520: Blog Apocalypse? Can A Pure Blog Still Make Money With Jim Wang

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Quarter 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. Today, I my good friend Jim Wang back on the show, and Jim has created and owned several seven-figure blogs over the years, so I invited him to come back to give his take on the state of blogging as a business in this day and age. 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.

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and ticket prices are going up on Friday. 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 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

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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, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit’s gonna be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th.

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And right now, the tickets are gonna go up in price this Friday. 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 grab my free bonus workshop 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.

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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.

02:06
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have one of my very first podcast guests back from 2014 back on the show, Jim Wang. Jim is a long time friend and mastermind buddy who I met at FinCon over a decade ago. He’s the founder of Wild Hacks where he teaches others how to make and save more money. His first blog, which was the subject of the last episode, Bargaineering, was sold for a seven figure sum, I think back in 2016.

02:35
And I thought the guy was retired, but then he decided to start Wallet Hacks, which turned out to be even more successful. So Wallet Hacks has been featured in Forbes, MarketWatch, CNBC, US News, Business Insider, a bunch of publications. And I’m actually doing a little segment on blogging on this podcast for the next month. And Jim is one of the pure bloggers that I know personally who is killing it. So welcome back to the show, Jim, after a long time.

03:05
Thanks, man. It’s a pleasure to be back. I was good seeing you a couple weeks ago, and I know we’ve kept in touch pretty closely over the years, but I never really asked you this question. You and I, we have similar personalities and that we’re family men, and we use our businesses to free up more time. We’re not trying to start the next hundred million dollar company. So back when you sold bargaining long time ago, you made a lot of money and you had this really cushy life. I remember we were chatting.

03:33
you messaging and you were doing nothing. And I know you have a pretty cushy life now too, but why start another personal finance blog? why did you create wallet hacks? So it’s funny. It turns out I sold bargaining in 2010. Oh, 2010. Okay. 13 years ago. And so what happened was, is I, you know, I worked for the company that bought it and then

03:58
started like just dabbling and doing other internet type of things. And it’s actually wallet hacks that got started in sort of like that 2015, 2016 timeframes. So it’s probably why you have the dates in your head. And yeah, it’s a cushy, like, you know, one of the things that people often don’t talk about is that when you quote unquote retire, like you have to find, you still have to find something to do. Like I now experienced this myself when I sold the site and I thought, oh, wow, I’m all set. don’t have to do anything.

04:28
I saw this with my dad when he retired, you know, he’s like, ah, I still have to fill my time. And my dad loves the golf. I need to golf all the time. But after a while you’re like, okay, I did that. Now I need something that, you know, you’re, trying to grow and build and get better at. after a few years of sort of dabbling on the internet, I thought, you know what I was good at and what I really enjoyed was writing and writing about personal finance and also like a bit of like an ego.

04:58
stroking, boosting thing, like getting emails from people saying, hey, this was really helpful. And it’s kind of nice to get that. And if you retire and just play golf and just play like some games and whatever, like you don’t get that type of feedback. And it’s, I don’t know, like I kind of liked it. So I thought I’d go back and do the same thing. And the beauty of it is that the first time around, when I started bargaining, I never thought I have to make money with this because I had a great full-time job.

05:25
working in the defense industry with security clearance, like I could do that for decades. And then now with the new site, I thought I don’t need to have it make money, right? So there’s none of the pressure. so it was probably those, lack of acute pressure, which may go against everything that business books say about like burning your shifts and like bridges and whatever, to like give you that pressure. I feel like that let me build it the way that I wanted to without.

05:54
the constant like 80 hour weeks and stress and that type of stuff. So what does it mean to build it the way you want it to build? Like how is this site different than bargaining ever was? So it was, it’s similar in that I approached it from the mindset of I want to write about various topics to help people to sort of scratch my own itch. I was interested in a subject, didn’t know much about it. As I dig in, I’m able to write about it. If I’m able to, you know,

06:24
the old adage, if you could teach it, then you fully understand it. And so I tried to approach content in the beginning from that perspective. And by doing so, you don’t fall into a lot of the traps that, one of the things you see now for those that follow sort of like niche sites and things like that, a lot of them were built to be side hustles to earn money. And so they’re very much SEO optimized. And you saw a lot of them get

06:51
in some ways punished by recent updates because they were a little too laser focused in how they were executed. And, you know, that’s not to say that we don’t pay attention to SEO and that we don’t aren’t laser focused ourselves. It’s that those aren’t the only things that we focus on. And I think it’s that breadth that makes it one fun to do and then to maybe a little more protected from sort of the whims of the Internet.

07:19
So basically the topics that you write about are not all keyword focused now. Is that what you’re saying? In not so many words? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. The way I approach content is I sort of fill it into three buckets and you have the bucket where I want it to make money as in I write it. It may be keyword focused in the sense that, this will drive affiliate revenue so I’m gonna sign up for a bank or a credit card or something because they read a review.

07:47
Another one is if I think it’ll gain a lot of traffic. So it may not itself be a valuable, financially valuable keyword, but it’ll draw a lot of people to the site. Maybe they’ll sign up for the newsletter and I can build a relationship. And that’s actually the third category, which is I sort of write things that I find interesting that they’re not going to get any search traffic. The only way they’re going to get read is probably because I shared it either through email or on social media. And I just want to write about things that are interesting.

08:16
and build that relationship with the reader. You know, it’s interesting. I used to do a lot of those types of posts, but just Google and the way it’s evolved over the years has forced me to stop doing that because I don’t like writing something without anyone reading it, right? So give me an example of one of these posts that you’ve written recently.

08:39
Uh, let me think. So a prime example, this isn’t recent, but so everybody in personal finance talks about, you know, net worth and tracking it and all that. So one of the things that did well when I sent it to the email list was a article just talking about, uh, the things that I learned tracking my net worth over 15 years, I guess now this is an old post, I suppose, over 20 years. And that doesn’t get any search traffic. Yeah. It doesn’t get.

09:07
It just, whenever I email it out to revisit it, that’s when it gets traffic. The other benefit is that other bloggers will read it. And this is like interesting. No one’s ever going to link to your bank review. Yeah. Right. Realistically. And so, but they will link to an article about things that you learned. Uh, another one, actually, this is the most recent one that I wrote. There’s, there’s a concept in sort of like the early retirement crowd where you set up.

09:36
your personal finances and then there’s a thing called the boring middle as you wait to accumulate enough wealth to retire early or whatever. And so that boring middle is something that people just have to endure where there’s nothing you could do to advance it. You just now wait for your income and your investments to grow enough. And so the article was just, said, the boring middle is bullshit. It’s only boring if that’s the only thing in your life that you’re focused on.

10:00
Right. So once something’s on autopilot, yeah, if you sat there and stared at the autopilot, like it’s really boring because there’s nothing one, there’s nothing you can do. And two, there’s nothing you should do. You just leave it there. So I suppose it’s just saying, oh, now go do something else. Do something fun. Entertain yourself. You’ve now we’re laser focused on setting up the system. Now let it run and then go do something else that it’s not going to get. No, no one’s searching for boring middle. Yeah. No, like, but people have emailed me.

10:29
and sent me the apps on Twitter that said, oh, that was a great article. They’ve linked to it. And that those have business benefits. But I wrote it because I thought it would be something interesting to share. You and what’s important for me is that writing those like product reviews, like things that make quote unquote, make money are not as interesting and not as fulfilling as writing these other types of articles and

10:56
So in order for me to keep doing this for a long period of time, I have to sort of scratch my own itch and do that instead. makes sense. So are you doing a lot of their own writing on wallhacks? I do. We have freelance writers. We have a few freelance writers and an editor. They tend to write the stuff that I’m less interested in. So like the reviews and especially with how Google appreciates reviews. do you want like screenshot, like hands on showing that you use the product.

11:26
And I really don’t want to open up a bank account to get like screenshots and walkthroughs and get like that, the more authentic review content. But so that’s, that’s what we have writers to sort of focus on. Okay. So I like your balance. you have the writers write the articles that you don’t want to be writing that probably make money. And then you focus on building the relationship side with, with the more personal articles. Yeah. All right. What is your writing frequency? Just curious of yourself.

11:56
It’s kind of when I feel like it. Nice. And so it tends to be a little more than every other week. Oh, okay. I want to have one arc. So I sent an email out every Wednesday and I want to have something interesting in that article. Sometimes it’s, it’ll be a topic that was assigned to a freelance writer, to one of our writers to write. And, you know, so for example, like a timely article say it’s close to Thanksgiving. Maybe I’ll send out how to have Thanksgiving on a budget.

12:26
or something like that. And then other times when it’s like, all right, so we only publish at most three articles a week. Right. So if a couple of them are, we try to do Monday, Wednesday, and then sometimes Friday. I don’t like pumping out a ton of content. Though from what I read about folks that are doing programmatic SEO and like AI driven content, apparently pushing out tens of thousands of articles doesn’t necessarily hurt you.

12:54
Yeah, depending on who you are and the space that you’re in. But so we do two to three. And so of that, you have to pick one that I think has a broad ish appeal to the to everyone. And then other ones that maybe are more niche. Yeah. Let’s back up a little bit. So how does the site make money? It is primarily affiliate revenue, with different merchants, and then a little bit of display ads.

13:23
Like a very small percentage. then is it just affiliates with financial institutions like banks? It’s a mix. They’re all financial in nature, I guess. So you’ll have like side hustle things like a little bit of tax, mostly banks, a little credit card, some investing, sort of like the crowdfunded investment stuff, like your fund rises and things. Yeah. But it’s primarily that.

13:52
And then you get a cut of the sale whenever someone signs up or are some of those traffic related where you just drive clicks or leads. So it’ll be a mix. Most of the affiliate ones are. It’s a payout based on whether or not they apply for or are approved for. You know, the programs are all different for an account. And then some are based on a cost per click. Here’s a funny story. I don’t know if you remember this, but you’re like, Hey, Steve, give me your ing affiliate link.

14:21
or something like that. And then you put it up and then all of a sudden I made like 300 bucks and you’re like, okay, well that one expired. Or there was a Southwest offer too, I think, was that through you? Probably. Where you’re like, Hey, let me just put your link up here. Cause there’s, there’s a limited amount and you gave me all these like free miles or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s a great way to build friends. You Bob is like, yeah. Do you feel like cause 300 bucks.

14:51
cheaper than average. No, I’m just kidding. Yeah, so actually, one of the things we did with bargaining that we don’t do with wallahacks is I used to give we used to have this loyalty point system. And you would get points for commenting, it’ll sort of like generate more activity on the site. And as one of the things that people get as a reward is I would use their IMG direct referral, because back then,

15:17
not a lot of banks had referral programs, but I was writing about the things like I still have an ING direct, now it’s Capital One, 360. But I would just write about it then it got traffic. And I was like, well, I’ve used up my referrals, I used up my wife’s, I started just asking around all my friends. And a lot of them were like, like friends locally, they’re like, I don’t know about that. I’m like, all right, don’t worry, I’m not here to convince you. I’m here to give you money. If you don’t want the money, that’s fine. I got plenty of internet friends.

15:47
And actually, there are people from the bargaining days that I remember doing the same thing with you, regular folks that would email me that are subscribers on Wallet Hacks now that like followed along. And I was like, all right, that was a worthy $250. All joking aside, like I’d rather someone get the money. Otherwise that link someone signs up, no one gets the money. And then, you know, this way everybody’s happy.

16:13
Yeah, but the referral thing anytime you can obviously anytime you give some money, they’re going to be very thankful. And that’s one of the sort of personal finance and sometimes other niches. One of the nice things is that when people sign up for various products, they actually get something. Whereas if you in and don’t know in electronics, if you have electronics blog of some kind in order for you to make money, someone has to buy so they have to pay for you to get paid and finance.

16:42
We all get paid and everybody’s happy, which makes it such an easier sell. The only hard part is electronics, if you have a credit card, you can buy it. In finance, if you don’t have a good credit score, you can’t. But then on the flip side, you can direct them towards credit building programs or just articles on how to get better credit. And so you can still nurture that relationship a little bit. You know what’s funny about our mastermind group that we belong to? I’m like the oddball out because I don’t really write about personal finance.

17:10
It seems like all of you guys are competing for the same rankings for a lot of the same keywords, right? And it’s a super competitive area. If you were to start all over, like if someone’s listening to this, and they’re like, Hey, I want to start a personal finance blog. Would you do that today? Do you think it’s too competitive? Or what are your thoughts today? And just blogging in general? So I think that you have to have a long time horizon at no pressure.

17:41
because it takes a long time. The reason is because if you think about personal finance and the obvious ways to make money, they’re all very big in the sense that like, they’re all very big and competitive, like credit cards, banks, insurance, mortgages. Like wallet hacks is what now, eight years old, I don’t do any loans, I don’t do any mortgages, I don’t do any insurance, I do very little credit cards.

18:09
The only credit cards I the sense that I don’t compete in search and I don’t I don’t do any paid rate paid advertising right now. But I can’t possibly convert compete with, you know, the nerd wallets of the world. Yeah, the you know, all the like the times and then, you know, all their their commerce platforms. So that’s where the big money is, but you can’t play there. So where do you play? You play in say you start a blog.

18:37
and you share about, you know, the smaller fintech apps that are out there. Maybe you try one, you write about it, you do a review. And those there’s those CPAs are like $10, $20 versus a credit card is 150 to 200. Right. So you just have to be very patient. Is it possible? I think it’d be difficult to do strictly a blog. I think what you’ve seen the last these last four years, five years, a lot of people building up massive businesses.

19:06
using social media and being lucky in that they chose TikTok and not Lime or whatever. The right platforms that grew.

19:19
So it’s not the content, it’s the platform and then being nimble enough to figure it out and just have enough experimentation.

19:30
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20:00
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.

20:11
I mean, before we got on, I asked you, hey, are you doing anything outside of blogging, whether it be YouTube? You used to have a podcast, which I enjoyed very much, but you’re doing a pure blog. And you know, with AI, were just, we were just talking about how some of these sites are pumping out like 10,000 articles a month or something crazy like that. And it’s just turning the whole space into just one big garbage heap of AI generated content, right?

20:38
so I guess what I’m asking is, do you feel like you’re gonna have to, you know, maybe make like a YouTube channel or be on social media? Like what are your thoughts on looking forward maybe three to five years? That’s a good question. I don’t know. It’s a short answer. The long answer is I…

21:00
I feel like I’m late to like the, to TikTok, to the TikTok, to TikTok and like some of the other platforms. Uh, there’s like a saturation point there that maybe I don’t have enough time to figure out AI. It worries me less AI directly than it does what it’ll make the platforms, various platforms like Google do in reaction to it. Right? So Google is.

21:30
constantly changing their algorithms with core updates now, know, two months in every month, Yeah. It’s in part in response to AI, but also like a lot of the various black hat things, like people doing Parasite SEO where they buy sponsored posts on high ranking sites to sort of get their content up in the results pages. I think it will make the sort of run of the mill

21:59
reviews and listicles and everything like that that doesn’t have like a personality to it a little less valuable, but one of the One of the features of AI is that you know, it’s a large language model it it can take all of content and like Reassess it whatever not really think about it, but like reconstitute it, but it doesn’t create anything new yet I suppose and so maybe those like thought pieces

22:29
Which on the whole, maybe I don’t think that I am such an original thinker that anything that my brain comes up hasn’t come up before. And so in that regard, it’s probably no different than AI. But I think articles like that, where you’re able to build a connection and build a following is going to be more valuable. Now, does that mean I need to try to push the B in different mediums like audio and video? It probably does on some level. I’m just not sure what it looks like at the moment.

22:59
And one of the things that I’m thinking about is hiring more people to handle more of the day to day and thinking about sort of the near term future only in that that gives me more white space to think about these problems more. Right? Like when you’re, when you’re in the hustle bustle, like doing compliance updates and, all the other things that co go with running a site, you don’t have the like space to think.

23:26
five years into the future. could think one year in the future, but maybe not five. And that’s, that’s sort of the timeline you have to have with technology like this. So given all the AI stuff that’s going on, and I’m sure you’ve been following a bunch of these other content sites that are pumping out all this content, what do you see? Well, let me ask you this. How do you rank your posts? We write them and then we link them internally. Okay, that’s

23:56
pretty much all the like hands-on SEO. We do keyword research and so we will focus on subjects that are relevant and that fit into our to like content map so that when we do publish it it has a natural fit. Right and it goes in the right bucket. You mentioned an email list. Does that become more of your strategy? Because it’s funny among our mastermind group it feels like a lot of the guys still aren’t paying attention to email that much.

24:26
Yeah, last year, we started adding in some technology that will give that gave us the ability to sort of have more insight into what people are doing. Because one of the things that we use currently we use active campaign, but this is the same for any email provider. But you just send out the emails and then you get maybe sort of in that bucket, or in that email world, like, oh, you know what they click on? Almost you know what they open. And that was it.

24:54
And so we added some tracking on the site where now we will know what they’re doing. We’ll know what they’re doing. Even if they didn’t necessarily come from email, like they, signed up and it’s giving us a lot of insight into behavior that I didn’t have before. And it’s showing me you’ll everyone knows how valuable email is, but until you assign a number to it, it’s like knowing the number somehow gives it more.

25:24
Gravitas, I don’t know gives it more importance. It’s like specific numbers people trust specific numbers more but if I’m like, oh well now if you track and you know a subscriber from here is now valued that whatever because your body of a thousand visitors says that it’s worth that much now you can actually take action on it and now getting someone on your email list has value and not just like in general Oh every email on the list of your 20,000 email list is worth two dollars

25:53
No, no, it’s not like that because it’s just like in the population. Some people are worth 200. Some people, people are not worth dollar amounts. But the lifetime value of an emo subscriber from this channel is worth $200 because they signed up on this page, but they’re only worth about $5 because they signed up on another page about like side hustles or something like that. So that level of granularity was kind of a pain to set up. We’re using whoopra. you using link clicky also? I am.

26:22
Oh, yes. Yes. I don’t know if you’re if you’re listeners are familiar with like, they’re not. It’s our mutual friend, Larry’s tool. We always make fun of him for the name of the tool. But it’s a funny name, but it’s like a more powerful, pretty links. And so yeah, yeah. Do you recommend a tool like that? If you’re not doing a lot of affiliate stuff for because it’s it’s expensive. Wooper is like 1000 a month or something. Yeah, yeah.

26:52
I would not. would. the wooper is nice because it gives you user behavior, but only a very small subset of those people are going to be on your email list. So what you’re able to do with it in terms of like, for example, one thing that we do is if someone clicks on an affiliate, like we put them in like sort of this flow where we wait a couple days, actually, I don’t think we wait at all. I think we wait like hours. And if they don’t become a lead, like the affiliate

27:21
company doesn’t or the merchant doesn’t tell us that they became a lead or a commission within like six hours, we actually email them and say, Hey, I saw you took a look at whatever. What did you think about it? Now, of the hundred people that are going click on it, maybe one or two are going to be on your email list. It’s like, it’s actually probably going to be like half a person. It’s like very small, but that gives you a little more insight into sort of what they’re thinking, what things they ran into.

27:52
It becomes even more valuable when you put an affiliate link inside of an email that you sent. Cause now everybody that clicks on that one is gonna, is gonna have this flow. It’s taught me a lot. It’s funny. Most people just like click on stuff and they look at it. They weren’t even really interested in it. They were just kind of looking around. That’s the most of it. And then the next subset is like, we will also send an email on some, some merchants will, if you, they’ll do, they’ll have multiple actions, right? You have the click, which I know.

28:20
And then they sometimes send the lead, which is like they put in their email address to get more information. And then the separate one, whenever they do the commissionable action, like they pay for the service or they whatever, we’ll send emails between the lead and the commissionable. It’s essentially we’re doing to find the e-commerce. The first step of click and doesn’t become a leader of sale is abandoned cart. Yeah, essentially. And then the lead to the sale is just sort of like that.

28:49
we’re kind of doing like their onboarding for them. exactly. You’re right. Because they should be sending out that. Yeah. So that’s essentially the analogy of what we’re doing. And this is what we brought and emails enables. Ah, that’s, I didn’t know that you guys were doing that stuff. Because I know in e commerce, that I do it all the time. Like I have, you know, repeat, so do you have it set up? Like if someone signed up for this one service, you refer them to other services that they might be interested in kind of automatically?

29:19
We do not yet because I see what you did. Cause I remember signing up for your emails and reading. Cause obviously whatever you’re doing in the e-commerce scene, they’re like multiple products. Like you’ll have a card and you’ll have like the merchant services or whatever. And that all makes sense. In personal funds, there’s less of a clear flow. So someone signs up for like a bank account. There’s no obvious like next thing. But I do, I do have to think about that some more.

29:45
The challenge is always that the numbers just get smaller and smaller. So like if hundred people click on it, I can only email one or two. So then out of the one or two, so after every hundred days, maybe I’ll get someone that means like the next thing. So it becomes a little too small. Uh, but it’s something to think about cause there’s definitely categories of products where people will sign up for multiple and we do take advantage of that a little bit by having them sign up for a sub email. Yeah.

30:14
You know, you could use one of those services where it’ll grab the email from someone just visiting your site and that way you can send them. I think you told me about that. Yeah, like three years ago, I was like, I think Bobby’s using it now. I think he’s having good results with it. But yeah, no, I see what you’re saying. That’s that’s really interesting though. And so both Wooper and Linklicky allow you to do these this tracking to such a fine granularity.

30:44
It’s actually Woopra that allows Woopra that does it. Link Clicky will do the redirects. It does a lot more than that, but the primary function for me is that it does the redirects and then it will go to the, and this is very important part of the process, is it uses the various APIs of the affiliate companies. So like your commission junctions or publicists and like Rakuten and Impact.

31:13
And we’ll use the API and grab the commission events. And then it’ll take those commission events and fill it into Woopra. That way I know in Woopra to tag this email and put them into a flow. And then the email will handle that. Interesting. So it’s like the Klaviyo of e-commerce. Woopra plus link clicky seems like, because Klaviyo handles all that stuff. It knows what people are putting in their code. It knows what people are clicking. And then you can guide them.

31:42
on different journeys based on what they’ve done. interesting. That’s huge. Because it’s not I mean, I think that level sort of customization has to increase lifetime value. Or even just per per card order, order card, whatever the term is, I don’t do ecommerce. Yeah, yeah. That’s right. So I know you read a lot of reviews and whatnot on your site. Do you ask for an email on every post also? And what is your lead magnet? Like, how do get them on?

32:12
Ha, you will love this. Actually, you will not love this. My email strategy is one, it’s a pop up that says, hey, join my email list. I think I say like you get like a money toolbox of like tools that I use. It’s not really a lead magnet. It’s a pop up. then the there’s a on some posts, there are forms in the middle that will say sign up for the and there’s those are generally like

32:41
more specialized, right? Email lists. So you want to get information about credit cards or banks or something on a post about that, it’ll have a fill fill out of a form. One thing we also do, which I did as sort of like a fun thing to see if it would work. If you don’t sign up, and you show back up within the next week, I will send you a show another pop up. It’ll be different. It’ll be a little creepy and say, Hey, I don’t see like the site.

33:10
Does that work? You should yeah it works. Okay I haven’t tried that one yet. It’s like it gets like a it gets a marginally higher conversion rate than the first pop-up. Grant it’s a smaller population. Right. But it gets a little but it still gets people. I had to like play with it a little to be like not creepy. I was like hey and I tried to make it like all cheery and not like hey I’ve been paying attention. You keep coming back. That’s funny.

33:40
That’s funny. So walk me through like your plans for wall hacks in light of everything that’s going on. And I know for my blog, I’ve chosen to go all in on video. I’m still going to do the blog and it still brings in the majority of my email subs and it’s my home base. But I feel like, you know, with all this AI content being spread and all this noise, it’s even starting to happen in like the audio space in the video space.

34:09
like you see all these faceless videos on YouTube. I feel like the last bastion of content is going to be video. What are your thoughts? The thing that I, I think that’s a good strategy, but I think to myself, okay, like a regular person that doesn’t spend a lot of time on the internet, right? When I watch YouTube, I’m watching entertainment. I’m watching the Mr. Beast videos. Like no, nothing against.

34:37
His videos are just pure entertainment. It’s like people playing hide and go Like people that I suppose the audience likes playing hide and go seek and like doing these fun challenges. I don’t know how many people are sitting there watching videos to learn something in the, you know. I still think that when people have questions, they will go to Google and Google it. Or they go to YouTube if they want to get instructions on how to fix something in their house or on their car. I think video is just too slow.

35:07
for things like investing and where you’re trying to answer a specific question. I think it’s different when you’re just like scrolling on your phone, like you’re lying in bed and you have like, I don’t know, Tik Tok or Instagram, whatever, reels and shorts, and you’re just watching. And maybe every software you discover like something new and you’re like, oh, that’s cool. I’ll try to remember to like Google that tomorrow. So I think video is good from a discovery perspective. I don’t know if it’s as good from an answer question.

35:36
perspective, but then the struggle is as a smaller site, I’m not the one that they get to when they search for like how to do anything with a Roth IRA, like they’re gonna get some other site. So on one hand, think, okay, if Google is where most people still go to, if I’m not there, do I need to do videos? So at least there’s some level of discovery, maybe start with shorts.

36:05
You know what’s funny is, uh, have you watched Rob’s channel Rob burgers? Yeah. Yeah. He’s been killing it and literally just goes on and just talks. I’ve been in, I’ve sat on to Rob burger. Uh, I guess it’s dough roller, roller. Yep. Don’t roller. I’ve, yeah, I’ve said it. It’s good. It’s really good. He’s got a, he has. So that’s what I think of when I think, okay, you have to do things the way you like. When I, when you originally talked about blogging, can people still do it? What has changed? I feel like you have to do things the way you want to do them.

36:35
without sort of focusing on like what makes money or what’s going to be popular. And eventually you’ll attract sort of the crowd that fits with the way you’re doing things. That way you also have the longevity of not having to pretend you’re someone else. You can go to Rob Berger’s channel and you watch his videos and his cadence is like a little slower than what you’re probably used to whenever you’re listening to an internet video. It’s not like a Mr. Beast like cut every two seconds like faces and right. It’s working for him. And now he has an audience.

37:05
that where it also works for that audience. I sit on his live streams every once in a while and I like listen in and just like just to see how things are going. And I think it’s great if you want to learn how to better manage your money, especially if you’re closer to retirement and are trying to like navigate all the complexities. Like you can’t do that fast. You can’t talk about like social security withdrawal strategies and like all that stuff, you know, 1.5 speed and still understand.

37:31
what’s going on. Plus people don’t want to. They’ll spend as much time as it takes to understand it. And so if you go fast and have to rewind it, like, it’s not good for anybody. You know, what’s funny about YouTube for me is I attract a lot of Asians and I attract a lot of women over the age of 35. Just you are very good looking. My video is probably better for you than it is for me. But just by nature of, I guess what I talk about and that sort of thing. So

37:59
And there’s some guys at FinCon that I met that are really good YouTubers. And I feel like you’re as eloquent or even more eloquent than a lot of them. So which is why I was very disappointed when you stopped MicroBlogger, which was your old podcast. yeah. That was fun. Yeah, I don’t know. This is hilarious to say. And I fully understand after I say it, how silly it sounds. So. It’s just.

38:28
Part of it was just the whole like, not anxiety, but just like apprehension about being on video and being on audio. Just even though, you know, I’ve been writing a blog that thousands of people visit a day. And I like, there’s no apprehension about, especially when you’re writing, like people can literally point and say like, yo, that’s wrong. You’re a dummy. Whereas on video, like it can pass so quickly that, you know, and plus the YouTube comments don’t.

38:57
don’t read them. Yeah, I don’t know. just, I think I just need to spend more time, like, with more space and just think about like what that would look like. Because I don’t know what novel things could be done. But then again, I don’t know, things on the blog, very little of it is necessarily novel. It’s just got my spin on it or Yeah, my flavor. Let me ask you this, how much time a week do you spend on your blog?

39:25
I’ve always been curious because like I picture you as you get up, you go running, you chop some wood, write an article and then hang out with the kids the rest of the day. Realistically, probably average, maybe 20 hours a week. 15, 20. It’s mostly in the morning. then yeah, I wake up. Usually wake up. Depending on when I wake up, it’ll be like 45 minutes before the kids do a little bit of work, like answer the emails.

39:55
fix things and then it’s just kids until 9 15 ish and then I’ll do work until lunch and then afternoons it’ll it’ll be some sort of like working out or nap or yeah because then kids are home by the oldest kid will be home by 3 30 ish so that’s the day what do you spend most of your time on your blog it’s a lot of keyword research it’s a lot of sort of dabbling with older content

40:23
either updating it or sort of optimizing it. It’s a little bit of like affiliate management. So there’ll be that compliance aspect and then just like emailing with different companies, whether or not to start a new program to upgrade or, you know, increase commissions or just play around. There’s really not much structure. I’m sort of in that like I fill in all the gaps type of role, is hard to describe.

40:51
So let’s say you sold wallet hacks and then it became like cash Lorette or something like that and you had nothing again. This is just all like secret. I know, know people don’t understand. So you’re going to put like show notes and explain everything. Everyone listening. the company that bought Bargaineering basically took down the blog, turned it into this site called the cash Lorette and then that got taken down. And I don’t think Bargaineering even exists anymore. Right. I mean, it’s Yeah.

41:20
But my original question was, if you were stall over, like let’s say you just sold wallets hacks similar to how you did bargaining, what would you be doing today? Would you start another blog at this point? Would you do? No, I would not. I would not because having done it twice, it’s like a slow slog. It’s like great if things work out. I would probably dabble in video, which is how I, actually what I should do today is just start dabbling in video.

41:50
without any expectation like I would if I’d sold the Yeah. And then have the added benefit of still having the site and just like messing around. We’re a lot alike. I like doing things without any pressure. In fact, I hate when I’m being pressured because I make silly decisions when that happens too. know, yeah, sometimes out of desperation or, out of like just pure monetary

42:16
I can’t tell you how many in the early days how many sponsored things I took on that were a pain in the butt. But I did it because the payout sounded really attractive. But just all the talking and the back and forth ended up not being worth it. I very much dislike like meetings, like phone calls, and stuff like that. you could make it an email, let’s make it an email. Even if it’s like the first time we’re interacting. Like, yeah.

42:45
Yeah, there’s a thing about pressure that pushes me and probably most people to just do something. Even when you shouldn’t necessarily do something, right? Maybe you should wait and like think it through. the fact that you have pressure on yourself and you’re like, and you haven’t done anything yet, like why haven’t you done anything yet? Like, I gotta figure out what I gotta do. Like I can’t just start going, right? If you don’t know where you’re going, if you just start walking, like you could actually be hurting yourself.

43:14
And then you also run into the whole shiny object principle, right? If you’re starting something new and like, Oh, I gotta, I gotta make money. Well, everything sounds good. Everything sounds good. That’s the whole point. They want you to promote them or do whatever them, but maybe you should like hold off and just like pick a handful and like, you know, test them out, test categories out. And if a category picks up like, okay, maybe we push a little bit more there. And yeah, I think pressure is good in some places.

43:44
It’s also good practice to force yourself to slow down. When you feel that pressure, recognizing it and being like, okay, I’m feeling the pressure now. What should I do? A prime example for me was, so for those that haven’t kept up with all the Google updates, there was an October, they called it helpful content update. Did not affect Wallahex. Thankfully we are still helpful content.

44:13
Then the October core happened and then we lost about 20 % of our traffic. And at first I was freaking out, not really freaking out. I didn’t freak out. Freaking out for Jim is like, Oh man, that sucks. So there was this one time with bargaining back in like, I don’t know, 2008. It was a Friday. I remember this distinctly because I was sitting at work 2007 or six and Google.

44:41
had taken what uh, bargaining completely out of search. So my traffic went from, was probably at the time, like four or 5,000 a day to like 200. The back then no one like publicized updates. So Friday I saw like the traffic crater, Saturday crickets, a hundred people, maybe Sunday crickets. And I was like, I’m on Friday. I felt sick. Like when people say like I was

45:10
I felt sick. was like, you’re just like over. No, I was like sick. Sunday, nothing. Monday went back to normal. I was like, what, just happened here? I have no idea what just happened here. So when this past October, when it lost 20%, I was, I didn’t panic because one, you never know if in like a couple of days it’ll come back maybe. Right. Right. I don’t know. And I dug into the, the, went down in

45:39
in terms of the results. And it all made sense. was all stuff that fortunately didn’t generate a lot of affiliate income. And it was just good from a traffic perspective. It was it was all the blood plasma donation articles, instead of ranking for I was, it turns out, and I never dug into it, because it was not like a monetization thing. Turns out the post that I had on wallhacks about donating blood plasma, they were ranking for the names of the companies.

46:09
So they were like five, six position for every single company. And then as it turns out, after the update, after the core update, instead of my site, my site was now down until like 15, 16, it had surfaced all of the like LinkedIn pages, Twitter, bios and all that up into those spots. And I was like, okay, without, if I’d panicked and thought like, oh, I have to do something.

46:35
instead of like research and like calm down and realize, okay, this is actually something that you cannot do anything for. I might’ve gone in and spent like all this time like updating stuff that I didn’t need to update. Maybe I would’ve edited other articles that hadn’t been touched and stuff like that. And it sucks to go through it when you see 20 % drop, you’re like, oh, this is bad. But it’s also good practice to like teach yourself, okay, don’t freak out, everything will be okay.

47:05
like your house isn’t on fire, feels like it’s on fire, but it’s not actually on fire. Let’s take a calm measured approach. And I think that only happens with time. Like you have to go through it enough times to be like, okay, yeah, we’ll get through this. It’s like the stock market also. I’ve lived through three downturns. I don’t don’t panic much anymore. Yeah. One thing I don’t even look. Yeah. I look once a month when I check on that worth and I record it and I’m like, oh, it was down this and then

47:34
As you get older, the dollar amounts get so big where like in a month, in a month you can lose or gain more or I can lose or gain more than I earned in my first year of work. Yeah. And it’s just like, that’s what happens when you’re in your, in your case, in your mid thirties, in my case, a little bit older, right? It’s just part of, if you look, you’ll freak out cause it doesn’t look fun.

48:03
But that’s these are all inside jokes because for some reason I thought Jim was still 30 something when we just hung out like a couple of weeks ago. But I just realized I’ve known you for so long that that’s how old we were when we met. We met each other at our 20th. I think I was. Yeah, I don’t remember. Anyway, you were in your 30s. Yeah, you’re a couple of years older than me. Yeah. So, Jim, where can people go check out your stuff?

48:33
and uh… set up for one of your creepy mellus well so if you go to wallace dot com you’ll get a pop-up about thirty two seconds after you show up on the site and then if you don’t sign up for that email and you come back five days later you will get another pop-up but you’d sign up to be the email sounds good the second pop-up will say hey man you’re back and it’s about time you signed up for this damn email list what’s going on so good it’s free

49:02
Join the 20,000 other geniuses that have signed up. They’re not all geniuses, but they’re all Most of them are bots, but some of them are geniuses. Hey Jim. Thanks lot for coming back on man It’s it’s been a long time and it’s good to know that things are going well with wallet hacks and one of the pure bloggers that I know that still not doing much video Hopefully I’ll see you on YouTube. We need more Asians on YouTube. All right, I’ll I’ll try. I’m a pleasure. Thank you

49:35
Hope you enjoyed that episode. Now Jim is someone who I consider one of the OGs when it comes to blogging. And for more information about this episode, go to mywifequaterjob.com slash episode 520. 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 intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go over to sellersummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

50:04
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.