leads, it’s free customers. And like we’ve seen

24:47
pretty often, like, in our back end data, like, customers buy more than one product from you. Like if you build if you get them into a program, and they buy a really great product, they might go like, you know, maybe proofreading is not right for me, but they might go and buy the bookkeeping course instead, right? Like we see that kind of cross pollination. And so and then eventually, like we want our customers to go and buy our high ticket programs. And we want them to go and go to our paid mastermind events. And then eventually, we’re gonna have a conference that we do. So you know, we’re we’re fine, like,

25:16
getting customers for free is a is a good thing. You know, and that’s, that’s kind of our thought. is the price point on the auto webinar? So we do either depends on the program, we either do 497 or 597 right now. Okay, although we are going to experiment with like, probably more payment plans or lower prices, like I don’t, we’re not officially in a recession. But like, I think that we are definitely in one. And I think that it’s

25:43
you talk to people, you know, our web developer, he’s, he’s actually going to be an employee with us, he’s coming on, but he, the company that he’s leaving, he was talking about, like, their travel budgets for the year, like, there’s, starting to tell employees, like, hey, we’re, you know, we’re not going to travel as much next year, like the economy is tightening. when you start to see the corporations do those things, it’s like, okay, we’re gonna have some headwinds, I think going into 2024. It’s just a matter of like, how bad, you know, and so I think that it’s going to be hard for people to stomach a six $700

26:13
program, you know, and I just, I don’t know that though. So we’ll kind of figure it out. But there’s also a lot of different payment options now. And, you know, whether that’s actually a good thing for what you sell, because it sounds like a lot of what you sell helps people make money in a specific discipline, right? Yeah, yeah. So why is that? What do you feel like that’s not good? No, it’s good. It’s better, right? Okay, okay. Okay. So I don’t know if being there’ll be as price sensitive.

26:41
It depends. mean, it definitely depends on the program. We see the people that my in my other business laptop empires. I didn’t even talk about that. I own another company called laptop empires. We teach people how to run Facebook ads for local businesses. That was the first course that I ever, ever did. It’s like the buyers for different disciplines are much different. Like a proofreading buyer is probably somebody that doesn’t want to spend as much money. Whereas like the bookkeeping course, we feel like we command higher prices for it. You get a lot of professionals that come in that people

27:08
people that already have a bookkeeping firm or accountants that want to add bookkeeping as a service. And then with the Facebook stuff, like we get a lot of like existing agency owners that want to learn how to do local ads instead of ecom ads, like they want to add that to their skill set. like, it just kind of depends on what the discipline is. But you know, some things we feel like that the bookkeeping one probably has the highest upside potential for us. Because, know, if you have, especially if we have a high ticket program for accountant, accounting and tax professionals, like they can afford

27:38
programs. Like that’s, that’s not something that, you know, three or $400 would be like nothing to a lot of those people. So it’s just one of those things like, it’s all different, but we, we don’t really judge it based on like, I don’t know, which, which course makes the most money. It’s like, we just want to put things out there that we believe in and, you know, help people really, I the book kicking course is kind of like real estate, right? It never goes out of style. Whereas Facebook ads, who know, I mean, there’s a big disruption.

28:06
not too long. Shockingly though, Facebook ads have been relatively stable. It’s been an interesting thing with Facebook. So we put that course out in 2018, the Facebook site also course, and it crushed. did $136,000 in our first weekend as a company. And we got to seven figures in 14 months. And that it was like the easiest course to sell ever because Facebook was popular. Like there was a time where people didn’t hate Facebook. That was like 2017, 2018. And then

28:35
Facebook went through all of their just, you know, everybody started figuring out the privacy stuff and like they just were under a lot of scrutiny and congregate, know, the congressional sessions with Zuckerberg and he looked like a robot and a weirdo. Um, and so what we found is like, there was a dip in popularity of that program, but then they switched to meta and that is dumb as it sounds like them just changing their name to meta has made a huge difference in terms of like trust and like, you don’t hear about them in the news anymore. Like that was a, that was a very like smart play.

29:05
to just completely rebrand the company and it worked. Interesting. Yeah. So let’s switch gears again and talk about that first question that I asked you and AI and how it’s affecting the way you do things. One, are you using AI for your content creation? And two, how do think it’s going to affect just the entire landscape of what you do?

29:32
I don’t know, to be honest with you. mean, in terms of are we using it? We use it very sparingly. We don’t have like all of our content team spitting out AI. Actually, we went to, I don’t know if you went to the session of FinCon, but one of them, were just saying like, they’re generating, they said the strategy right now is like generate tons and tons and tons of content with AI and then just like upload it all to your website at once. you know, Google’s come out and said that they don’t want AI, but then they’ve kind of relaxed the thoughts on it. Our thing is like,

30:02
What we’ve been doing has worked for a long time where we have a very like personal sounding, like when you read our articles, they’re not like boilerplate stuff. Like it sounds like it’s conversational tone basically. And that’s worked extremely well for us. So we’re kind of like, why change something when it’s still working? And sure we could put out more articles, but I’ve also seen this thing that happens with blogs where they start, they go, okay, we rank really well for this thing and we’re making money in this vertical. So let’s just expand.

30:28
like crazy. Like, let’s just put every vertical and like talk, you know, like we’ll talk about everything and make all this money and then their site tanks because they’ve ultimately like Google is like, what the hell is this site? Like we don’t even know what this is anymore. And so we’ve intentionally kept it very narrowly focused in a couple of like we’re a make money site and make money brand. yeah, we’ve, we’ve intentionally kept it really focused and, we’re trying to stay very disciplined with that. And that’s why we’re expanding to like YouTube and other platforms as well. And we’re just going to kind of keep what we have with the blog going. And

30:57
know, it’s in terms of like AI and what I think it’s gonna do. I don’t think it’s gonna like, completely get rid of, I don’t even think it’s gonna get rid of like writers necessarily. I think that it’s more of like, it’s more that people are just gonna have it there. Paul Pant give a really good speech on this at FinCon where it’s like the the people become the curators. And it’s like you’re the tastemaker, I think she said. And that was actually a really great point because it was just like

31:22
you can get AI to do some really incredible things. But at end of the day, like you still have to decide like, is this going up on the website or is this not? And I think that that’s where a lot of like the services that provide like content and things like that, like it’s going to be more of like consulting almost, or like, you know, trying to just make sure that it’s like conversational and not too, you know, not too dry. So I do think that AI is going to have a big impact. also think, I think we talked about this one point.

31:49
I think it’s gonna happen a lot slower than people kind of think. Like AI came out, chat GBT, like everybody was like, oh my gosh, it’s the craziest thing ever. But like, I don’t know, most people still use Google. I was talking to my, my sisters, kids. I always like to talk to like my nieces and nephews to get like a feel for like what’s going on on the ground right now, you know? And they’re like, yeah, nobody uses chat GBT. they’re like, everybody uses Google. Like I think that people are creatures of habit. And I think the chat GBT stuff is really cool, but I don’t see like mass adoption right now. I think it’s gonna be.

32:19
take several years for the stuff to like really, really get ingrained. But I could be an idiot too and it might just happen really quickly. Like I have no idea. I just remember when I was in college a long, long time ago, Yahoo was the leader and everyone was using Yahoo and within one year it flipped to Google. That’s all I remember. Yeah. Yeah. No, you, think you mentioned that to me last time and that could for sure happen, right? Like that’s a super possibility, but like, I just don’t think, I just don’t, I think that Google

32:47
I don’t know. think that this stuff is like AI has been being worked on for so long. I didn’t realize that. Like I didn’t realize that AI has been this like decades long project. And I, and I think that, um, Google’s going to figure out a way to compete well, you know, like I don’t think that Bard is from what I’ve used, seen and used. It’s like, it’s not as good as what chat GPT can do, but like, I still think that people just are creatures of habit and they’re going to just keep going to Google until chat GPT is so much better that they just can’t, you know, avoid it. But I don’t know. We’ll see.

33:16
Did you play around with Google? can’t remember the acronym now, but I think it’s GSE. Basically, it’s this switch that you turn on in Chrome. And the top search result, which takes up a third of the page, is the AI-generated answer. Yeah, I that. I did see that. And I had a conversation with Robert Farrington about this. He was like, well, Google still needs the content from the sites to create those. It’s not creating its own content. So Google would either have to hire just their own in-house

33:45
publication team that AI is scraping or, you know, they’re still going to have to use publishers in some ways. So he believes that like AI is going to have like no impact on like, and they’re just basically it’s just kind of a gimmicky trick thing. I don’t think that I believe that, but he had a good point of like, they’re, replacing with AI, but then they’re also still giving credit to the, blogs that created the content. And ultimately I think the biggest thing is that like ads aren’t going to go.

34:13
Like that, like if you can get a profitable ad strategy, like that’s not going away ever. Like that’s, that’s how they make their money. Right. So like, that’s what we’re really focused on too, is just like profitable or break even funnels with ads. Cause I think that that’s, that’s the real surefire bet in the future. So in terms of the actual content on your blog, are you focusing that on just like bookkeeping content, proofreading content, that sort of thing, or just across the whole moneymaking landscape? Yeah. Yeah. So, um,

34:39
Freelancing, freelancing, side hustles, investing, passive income. We’re really just staying in those lanes though. I think we are for sure we’re using the site to generate leads for our courses, right? Like it fits really well. And we think that we have a little bit of an advantage there. Like I don’t wanna go into all the reasons why, but there’s an advantage I think for us to go after those verticals. And so it’s worked really well. What I will say is that I don’t think that

35:09
the quality, I’m gonna say quality, it’s just hard to sell courses off of cold. It is just stuff that comes in from Google, even if it’s like super, super high intent stuff. It’s just difficult. People if they’re gonna buy something like it takes, I think video accelerates the process a lot faster. But like people are really like, so you know, I think like I was saying video accelerates the process. But if people are going to spend four or 500 bucks on something like they they do a lot of searching around like they don’t just look at a blog post and go by.

35:38
they look at a blog post and they look at reviews for the product and they go onto YouTube and they look at reviews and they like they’re just trying they really do a lot of research before they do like a buying decision. And so it’s like it just helps. It’s part of it. I think for us is like we just want to get as many people in our funnels as possible and then just like nurture them. But you know it’s it’s just like I just don’t think that that traffic that comes in is like the be all end all for courses is great for like

36:07
surveys and stuff like that, you know, like easy conversions, but for things that actually take a real funnel, like it’s tough to get those people to convert. So you’re going all in on video. Can you just give us a preview of your overall YouTube strategy? Are you going to put out the same content? Are you going to have special content just for YouTube? Are you going to take blog posts and turn them into videos and that sort of thing? We’re doing a little bit like we’re basically, we’re going to be doing some, you know, some of stuff that works on the blog. We’ll do that on.

36:36
on YouTube as well. we’ve actually, you know, our channel is very small, but we’ve already seen like success with that. Some, some of our videos are starting to really do well. But really, I think we’re going to take more of an approach. And I think, and you can tell me this, but I think that it’s YouTube is more rewarding, like just really good entertaining content versus like search content. Correct. And so we’re going to take that approach. And I think it makes sense for us to just take that content and then we’ll do, you know, I’m sure we’ll use it for social and all that stuff, even though I’m not even really concerned about social at all. I don’t, I don’t particularly care about TikTok or any of other ones.

37:06
at this moment. But I we’re gonna make what we think is like really good entertaining content. And, you know, some of it will be search based, but probably not very much of it. entertaining kind of implies like a funny script and just writing those things from scratch, right? I don’t want man, I don’t know everything’s, you know, it’s there’s so much more that goes into a YouTube video than I realized.

37:32
you know, it’s like, you know, within the first few seconds, like you have to have a great hook. And it’s got to like, you really have to grab people in that first period of time. And then the new head of content that I hired, Frankie, like he’s, as he was detailing, like the YouTube strategy and like how you make a good video pop off. But he was working on a channel that he got to 1.3 million subs, I think. Wow, crazy. And it’s just the reality is like, it takes a lot of editing. It takes every video takes a lot of thought.

38:01
and really like intentional. I don’t know, like the, it’s not just reading a script. It’s like, has to really be intentional with the music and the timeline of what you do within the first X amount of seconds and all of that. So it’s something that’s going to be a beast of a project, I think for us, but like, I think it’s still, I think net it’s still worth it to go down that road. I mean, it’ll create this huge moat for you also. hope so. Yeah, I hope so.

38:31
You know what’s funny is I’m actually having Rob Berger on almost an hour after talking to you and you know, Rob, he started this YouTube channel, disobeying all the laws of YouTube. And he’s managed to create this amazing channel. So what is he out right now? What is he at Subway? that 130,000? I think he started like a year ago. I want to say I love dude. Yeah. And his stuff is so good too. But I think that’s what it is. Like, you know, when I was going to say like, what’s entertaining and it’s like,

39:00
I think just being yourself a lot of the time, like being your weird self and you know, like putting putting content out there that you believe in, like sometimes it doesn’t work at all. But like in his case, I mean, he just puts out really good content. And he’s just like, I would have never thought of him as a YouTuber, to be honest with you. Like no offense to him, but I just didn’t think like, he didn’t seem like somebody that was going to go and crush it on YouTube. But then I saw his content, I was like, dang, like he’s, he’s got it. Like he’s got he’s charismatic. He’s got, he’s got like, think the kids would say he’s got the sauce, you know, he does, he does have that.

39:30
You know, he does and he does zero editing, except lopping off the front lopping off the back to I remember, were you there? We were at a mastermind together. And I was like, dude, just just put like a little bit on your thumbnail. Just like what the topic is because before you’re making thumbnails. Yeah, yeah, I was there with him. Yeah. Yeah. Is he doing thumbnails now? He is but not you know, he literally just takes a frame his video and just puts like four words or something like that. Yeah, that’s another thing about YouTube. That’s like

40:00
the thumbnail game, like just the titles and descriptions and stuff like there’s so much that goes into that. And there is with the blog too, but I do feel like there’s you feel like you got to be like a production company, like we’re, you know, we’re about to set up this new thing in our, my office where it’s like, I’ve got a multi-camera set up and all these lights and all this nonsense, you know, but it’s like, that’s what you have to do to have good video. think I think I’m somewhere in between you and Rob. So like you’re looking at my setup right now.

40:27
My bookshelf over here on my right, got a teleprompter and a camera, a foot pedal, and then the lights are all set up. And it’s worked well for me so far. I think there’s just different grades depending on what your delivery style is like. So everyone just needs to figure that out. Yeah. And it’s going to be, man, it’s going to be a lot of experimentation for us. Like that’s, mean, we’ve, we’ve had some kind of early wins with some of our early videos. But I just think it’s going to, it’s going to be.

40:55
slog. But that’s fine, though. It’s like kind of, none of this stuff is easy to like, go back to your first question, like, should like, should you still start a blog? It’s like, you can, but it’s not gonna be easy. All this stuff is really difficult, you know. And that’s why I do think like, you know, the course that you sell or courses that you sell, like courses I sell, like, I do think that that’s why it is important to, like courses, make all of it way faster for people. So like, if you’re going to start a blog, I highly suggest you go and take some

41:23
blog course. I don’t know who has like the top blogging course right now. But like just do that. And it’s like, you won’t have all the, you know, experimentation that like I didn’t have a course or anything. I just it took me forever to figure out what I was doing, you know. Actually, when we started actually when I started I started 2009. It was the wild wild west. Like no one knew what they were doing really. And then Darren Rouse came out and everyone started following him. 2009 man that’s it. You know, what’s funny about the internet is it’s like dog years. Like it’s just

41:53
It’s like I, I feel like I’ve been in business for like 40 years or something, but it’s really been like nothing has been eight years. It’s like nothing in business. And it’s just like, but it, and I was talking to my head of content about this the other day. It’s just, it’s because the landscape changes so fast and you’re always like, you can’t just build this like business that just sits there and like just generates money and super easy. Like it’s always like, you, there’s a, you know, people are trying to take you out, you know, like there’s a lot of competition that’s trying to, trying to take you down and, um,

42:21
the platforms change and the the ad costs change and the algorithms change like everything’s changed at all time and you’re just trying to like navigate through that and hopefully be profitable as you go. Well let me ask you this uh for all the listeners out there who want to do what you do what like what is your best piece of advice so you mentioned first you probably started a YouTube channel and what are some expectations that you would set in terms of time frame and what is probably the easiest way to get some quick wins in terms of monetization early on?

42:51
I don’t think that you should go for quick wins in monetization. And I don’t know if this, is probably a pretty common answer. I used to say like, man, just quit your job and just go all in on the stuff. like, which there is something to that. And I’ll get back to that in a second. I think that the reality is like you, should expect to go a year without making like significant money. Like, and I think you should expect to go six months without making a dime. And I think when it comes to, especially content creation, like

43:20
you always see people try to hack things, right? Like you see all these people try to like hack TikTok and hack the algorithms and all this stuff, but like they never last. Like those people flame out very quickly. What you need to do is get really, really good at your craft. And I, and I heard somebody talking about YouTube the other day and they were, I think it was actually Mr. Beast was talking about it. He was like, you just improve one thing every time, every time you post a video and just get better at it. like maybe a better thumbnail, you know, next time, or maybe a better, I don’t know, better editing or whatever.

43:49
But you have to do that for a very long period of time to where you become an expert in what you’re doing. I think you don’t have be an expert to make money, but like you have to really commit to the craft and you have to really commit to like understanding that it’s going to be really difficult. It’s going to, you know, you’re going to feel like you’re failing constantly. And that never goes away. Cause even at our revenue level, I mean, and every day I’m like, Oh my God, we got to do all these things. We got to get things moving. Like if, you know, it’s like that never seems to stop.

44:18
You know, and you just have to, you just have to really put the work in. and so like, um, and I also think like, if you don’t monetize too quickly, you build a lot of trust with your audience. Um, one of the reasons that I was, well, I say I, my business partner, I for my business partner and I for laptop empires, one of the reasons we were able to, to, you know, reach a six figure launch so quickly and like do seven figures of revenue so quickly was just that I just provided a lot of value for a very long time and I didn’t sell anything to my audience.

44:47
So like when it came time, like only, did that 136 K with a 13,000 person email list. Like it was not a big list. And yeah, but it was just like, just provided a lot of value for a long time. And I, like, I was making money with my marketing stuff. So like, I could just be a value provider with the blog and I did that forever and ever and ever and ever. And then just when it came time to sell something I sold hard, you know, and then it worked because I had built up so much trust. I had built up so much like, uh,

45:15
I guess, goodwill with my audience. And like you hear influencers talk about that all the time, but it’s a very real thing. So I would say like, find some other way to make money, like do some kind of service based thing, become a freelancer in some discipline or whatever, start something that makes money. And then if you’re, content creation and like building a brand is what you want to do longterm, like just do a lot of content creation and don’t sell too much in the beginning. And then once, once you have a good offer, then you can sell and then you sell hard. Okay.

45:44
What were your views on social media? Just curious. You said you didn’t care much for it. Is there a reason why or? Man, I just think that it’s a lot, especially Tik Tok. And like, I’ve had some Tik Tok stuff go sort of viral before, not a ton, because then I very quickly was like, I don’t want to do this anymore. But I just think it’s a hamster wheel. You know, it’s a lot different than what I see, at least as I understand it and how I’ve kind of

46:10
thought about it for a while. It’s like YouTube, you can create a piece of content and it’ll just generate views for a long time if it’s good. Google, I mean, like you can put a blog post up there and it was like generates revenue forever until an algorithm change or something. But like the TikTok stuff is so quick and they don’t make it easy to get off platform. Right. So it’s like, it’s, just, you get this like very surface level interaction with people, which isn’t a bad thing, but it’s, don’t think it’s like a good conversion mechanism. I do think it’s a good, like if you have a massive audience, you can sell sponsorships or sponsor deals.

46:40
Um, but that’s a tough way to make a living. In my opinion, I don’t like that. Doesn’t feel like a business that I want where I have to just like always be creating content. Um, and I’m trying to work with these brands and then do they have marketing budget? Do they not have budget? Um, and I hate going into those negotiations with brands anyway, like a corporation. And it’s like, you’re talking to some like middleman person that doesn’t even know what’s, don’t know. I that it’s, that’s been surprising to me, like as throughout my career and as I’ve learned more.

47:10
When you talk to some of these people at these companies that are managing these marketing budgets, a lot of them have no idea what they’re doing at all. Like they don’t understand marketing. Like they don’t understand the value of an audience. They’re just kind of like writing checks to people. So it’s just a, don’t know. just not, will, social media will be the last thing that we layer on to everything we do. Cause it’s top level awareness, you know, at the top of the marketing funnel is great. And if you can create a really good strategy to pull those people down into your funnel and eventually convert. But I think that

47:40
you needed you needed work on things that are closer to conversions, which would be like a high intent YouTube video or blog post or something like that, where it’s like the people that are that are watching your stuff are wanting to buy something that makes more sense to me. Cool. Actually, we have the same philosophies. Sweet. So Bobby, hey, thanks a lot. If people want to know about the programs that you sell or your website, YouTube channel, where can they find you? So social handles basically across everything mill money man, ml.

48:09
Money Man. We took out the millennial part because it’s too hard to spell. And then website, millennialmoneyman.com. You can also find me and my other business Laptop Empires. And please go and subscribe to our baby YouTube channel because we need as many subscribers as we can possibly get. And I think that’s it. Yeah. I’ll link those below. Is there a particular goal you’re going for this year with your YouTube channel? No, we were talking about that as a team. Like do we set like a subscriber goal?

48:38
I’m more like, let’s get a good clean process for creating content, like multiple pieces of content per week. And then we can read, like we’ll go back to the subscriber goal after we figure that out. Cause I think that’s more important than the number. It’s like, let’s get the process dialed in and make good content. Yeah. Power to you, man. Multiple YouTube videos a week is, it’s going to be tough. We’re going to do it though. So yeah. Well, thanks a lot for coming on the show, Bobby. Appreciate it, Yeah. Thanks for having me on.

49:08
Hope you enjoy that episode and I encourage you to go check out Bobby’s site over at millennialmoneyman.com. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoderjob.com slash episode 513. And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small and intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

49:37
Head on over to MyWifeCoderJob.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.