00:29
is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine 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 e-commerce 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.

00:59
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. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

01:29
Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. And finally, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still get 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 mywifequitherjob.com slash book.

01:59
So go to mywifequitherjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

02:13
Welcome to the MyWifeQuitterJob podcast. Today we’re going to talk about content creation and specifically blogging, which is actually a topic I didn’t really want to talk about today, but Tony wanted to talk about it. Mainly because I’m kind of down on just regular blogging. And just to be clear, this is blogging not for e-commerce, not when you have a business already established. I’m just talking about blogging in general. So I know you’re very down on blogging right now. Yes.

02:43
But we’re doing a blogging basics series or content creation basics. And so we can’t not talk about writing in the series. That’s correct. So maybe like the way I can, otherwise I’m just going to be in a bad mood the whole time. I know, I know. I’m trying to redirect here. We can just frame it in terms of blogging for e-commerce, which is still working very well. And if all of you listening out there, the reason why I’m down is because Google’s algorithm changes

03:11
pretty much penalized every standalone blog in existence. So basically if you have a blog without a business under it, they really hurt you in the search rankings. Whereas, so for example, mywifequitterjob.com is down, whereas the Bumble Bee Lennon’s blog is kind of taking off actually. But you know, My Wife Quitter Job, I’ve spent so many years working on it.

03:41
I’ve talked to a bunch of SEOs and Google has pretty much admitted that they’ve over-corrected. I wouldn’t be surprised if things change, but as of right now, I’m actually down on it. How’s that to start the podcast, huh, Toni? I think that’s fair, but here’s what I think. I know you’re down and I know you just got a quote for some stuff that was absolutely insane to…

04:08
to help fix some of the issues. I usually overguess when you say, guess how much this would cost. I usually wildly overguess and I was six times under when I guessed initially. I know why you’re down and I know that for a lot of people who have made a living off of SEO and ranking, that all of the changes has, I hate to say the word decimated, but it really has decimated a lot of people’s businesses.

04:38
That were, I would say, providing really helpful and great content. So I understand the frustration. I also find it, just side note, very entertaining to watch all of these SEO guys make TikToks now. So for my own entertainment. But here’s why think it’s important to talk about. Because no matter what, even if you are like, listen, I don’t even want to do a blog. I just want to be on TikTok. I just want to make my Instagram reels. Just give me my YouTube.

05:07
You have to have that home base. And we talk about this all the time. We talk about it in our webinars. We talk about it in the course. You have to have a place where people can go to, if absolutely nothing else, get on your email list. Sure, but that’s not a blog, right? That’s not a blog. That’s not a blog. You have to have a home base. But my argument would be your home base should have a little bit of content on it, even if you’re not building out a 300 post blog.

05:36
Right, like you’re, don’t know how, I know you’ve culled your posts a lot, but you know, not saying that you need three, you know, a thousand posts or even 25 posts. But I think the creation of content, understanding how to format things for the web, understanding how to write for the internet, which is not like writing a book. And I think people get very confused about that. Those are still things that you need to know even if you are going to do just like the bare minimum of blogging.

06:06
I guess I could agree with that. I mean, the format of writing that we were teaching was how to rank and search, right? For standalone blog. And we can go over those principles and they still apply if you have a business underneath it. Let me just take a step back in case people are just not up to date on all this stuff. So thanks to AI, people just started generating all this AI spam.

06:36
like all over the internet. And it was working for a while. And so I think Google was not able to control any of this. So they just put the hammer down and just said, hey, anyone who’s creating content that doesn’t have like a business underneath it, we’re just going to devalue those blogs. Right. And so let’s just take my wife, Quitterjob.com. I don’t sell anything on that blog. It is a pure content site. And so that’s why it was devalued. Whereas Bumblebee Linens,

07:05
It’s got an e-commerce store behind it and it has sales, it has reviews and that sort of thing. So it’s a legit business. So hence that blog actually got promoted. Yeah. Which is I think great news for e-commerce store owners, right? Because a lot of people we know struggled for a long time to get their stores to rank and search against blogs, right? Against your traditional content-based sites. So I think in the e-commerce world, this is exciting news, right?

07:34
but you also have to once again, and I think you said we taught how to write for search, we also taught how to write for readability. Because if you go back to your English, ninth grade English class, and you think about everything that you had to do, or if you ever took a creative writing class in college or anything like that, basically you have to throw all of those things out the window.

08:00
that you learned in writing class. All of the things that you can remember from eighth grade on are garbage when it comes to writing for the web. And this is if you have an e-commerce store blog or if you have just a traditional website because people don’t read that way on the web. I don’t know if I agree with that statement. Okay. What you said is true if you’re writing for search, but it’s definitely not true if you’re just like, like take Mark Manson.

08:29
Do you read his stuff? I do. This stuff is amazing. He writes it like a book. It’s not like the way we teach it, because he doesn’t care about search at all. Yeah. He writes stories. It’s excellent. He’s developed an audience without depending on search at all. Yeah. So yeah, the style of writing that I don’t know where you want to go with this, but what you just described is writing for the search engines to me. Well, I was meaning more about

08:58
just things that we would traditionally not do. What did you learn a paragraph was in high school? Four sentences, right? Usually the bigger the better for these paragraphs. You’re talking about aesthetic formatting. Yes, which is very important. I think this is the easiest thing for people to learn. This is the easiest shift that you can make. This is really important in e-commerce because I guarantee most people are probably looking on mobile.

09:22
This becomes far more important when you think about the size of, even though these new iPhones are gigantic, but it’s still a much smaller screen than a desktop computer. So just basic things like using bold and heading tags to break up your text, adding images into your content, making your paragraphs one to two sentences, which to me was like the hardest thing as someone who wrote a ton before the blogging world.

09:50
to think that you could have a paragraph that was one sentence is absolutely nuts. And then one of the biggest things that I think, we don’t talk about a lot, but this was a tip I think I got from our friend JD Roth, who’s a great writer, is that after you write something, you walk away from it and then you come back and you trim as much as you can off of it, right? It’s not about, like I remember certain classes in high school and college where it was like you just had to get the word count in.

10:18
Like the more words, the better. And I know there was a time in SEO where you were, I think you were doing like 5,000 word posts or something crazy like that. But nowadays just for the reader, for the use case, is go cut all the fat off the content. You don’t need to overwrite and over explain. Figure out how you can say the same exact thing and as least words possible.

10:45
And you’ll give your reader a much better experience when they come to your website. And again, I think this just depends on the type of content we’re talking about. If they’re looking for answers, then yes. Most people don’t even read the content. They just look at the heading tags to get an idea. But if you’re writing a narrative, like your however many page thing that you wrote about your life, which was like 15 pages or whatever, I don’t think any of that stuff matters. What I will say,

11:15
is that if you have a blog and it’s like the full width screen, it’s actually really difficult to read something that’s super wide on a desktop also. Because I like lose track when I go back to the left where the sentence actually left off. So even though you have all that screen real estate, you don’t want to make your content the entire width of the screen either. Yeah. And the nice thing is whether I think you’re on WordPress or even if you’re just building a blog on Shopify,

11:44
you can have a mobile view of your content before you ever publish it. Yes. And you should be arguably designing your blog for a mobile phone first instead of desktop because I mean, that’s probably 75 % of my traffic. Maybe even more. Actually, I haven’t checked my wife quit her job recently. I found that the store websites, their traffic is so mobile heavy. Right. Yes. And so

12:12
I’m 99 % sure that every Shopify theme allows you to do this, but you have to check this stuff, right? Before you hit publish, because what you don’t wanna do is drive an ad to something or a lead ad, right? Or even send out an email where you want to drive people to your e-commerce content and then have people scrolling around like crazy, not able to read it because it looks wonky on mobile. And so often it does.

12:41
if you don’t do mobile first. And I think really the mistake that most people make is embedding images and videos. So for example, let’s say you’re gonna embed a YouTube video by default. If you were to cut and paste that code into your site, it would not look right on mobile. In fact, don’t know why YouTube does this actually. I always have to add extra code just to make sure it automatically sizes to the container that it’s done. But yeah, videos can look wonky if you don’t do it right.

13:11
And then images also. Yeah, you got to just make sure that, I remember looking at my blog once and I had an image that almost fit the entire width, but then there was space on the right side of the image where it could fit just one word. So the paragraph started with, you know what I’m saying? Yes, I’ve had that happen before. Or like one letter going down. So yeah, I think that’s a big thing for sure is that

13:38
the aesthetic of the content is actually really important these days. I also think that, and this drives me nuts, and I do this too, so I’m I’m talking to myself, but people do not grammatically check their content. And I feel like we’re just in this world where it’s like, we have spell check, if it doesn’t check it, it’s fine, if he doesn’t catch it, it’s fine.

14:01
but it doesn’t always catch the correct use of they’re there, you’re you’re, like all these things. And depending on what type of content you have, and I think especially if you’re a brand, like if you’re selling something, that to me, if I see typos on a brand site, that is a red flag for that product, especially if you think about this, right? Like everyone’s competing against Amazon to get people to buy their stuff. Amazon is a trusted,

14:31
resource for the buyer. I know for the seller they might not call it a trusted resource, but for consumers like they know Amazon, they order it, it comes in two days. If there’s a problem, Amazon fixes it immediately. Like their experience is very positive. So if you’re trying to compete with Amazon on your Shopify or BigCommerce store and your content is loaded with typos and just mistakes, to me that immediately diminishes the trust in the brand.

15:01
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

15:30
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.

15:42
Yeah, you know what I do these days? I just cut and paste everything in the chat GPT and just say, fix grammatical errors without changing the content. Yeah. Spelling and grammatical errors. And then it does that. And you should, there’s no excuse basically. Yeah, there’s no, yeah, there’s no reason to have this. I mean, there really isn’t ever a reason, but you know, there, you should absolutely make sure that everything is written correctly. back in the old days before AII, I mean, it’d be very easy to miss like,

16:12
For some reason, I always had this problem where I would miss an A or B or something like that you’re reading it fast, right? You’ve also written it typically, so you’re reading what you already wrote, so you’re reading what you thought you wrote, not necessarily what you actually wrote. Honestly, as I get older, I fully omit words in my sentences now. I have found that I will just absolutely forget how to spell something.

16:41
Like last night, we were texting back and forth with friends. And I mean, this is kind of a word that not many people know how to spell, but we were talking about the different types of salami because we were doing we’re doing charcuterie. And so there’s a meat called sopracetta. It’s probably not being pronounced correctly, but I just couldn’t even get to like the fourth letter.

17:03
Right, I was just like, and it was so poorly spelled that like my phone wouldn’t auto correct it. It was so bad. And I was like, I have no idea how to spell this word. Like absolutely no clue. I just went completely blank. And I feel like that happens every once in a while with writing. It’s just like, there’s a word where you’re like, I don’t have any idea. Or I’m always like, is it principal or principal? Like there’s those words that, you know, have the double spelling. So anyway, that kind of stuff is actually important, especially if you’re a brand, because I feel like everything that you put out on the web,

17:31
is building up trust in your brand. so having the least amount of problems on your pages is gonna help people realize that you’re a place where they can confidently buy. Yeah, so just run everything through AI really. So are we talking about e-commerce blogging right now then? I mean, I think we’re talking in general, but I think it’s just so much more important for e-commerce. Yeah.

18:00
And you know, it’s hard for me to hide the fact that I think SEO is going to die. Yeah, eventually. But it’ll probably take a while. I don’t know if we’ve talked about the Google antitrust case much. We talked about it once. But I don’t know if you listen to the all in podcast. And there’s some other podcasts that I listen to that specifically cover this. And it looks like it’s going towards a direction of breaking up Google and the separate companies.

18:28
And all those deals where Google’s paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine will likely not happen anymore. Oh, that’s right. Yes. So when you get your phone, that’s where it has the biggest, I would say, one of the bigger impacts. Yeah. I mean, think things will fundamentally… The reports are saying that all this stuff just takes forever based on prior trials.

18:57
We might not see any changes for like five years, right? So if we can talk maybe in the context of five years, things probably aren’t gonna change a whole lot. in terms of just search market share, Google actually hasn’t lost much market share at all. Because if you look at percentage wise, we talked about people using perplexity, people using chat GPT instead of search. It’s really just like a percent or something like that for now.

19:27
So all the things that we’re talking about, if you’re writing for search and you have an e-commerce store, they still apply. The principles of ranking and search have not changed fundamentally over the years. So do a quick overview for people, because I know a lot of people out listening do have an e-commerce store. so I think there is some good news. I know you’re all down on blogging right now, but

19:56
I do think there’s good news for store owners. For store owners, I’m really happy with the Bumblebee Linens blog, but the Bumblebee Linens blog is also not something that I spent the last 13 years painstakingly writing the content myself. You know what saying? That’s why it’s great on Bumblebee Linens land, but I’m not proud of that content like I’m proud of the content that I’ve written on the blog. That’s why I’m down on it, just to be clear. Probably because you’re not a big wedding hanky guy.

20:25
No. Honestly, what we’re ranking for on the Bumblebee Linen’s blog is mainly anniversary gifts and wedding-related stuff, which drives traffic in the store, which is great. It’s not like I put my blood, sweat, and tears in that content. If you sold something different, you might feel differently. Maybe. If you sold microprocessors, you would be thrilled right now.

20:52
So, but just for people that are listening that are like, okay, give me a five minute SEO basics for my e-commerce blog. Basically, you want to figure out which keywords that you’re trying to target. And then you want to, you need a keyword tool to figure out what the best word is to target. And then there’s a lot of related keywords that are often used with those keywords. So you can use a tool like Surfer. We use Ahrefs for keyword research and just write a post that

21:20
Answers the question for the keyword that you’re targeting as succinctly as possible or all the different questions that are related to that and Do it in like the first sentence and be succinct Yeah, if I were to just that that’s like a 60 second lesson basically I mean there’s a lot more to it obviously but I Did want to talk about some of the other concerns about SEO that people were having

21:46
We can just focus on e-commerce since I’m still, I’m very up on e-commerce blogging actually. Before we go to the next topic though, because I people ask this of us every webinar, you talked about the tools. We use Ahrefs. You want to say why that’s your choice versus some of the other tools? Ahrefs unfortunately is expensive, but I think they have the best data of any company. Data is the important part of these search tools.

22:16
They have this Chrome plugin also that a lot of people have installed where they’re tracking people directly from the browser also in addition to the other data. That’s why they’re the most accurate. If you had to give people a budget option, what would you? Probably Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest, yeah. Neil Patel’s. I feel like Neil often offers deals on that where you can…

22:42
I don’t know, I feel like they’re in my inbox every once in a while, where if you sign up, you get a period of time free, or if you pay, you know, I don’t know, I feel like there’s still some deals running on that every once in a while. So if you’re not on his email list, that might be a place to start. Yeah, they have a, he always offers a lifetime deal. I think the last time one of my students checked and it’s still available, I think you sign up first and then they get you with a lifetime deal after a month or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

23:09
Anyway. He’s got an interesting tactic though. His close is always, you want to book a call? Is it really? I didn’t know that. Yes. I mean, you don’t talk to him, but yes, that’s his close. Anyway. Well, it’s very effective, right? Yes. if I ever wanted to blow up my course, if I ever wanted to do it, I would just hire an army of salespeople and just give them a commission because people want to talk to people with courses, right? Yes.

23:38
Okay. All right. So where was I? I don’t even remember what I was going to talk about. So SEO for businesses. Yeah, no, I was going to just talk about some of the concerns that people have been having, some of the questions I’ve been having. Mainly has to do with AI, right? People often ask me, hey, is it even worth it to do this stuff anymore? Right. And if you look at Google right now, you’ll notice that sometimes when you do a query, there’s this like purple box that pops up.

24:08
that it’s called the AI overview that basically summarizes your question. feel like that always pops up now. Well, it actually only pops up for 7 % of search queries. Back in the day when they first released it, it was like everything, but then it started hallucinating and they got a lot of negative press on it. How am I in the always 7 %? I don’t think I’ve never not seen it. Oh, I haven’t seen it actually in a while. I saw it yesterday. Anyway, go on. What are you searching for?

24:37
We can’t talk about that on the podcast. The stats are it’s 7 % of search queries and 17 % of e-commerce queries. Oh, interesting. I guess most of my searches are probably very AI-friendly, like how many cups in a quart or how many. Oh, yes. Most of my searches are how many kilometers or in a mile.

25:02
type questions, so that would make more sense. So 17 % in e-commerce, 7 % regular. That’s interesting. Yeah, but the whole point is people will worry about creating content and those AI overviews totally eating up the clicks. Ironically, and someone did a study, I can’t remember which website did the study, but the search clicks actually went up as a result of AI overviews. Because apparently, no one really trusts what AI says.

25:31
And then they actually click on the links to just verify what AI is saying. Interesting. So we’re talking about low single digits here. Everyone expected a decrease, but surprisingly, it’s actually resulted in an increase. Yeah. And my long-term view of all this also is all your efforts in search are probably likely going to translate over to AI eventually as well.

26:00
So for example, if you’re ranking number one for wedding handkerchiefs, when you ask AI, and I’ve tried this with Chachi BT, like what’s the best place to get wedding handkerchiefs? And Bumblebee Linens was listed, probably because they’ve crawled the web, maybe using Google or another search engine, and those are the ones. So even if you look forward in the long run, I still think doing SEO is worth it. It’s just gonna be different. You’re now gonna try to rank in AI as opposed to just search.

26:30
We’re looking like five years out, probably five, 10 years out. Do you think ranking in AI is going to be significantly different than ranking in search, like the strategy? Or it’s too soon to tell? I have no idea. But AI has to get the data from somewhere, right? Yeah. And like the authority. it’s probably natural that it piggybacks on some ranking algorithm, right? Nobody knows. mean, we’re looking too far in the future.

26:59
If you’re worried about AI overviews, it hasn’t really been much of a factor yet. Yeah. So let’s see what else. And I think I already mentioned before, like if you’re worried like chat GPT, search GPT and perplexity are just going to eat Google’s market share, probably not going to be happening. Because as long as Google has those deals in place. Yes, yes.

27:27
which might, which they might lose. we’ll see about that. we’re talking, you know, we’re talking years out, think. Yeah. In case any of those things change, like I probably wouldn’t, there’s always going to be some sort of search engine. So I think the work that you’re doing will translate to the other ones. But I mean, we’re talking chat GBT, we’re talking like a percent right now, even if everyone went to chat GBT now, but.

27:58
So do you have anything else to say about e-commerce? Because I have a key for people. I think one of the things you should take away from this podcast is that if you have an e-commerce site, you need to be working on the content side of it. You need to be creating that blog style content for your website if you have a store. If you are a content creator and you do not have a physical product to sell, I don’t think that you can just

28:28
jump up and down and be excited that you never have to write again. Because I do think that writing is important and understanding how to communicate via the written word is still something that you need to do. And here’s where it matters, on a sales page. Now, I would argue that like, I would use Claude to help me write my sales page, right? Like I would use AI tools to help me do some of these things. However,

28:56
Claw, ChatGBT, all those tools are really only as good as you can prompt them to be at this point. So if you, and I think whenever I’ve, realized this when we did the webinar where you gave the YouTube prompt that was like 16 paragraphs long of how to get, but the response from people of like frantically trying to like get that information down and you did it in office hours and everyone was flipping out about it and in a good way.

29:24
But I think you still have to understand how to communicate well to be able to get the results you want in any sort of AI tool. to think that like, okay, this is great, I’ll never have to write again is not really true. You do have to figure out a way to create persuasive copy to be able to explain your value proposition. And you know what, if you can do that in a video, awesome, but you’re still gonna have some text, you know,

29:52
on the page somewhere to continue to close the deal. And then you’re gonna have to email people, which we talked about email last week. So you’re gonna be writing emails to people. So there is still something to be said about practicing your writing and understanding how to communicate in the written word. It’s just not looking the same as it did when we got started 15 years ago. And just to be clear, I don’t think…

30:19
every store has to have a blog. I think every store needs to be doing some form of content. Like a blog might not make sense for certain stores depending on what you sell. True, true. And we all have limited time, so you just need to choose the right medium. Like for example, if you’re in fashion and you sell like dresses, for example, I don’t think blogging is gonna be the right medium for you. No, I would create video content somewhere.

30:47
Yeah, exactly. Or short form or influencers. Whereas if you sell something a little bit more obscure, then maybe blogging because those keywords probably won’t be that hard. And again, we’re just talking about in the context of ranking. Or if you have to teach people how to do something with your product. Yeah. So if your product is complex or is used in a way that, you know, it’s not like a dress where you put it on, you zip it up.

31:12
Right? Like there’s not, usually don’t have to have an instruction manual to put on clothes. But a lot of people sell products that are a little more complex. And so having that content to explain or to explain to people why they need what you’re selling versus a different product or less expensive product or something like this, especially when you don’t have the name recognition. Yeah.

31:39
And I’m just people always ask me about the product descriptions and whether it’s worth it to put a lot of effort in there. I think your product descriptions, again, if you’re thinking about it from a source search perspective, you want to put in the keywords that you’re going for in the description. But honestly, no one reads the description or very few people. Like if you look on Amazon, very few people look at the description. It’s mainly the image and bullet points, right?

32:08
Yes, I was thinking bullet points was part of the description. I was like, think people do look at those. Again, it totally depends on the product. If you’re buying something tech that’s very technical, maybe you’ll look at it. This is where I think your niche is so determining of what you do. I don’t buy a lot of clothes on Amazon, but if I need something for a party or whatever, like, what does Amazon have that can be here tomorrow?

32:36
and I’ll go on Amazon. The only thing I care about is what the blend of fabric is. I want to make sure it’s not 100 % polyester so I won’t sweat to death. Then the next thing I do immediately is scroll down where the user-generated content lives, where people take pictures of themselves in that piece of clothing, which is all in the… It’s not lower carousel, but it’s where the lower carousel is on Amazon.

33:01
And I will scroll through and I will find people that are like my size, my shape or close. Right. Like, OK, this person is six foot tall, so it’s definitely not going to look like that on me. You know, and that’s how I make my decision fully, fully based on pictures of other people in the outfit. However, if I’m buying like a bookcase or, know, I’m read I’m what kind of what is it? What are the dimensions? How thick are the shelves? How tall is it? Does it have a thing that bolted to the wall? Like, right. Then then you’re much more invested in the product.

33:31
bullet points and descriptions. So I think this is really like a niche specific. It is. It’s funny though. There was the only reason why I said that there was a statistic somewhere I would I’d have to find the article, but it’s like the amount of people that actually read an Amazon description is like single digits. I me just me over here reading Amazon description. Actually, when I buy clothes like I don’t I don’t

33:58
I just look at the picture that I buy. Yes, because you just want to see how it looks. Yes, but I clothes that often. Yes, I don’t buy a lot of clothes on Amazon, but when I do, I’m just immediately to the lower carousel. Show me regular people. I don’t want to see the six-foot Russian model wearing the outfit that looks nothing like me.

34:22
Actually, if you think about it, it’s actually hard to find the description on Amazon, too. You got to scroll down many pages. they continue to hide it. They don’t hide it. It just goes to show that very few people are looking at it. So why put it higher up? Yeah. No, and you know, it’s interesting. And this is where it drives me nuts when like e-commerce store owners think that they know better than Amazon because like,

34:49
I noticed like Amazon did that, right? Where they continued to like bury the description. And then if you go to other big websites like Lowe’s or Home Depot, like I can’t, one of them also has descriptions like significantly further down than they used to be, right? And it’s like all these other huge e-commerce brands, right? Follow suit. And they’re like, well, if Amazon’s doing it, they clearly have spent millions of dollars researching and know every single thing about everyone’s mouse movement on a page.

35:17
but then an e-commerce store owner who sells, you know, $100,000 a year is like, no, I know better. I know better than Amazon. It’s like, no, you don’t. Just copy exactly what they’re doing and move on. So yeah, that always, I always find that entertaining.

35:35
Yeah, so I guess people are probably listening to this wondering if they need to start a blog. Right? Yes, which we saw. We kind of have said the same thing for a while now, which is you need a website that’s a home base. Correct. Correct. Yeah. mean, that that home base, like in the context of e-commerce can just be your store. Like Shopify, you can put put together landing pages and, you know, content pages. Yeah. And if you’re on big commerce, the same thing.

36:04
If you’re on WooCommerce, you’re on WordPress, so you already have like a home base. So, I would say that if you’re going to start a standalone blog today without a business to do affiliate marketing or whatnot, I probably wouldn’t do that right now to be frank. No, seriously. Burn it down. Well, I’m just giving it to you straight. Like if you’re doing it, like an app, your affiliate blog today, I just wouldn’t do it.

36:33
But you do need a website. Like let’s say you want to sell course or whatever. You definitely need what you said, a home base to collect emails, to talk about your offer, to talk about yourself, kind of like a portfolio sort of website. Yeah. Because I will say as someone who has worked on the brand side and on the content creator side, it is frustrating to me to find a content creator on TikTok or Instagram.

37:01
who has no website at all. The only way to contact them is through a DM. To me, is, if you want to become a content creator and you want to educate people through whatever medium it is, video, podcasting, the written word, if you want to write a book, you want to put a book on Amazon, you have to have some sort of home base because if you get, you

37:30
You don’t have to get that famous or that big or that many views for people to want to reach out to you. And a perfect example of this is, um, I don’t, we are in such different Tik Tok feeds. Every time I bring up a Tik Tok reference, I know you’re going to have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. Um, have you seen the 17 diaper mom? What do you think? Well, only because she ended up on good morning America or one of the morning shows.

37:57
I don’t either, but at that point it’s in national news. So she made a TikTok, she has a newborn kid, and she posted a video. I didn’t even see the original video, but it was like, here I am, I got a four-day-old baby, and I’m going around the house collecting all the dirty diapers from the day before. And they’re not in a diaper pail or anything like that. There are literally three on the coffee table, and one on the floor, and one on the couch. OK.

38:24
But if you’ve had a newborn baby, you know that sometimes in the middle of the night, you’re changing that baby on the couch and you’re just leaving that tiny little newborn diaper. It doesn’t matter. It’s like, how bad is that thing? Not that bad, right? So people like came after her, right? Like, how could you do this, whatever. But then, and of course the internet is a wild place, right? So then she had all these people defending her. basically people were making videos, moms that were like, this is my 17 diaper moment. When I had a two week old,

38:53
you know, baby, I had such severe postpartum that when my husband came home from work, I would give him the baby and drive the car around my neighborhood for two and a half hours every night. Like, and they were sharing like, it’s okay to have 17 diapers because everybody handles like having a baby. And it got to be so viral that she got invited on a morning show. And you know, she made this, I saw the video she made where it was basically like this video changed my life, right? But.

39:20
You never know when you’re creating content when you have the 17 diaper moment, right? If you make that video that like the girl that Elise Myers a couple of years ago who posted the bit about the date at Taco Bell where she went on a Tinder date and he said, let’s go to Taco Bell and they get in the drive through, he orders a hundred tacos and then he doesn’t have his wallet, right? She blew up from that one video, ended up leveraging it into a lot of different things, but.

39:43
If you don’t have that website where people can contact you, sign up for your, I mean, if people are trying to find you, let them find you, know, give them that place to, you can grab their email address. They can fill out a contact form, all those things. You want to make it as easy as possible for people. Cause especially when they’re watching it on their phone, if it’s not super easy, they’re going to move on to the next person. I mean, I have a counter example. I actually know a lot of people who don’t have a home base and collecting emails and they’re just depending on

40:13
You know, whatever social media platforms, built in audience, like they’re just relying on Instagram, for example, like the Instagram lists and whatnot. And I know that this is just a story back in the day when Facebook allowed you to collect messages, subscribers, there were a lot of people, including myself, building a list on that platform until Facebook basically decided to destroy it. Yeah. So all that work was just gone in the span of

40:42
of an announcement. if you have your own email list, that’s yours and no one can take that away from you. So even if you think you have an audience on a social media platform, anything can happen when you don’t own the list yourself. Yeah. So I think if, before you go cry over Steve’s depressing- I know, I’ve been very negative this episode.

41:08
I’m you, didn’t want to record this. I you didn’t, but I think it’s important for people to understand just the basic stuff. think if you’re thinking about that content creation, give yourself a home base if nothing else. That’s an important step because you and I both know way too many influencers who have the algorithm changes, Facebook changes the rules, they stop showing things to groups, whatever it is, right? Where then all of a sudden, their reach that used to be a million is now

41:37
10,000, right? So you wanna be able to capture as many of those people as you can, especially while you’re riding the wave of virality. And if you have an e-commerce store, you should be creating some kind of content, whether that’s written, video, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, you need to have something out there so people can discover you and learn more about your brand, but it definitely needs to be something that you think about when you’re creating that online store.

42:07
Hope you enjoyed this episode. As you can probably tell, I’m a little down on blogging, but only when it comes to a pure content site. For e-commerce, blogging is still a viable traffic strategy. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitherjob.com slash episode 563. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 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.

42:37
Go to SellersSummit.com and if you’re interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuitherJob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.

00:30
The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine 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 e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods,

00:57
and not some high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s 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. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit

01:26
is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th. Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. And finally, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur Yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death. Plus, you can still get my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging.

01:56
YouTube and podcasting when you grab the book over at my wife quither job comm slash book Go to my wife quither job comm slash book fill out the form and I’ll send you the bonuses right away now on to the show

02:14
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast. Today, Tony and I are continuing with our content mini workshop. Today, we’re going to be talking about Tony’s specialty, which is email marketing. I was going to say my favorite topic. I’m excited. You just sit back and relax and enjoy the show. What’s funny about email is I remember when I first got started, I was too cheap to pay for email. Today,

02:44
ConvertKit or kit I should say is now free for 10,000 subscribers. So had kit existed back in the day, I definitely would have signed up, but I lost out on at the time probably tens of thousands of dollars with the revenue when I first started out by not doing email. Yeah, what’s interesting and yeah kit just re reframed their pricing model, I guess you could say

03:09
and you get 10,000 subscribers for free and you actually get one automation in that as well. don’t know if you knew Yeah, actually, yeah. Before MailChimp was the game in town, right? Yes. And I think that was a big game changer for Kit because before they did have a free tier. think it was up to thousand subscribers. However, you couldn’t do any automation. So basically to get those subscribers, you kind of need an automation. I mean, not really, but I would say that’s a fundamental.

03:37
And so it was like, well, it’s free, but not really if you want to do anything. And now it truly is free with the one automation. And honestly, I feel like if you can just get one automation set up, you don’t need any more in your business. I obviously run lots of automations, but that is not that’s not essential for the for a content based business at all. I mean, I lived on one automation probably for two years. Yes, yes. Literally, the pager bills.

04:07
Yes. Well, let’s talk about automation since I don’t want to assume that everybody knows what Let’s define it first. Yes. Yeah. So basically, you get a subscriber on your website. I think most people know what a subscriber is. But what’s nice about something called an automation or a flow, and it depends on whatever email service you’re using, is that when someone signs up and you can kick them into an automation, they’re going to get a series of emails automatically.

04:34
which means you write them once, you create these, you know, basically email templates, and then they’re just sent out in a timed manner, right? So you can set it out to go out once a day, every other day, once a week. And these automations can be truly as long as you want them. Yeah, actually, I’m thinking how long mine is. My longest one, I think, is 60 emails. Yeah.

05:00
When I was doing e-commerce, think one of them was 162 days or some obscene. It wasn’t 162 emails, but it was like every couple of days people got an email. Oh, wow. Okay, so I usually dial it down to once a week towards the end. Yeah. But anyway, so I think that’s awesome that Kit now offers that for people because you can basically get started and get set up.

05:27
for free. And I think that’s one of the reasons why people get hesitant about email marketing because it is a true cost, right? We talk about, okay, you can buy your domain for 10 bucks on GoDaddy. You can set up a website for pretty inexpensive hosting, know, a couple dollars a month basically. But then emails like, and now you’re gonna pay $122 a month for this email list that you don’t know how to monetize. So people were like, no, I can’t do that because I’m not making any money yet.

05:57
That was exactly what my problem was. I needed to be convinced. That’s why I waited for so long. I had to have my mastermind group berate me into it. I feel like there’s a lot of things in your life that you have to be berated. Webinars, email. I’m sure people listening can understand. If you’re putting down money and you’re not 100 % sure it’s going to make you money, and it’s a significant amount for content of all things, right?

06:24
Like when I first started with content, I didn’t think it was really going to make any money. Like you’re not sure, right? Yeah, no, I get it. I get it. So that’s why I think this this new tier from Kit is exciting because it does allow you guys to and doesn’t force you on MailChimp, which, you know, we don’t recommend or love. Yeah. So no excuses anymore, which is the great thing. So anyone listening to this should actually go sign up and start implementing the things that we’re going to be talking about today. Absolutely.

06:52
So the first thing that I notice when I go to people’s websites is, one, how do you get them on your list? And I still have the sidebar signup on my site, so I’m not gonna be dogging that because I still have it. It doesn’t get any signups. I mean, very few, right? So that’s not the move. And while it probably used to be 15 years ago, you have to give people a reason to get on your email list outside of, I’ll email you once a week.

07:18
Like that’s not compelling for people. So you need to create something called a lead magnet or some reason to get people to actually give you their email. Actually, I want to, we have contrasting styles here. I just have one main lead magnet. Actually I have two main lead magnets and I can’t keep track of more than two to be honest with you, but you have a million of them. So here’s, here’s why. Because my site is not as targeted as yours.

07:47
I talk about a variety of things. I talk about budgeting, I talk about recipes, I talk about home decor, I talk about parenting. so, know, certain lead magnets just aren’t gonna convert well. If you only want my recipe content, then you don’t need my, you know, letter alphabet printouts for preschoolers, right? Like, you’re not gonna get on my email list for that.

08:16
Does that mean you have everyone segmented and you have to send out like 5x the number of emails every week? So you know what, I actually used to do that. I used to send a week. Yeah. So this is this is what not to do. So I, you know, I have like six main pillars on my site. And so I used to segment everybody by the pillar they were in. So if you came in through a grocery budgeting lead magnet, then you got food content every week.

08:44
If you came in through a homeschool printable, you got homeschool content every week. So I was writing five to six emails every week. Now, granted, these emails are basically like regurgitation of your content. You’re not like creating brand new content for that. But it’s a lot of work. And so I have I will say in the past like five years, I’ve only created like two lead magnets because I I don’t do that anymore. Everybody gets everything. You can unsubscribe if you don’t want to read it. OK, yeah, I was about to say it’s not like it’s not.

09:13
Easily sustainable. mean, you can do it, but yeah, like I have problems with like one or two emails a week actually. Yeah, so but I it’s here’s the hard part though is when you figure out a lead magnet that works isn’t this is what happened. I got lead magnet happy. I I was like ooh, this is a cool lead magnet idea and I would literally create the lead magnet whether it was like a printable or a worksheet or budgeting whatever it was. And then I would like.

09:42
pin it on Pinterest, right? Like I would create graphics for the content. And then, you know, I would look in like 200 subscribers a week, 300 subscribers a week, and I was doing nothing, right? Like literally nothing. So, and then these people like were pretty, for the most part, these people stayed on the list and were high achieving email subscribers, right? Like they weren’t duds, they weren’t unsubscribing, things like that. So when you start to see that happen, it’s hard not to be like, I’ll create another,

10:13
Like, oh, I just created, and I’m not even joking, this week more Halloween printables. And I’m way too late in the game for Halloween, just so you guys know. Like if you’re listening to this now, don’t do Halloween printables. Work on Thanksgiving or Christmas. Actually, it’s not too late because we just created a printed line of Halloween and we sent it out last week and it actually did really well.

10:35
Yeah, so it’s hard for like the lead, because it’s like if especially if Pinterest is like one of your main like drivers, which is one of my main drivers of email traffic, like it needed to be out like four weeks ago, you know, just to like get some get some juice. It’ll still do well. And I and it’s just an add on to what I already offer. So it was more like, I’m expanding the line of printables. But yeah, it’s hard because like when I see something work, then I get crazy about it and I want to do it over and over again. So don’t do that.

11:05
I would say, especially if you’re just getting started and I know most people are still like, oh, I don’t have one lead magnet, get one lead magnet. And it really needs to be, and this is where I see people make their first mistake. It needs to be so relevant to the content that you talk about on your site. It can’t be something on the side, right? So if you have a, like your lead magnet is a six day mini course in e-commerce. What do you talk about all day long? E-commerce.

11:33
What’s your social talk about? E-commerce. What do you talk about on YouTube? E-commerce. Because these people are opting in. At this point, you’re paying for people, I’m paying for people on our list. We don’t want people that are opting in for something that then you don’t talk about ever again, right? So I do recipes on my site, but I’m not gluten-free, dairy-free. It’s like I do all kinds of recipes. So I’m not gonna have a gluten-free lead magnet. Because if I had a lead magnet for a gluten-free recipe,

12:02
then who would I get on my list? A bunch of people that can’t eat gluten and half my recipes include gluten, right? So you want to, with your lead magnet, make sure that it is super targeted to the people that you know are going to take the next step to make you money. Yep. And in my case, that’s my mini course. And in your case, you have a whole bunch of digital products too, right? That you steer people I really just want moms on my list. That’s true.

12:29
Yeah, yeah. My demographics really broad, mostly frugal moms. you know, so but that’s when you’re giving away something for free, you usually get the frugal people first anyway. So yeah. And this is the other thing, like when we started doing this a million years ago, like your lead magnet was all emails, right? You sent emails out to people and it was just written content and emails. You know, mine still is primarily printables. But now you can deliver video content.

12:57
in a lead magnet, which I think is for most people so much more effective than just something on print. think if you can, especially that first video, and even here’s the thing, even if you’re giving away, you know, snowflake printables for people’s preschool or something like that, right? Make that first email.

13:17
include a link to a video, right? You can embed really a video in an email, but you can take a screenshot and put the link in so it makes it look like they can click on it and play the video and it’ll open up in YouTube. Make it unlisted if you don’t want people to see it. And just make some sort of video content because that will, one, it’ll improve your email engagement, right? Because people love video content and emails. And then two,

13:41
you’re gonna immediately introduce people to your brand, who you are, what you have to offer. And you can do that so much better in a video than you can in the written word, 99 % of the time.

13:55
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

14:24
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.

14:36
I mean, I think this generation now doesn’t read. I don’t think so. I don’t. Yeah. Because I just look at my kids, they’d rather watch a video. I’d rather read something personally because it’s faster. But I almost think that video is almost required now. I guess depending on your demographic. But I would say even if you think like, oh, you know, this isn’t, you know, it’s just a printable or it’s just you know, grocery list, make a video when you’re in the grocery store.

15:06
Just pull out your phone and be like, hey, it’s Tony from the happy housewife. I’m so excited you decided to download my grocery budgeting printable. If you’re like me and you shop with kids, blah, blah, you get them a 30 second intro and you still deliver the printable. You still give them the PDF. It’s not like you’re exchanging something, but you just get that like immediately they can relate to you or they don’t relate to you and they unsubscribe. Perfect. Get them off your list.

15:35
I always, I always love people that are all about like, Oh, I’ve got 500,000 subscribers. I don’t want to pay for 500,000 subscribers. Give me 10,000 subscribers that love to click on affiliate links. Right. I mean, so, you know, I think if, if people don’t relate to you and that video can really make or break it good, get rid of them. Don’t pay for them. And if you’re an e-commerce land, about three months ago, I changed my pop-up again to this modified spin to win.

16:04
that now converts at like 8%, between 7 and 8%, I should say. What’s the modified spin to win? The modified spin to win. Actually, I don’t want everyone to go and sign up for Bumblebee Linens because I actually pay for those subs. Basically, it asks you first, hey, would you like free stuff? The wheel is spinning but not spinning, just moving to catch the eye. Then you click yes and then it spins.

16:34
and then you actually have to enter your email to stop the wheel. Oh, interesting. Okay. You enter the email and then it stops and every spot is a winner. Oh, Then it asks you for your phone number to actually redeem whatever prize that you had. Yes. Look at you getting the two steps. Actually, the two step is a game changer. I never thought that it would be better, but it’s more of a pain in the butt to implement. Yes. Well, it’s also, I mean,

17:03
Because they have to enter their phone number to get the discount, you’re, I mean. It’s about 50%. I get the email and it’s about a 50 % to get the phone number. It depends on the size of the discount, obviously, that they’re winning. And in e-commerce, I would say your lead magnet’s a little bit different. If they’re coming to your e-commerce blog or your content site, you can give them informational.

17:30
content, right? So I know for Bumblebee, you did like a hanky tutorial, folding tutorial. We used to give, when I sold the essential oil jewelry, we used to give like essential oil blends for your jewelry. So you could download like seasonal. So in the winter, you should use these blends and the summer use these. So you can give, if you, know we have a friend of ourselves keto snacks. You could do like three keto recipes. You definitely don’t want to miss. Like you can do informational content in

17:59
your content site for your store. I think if people are landing on your store, like direct where there’s products and you want them to grab their email, you need to have some sort of like purchase incentive. So for you, it’s the spin to win wheel. It could be, know, and you see this all the time, enter your email, get 10 % off. I would say try something like enter your email and get a free gift with purchase, right? It’s a better deal, right, for you as far as, you know, you’re not giving that discount right away.

18:29
And other things for e-commerce like don’t have the pop-up appear right away. That always drives me nuts. Like, because there’s sometimes where I’m like, I’m going to buy it. I don’t care if there’s a discount. Like I need it. Right. And then you’re like, now you’re just going to give me 20 % off. Thanks. You know, make it on exit intent. Don’t show it to people once they’re already a purchaser. You know, there’s all these things you can do. If you use Klaviyo, you can really narrow that stuff down in there. So just make sure you’re following like a lot of best practices in e-commerce when you’re doing this.

18:58
So this is just something random that I’m not sure all of you will be interested in, but Google nerfed exit intent on mobile. Yes. Probably like six months ago. So I had to write this little bit of code now where it detects the speed of your scroll up. Because when you’re ready to go, you scroll up quickly. And that’s when it triggers the pop up now. So you can do it on a timer, though. Yeah, you can do it on a timer, but that’s not exit intent, right? No, it’s not. But you can.

19:27
You can sort, I want to say like you little bit mimic it. Like if someone’s on there for 45 seconds. Well, you’re not supposed to do those pop-ups now, the timer ones that occupy more than a third of the page. on mobile. Oh yeah, yeah, on mobile. so that’s why the exit intent was so important on mobile. like, I was wondering why my exit intent was busted. This is like probably six to eight months ago. It’s because Chrome, people were abusing the back button counting.

19:57
I don’t know exactly why there were some spammers that were abusing the back like you know how you you hit back but they were preventing it from you being able to leave this site full of pop-ups and whatnot. Yeah, so anyway, let’s talk about money because one of my Hiccups early on with signing up for email today. There’s no excuse back in the day. You had to pay to play was convincing myself that I could make money with this so

20:25
I know with content and e-commerce, the money pretty much comes right away. But with content… one should argue. You don’t get to argue with us on e-commerce. If you don’t want to do email, you’re dumb. So, end of story. Let’s talk about content. Let’s talk about content. And the reason why I had a hard time justifying it for content was at the time I didn’t have anything to sell. Yeah.

20:49
but that doesn’t have to be the case anymore because you can just sell other people’s products, which would be my number one thing if you’re just starting out with email. Yes. Big caveat to this, you cannot use Amazon links in your email because I just ran into this with an actual rather large blogger who was using Amazon links and I was like, ah. Did they get banned? Don’t do this. No, I found it and I was like, stop immediately.

21:17
I have a feeling they probably do a decent amount of Amazon affiliate revenue. But here’s what I think is interesting. So you can use pretty much any other affiliate link in email unless they’ve specifically forbidden it. For the most part you can, which is nice, because not everything should have to run through Amazon. And actually I don’t know, Walmart’s really pushing, I know their affiliate stuff lately, so I don’t even know if they have the same rules as Amazon because I don’t promote Walmart, but.

21:43
definitely something worth looking into if you want to promote Amazon type products because Walmart’s basically got the same type of platform. But what I think is nice is one, you can promote any other affiliate in an email, which means you can literally send an email to your list. And I do this all the time where it’s like, hey, my friend, Kelly at Adore Your Wardrobe has a free closet, frustration to functional closet challenge, right?

22:09
you can sign up here. Well, obviously that sign up link is my affiliate link, which then she’s selling a course at the end of the challenge, right? So I didn’t have to create the clothing course, she created the clothing course. So I sign people directly from email. So it’s one step, right? I’m not sending to people to my website first. I don’t have to worry about people dropping off. And the click through rates always higher on my email than people just landing on that post, because I have a post on my site too.

22:34
the email just does so much better, right? Because I’m able to talk directly to my, and sometimes I even make a video for it, just depends. But that to me, that’s like the first no-brainer, right? Is sending people to affiliate, whether it’s courses, products, information, a lot of people offer a free trial, free version, lots of people sign up for free, and then it’s their job to get them to commit, but then it’s off your plate.

23:03
You know who convinced me to do email and where I made my first money was Ramit Sethi. Oh, yes. contacted me and he’s like, Hey, would you like to promote my earn 1k programs coming out in like six months? I was like, sure. You just want me to put out a blog post or something. He’s like, no, just send something out to your list. I’m like, Oh yeah. And then I had to like look up what, you know, so anyway, I, uh, that’s when I decided to sign up.

23:33
And then I, the list wasn’t big at all, but I remember I sold like 13 copies of his class and I think he was charging a thousand at the time. And then I got half of that and all of a sudden, you know, that paid for years and years of my email marketing. was like, okay, I’m in, I’m in all this, but once you have like, you don’t need to have your own product today. I mainly push my course and I do push affiliate revenue here and there, but

24:00
If you’re first starting out, you don’t need your own products. Almost every single company has an affiliate program. Yes. That to me is step one. The other thing you can do is, I like to direct link and email, but if it’s an Amazon product, then you can’t. What you can do to help your Amazon conversions is, recipes are really hard to monetize. In fact, I would probably…

24:25
I probably caution anybody into making a recipe blog at this point. There’s a lot of competition, it’s hard to monetize. And the one way you do monetize is by like, hey, this is my favorite Instapot. Hey, this is my favorite air fryer. This is my favorite, you know, whatever. Well, you you can’t put that in an email, but what you can do is write an email linking people to that post, but really calling out the features of that product in the email. So while they can’t…

24:52
you know, click and buy directly from the email by the time they’re on the blog post, you’ve kind of already sold them on the newest air fryer, right? Like, so rather than having to do like a full on product review and a post, if you don’t want to do like if it’s a recipe post, right. And it’s like, you know, air fryer zucchini fries. Actually, that’s one’s coming out of my site this week. So if you’re like.

25:15
The recipe you want to talk about the zucchini fries. You don’t want to talk about the brand of air fryer that you’re using. But in the email, you can be like, hey, I’m sharing this recipe this week. And let me tell you, the air fryer I’m using is an absolute game changer. I used to use this air fryer, but I’ve switched to this. And let me tell you, they’ve never been so crispy. You know, don’t have to use any butter, whatever. Talk up the health benefits, whatever you want to do. But you can use email.

25:37
to like sell and then the link is in the blog post, but the blog post isn’t so salesy, it’s that recipe. So when people search and are like, I’m so sick of hearing your sales pitch, right? People that are finding you from search or Pinterest or social, they’re not irritated, right? Because they’re just like, oh, there’s a link for an air fryer or whatever, but you can sell it in the email. So you’re not using the air fryer that I got you as a house warming a long time ago anymore? Oh, so you know what?

26:04
Arden is now using the air fryer you got me because their oven broke and that air fryer is so amazing that I was like, you know, and we were moving, so we didn’t have a house. So was like, you know what? Use my air fryer. This thing is an oven and air fryer, a microwave that like does everything right. So I gave her the air fryer. Well, they still haven’t got their oven replaced. And so we got a kitchen and I was like, we need an air fryer. So I just bought one on Amazon and my whole family is like, can we give her the one we bought and like get ours back?

26:33
Like there’s this like movement to get the air fryer. I was like, aren’t they the same? They’re like, they’re not the same. So anyway, look out for my comparison post coming soon. I would love to believe you, but chances are you bought the air fryer that had review slots open in the video so that you could create an influencer video. could create influencer videos on it? I didn’t because I was desperate, desperate times. no, seriously, and Brian’s like, I really think we should ask for the air fryer back.

27:00
I was like, okay, it feels weird because I feel like they’re the same, but apparently they’re not. Really, she had Fluencer Fruit open and she noticed that the Air Fryer had a 90-plus score on the review. 94 score. Everyone hates it, but it’s making a ton of affiliate money. That’s to me a really great way to use affiliate in email. I do think that everyone who has a content

27:29
based business needs to have some product to sell. Whether it’s an inexpensive product like a mini course, like a mini course that you charge for, right? Like a 9.99 or a 19.99 course or a larger course, right? Like profitable online store, which is thousands of dollars. I think when you create content, you should be doing it with the goal that at some point you’re going to…

27:55
monetize it with something that you can sell directly. Because I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but one of my first affiliates in email was a bread making course. And I had thought about creating a bread making course like 15 years ago and I was like, who’s going to buy a bread making course? That’s dumb. Didn’t make it. Two years later, one of my blogging acquaintances came up with a bread making course and I sold like 700 courses. 700.

28:19
Yeah, it was like insane. And I got like five bucks as opposed to $29, whatever the course was. Right. And I was like, that was dumb. I’m not going to not create a bread course again if I ever, you know, want to do it. give you half. It wasn’t half. It was like this is is yeah, I was like, now I’m like, listen, I need 25 % or more from promoting your digital product. But yeah, it was it was like a crazy amount. I sent tons of it. Here’s the thing. I sent so many clicks.

28:46
Right, so like even if people didn’t convert, now she’s got them on her email list. I mean, I don’t dislike this person, right? Like it’s business. But just seeing that and going, okay, so if you’re promoting affiliate products, right, or affiliate courses, services, and you notice that something’s like performing really well, create your own version of it. Create a parallel product because clearly that’s your audience, that’s what they want. And why not you keep all the money and or you you keep most of the money and pay someone else in affiliate.

29:15
You know, a student once emailed me a question saying, why should I create my own class and have to support it and do the work when I can get 50 % by promoting someone else’s? And I had to think for a moment there. And my reasoning for creating my own is you never know what’s going to happen with that other product and your reputation is at stake. So if you end up referring out to some class that maybe initially was good, but

29:44
isn’t good later on, then your reputation will take a hit and that’ll prevent you from, it’ll erode the trust that you have. So that was my number one impetus for creating my own class. Cause there’s a ton of e-commerce classes out there. Well, I also think too, yeah, I mean, obviously you, when you endorse something, that’s a big deal, right? Like I don’t like to endorse stuff and then, you know, have it go down the toilet later.

30:10
But I can remember, I’m trying to think of what, was a grocery product. It was a grocery SaaS product. And all these bloggers promoted the heck out of it. And I mean, it wasn’t like a game changer monetarily, but it was like several hundred dollars a month that I was making from promoting this product. And then they just went under. And I’m like, I don’t know how they went under, because I feel like every blogger in the world promoted them. Maybe their payouts were too high or I don’t know. But all of a sudden, like that revenue stream, gone.

30:40
Right. Like literally overnight. Like then there’s literally nothing you can do about it. It’s not it’s not their fault. Like they just went out of business. And I know like a lot of people like I’ve and I’ve seen this happen with other companies, too. Like I remember back in the day, everyone was promoting like diapers dot com and then diapers dot com got acquired and I think by Amazon and like the sweet affiliate payout just was like, well, you were making I mean, I people making thousands of dollars a month. Right. And then zero.

31:09
So I think promoting affiliates is absolutely great. And I think when you’re just starting out, this is the way to go. Like this is way to start making money is promoting affiliates. But once you start establishing yourself and you have like a rhythm down for creating content, things like that, creating your own product to sell with email, like a product in an email list is like your retirement fund. Yeah, I have to agree with that because I remember one time I created this whole content series around this one affiliate.

31:37
because I was making about $5,000 a month off this one affiliate. And then one day they said, we don’t need you anymore. Your affiliate program has been canceled. And I spent all this time on content just to promote this one product. it’s almost like an e-commerce where you’re selling someone else’s product versus coming up with your own private label version. The private label under your own brand is always going to be more stable than you selling someone else’s stuff.

32:07
Here’s the other thing to think about with email. Shifting a little bit is you started a YouTube channel five years ago. We always debate the date. Five years ago, started was 2020. It was during the pandemic. Yes, during the pandemic. Four years ago. Let’s call it four years. Everybody that I know that has started a YouTube channel that already had an email list has had a leg up in getting their YouTube channel off the ground.

32:33
Just like everybody I know that sold a physical product not on Amazon and launched on Amazon with an email list has a leg up. If you can take that list of even 5,000 people and drive them to your YouTube videos as soon as they’re published and ask people to subscribe, mean, don’t be shy, subscribe, follow, watch every video, watch them four times. Your list is your most loyal people.

32:58
Those are the people that have given you their email. They wanna have a relationship with you online. That sounds weird, but you know what I mean. And so for you to say to 5,000 people, 10,000 people, 15,000 people, hey, did you know I’m on YouTube? I’d love for you to watch a video. I’d love for you to leave a comment. They will do that for you. And so that is a great way to help build your other properties, drive traffic to your website, whatever it is. One of the things that I started doing a while back was,

33:27
Like whenever I send out a recipe, an email, I have a button at the bottom that says, don’t have time to read it now, pin it for later. And it takes them directly to the pin, right? On Pinterest, all they have to do is save it. It’s the second highest clicked link in an email for me every time. So the first highest click link is always like the picture of the recipe. The second one is always the pin it for later, which then gives some virality to a pin, right? So you can do this with just about anything. I mean,

33:54
I’ve never tried sending people to TikTok or something like that, but you could probably do that too. don’t know if I would necessarily send people to TikTok, but I would definitely send people to my YouTube channel to get them to subscribe and watch videos. Yeah, definitely. I think for when I first launched my YouTube channel, I remember I did this contest where I gave away a bunch of stuff. And that’s how I got my first…

34:21
can’t remember how many subscribers I got out of that, but a thousand, something like that. Yeah. good. Jumpstarted it and I got like over a thousand views on my first video just from the list. yeah, having the list was invaluable. It’s for everything actually, for the podcast. It’s just a way for your loyal followers to find all the content that you’re creating because there’s nothing like creating content and having no one consume it. Yeah. And the email is almost like guaranteed consumption, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah.

34:51
So I think knowing all of that, there are things that you need to do with your email that will help build that loyalty. So I think, you you get people on your list. We’ve talked about creating that lead magnet. We’ve talked about putting them in some sort of automation where you’re introducing them to your brand, who you are, whatever you talk about. You’re giving them more. You’re just giving, right? You’re giving, giving, giving, dropping affiliate link in there here and there, but it’s more about the give.

35:18
But then there’s also, I like to do like a weekly campaign send. So a campaign is a one-off email where you’re writing that and it’s just being sent out like Tuesdays at 9 a.m. or whatever time you pick, which you can also test and see when are people most likely to open. I just did a test today where I was like, you know what, I usually send in the afternoon, I send at 6 a.m. Amazing open rate right now, amazing engagement. I was like, oh, apparently I’ve been sending at the wrong time for 10 years.

35:47
You want to send people at least an email once a week because if you don’t send them stuff regularly, they forget about you. Then all of sudden it shows up in their inbox and they’re like, wait, did I subscribe for this? Did I sign up? Who is this person? I feel like nowadays everyone’s selling your email, so you get a lot of that anyway. You want to be top of mind for people. I think you and I both do text-based emails. Yes, I only do text. I have a-

36:16
an image in there occasionally, but it’s not like a company. don’t have headers and things like that. I would say that’s something you test for your audience. I used to do a whole, I had a beautifully designed thing and I was like, I don’t think this is making a difference. I switched, I’ve never heard one thing. My rates have gone up a little bit, nothing drastic, but I think that’s a testing thing. But then you just want to send them something weekly where they get used to, and you can send more than that. You can test it.

36:45
but it has to be a regular send. you know, this can’t be send one, don’t send for two months, send one, don’t send for a year. Because the other thing that happens is like people move or they quit their job or don’t have that email address anymore. So then when you decide to send again, you have to actually like warm up your list all over. So I think that, yeah, I think that’s really important to just regularly

37:15
put that content out, you don’t have to make new content, it can be regurgitated blog posts, it can be links to your YouTube videos, it can be random stuff that you wanna talk about, doesn’t matter. I would say don’t be too lazy about it. I had a student that emailed me saying, hey, it looks like I can just send my blog post feed as an automated email. Right, and literally what it does is it just.

37:41
takes the last blog post that you wrote with an excerpt and just sends it out. No greeting, nothing. And that’s fine. I mean, you don’t have to do any work. It’s all automated, but it’s not building anything personal. It’s like a robotic email and pretty soon people are gonna stop opening those once they catch on. I would say think of it as sort of like your YouTube content you wanna hook. So like the one I sent out this morning.

38:06
It’s an old recipe. think the recipe is like 10 or 11 years old. I’ve redone the photos and stuff, but it’s basically the same recipe I’ve had for long time. And I’ve sent this email out before. Like people have been emailed this recipe in the last five years, because I figure they didn’t open it. They’re new on the, I mean, I have a bunch of new subscribers now, because it’s the holidays. Everyone’s getting my printables. So I started the, and it’s a crock pot recipe, right? And I start the email with confession time. My kids hate crock pot meals. So.

38:35
You’re like, I’m sending you a crockpot recipe and I’m telling you my kids hate it. Right. So immediately people are going to the engagement of this email. And I rewrote the email just specifically to test this. And it’s doing so much better than the email that went out a couple of years ago with the exact same recipe. know, so you want that even if it’s like two sentences. Right. And then you link to the blog post, add a picture, give them a reason to go over there.

38:58
You’re not going to believe the change I made in this. I can’t believe this little hack I discovered that saves me 15 % of my Amazon fees, whatever it is, right? Give them that hook that makes them want to click over. Because obviously the goal is to get them on your site and get them engaged with your content, get them on your YouTube channel, whatever it is. Actually, that’s a good point because there’s no excuse now with AI. Yes, I was just going to say. Because for a while I was lazy.

39:28
And I’m still kind of lazy because but but yeah, I forgot because I spent so much effort on my YouTube scripts, but I should spend equal amounts of effort on the the email as well. And it’s not that much. It’s not still not that much effort. It’s you’re right. It’s not that much more effort now. Yeah. So now you and I probably differ a little bit on this one, but I really only like asking people to do one thing in an email.

39:51
I know you send out emails where like, here’s my podcast, here’s my YouTube, here’s my blog post. If I want to sell something, then it’s the only objective. If it’s content, then it doesn’t really matter. For me, at least, that’s my philosophy. Even with content, I like only giving people one thing to do because it just performs better.

40:10
It’s like, you when you go to the grocery store and there’s 52 kinds of jelly and jam and preserves and marmalades, it’s like, forget it, I’m not buying any. It’s too many choices, right? I like to be like, this is your only choice today. You’re reading this recipe. The other thing that I see people make mistakes about is font size and link size, right? So chances are, go into your email service provider. The majority of people are probably reading this on mobile. Most people open email on their phone. That’s 2024. That’s the reality.

40:40
Most people have fat gross fingers. make sure that it’s, especially if you have multiple links in an email, don’t make it hard to get the link, right? Like you put your thumb on that screen and you could be hitting potentially three links, right? Use H2 tags, make it 24 point font, bold, whatever it is. Use a big, I don’t mind using big buttons in emails, right? Like make sure that like whatever you want them to click on is very easy to click on and not.

41:07
going to be something where they like, I cannot stand when if I go to something and I can’t click on it right away and it takes me to something else, I almost always just give up. Right. And that’s the same response you’re going to get from people if it’s too tiny or it’s hard to access on a mobile phone. I 100 % agree. I would say that if this email or this action that you want people to take is very important, like all of our e-commerce emails only have one thing. There’s the, there’s three ways to go to the same place.

41:37
is very important and you’re right, everyone’s opening on mobile. All the email providers I can think of now allow you to put buttons in there. And so just use a button, a big fat red button and things will be good. But I think the moral of this story here is if you’re listening to this and you still don’t have email, there’s no excuse. If you’re in content, go sign up for a kit. 10,000 free email subs and one free autoresponder sequence.

42:07
It’ll take you a hot minute to get to 10,000. Yeah. I mean, your first 10,000 is the toughest. I would say two years, right? It’ll probably last you two years on the free plan. Maybe less, depending on what your topic is. Probably a year. I would say a year. If you get your lead magnet right, you’ve still got a year. But here’s the thing. 10,000, by the time you’re at 10,000, you’re paying for Kit. You can afford to pay for your email list. Yes, that’s correct. You can afford to pay for Kit.

42:36
when you have like a thousand or less subs, I would say. Because I remember when I promoted Ramit’s course, I think I might’ve had like maybe a thousand. So I read these all the time. I don’t know anyone personally who’s done this, but I’ve read about a million case studies of people who are like, I had an email list of 250 people. I had an email list of 500 people and I launched something or I promoted something and

43:04
they had like 10 to 15 % conversion, right? And it’s usually because those 250 people, those 500 people are like your number one loyal people. Like you’re just getting started. They’re signing up for you before your lead magnet looks good or you even have one, right? Like they’re signing up in the sidebar. So you would be surprised at how powerful a small list can be if it’s the right people on the list. And the best part is that it is free. No excuses. Go sign up right now.

43:37
Hope you enjoyed this episode. When done correctly, email marketing is literally like an ATM machine. For more information and resources, visit mywifequitherjob.com slash episode 563. Tickets for the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale at sellersummit.com. If you wanna 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 to sellersummit.com.

44:04
And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head over to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right to your inbox.

00:29
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, mine is a curriculum-based event 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, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

00:55
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 8 years. Now if you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur making over $250k or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive Mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th, and right now this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be.

01:22
And finally, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 25 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t 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. 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.

01:59
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today we are continuing on with our Back to the Basics series. And today we’re going to cover how to do long form video for YouTube. Yeah, we started this last week, but then we realized that short form and long form needed their own, they each needed their own podcast. So here we are. Correct. And just judging by experience in teaching long form is a little bit more intimidating and a little bit more involved than short form. Short form is like,

02:28
the gateway drug to long form, I would say. Well, and what I’ve noticed is we actually have a little bit of case studies, probably too strong of a word, but we did this challenge back in April with the course with profitable audience, basically challenging people to make 30 short form videos in 30 days and publish them on whatever platform they wanted this. Well, now we just finished September. So in September,

02:52
We challenged people to make one long form video a week and two short form video a week and we had much fewer participants in the long form challenge, which just shows us what we already knew, but basically that long form is just tougher.

03:08
It’s more intimidating. I wouldn’t say it’s tougher. I think it’s easier. It’s tougher for people to get the… Short form, you’re right. It’s like a quick drug. I don’t know what quick drugs are, but like that… I was relying on to… I don’t know exactly what that means. I feel like with short form, it’s like back… Okay, we’ve talked about this a long time ago. Remember StumbleUpon? Yes. When your post got stumbled and all of a sudden your site would crash because you would just be getting thousands of visitors an hour and all this stuff.

03:38
So I feel like short form has that same rush, right? Where it’s like you publish a video and a lot of times you know within like an hour two how that video, you’re seeing results, right? You’re getting like, and when you have a short form take off, it’s like this, ooh, I gotta make another, I gotta make another. And because it’s only 35 seconds, 40 seconds, you’re like, oh, I can make another really quickly. Whereas long form, I think for people, one, I think it takes longer to get that hit of a long form video.

04:06
So it’s not like you can have zero followers and have a short form video take off pretty, we’ve seen it happen a lot. We don’t see it as much with the long form. So I think it’s just, it’s harder for people to get over the mental hurdle for long form video. Not only that, it’s the mental hurdle of production. With short form, you just film it on your phone and you just release it you’re like, whatever, right? All the stuff out there is just people holding up their phones anyway. With long form, there’s this like psychological need to edit everything perfectly.

04:36
and make sure you don’t stumble on your words. It’s almost like the difference between Instagram and TikTok, right? Instagram, feel like you need to portray this image. At least that’s what the platforms are like. But it’s actually not true. Hopefully, we can get through some of the processes for you to get over those humps in long form today. We talked about something last week and I felt like we sort of brought it up at the end, so we didn’t give it enough.

05:05
recognition, but I think the number one key, especially with long form, is to have your setup set up all the time. I think the number one hurdle in creating video for anybody is just that, like whipping out your phone to make the 30 second video, but if you do want to use a little bit of a better camera, I would recommend a tripod for long form video, you know, having, you know, at least prop your phone up on some books or something, but you really want to have everything set up so that

05:34
you’re taking that initial technology hurdle out of the picture when you’re getting started. You know me, I actually wanted to start a YouTube channel for years before I actually did. And I tried and failed multiple times because it would take me 20 minutes just to set up the lights. Yeah. And this is mainly because my wife didn’t want me creating a little studio. And remember, I had that green screen backdrop too. And it was really ugly. And it ugly up the house.

06:03
but once I had my setup. You some hiccups along the way. Now I just sit down and basically turn on the camera and hit record and that’s been a huge game changer for me mentally at least. I think you and I both have the luxury of having a home office, a separate room in our homes, but not everybody has a full room. I have seen creators who take a corner out of their den or

06:30
A lot of people don’t use their dining rooms anymore, right? It’s basically for show and everyone eats in the kitchen or around the island or whatever. So I think any space you can carve out in your house or your apartment that you have everything set up, you might have to bring in your laptop and plug it in or something like that, right? You might have to take that final step, but the more you can have set up and ready, the more likely you are to create the content. Yeah, absolutely. And then after that, I mean, since we’re on this topic,

06:59
We talked about the teleprompter. One of my biggest hurdles also was forgetting what I was going to say as soon as the camera turned on. I don’t know what it is. When I’m up on stage talking to real people, this does not happen. But for some reason, when I’m staring into the lens of a camera, all of sudden I forget everything that I want to say. So teleprompter doesn’t have to mean that you script everything out word for word.

07:24
Usually what I do is I have some sort of outline. Sometimes I have word-for-word if it’s like a complicated intro, but for the most part, it’s just bullet points. I think here’s my theory on why you and I both find it easier to talk live than scripted. It’s because I feel like we’ve accepted the fact that if we say the wrong thing live, like if we flub a word or misspeak while we’re alive, we just correct ourselves and move on, right? It’s no big deal. We know

07:53
that like this has to be edited. It’s like when you mess up in video, you have the opportunity to fix it. So then it’s like it becomes a sort of, know, OK, well, then I have to fix this. Oh, great. Now have to fix this. And it just, you you kind of it sort of spirals right after you make the first flub. And then it’s like, I’m talking too long. I’m too long. You know, all these things start happening. And I think that just causes more stress, honestly. Yeah. And then a lot of people have, I guess, writer’s block.

08:23
But these days, it’s actually so much easier. So I’ve been using Claude.ai, especially to write the intros. And Claude is, if you guys haven’t heard of Claude, it’s a company by, it’s run by this company called Anthropic. And it’s, in my opinion, better than ChatGPT for both coding and creative writing. So I’m actually considering canceling my ChatGPT membership and then just going straight with Claude because

08:50
Right now I have like four AI memberships. I don’t feel like I need all of them. No, you’re smarter than that. You don’t need that much. I don’t, but it’s like they keep leapfrogging each other, you know? Yes. Because Chat2BT came out with the O1 preview and we were just kind of talking about this earlier. It thinks and it generates prompts on its own, which is what I like about that. So that’s why I’ve been keeping on with both. But anyway, back on topic. If you’re having problems creating like a really good hook for your video,

09:20
just give Claude a try for whatever topic that you’re doing. It will give you amazing results, I promise you. I will say, so you used Claude a couple of weeks ago in a student video breakdown. So a lot of times in profitable audience, we will take a video of our students and give some critique and then almost always rewrite the intro. And so you use Claude to rewrite the intro. I’m usually not super impressed with AI.

09:50
writing and probably because I’m more of a writer, right? So I’m like, I can do better. But I will say, like, I was blown away by what you got from AI with that script. And I think it was the pet one, right? Yes, was a pet one. Yeah. Yeah. Very impressed. Like I am. Well, I’ve had a crazy couple of weeks with other projects, but like that’s on my list to like start using because I was so impressed with. Yeah. The intro. So.

10:19
We have the setup down. Teleprompter, all you need is one ring light, I think. You can use your phone as the camera. Content-wise, you can use AI. What other hurdles do we have to dispel here or overcome? If you’re Steve, you can film in your ratty v-neck t-shirt.

10:45
but a lot of people want to look their best on video and I support that because there was a time where I made a lot of videos in my pajamas and not for questionable sites because I know that will come up next, but for like, I would make a cooking video and because I was still in my pajamas, I would just make the cooking video in my pajamas and didn’t think anything of it. Looking But that video got 1.5 million views, didn’t Yes, those videos did well.

11:13
in my flannel pajamas. However, I would love to have been wearing pants in those videos and not been in my pajamas. So I think the biggest trick for me as someone who would like, okay, today’s a hair wash day. I’m gonna actually get out of my workout clothes, make a video, is I try to film everything on the same day. And I know you do batch filming as well.

11:41
To me, that’s one of those other things that takes the hurdle away. Because if I thought to myself, I have to make a video every single day, like I have to film something every single day, there’s no way I’m gonna do it. Because it’s like, okay, well can’t film right now because this is when the garbage truck always comes. You know, it’s like there’s always like these little hurdles that happen that you can’t control and then there’s the hurdles you can control. And so I think if there’s a day of your week where you know you can get, you know,

12:10
maybe an hour or two of film time. So you get up, you put your film clothes on. And I know some people always wear like a black t-shirt or always wear the same thing. So then if they have to edit stuff out later, it’s really easy because they’re always wearing the same thing. I think that’s a great idea too. But I would say if you can bulk film and just be like, Tuesdays are my film day. And then you get up on Tuesday knowing like, okay, I’m gonna get up, I’m gonna do these three things, I’m gonna get ready, I’m gonna do my hair, whatever it is.

12:38
you do that and it makes it so much easier rather than like, I think I’m going to film today. Then you get up and you’re doing this and then you’re like, oh, I’ve got to run this errand and then, oh, I should do this. Oh, let me go take the dog for a walk. Then it’s like 4.30 and you’re like, well, I don’t want to get ready now. I don’t want to be film ready. I think if you just have in your head that you have a specific day, very helpful. I think the filming part for me is the easiest part. It’s not for most people though.

13:07
Is that true though? Once you have the teleprompter and you’re set up ready to go, the hard part really is what you’re going to say, which is the script. That’s what takes me the longest. It me about two takes you the longest, but think about this. Just think about the unique advantage that you and I have in creating video content. You have been teaching via video for 11 years, 12 years, right? How long have you been? It’s been 13.

13:37
13, yes. Okay. You have been every Wednesday giving a lesson, which is basically like what your YouTube videos are. They’re a lesson in something. They’re just shorter. You’re giving a mini presentation every Wednesday for the past 13 years of your life. Most people aren’t. Most people, the first time they were on video was in 2020 when they had to get on Zoom for a work call. I think for you, the reason why video is easy is because you’ve literally been doing it for so long. You don’t think about

14:06
that part of it, but for most people, hearing themselves and seeing themselves is actually a huge hurdle. And so that’s why I think the picking a day and things like that are- I agree with everything that you said, but I would say the biggest hurdle people have isn’t the actual, assuming that they’re just using a teleprompter. If they’re just going off the cuff, which is something that I can’t do, it’s something you can do, can, camera turns on, you can just talk forever.

14:35
I can’t ever. turns off. I’m still talking. I can’t do that. Yeah, I’m good for maybe like four minutes and then I’m done unless I have an agenda. Yeah. But I would say outside of the filming part, I know my biggest hurdle was the editing. Right. Yes. So not only do you have this video, you can’t just publish it as is. You actually have to make it good. And then that opens a whole new can of worms.

15:05
What software should I use? Man, this stuff is complicated and whatnot. How do I get it presentable? Yes, the software question to me is the one I find the most humorous because I don’t, and I’m probably naive in this, I don’t think there’s a superior software for regular users. I’m sure if you are a video editor by trade, there is a superior product, probably Final Cut Pro or something like that.

15:34
But like if you’re, you know, Bob Smith making videos in your basement, there’s the best video editing software is the one that’s easiest for you to use. Whatever, based on your price point and, you know, the machine that you use. Because we get this question every single week, right? Well, should I? Like last week, should we try CapCut? Well, I love CapCut. Like, I love it. But we have a lot of people on our course that love DaVinci. Was it DaVinci Resolve? Yes.

16:04
Yeah, they absolutely. Yeah. So it’s like, I don’t mind paying, you know, $60 a year for CapCut because it’s like for me, that software is intuitive. Like, and I like that you can have it on your desktop. It’s also you can also have the cloud version of it. know, so for me, it works. But like, I would never tell somebody you’ve got to use CapCut. It’s so great because if it’s if the interface isn’t what works for you, then you’ll struggle on it. Just like I would probably struggle on, you know, DaVinci, right? Because I now I’ve learned this other software. So, yeah, I think

16:34
But you have to pick one and then stick with it. Don’t jump around because it’s easy to get shiny object syndrome with tools.

16:44
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

17:13
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.

17:24
It’s funny, I forced myself to learn Adobe Premiere because it was the most comprehensive and it’s what the professionals use. But you actually have to click a whole bunch of clicks to do something that Camtasia can do in just one click because of all the features. Camtasia doesn’t do very much, but for my purposes, it’s exactly what I need. So you just need to figure it out. Yeah, that’s the other thing for people is like, we have our

17:52
You guys know Kevin, we talk about him a lot, but he does crazy editing, right? But I feel like he enjoys the pain of editing. I would say for most people, another tip for them would be don’t get into crazy editing your first go-round, right? Just do the minimal editing that you need to publish the video. Add some B-roll, add some text, whatever you wanna do, but try to keep it on the more minimal side, especially when you first get started, because editing will kill you.

18:22
As far as time, mean, we know Kevin stays up till like two in the morning editing videos. I think for most people, that’s not a sustainable schedule to make video. That’s the understatement of the century. I remember the first video I edited, it probably took me like two hours just to do five minutes or something like that. I was like, hey, this isn’t sustainable. Again, I didn’t know what I was doing at the time.

18:52
And I was trying to make everything perfect. Yeah. So now like, love using, you know, our mutual friend Rob burgers as an example, the man gets hundreds of thousands of views per video and he just lops off the front and lops off the end and publishes it. Yeah. The content will prevail if it’s, if it’s good. And I think editing is, is overrated depending on the type of content that you’re putting out. If you’re putting out teaching narrative comment, think.

19:22
I think editing is overrated. Yeah, I think the bigger thing, especially if you’re teaching, is if you’re teaching something that is, let’s just say you’re teaching how to use Google Sheets, right? Like that’s what you’re teaching. Then the most important thing is that Google Sheets is front and center and maybe your head’s in like a small little bubble on the side, right? But for you, like you’re teaching, you’re usually teaching like higher level concepts. So your editing, from what I’ve seen, mainly consists of

19:52
I would call them like markers that trigger remembering things. If you say a word like overpriced, then overpriced or something that symbolizes overpriced would come on the screen. I’m not saying that it’s not good editing, it’s good editing, but it’s not difficult as far as some of the things that are out there that are clearly. Here’s the other thing, the people that you see that have heavily edited content are almost

20:22
Guaranteed to be having to edit it by someone else They’re not doing that editing themselves unless that’s their trade and they’re already a video editor and that’s and that’s the spin of the video Right is the editing There’s this Chinese guy. I watch he puts out content almost every other day The guy’s channels clear value tax. He what he does is he all he does is he gets on? He always has this like pissed off look on his face That that’s like his and then he just talks about the economy Yeah, just him reading

20:51
I doubt he edits a single thing. And he doesn’t even change the camera angles. There’s no annotations, no B-roll, nothing. It’s just a pissed off Chinese guy talking about the economy. But he gets hundreds of thousands of views per video also. Yeah, when I first started putting videos on YouTube, I think that was like 2009, the only editing I would do, so one I’m in my pajamas, I had terrible light. Like I did everything wrong.

21:17
And these videos all got traction. Part of it was early adopter, right? But other part of it was it was good recipes, right? It was good content for the people who needed it. But I would literally give it to my son who was probably like 11 at the time. And this is like before all 11 year olds knew how to do everything, right? Because technology wasn’t as prevalent as it is today. And he would go on iMovie and like…

21:40
lop off the beginning, give me a couple transitions where the page would swirl or slide over, this basic, and that was all that was in there. Maybe two transitions in the beginning and lopped out. People like the videos. The content is still the king, but I will say, don’t get so worked up about the editing process. Just do the bare minimum when you’re getting started. Right.

22:07
And let’s see, outside of that, I guess- here’s an editing tip. I wanted to this earlier. Here’s a trick. So if you are filming and you mess up, and I do not take my own advice enough. So if you say the wrong word or you flub something, you have to pause before you say it again.

22:29
I am so guilty of saying the wrong word and then I just keep talking just like this and I just keep going and I resay it but I haven’t made any pauses, to edit that is a nightmare. But if I said, and my partner, Steve Chow, right? And then I was like, whoops, I would wait a second and then I would say, my partner is Steve Chiu, right? Because giving that pause will make your editing a thousand times easier.

22:56
And it’s so easy to want to just keep going and like, you know, let me just get it out. But if you give yourself pauses and even when you talk, if you learn to pause more, it’s much easier to edit when you have a lot of pauses, because you can take all those pauses out using the Adobe. It’s free, right? The Adobe editing software. Yes. Yeah, it’s Adobe Podcast. Yeah. So can take all those pauses out of your of your videos. So give yourself some pauses if you make a mistake.

23:26
Pause, if you have a big long pause, clap your hands, right? Because that’ll spike your audio and then you’ll be able to find it on editing. So there’s a few little tricks that you’ll learn as you go as well to help make that easier for you. Actually, since we’re on this topic, I always just turn the camera on and just let it roll. Me too. Back in the day, I used to go and I’d screw up and like, ah, and then I just turn off the camera and then restart it and just start over. And then that just leads to like hours and hours of frustration.

23:55
I don’t know why we did that. I don’t, because I did the same thing and I’ve been making all these Amazon videos this month. And at first I was doing them in clips. Like I was like, okay, put the camera here, unbox, turn the camera, turn the phone off, then move the, do this. And now I just, mean, they’re 30 second videos. So like the longest these videos are even with all the like waiting is two minutes and 30 seconds, right? That’s the absolute longest. So it’s like, I just turn the camera on, sit it there.

24:23
I do it and then I go change whatever I need to change or get the next thing, bring it back over. It’s made a world of difference. Because also then when you import it to edit it, you’re not importing 22 files, you’re importing one file. So anyway, it’s a good tip. Yeah, just like you said, whenever I screw up, usually I’ll start the whole paragraph again from the beginning. Yeah. Because otherwise it gets like really choppy if you’re trying to edit. Yeah. Just some little tips there.

24:53
I forgot what my train of thought is when you want to give your tip. But I think overall, that’s pretty much it. Really, the hard part for me is just sitting down and doing it in the first place. Yeah. And I think for that, there’s some tricks like tell the world maybe that you’re doing video or channel to kind of shame yourself into doing it or just

25:22
having an accountability group, this is why we run the challenges in our class, because people just have a lot of problems getting started. And if you see like a lot of your peers are doing the same thing, it just makes it that much easier to create content on a schedule. So here’s something that’s been motivating for me, is that I will go on YouTube, and this is not like a productivity hack, this is definitely a motivational hack. I will go on YouTube and I will search topics that I could make videos on.

25:52
right, in the home economic space. So productivity, organization, recipes. Recipes is his own bucket, but like outside of recipe content, because there’s some amazing and amazingly edited recipe content on YouTube. So like, let’s throw that one out. But I will watch three or four creators who have anywhere between 50 and 100K subscribers, because to me, that is a lot. Like you are successful on YouTube with 50 to 100K subscribers, like no argument there.

26:22
and I’ll watch their content and as I see what they’re doing, and they’re all proficient, but I’m like, they’re not that good. Like 50,000 people are interested in this. And they’re, in my opinion, a little above mediocre. So, but there are some phenomenal people out there for sure, but they have millions of followers. But I try to find people in that like 50 to 100K, because I think if I can just be as good as them,

26:51
right as far as delivery, editing, especially with the editing and the like, what are your camera angles? How are you positioning yourself? Like when are you focusing on you versus what you’re talking about? Like just those little nuances. I think if you go watch Creators in Your Space or the space you wanna be in, that actually really helps you because it sort of removes that issue of confidence when you see that other people are putting out content and having success.

27:19
without like a production crew in their dining room every day. So what I do now is if I find a creator that I like, I use this Chrome plugin. I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s like a YouTube AI plugin. And I just grab the transcript. Interesting. And then I just paste it in the chat GPT and I say, hey, just summarize this. And then I look very closely at the exact words they use in the intro. Because usually it’s catchy.

27:47
Then I just look at how they structure the body of the content also. For me, it’s much easier. Maybe it’s because we’re old. I prefer to read a transcript than watch the actual video. I think reading the transcript, especially for the outlining of the content, is very helpful. One of the goals of people watching long-form video is continuing to watch.

28:14
So it’s like you can have the best hook in the world, but if you can’t get people to stay past that 15, 30 seconds, it doesn’t really matter. So being able to see the whole transcript is really helpful. Here’s the other thing that’s meant a mental hurdle. When people create video, they always think that they need to be completely original and come up with everything from scratch by themselves. But what I do these days is I have my own opinions on a lot of things. And sometimes I’ll take current events and just give my opinion.

28:44
Sometimes I’ll take the transcript of other people’s videos and then put my own spin on it. And that just makes the content creation process that much easier. You don’t have to come up with everything from complete scratch every week. Yeah, I was thinking about this because, I don’t know, did you watch the debate last night? I did not. No, it was very simple, I will say that. But then after the debate’s over, all the networks,

29:13
have their pundits commenting on the debate. And to me, that reminds me of the content on the internet. There’s not a lot of original content. All these people are commenting on the, we all saw the exact same thing. Everyone saw the debate, same camera angles, because I think it was CBS broadcasted, but they all had different opinions on it. all, some people thought one guy did better. It’s like everyone had their own spin.

29:38
So there’s like six networks doing the exact same thing just with their spin on it. So when you go to create content, realize that the chances of you having something 100 % original is very slim. So know that other people are also doing it, but that’s okay because there are people that like one channel over another channel because their spin or their people resonate better and you’re gonna resonate more with certain people and other creators are gonna resonate with a different type of person. Absolutely, actually,

30:08
I could take the exact same script that someone did and got hundreds of thousands of views and I would just give the same presentation and I might get only like a hundred views. Because people like, they follow you for you, your delivery, your style, your look, everything. And you’re right, nothing really is original, hardly. I mean, there are obviously original YouTubers out there, but I would say the majority of this stuff is not. Especially if you’re teaching content.

30:38
I was working on one of our students, Mike, has a low carb store. So I was actually, incorporating some of that into office hours today. So I was just doing some low carb searching. it’s like, low carb is low carb. You can only spin it so many different ways, right? But I mean, I was looking at low carb cookbooks this morning on Amazon and there’s a million of them, right?

31:05
But some people resonate with this person’s type of recipes or because these person’s recipes are also under six ingredients or they’re under 30 minutes to make. It’s like you have to have your angle. think for you, one of the angles that you’ve done a good job developing is that you’re, just like your book, The Family First, you’re not about the hustle entrepreneur life. Have you seen the comedian who makes fun of entrepreneurs on TikTok?

31:35
No. His name is like, I don’t know. It’s not his real name, I don’t think, but it’s like Chad Chatterson or something. And he’s like, rising grind, everybody, let’s go. And he’s like, today I’m going to open my mall kiosk because I need to be everywhere all the time. And he’s always like parodying, like, you know, but like there’s those types of creators right in the entrepreneur world that are just like, you know, you got to work seven days a week. It’s hustle all the time. You know, you don’t need to eat lunch, whatever. And those people resonate with a different group of people.

32:03
but you’re never gonna resonate with that group, right? And so that’s okay because there’s a whole lot of people out there wanting to consume content and there’s gonna be a subset of those people that like your content. Yeah. I’m trying to think what other the common hurdles are there for people to get over? I will say a thing that’s not a hurdle and do not let this be your hurdle is setting up your YouTube channel. Like we’ve had people that have

32:33
gotten a little bit into the weeds in this overthinking like what kind of header image do like just start the channel, connect your Google account, like done. Don’t agonize over that at all. Almost no one goes to your channel page anyway. No, no. Is what I found. Yeah, so don’t, and that’s the other thing is like don’t get caught up. I mean, YouTube’s got a lot of really cool features, right? Like you can categorize your videos, you can do a lot of different things.

33:02
And it’s like those things are all good to do, like if that gets you, because we know people that are like, well, that’s gonna be the next hurdle, right? How should I categorize this? Should I put this in the list form? Should I put this in the, it’s like don’t, don’t, don’t let all that get to you. Just get your videos up there because the reality is for most long form video, if you have two subscribers, that video is not gonna be seen by a ton of people initially.

33:28
Now, it probably over time will build up, right? Because as you get more subscribers, some of them go back and watch your content, depending on how it’s been categorized. But like initially, just get it out there. Don’t worry about all the other things when you’re just getting started. Yeah. And I guess we should just touch on some of the other things like the title and the thumbnail. mean, basically you want people to watch your video. And so usually what I do is I’ll just figure out what people are searching for. And there’s a number of tools that

33:56
that do this, vidIQ and TubeBuddy. And just find the keyword that people are typing in and then just kind of work it into your title. And that’ll get you some initial traffic because you’ll get some search traffic. But then over time, as people get to know you and just want to watch you for you, you can stop doing this. But I think in the beginning, it’s important. Yeah. I also think it was the financial tortoise.

34:24
who said this at the last FinCon, but for his thumbnails, he literally just sets up a camera and takes like 50 pictures of himself with making like crazy faces and like pointing and doing all these things. And it’s like, then he has his whole database of thumbnail pictures. And if you use a tool like Canva, I mean, they have a YouTube template, a thumbnail template, you can create the basic template and all you need to do is add the graphic.

34:53
and the text. You can basically start out by doing that. Thumbnails are important and I don’t want to say that don’t worry about your thumbnail at all, but I think just once again getting started, just get a thumbnail out there. Don’t agonize over the colors and this and that. Because here’s the other thing, without people watching it, you’re not going to really be able to tell if the thumbnail is performing. The more content you get out, the more people that are going to watch, you can tweak it. No one’s going to look back and go,

35:21
Steve used to have a different type of thumbnail. Nobody cares. You’ll be able to iterate on a lot of this as you get going. What’s funny about this is our mutual friend Rob, he never did any thumbnails for his videos and they were still getting tens of thousands of views. We literally got in an argument. I was like, if you just take the time to just put a little caption on it, that way people know what it’s about at least when they glance over it.

35:51
Yeah. And I just had him do one where he literally just took his existing thumbnail and put some words on it and his click through rate went up. Right. So it’s just stupid things like that. Like he still makes no effort on his thumbnail. He literally just takes a frame of the video and he just puts some words on what the topic is about. And that’s it. Yeah. And he still gets acceptable. Absolutely. I think if you want to sort of.

36:18
Automated a little bit just create a couple templates and then just drop in the stuff. It makes it I mean canva makes it so simple I know most people have a canva account. It’s not hard to just get that going I mean, I think all these things are progressions like gradual progressions You start out just putting out video and then over time you just kind of refine your craft, you know, maybe you’ll do better thumbnails or I Don’t know. Maybe you’ll do a little bit more editing

36:45
a little bit of B-roll and whatnot. None of these things are necessary, but it just kind of goes in a logical progression. Over time, as you make more videos, you’ll become better at what you do and your content will just gradually become better because you’re going to want to constantly be improving it. Yes, and I think that leads us to probably the last and probably most important thing, and that’s consistency. You need to be putting out content on a regularly scheduled basis.

37:15
So whether you’re like, I can do two videos a week, I can do one video a week, you can’t do one video, go four weeks, put out another video, go three weeks, put out two videos, six weeks. It is a numbers game in that the more videos you put out, the better. But they do in long form, it’s not about the short form where it’s like, just put out as much as you can, quality’s not super important. The quality is important, but having consistent content, I mean, you started at one a week.

37:43
I think you’ve upped it to two right now. one a week for the most one a week? Okay. You talked about going to two. I do. This is what I do now. If one of my videos is a dud, then I do two for that week. If it’s good, then I like to ride that good feeling for the entire week. You have to be in a place where you are committing to doing that because just putting up one video and then not doing anything for a while will hurt you.

38:11
I would definitely just know, would have some in the, I would start your channel, put up a couple of videos at once just so you have some content there and then have some stuff backlogged, at least already filmed so that you can continue with the schedule of at least one a week. For me, I have scripts backlogged, not the actual filming part because that’s what takes me forever. That’s the most intimidating part for me.

38:38
Whatever your hurdle part is, make sure you’ve got a little bit of backlog of that. Then don’t be afraid to rely on AI. Actually, I started my channel before AI was even a thing. I don’t even know how I got to that. so much better. It’s gotten so much better now that computers are writing your- Exactly. It’s much better now that I have that help. It makes it so much smoother.

39:06
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now, right now, I think YouTube is the best opportunity in the content creation space, and I make six figures per year on advertising alone. You need to be on video. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequaterjob.com slash episode 561. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2025 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.

39:35
go to SellersSummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuarterJob.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.

00:28
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 event 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 and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now, I personally hate large events,

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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 6th to May 8th, and right now this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. And finally, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet,

01:26
It’s actually available on Amazon at 30 % off. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t 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. 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.

01:57
Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast. In these next series of episodes, what Tony and I are going to do is we’re going to just talk about some of the fundamentals of content creation and each week we’ll cover a different topic. Today we’re going to hit video, which is ironic because your video is not working today. Yes. I did a Windows update right before this call and all of a sudden my camera is not working.

02:25
I’m having so much with this. I’m having so much fun that you’re having technology issues because you constantly harass me because I have all this series of bad luck and now you are having bad luck and it makes me feel really good. So I’m starting off my day on a positive note. You know what I don’t like about Windows now? They force you to do the updates. You can’t really easily disable it. I’ve disabled it, but then they undisable it. anyway, we don’t need a camera anyway. It’s all good.

02:53
You can’t see the faces that I’m making you right now. I know what you look like. It’s enough. I thought we’d start with video. The reason why we’re starting with video is I think video is by far the best way to create content today if your intention is to make money, whether it be through affiliates, memberships, digital products. We actually have a quick success story with

03:22
our course, so we’ve been running these video challenges throughout this year, just really pushing people to put themselves out there, create that video content, because it can be tough to get started. So one of our students, Kevin, who’s the grumpy sysadmin on YouTube, has really taken off with the video creation. He’s gotten super into editing, but he’s struggled a little bit with like, okay, when’s the money gonna come in, right? Because he’s like an over-editor.

03:49
unlike you and I that don’t do. I do very little editing. You have an editor, but your editing is still pretty minimal in the scheme of things, especially compared to what he’s doing. He posted a video. We did a critique with him a couple of weeks ago, and you gave him some ideas. I you rewrote the hook for his video. I don’t remember what he was talking about. I think like Wi-Fi mesh systems or something in that realm.

04:18
you know, we reminded him that, you you can put those affiliate links in your either YouTube description or your comment, your first comment. And he did, and I can’t remember exactly what it was, but the video actually didn’t have a ton of views, but he had already made 60 some dollars in the first, you know, couple days of this video being up.

04:40
and had driven a significant number of clicks to those affiliate links, like in the hundreds of links. And compared to the video only getting hundreds of views, the link clicking was pretty high. So anyway, it just goes to show you that it’s not just about monetizing video with ads and things like that. The affiliate play does work, even if you have a small following. You know, it’s funny, I just got off a one-on-one call with a buddy of mine who actually runs an event, but

05:10
Uh, things are kind of getting harder right now for him with his event and, and what he does. So he is pivoting towards YouTube and. Not in so many words. He just asked me, what’s the secret of getting views on YouTube? Because he, he has like 2000 subscribers, which is, you know, which means he’s been doing it for awhile now. Cause getting that first 1000 is tough, but he can’t seem to crack, you know, that, uh,

05:39
I guess that thousand views mark on his channel. And so I took a look and he was just basically posting interviews and just stuff he’d already had just and just posting it. Which is what a lot of people do. They just throw up like kind of right. Like we record all of our podcasts, audio and video, and we don’t do anything with the video. But a lot of people just throw up these interview type.

06:06
videos on YouTube without any of the basic fundamentals of creating a successful video. Or even just like he actually made an effort to and edited those videos. Like the interviews, trying to pick out like the best clips, kind of like what Rogan does and some other popular YouTubers. But it just hasn’t been, it hasn’t caught any traction. I think.

06:31
In general, podcasts are pretty difficult to get a lot of views. I think the advantage with podcasts is that they’re long, so you get long watch times. You can get it to work, but I would say still the first minute’s got to be interesting enough for someone to want to sludge through the rest of the podcast. Do you know where I see podcasts actually performing better when it comes to the video is actually on TikTok? I see a lot of people putting their podcasts on TikTok, not the full podcast, but clips.

07:00
And they obviously pick the juiciest part of the clip for TikTok. those are in my feed, probably because I’ve watched many of them, but they’re in my feed all the time. And they always have in the tens of thousands of views, if not even higher. Yeah, I’ve seen those too. Of course, the ones that we see are always going to have higher views. So one thing I always do is I always actually click into it and just see if it was a fluke.

07:26
And most of the time, you know, it’s that one clip that that’s done really well and the rest of them aren’t doing so hot. But yeah, I started doing that with mine also where, you know, I’m just using AI right now and occasionally one does okay. But in general, what I found with content is that the more effort I put into it, the better results I get. And anytime I take like a shortcut, uh, it just doesn’t do as well. But on the flip side, posting.

07:56
is in general better than not posting at all. That’s what I think the hardest thing to unlock about video because we give people a lot of advice such as have good lighting, put your camera on a tripod or your phone on a try. Don’t have a wiggly camera. Use a microphone even if it’s an inexpensive $20 Amazon microphone. We give people these basic

08:23
tips for filming. Use a teleprompter if you’re long-winded, things like that. But then there’s always people who have success holding their camera in their car, no microphone, like breaking every single rule, right? And they have grown their channel to 100,000, a million plus. I think that’s only the case for short form. I think for like a long form YouTube video, I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t use a mic.

08:54
I told you I found that person the other day that, well, I guess she had a mic, I don’t think it was working terribly well, but the audio quality was garbage on most of the videos. I mean, I think that’s the exception. Yes, hopefully. Whereas on TikTok or short form, anything goes, right? Actually, because I want it to be easier for me to film short form, I think I’m going to start doing them without a mic. That way, whenever I’m just kind of out and about, I can just pop up my camera and film something.

09:23
Any barrier to anything related to content creation is going to stop you from creating it. That’s what I found over the years. So I think the rules are different even on YouTube for short form to long form, just like you were saying. I think you can get away with a lot of things with short form that long form, you know, it might work a little bit, but it’s not going to work as like a long term strategy. You want to elaborate on that?

09:50
Well, just like you were saying, you know, lot of people create the short term video without a microphone. A lot of people are holding their phone as they’re walking or like the, you know, the there’s movement, right, which can get like on a long video that can get like kind of nauseating after a bit. You know, they’re not they don’t use any B roll or, you know, side by side. It’s like it’s literally a lot of times just a person in the camera.

10:14
talking on short form video or someone talking over all B-roll, right? There’s just the short form creation process to me seems like it’s become very different than the long form creation process. Yeah. So let’s start with the basics then. Long form versus short form. I think both can make money. I was just actually chatting with one of my buddies and he’s been making money.

10:44
by taking clips of popular people, mixing them up, joining the Creator Program, and just getting a lot of views on the backs of people who are famous. OK, can you give me an example? Because I’m not sure what you’re talking So for example, let’s say, OK, those guys at My First Million are reasonably popular with their podcast. So someone will take one of their clips, a viral clip.

11:11
mishmash it in their own clip, publish it on their own channel, get millions of views, and they get paid for it.

11:21
Interesting so that what are the rules about that like how much of a clip of someone else can you use? So there are rules, but if you know that that person’s not going to go after you In the case of my first million they welcome it because that’s perpetuating their brand online, right? So you take someone famous or semi We’re not talking like a list celebrities or anything like that. Although you could but anyone who who if you see online You know is going to get a lot of views just by nature of seeing their content

11:50
Like Gary Vee, for example. I’m not sure what his policies are, but you take those and you get a lot of views. You can get paid about one, I think it’s like $1,000 per 10 million views. Okay. That seems like a lot of views to get paid. It does, but if you’re piggybacking on someone famous, you can do this. In my eyes, I think doing that doesn’t really perpetuate your brand or anything.

12:18
Like I heard what my buddy was doing. He was making some decent money out of it. But in general, like what’s the point, right? It’s like temporary money. Well, it’s sort of that short-term play. It almost reminds me of, well, I know Spencer Hawes did a whole experiment. Didn’t he do something with AI writing all the blog posts? Was that Spencer? Yes, that was Spencer. Yeah.

12:42
So like to me, that’s like a short-term play, right? Like you might get traffic initially, it might, you know, earn you some quick money, but it’s not going to be like a long-term, it’s a long-term brand play for Spencer because he’s doing commentary on what he’s doing, right? So it works for him. But if your goal is just AI everything all the time, it’s not an experiment. I think over time, it’s not gonna be like a long-term brand strategy. Yeah, so if you wanna do, let’s start with short form, because that’s easier. Maybe we can actually split it up.

13:11
between short form and long form in a separate episode. But short form, like if you want to promote something, you have to focus on the actual script. You can’t just take something, break it apart using AI and have it really do well. Right, which a lot of people are doing. Right, which is kind of what I’m doing right now because short form is kind of like an afterthought for me right now. I focus all my efforts on YouTube, the long form, and I break those apart into the short form.

13:41
They don’t do that great. They do okay. Occasionally I’ll get like a 10,000 or like 20,000. Actually, I got lucky the other day and I had like a 200,000 view thing, but for the most part, it’s not going to happen. Yes. I think the other key with short form is that if you are talking, you have to be succinct. This is where all of the filler words and I don’t know whether it’s best to script it, use teleprompter, bullet points.

14:10
But most people are pretty long-winded. And so it’s hard to get good points made and information passed from you to the watcher or the consumer of the content in a way that is 30 seconds or 45 seconds. You know what I mean? It’s pretty tough to put that information together quickly without using some sort of script or outline.

14:38
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15:07
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.

15:19
So I disagree. I think it just depends on the type of content that you’re going to make. Right. If you’re doing teaching content, I think what works well, at least for, for what I see in my feed and I know your feed is completely different, right? You’re getting like real housewives content on your feed. The Mormon wives of TikTok or whatever. Yeah. That’s what I’m watching. But anytime someone weaves a story into teaching something that always works well. And when you’re storytelling,

15:46
You don’t have to be like completely succinct. You just need to like grab me in like those first five seconds. And I think that’s like the most important thing. Grab me in the first five seconds with a story and then weave in like a little lesson into it. You can’t really do this by cutting apart things that you’ve already done. You pretty much have to come up with the idea from scratch. Although there’s some people I follow where they’re just doing it all in one take and it does not look like they’re reading or anything. Yeah.

16:15
And I think they’re just good storytellers. Yeah, but I don’t think most people are. I think in general, you become a good storyteller. So when you’re starting out, if you’re like, once again, getting back to the basics, if you’re just getting started in this, you have to do some sort of scripting or outline before you if you’re trying to get everything in in 30 to 45 seconds, even down to, you you’ve redone a couple of students’ videos in the past several months in the course. And one of the things that I think is interesting is

16:44
A lot of times in email, we use a question to get people to open the email. But I actually feel like in video, it’s better to make a statement. And I remember the one, you rewrote one for once again, Kevin, who was talking about, was it like Google, I don’t know, incognito, right? Yeah, it was incognito mode, yeah. Yeah, and you changed the intro to…

17:09
Google incognito or whatever, Chrome incognito almost ruined my marriage. Right. And so that was really interesting to me as someone who writes a ton of subject lines for emails, because I probably would have started with, do you think you’re safe using incognito or something like that? Like I would have made it a question, but I think in video it worked so much better with that statement of fact, basically.

17:37
Yes, and think it weaved in a story that people would care about. If you lead with incognito mode, think most people will just scroll on by, right? Right, because they’re like, don’t use that or whatever. I know everything there is to know about incognito or who knows what they’re thinking. Whereas with email, I think you already have a captive audience of people who you know are interested in your stuff, Yes. In theory. That brings up what you’ve been talking about and something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the past couple of days because

18:06
Well, we’ll go into that in a minute, but so many people, like I think you can repurpose your content. I’ve done talks about this at conferences about repurposing your content. Create one thing, use it a hundred different times. But I do think it’s nuanced in how you can use it. And I think so many people just take the exact same piece of content and dump it in 50 places, right? Which is problematic. Whereas just the small nuance between,

18:32
You know, your email list being a more captive audience, a short form video being people scrolling mindlessly on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, know, YouTube, wherever, right? So the, you know, what you don’t know about incognito mode or incognito, you know, this almost ruined my marriage versus you’re not as safe as you think you are with incognito. You know, just that small change when you take content and move it from one place to another, right, is really important to do. So you can’t just take the exact same thing

19:01
and just put it everywhere, in my opinion. I mean, I’m of the belief that if you want to be good at any one platform, you need to create custom content for that platform. Right? So what works for TikTok might not necessarily work for Instagram. What works for Shorts might not necessarily work for TikTok. So really, you have to make a choice. You can repurpose, and I repurpose all of my stuff. It’s just not going to be as effective going from long form to short form.

19:31
Whereas you can usually just get away with, in a lot of cases, posting the same short form across all the platforms. Because they’re all kind of similar. Yeah, I think for short form, definitely. I just think people run into a lot of trouble when they’re hacking up their long form into short form. Yeah, I guess it just depends on what your goals are. Like my goals are to just basically be everywhere. Yeah. So that’s why I’m breaking up the short form. For some reason, I just can’t get myself to keep up

20:01
producing short form every single day. Well, that’s another fundamental short form, right? Is that really short form is a volume play. The more content you create, the better you do. You saw this when you, I think you did this like a year or two ago where you like posted a TikTok every single day. And we did that with the class where we did short form every single day for 30 days. And every single person that participated in that challenge grew their YouTube.

20:29
subscribers, right? Every single person increase their views. Like literally it’s a foolproof method, right? But with that comes you’re posting a video every single day, which means you’re creating a video, not every single, you you, probably batch creating, but you’re investing a lot of time into getting that content out every single day. And what it, what is the long-term play for that? Like what is the reward? Are you going to be able to grow your YouTube account only offshore form?

20:57
Maybe, but I don’t think that’s the best strategy. Not if you want to make money, but I don’t want to scare people listening to this either, but my buddies who do short form very well, they post three times a day. I think Alex Hormozzi was famous for saying he was posting 180-something pieces a day. Yes, Something crazy like that. I can’t remember what it was. Something crazy. It was something that don’t try to do it at home kind of thing.

21:26
So unfortunately, like if you want to be really good and your goal is to grow your channel as quickly as possible, you’re going to have to produce at least minimum one piece of content per day, preferably like three pieces of content per day. Yeah. And you never know what’s going to hit. Right. And then once you have like, once you’re in the mode where you’re not trying to grow your subscribers, then you need to just mix in some really good pieces that require a lot of thought. Yeah.

21:55
in their intermix. So this is why I’ve never been able to get myself to maintain the short form. Like I’m not a three times a day kind of guy. No, I’m more like a once or twice a week kind of guy, which is why YouTube works really well for me. Like sure, takes a longer time to put together a script that’s 10 to 15 minutes long, but I can just do that. My leisure bank up a bunch of episodes and just post once.

22:25
at most twice a week. It works for me. Anything I have to do multiple times per day just seems like work. That’s why I haven’t been able to do it. Here’s the other thing that I actually was thinking about this too, because I have all this video content right now for Amazon that I’ve been creating. I have 70 plus short form videos that I’ve made over the past two and a half weeks. I hate the fact that it’s only on Amazon right now because I could in theory be putting it on other platforms. It’s like, should it go?

22:54
But what I realized was back when I was just blogging and all I did was I had Happy Housewife and that’s the only thing I did all day every day, right? All my content for Happy Housewife came from everything that I did all day long, right? Cause I had all these little kids, you know, we were doing things every single day, making, was cooking three meals a day. So if you are,

23:19
creating content about your everyday. And I’m not saying just like a vlog, like that’s not, think that’s the hardest way to make money is just like talking about your day. Most people, you can’t hook most people with that. But let’s just say like you’re an auto mechanic, right? And you could in theory create videos about every car that comes into your shop every day, right? You could create 30 second videos. Or if you are, my nephews used to work for that exotic plant nursery, right? Where they had like really rare species of plants.

23:49
My nephew had no issues coming up with content about plants every single day, because every day they were getting new plants and new varietals and there’s only 100 of these, all this stuff, right? So if you are doing something that is directly related to what you do every day, I think it’s actually not terribly hard to create a lot of short form content, right? Because you literally can pick up your phone and be like, hey, making my next batch of sourdough, right? And this sourdough’s got

24:17
I was watching this sourdough guy the other day and he’s like, this sourdough is jalapeno and whatever. And I was like, that sounds disgusting. But like he’s clearly just making content throughout the day about what he does, right? Which is so much easier than like me who now sits in front of the computer for eight hours a day doing all sorts of stuff. That’s not super interesting, right? Like, oh, here we go using AI to test subject lines. I mean, it might be interesting for some people, but like it’s not as interesting as like, hey, now we’re trying this new granola recipe or

24:46
I’m going to show you how to scrub your baseboards because that’s what I’m actually doing right now. So I think if you are creating content around your life, what you’re doing and you’re teaching people about that or informing people or educating people, however, that actually isn’t too hard to get a lot of short form out of. I 100 % agree with you. So my buddies who do it well on three times a day, the first thing that they do as soon as they start working or wherever they’re at, and a lot of these people are e-commerce folks, they sit down in the office and they just

25:16
pump out three short form videos and that’s that. And they always have content because they can share their orders or whatnot. This is something that I’m gonna start doing for Bumblebee. I was just gonna say you could do it for Bumblebee. Right, because unfortunately I’m just not here in the office. Like I come in maybe once a week or twice a week. But I think I could just come in here and just film some random videos. I think I have an advantage now that I have an editor, but.

25:45
taking something off the cuff on your phone, I don’t feel is publishable unless I get it right like the first time. Yeah. So. The other thing that I’ve come to learn very quickly after doing all these videos this month is the batch recording, if possible, for short form. think batch recording with long form is a lot harder because those videos just take a lot longer to make. Yes. But, know,

26:12
I’ve been making these 29 second or less videos for Amazon all month. And like this morning before we recorded, I think I recorded 10 videos. Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I’ll edit them, you know, this week, like in batch two, I’ll edit all 10 at the same time. And so if you think like, oh my gosh, I can’t put up one video a day. Well, in theory, if you’re doing 30 to 60 second videos, you can probably knock those all out in recording in under 30 minutes.

26:41
And if you’re not doing crazy editing, which I don’t recommend for shorts anyway, unless you’re like known for your editing, like what’s his name? Zach King, right? Like who’s literally got to start with crazy edits. If that’s not you, then just put together the, you know, simple and sweet. And, you know, I timed myself. So to edit a 30 second video, takes me and I probably have six or seven like video clips that I have to edit together and cut stuff out. It takes me about six minutes.

27:11
That’s really fast. Okay. Yeah, but think about it. It’s a 30 second video. you know, you literally only have 30 seconds and I’ve experimented with because I’m doing videos of like I’m demonstrating things. So I’ve I’ve experimented with leaving the camera on, leaving my phone on and filming everything and just chopping that up or filming in segments and then having like six or seven, you know, segments that I have to edit together. I found for me, it’s actually easier to let the camera run and cut

27:41
from the one piece of footage because of importing time. Just that one thing, because I’ve got to get it from my phone to my computer, my computer to CapCut because I’m using the desktop version. So like, but just little things like that that I’ve learned over this month. And when you start creating that content, you’ll learn for yourself, like, oh, it’s easier for me to put together five separate clips or I’d rather just cut up one. Little things like that. And that actually makes a big difference in your time of how long it’s going to take you to do something.

28:09
So if any of you are listening to this and thinking to yourself, I don’t want to do any video. Like this is not for me. This is the way that people are selling going forward. It’s easily the most effective way. That’s why TikTok shop is taking off. Just video commerce. Everything is moving towards video. Yeah. Right. I I’ve realized that I was even listening to podcasts on video the other day.

28:34
Just I was letting it play on my computer. was just letting it play on my computer. was like a YouTube that I was like letting play while I was working. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, I just think that people are just becoming so much more comfortable with consuming the video content. And I actually read a stat just this past week about I don’t know what the names of the gents are anymore, like Gen Z and Gen Alpha, like

29:02
They plan on doing the majority of their Christmas shopping on TikTok shop. It’s crazy. Like 50 some over 50 % were like TikTok shops. My first stop. I thought you were going to say Timo for a sec, but then you. Yeah, honestly, I’m surprised it wasn’t because my kids like Timo and I can’t stand that they like Timo. But anyway, I just think like you’re right. Video content is.

29:29
Like you just, have to do it. I wish I could say like, oh, you you can still just do, you know, put out white papers. Eh, I just don’t, I don’t think you can anymore. I think you have to have some kind of video component. Yeah. So even though I kind of detest doing this, I mean, I realize that it’s something that needs to be done for Bumblebee going forward. Yeah. So I think the other thing to realize is that

29:59
you’re never gonna like what you video, you’re never gonna like yourself on video for the first year. Just be prepared that you’re not gonna like it and just do it anyway because you’re the only person that thinks that about yourself. Everyone else thinks it’s fine. No one else cares. You care more than everybody. So you have to get over that and just keep putting the content out there.

30:26
So let’s switch gears a little bit and just kind of talk about the process for creating one of these short forms. I have my own process, but I’ve always been curious about what yours is. My process actually always starts with AI now. I tell it what I want to talk about, and I say, give me a five second hook for this video that tells some sort of weird story.

30:49
and then I have it give me 10 versions and then I see if I actually have a story that matches what they talked about. You’re like, no, none of these relate to me. Right. Then I go with it and then film something out. Do you start with like, I’m a Chinese engineer so that the stories will make sense for you? When I was got my first B in the 11th grade, just so it can correlate.

31:13
So I actually, you’re joking, but I actually say in the voice of Steve Chu now, if my wife quit her job and it knows kind of who I am because there’s so much content out there now. Yeah. But yeah. So it’s interesting because for short form, I do not do any of that. I literally just go. And I have done so when I’m on. So I make two forms of short form, some where I’m completely off camera. It’s all voiceover and that’s all like demo stuff. And then I have the short form where I’m actually giving like a quick tip.

31:43
on how to do something. And I have found in my kids, this literally, I’ve been told, I had a kid block me on social because she doesn’t want her friends to see my content because she’s so mortified, right? I know, I’m like, yes, your mom is so cringy, yet who pays all your bills? So I found that like jumping into the screen, like with your which.

32:08
My kids are literally like, one of my kids was like, I was literally terrified in my bed when I saw you in my feed. And I was like, oh, I’m sorry, you were terrified in your bed in the home that I pay for. So I have found that I just start, I jump in the screen and I talk and I almost don’t, when I’m talking to the camera, I know the tip, right? One of the tips I had was,

32:33
how to store a paintbrush. If you’re painting projects, you have to stop for the night. You don’t wanna wash out the brush, because then it might not dry by the next day. I know none of this, you have any idea how to do any of this. So there’s some ways that you can store a paintbrush with paint on it, so that when you use it the next day, it’s not all stiff and gross, and you don’t have a clean line. But I already know all that, so when I start the video, it’s like, hey, blah, blah. Here’s the tip. And then I sometimes have B-rolls, sometimes I just show it right there.

33:01
And I’m done very minimal editing. So I don’t use a lot of like tools, but after listening to your office hours last week, where you talked about how to get that hook using, um, you always say it wrong. It’s Claude, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, I might actually start utilizing that to, uh, to do for some of the short form. Cause I actually thought that was a pretty clever tip on getting it to create those hooks. And I thought the hooks that it came up with were actually pretty phenomenal.

33:30
I’ve never been happy with like chat GBT’s hooks. I agree. Even in the paid version, I always felt like they were like, I’m like, I don’t use those words. So I might change that around a little bit. And then for the for the video, that’s just B roll. I just film as much B rolls I think I need and then I edit it. And by the time I’m done editing together, like in that six minutes.

33:55
I pretty much have figured out what I want to say about the product or whatever I’m doing because I’ve watched it like four times. So yeah, don’t use any for short form. I don’t use any script. I don’t use anything. I probably should. I probably should work on a hook better. But my fat face coming in there seems to work just fine. You I don’t think you should because I was looking at it’s different using a teleprompter on a phone versus a teleprompter like for like a long form.

34:24
Because when you’re using a teleprompter on your phone, like it’s like right up against your face and you can actually see eye movements. Yes. You know, and for sure for me, you know, because that first five seconds, like my best ones, I’m actually not using the teleprompter in the first five or 10 seconds. And then if I forget what I’m going to say, then I’ll stop. I’ll like, I’ll have the teleprompter up, but I’m not using it. Yeah. And if I forget what I’m going to say, then I’ll stop and then go towards the teleprompter part.

34:53
memorize it and then say it and then I’ll stop. And that way my editor is the one who kind of pieces everything together. Yeah. I think Jim does it that way too, right? Except he films it directly in the app. He films it directly in the app and just pauses and then goes to the next point, which is another way to do it actually. I have my kids film everything in the TikTok app too. I do not because I’m not 18, but Jim has mastered it. And he basically

35:22
Jim just basically says, know, have you ever wondered why your money’s not insured and whatever, you know, and then he has his standard intro that he, that he does. And then he goes in, but you know, he’ll say two or three sentences and then it’ll cut to like the next section. So I’m sure he can like, he also is talking about subjects that he knows infinitely more than most people about. So just the cutting probably allows him to gather his thoughts and, you know, go on to the next piece of information.

35:52
Which is another way to do it. Yeah, this is why I say it’s a volume game. Like there’s this Chinese guy I follow. All he does is he presses up his face against the camera and just says something that’s really interesting. Okay. Like there’s no hook really. He just answers a question and it’s mostly about like the tech world and that sort of thing. He’s got millions of followers. Literally he’s dry. But he always says interesting things, you know, but without a hook or any of that stuff.

36:22
And I’m pretty sure it’s just a numbers game. Like I see that guy’s face and I just want to hear what he has to say. There’s also this stock guy that, that I watch and it’s really the Chinese guy that just talks in front of like a whiteboard. Well, no, no, no, no, this is a Chinese guy, but he’s dating like some 20 something blonde, like he’s like 50 something or maybe even 60 probably probably mid fifties, but he’s dating like this 20 something blonde girl. So the blonde girl just goes and asks,

36:51
Hey, what are your thoughts on like Nvidia or something? And then he just talks for like 30 seconds. Kind of dry. And she’s not even in the picture. Like she was in the, the only reason I know she’s blonde is because she was in some of the TikToks. But for the most part, she’s not even in them. And it’s just straight Q and A and it works really well because what he says, like he he’s established like an authority in my mind. Just cause the way he talks and the way he’s dressed, he’s always in front of his computer with like millions of charts, stock charts.

37:21
He must be an expert. He’s got tons of followers of what he says, the content. That’s what I think people who are listening and probably now in a full-on panic about doing this is that it’s so much easier to create content about things that you know a lot about.

37:44
You know, there’s because we always get these like, well, I don’t know. I have these four topics and one of them is all there’s always one topic that like they have no knowledge of it at all. But they’re like, but I’ve always been interested in monarch butterflies. And you’re like, yeah, but like you can’t talk about like I know, like I have a friend that’s like a PhD bug guy, right? He’s an entomologist. And he literally if you if you ask him a question about any bug, he would be like, let me talk to you for six hours about, you know, the common red ant, right? Because they’re like he just loves bugs.

38:14
So if you can find a topic that you love and know a lot about, like those people, to me, that’s like a guaranteed success, right? Because you never run out of things to talk about. You’re never bored with what you’re talking about. And after you create, you know, certain amount of content, people know that you’re an expert because it comes through and how you tell things and talk about things. Yeah. So I think that’s great advice. And I think if you’re going to go into this,

38:43
If you’re going to script anything, just script like the first five seconds and then go off on your own. And any barrier that you have to making the video, you need to eliminate it. Earlier in the episode, I mentioned like, I think I’m just not going to use a microphone now because by the time I bust out the microphone, like even something stupid like busting out the microphone and hooking it up to my phone, that takes like 30 seconds. That’s actually going to stop me from making the video.

39:12
especially if I just happen to not be carrying the microphone on me. Yeah. You know what’s so interesting about that? And I can, I think if there’s one tip that you take away from all of this podcast, it’s that remove all your barriers because you know that technology and I have a love hate relationship. I’ve had issues in the past, like couple of weeks with my microphone and my computer, not working together. Right. We’ve had issues like I’ve had to like restart my computer and do this and all these things. Right. So

39:40
I go to edit video on Monday and I had filmed like, I think I filmed 15 videos on Sunday and I was like, okay, I got two hours this morning. I am gonna easily knock out these 15 videos, upload them, be done, like pat myself on the back and go to lunch, right? I could not get the narration to work on CapCut with my microphone. And…

40:05
I tried the desktop, I tried the web app, I tried recording in Camtasia, I tried the voice recorder, like I could not get my microphone to work. And I knew that because of the types of videos I’m making, the audio recording is actually super important, right? So I can’t just use a pair of AirPods. And I probably spent 45 minutes trying to get this to work. And I finally got it to work, but by the end of that time, I was in such a bad mood.

40:35
I didn’t wanna record. And these things like I’m getting paid to do this, right? Like there’s guaranteed money to do this. So think about if you’re doing it and you’re just like hoping to get views, right? Or you’re hoping people click on your affiliate. So like I didn’t wanna do it and it was guaranteed money because I was so angry and irritated and frustrated. was like, why doesn’t anything ever work? And like, why can’t I just get something done and required amount of time and like all this stuff. I just spiraled into this like, you know.

41:03
technology hatred. So I can imagine people that are like new and we see this with our students, right? New to tech, certain types of technology, or maybe they’ve never, I mean, most people haven’t hooked up a microphone before, right? If you’re not a content creator or an audio guy. And so if you can get things set up to where you like even have like a separate laptop or computer where you like turn and that’s the little studio area or

41:27
Everything’s set up on a tripod and like, like right now I’m filming all this stuff in the kitchen. I literally have a tripod set up in the kitchen on my kitchen counter. It has not moved for two weeks. So when I need to film, I literally go snap my phone in and like get going. But it’s like, I’m not looking for the tripod. I’m not trying to find this. Like I have everything like in these little buckets so that I can get them and find them. it really does eliminate 90 % of the problems with video creation. But the second you hit that first hurdle, it’s very easy to just spiral and then be like, I’m not doing it anymore.

41:57
not worth it. Yeah, I’m just thinking to myself also, like the more natural the delivery, the better also. Sometimes when I have the teleprompter and for some reason it’s natural when I do long form and but whenever I do short form, I feel like I’m in a rush or something. Yes, you talk fast. Yeah. So I I’m not as natural on the teleprompter. So I’m thinking about dropping that too. Well, because it feels like you’re reading something really quickly.

42:24
Yeah, I mean, some of my best videos are one that I just did completely off the cuff and the audience knows. Yeah. You know, whether you’re reading or not. And you don’t you do not need a teleprompter for short form. I do not, but it makes it more efficient. maybe I’ll. Yeah. I don’t know. As you guys can tell, I’m kind of in this experimental phase, trying to figure out that flow that works for me, you know. But if I said to you, like literally off the cuff,

42:54
give me three reasons why people should not drop ship from AliExpress. You could tell me pretty succinctly three reasons why people should not drop ship from AliExpress, right? Like you have enough knowledge to talk without a teleprompter in a 30 to 60 second video. Yeah, the key point that you just said was being succinct. Like I can easily whip out the answer, but can I whip out the answer in as few words as possible and still have it flow? That requires thought.

43:24
Whereas just answering the question is easy. Right. Right. And that’s why I think like what I said very early on is getting that message out in a succinct way is really important in the short form. Because it’s I can’t like and that’s probably one of my own personal pet peeves is when I see creators and it’s like they’re going to tell you how to do something but they just drone on and on. like I’m like no like I don’t mind hearing the story but I don’t need to hear the story plus.

43:51
some more plus a side note in a 60 second video. Like just give me the information. Yeah. So the other key takeaway of this episode for sure form is it’s really about it’s really a numbers game. You know how they say like dating is a numbers game like sure form. It’s it really is like the more content you have out there. The goal for you is hey you know I have seen that Chinese guy before. I think I like what he had to say before. I’m just going to listen to what he has now and just

44:20
over time, people recognize you instantly and want to hear what you have to say. Yes, because the reality is the first time you show up in someone’s feed on any platform, even if they listen to you, they’re probably not going to follow you unless it’s so earth-shattering. They’re going to have to see you in their feed a couple more times before they make a commitment. That’s why I think the numbers game is so important because if you have a lot of content,

44:46
that’s being published, then the chances of you appearing in someone’s feed, especially if they’ve watched a good percentage of your video, is pretty high.

44:57
Hope you enjoyed this episode, but don’t forget that this was just part one and there are three more coming. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 560. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2025 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 to sellersummit.com. And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store,

45:25
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.

00:29
But before we begin, wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 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, mine is a curriculum-based event 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

00:59
and not some high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. 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 nine 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 6th to May 8th.

01:27
And right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. And finally, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s available on Amazon at 38 % off. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t 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.

01:54
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.

02:07
Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today’s episode is going to be a little bit different. Tony and I are actually going to do a live brainstorm about how we’re potentially going to modify the way we do our content-based workshops. Yeah. Now everyone will see that all the ideas come from me. Finally, it’s my chance to shine. So what’s funny about this is usually once every month, I do a workshop on e-commerce.

02:37
where I just spend three days teaching everything. And I go into a lot of detail and that’s just the way I’ve always been. Like I designed the workshop in a way where I would actually want to attend, right? You don’t want to attend a workshop where you’re not learning anything and you come away with more questions than answers. And this model has worked really well for me. Like I go into great depth on e-commerce and it always converts a lot of signups. However,

03:05
I also run another class with Tony where we teach blogging, YouTube, podcasting, basically how to build an audience and then monetize that audience through memberships, digital products, courses, a whole bunch of other ways to do it. That one, following the same philosophy does not convert as well. We’re to talk about how we’re going to change things up or just brainstorm live. The one thing that I do want to stress is that

03:34
It’s tempting to say like, well, those webinars aren’t successful. And I don’t think that’s true because I think anytime anyone signs up for your course or your membership through a webinar, it’s a success because you are helping change somebody’s life. Whether you sell content like we do, or you maybe are in like the health space or whatever it is. I think even to have one person sign up, we have actually someone in our course.

04:00
who does mental health type webinars. And she’s struggled over the past several months, just only getting one sign up, something like that. But I even feel like one sign up is a victory because you’re now gonna impact that one person. Now you have a potential success story. You can build on that. However, when we’re comparing our webinar performances and our workshop performances from previous years and then also comparing them to profitable online job,

04:29
probably my store. I don’t know where I got job from. You don’t have a job. You a job. We feel like it’s not converting as well as it should. I thought this would be a really fun thing to do live, unedited, where we could talk through some of the things that maybe should be updated or changed or things to try because I’m-

04:54
One of the things that I think is cool about running a class about content is we get to do things, to try things and let people know if they worked or not. And so let us make the mistakes or have the success, and so that our students don’t necessarily have to. So I think one thing that just came to mind is when you talk about selling products online, that’s an easy concept to understand. But I think for the vast majority of people out there, they don’t think that

05:23
content is like a sustainable moneymaker because it’s still relatively new. I mean, there’s still lot of influencers out there, but e-commerce is just, the whole concept is tried and true and it’s been around for a long time. Well, and I think that is very, it makes sense because I think there’s people in both of our families that still quite don’t get what we do on the content side. Whereas selling hankies makes sense to people. What do you do? I sell embroidered handkerchiefs. When I sold jewelry, what do do?

05:53
I sell jewelry. That’s really easy to tell somebody. But when you try to tell someone, well, I teach people how to make money online, you’re immediately like, oh no, get away from me. Or if you say like, well, I teach people marketing. Oh, what kind of marketing? Well, online marketing. Well, what’s that? It’s like, uh, you know, it’s just really hard for people to grasp that concept, especially without thinking that you’re shady.

06:18
Well, I’m not even thinking about what we do. just think I’m just talking about just making money through content in general. Yeah. Like when I tell my mom how much I make just on YouTube ads alone. Yeah, she still does not believe it. She does not understand the business. She does not understand how it can possibly make any money at

06:36
That’s what my mom is like, yes. It’s not the gold standard for understanding those types of things. Understanding complex science things, absolutely. I do think in general, it’s hard. The first thing that I’m thinking about is I was over the weekend going through our webinars in my head. What are the things we talk about? What do we do? I think our first mistake is our third slide where we’re like,

07:05
Yes, where we’re like, you’re not gonna make money for a very long time. Which I feel like can be true. I also feel like in today’s world, it doesn’t have to be true. Now, I absolutely do not wanna give people false hope or make them think that you’re gonna make money in three months. But I think let’s just compare both courses, right?

07:33
I have a lot of familiarity with your other course. You obviously do too. When you talk about like buying a physical product, people can see like, oh, I buy the product, I get the product, I list the product, I sell the product, I make money. There’s like this logical timeline. But what I don’t think people think about is I have to find a product two to three months. I have to find a supplier month, two months. I have to get a sample month.

07:59
I have to approve the sample. So by the time they actually have a product and list it either on their own store, on Amazon, whatever, they’re like eight to nine months in typically in the process. It’s not like they take a webinar, have a product and are on Amazon in three weeks. What’s funny about that is I use that exact same slide in my workshop. I’m like, hey, if you’re gonna do this, it’s gonna take a year. That’s I’m flat out, yeah.

08:25
I know and I’m not and I’m not you know that I don’t think that you try to like scam anyone. I’m I use the same verb. You know it’s going to take a while. But it’s very but like when we say it it’s very abstract right. Like well you’re not going to really make money. But when you say it it’s like everyone thinks like well maybe it’ll take you a year. Right. Like I don’t think people because I think in people’s mind when you think about the steps you don’t understand because we have people that are in the course in profitable online store.

08:53
who are like, hey, I wanna make sure that I have stuff for Christmas this year. I’ve seen that on like multiple calls lately. And I’m like, there’s absolutely no way you’re getting anything in time for Christmas. Like you have to have your stuff into Amazon yesterday. October, yeah. Yeah. So I think that even though you’re very upfront about that and you’re very clear, people don’t think, they don’t really understand like, oh, actually, yes, it does take forever. And I remember like,

09:22
And I used to have my products air shipped, right? Because they were so small and lightweight. So I never had anything on a boat. And now that I deal with people that have stuff on a boat, I’m like, holy cow. Like we’re talking like a 12 month cycle between like product idea and product delivery, if not longer sometimes. That wouldn’t go that far, but yeah, it can Well, we’re creating like curriculum. So it’s a little bit different. You’ve got to have the creation process, but.

09:48
Yeah, it’s definitely I think people don’t really envision it as taking it. It seems quicker to me. And so my first thought is we need to rephrase that slide. I don’t think we should take it out because I do think it’s like, hey, we don’t you’re not going to get rich. We’re not going to be standing in front of Lamborghini’s throwing money in the air like we’re not. Have you seen the guy on TikTok who like mocks all the like bro, you know, the bro culture actually?

10:15
Yeah, he’s got he’s totally satire, but he’s hilarious. He’s like, got to hustle. You got to hustle. He’s like doing all this stuff. And I was like, oh, that’s pretty funny. So I think there’s probably a medium, right? Like how do we set expectations but like not discourage people? Because like I was thinking about the last one where I’m like, that slide’s really a downer. Like first thing in the webinar and.

10:38
For the most part, people have a lot of self doubt. So then like being like, and you’re definitely not going to make money for like three years, you loser. Like, I don’t know. So I think we need to find a way to reframe that. That’s step one. Maybe that slide is, I don’t know. I’m just, I just want to make sure no one is accusing me of it being a get rich quick scheme. That’s the purpose, right? That’s why I do it with my other workshop too. I’m just saying, Hey, not to get rich quick scheme. This is going to be how long it takes.

11:06
telling you ahead of time. you know, if I tell you three months and three months goes by and nothing happens, you’re going to just give up. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, I totally see where you’re coming from. Yeah. There’s got to be some happy medium, though, where it doesn’t come across as a get rich quick at the same time. So, And I also think it’s really person dependent. Like if you have a great topic idea or you have.

11:35
a if you are that go-getter personality, you could in theory build up through mostly I would say through video, like depending on your channel, you could grow very, very quickly and have opportunities to make money in much less than a year. That’s not the norm. That’s absolutely not the norm. But like if you want to hustle in like a positive way and you’re like, I’m all in to this, then I think you can see success.

12:03
you know, almost as fast as you want to. But that’s not everybody. Right. Yeah.

12:11
Okay, so that’s one thing. And then the other thing I’ve just noticed, it’s like a very how-to based workshop, which has been my bread and butter for e-commerce. But for something that’s more of a foreign concept, I think, and what’s funny about this, I was just chatting with my mom about this. And she’s like, I need to believe first that it can actually happen because I don’t trust this business model whatsoever is basically what she said. Yeah.

12:40
So that was actually the next thought that I had was, you know, most people, have all this self doubt. So to then to have like this sort of foreign concept, it’s like, well, how do I take something that I don’t quite understand and I don’t think I’m good enough? Like that you combine all that and it snowballs into this. Well, this sounds cool and all, but it’s not for me. Right. I think our first day is actually pretty good in that respect, right? We outline like how you can actually make

13:10
make the money, right? Yeah. With the content. I’m not sure if it’s a little too detailed though. Like I’ve just taught it one way where it’s the type of workshop that I would want to attend. But I think for people who are interested in content potentially, like I’m not like my own target customer. No. And I think our, what we’re teaching would be great if you already had a website up.

13:39
So if our demographic is already creating content but doesn’t know how to monetize it, then that’s where that webinar really fits well because, I mean, we’ve had people like that on our webinars, in our course, and are like, oh, like, I just didn’t realize I could do this or I didn’t know that this is the requirements for this or this is how I set it up so I am eligible to run ads, whatever it is, right? Just getting them that like extra piece of information.

14:07
I think the problem is, that most people start, like, I usually when have people on, they’re like, well, I have a website, but there’s nothing on it. Or I have a YouTube channel, I’ve made zero videos. I have a TikTok, I have two videos up there of my kids, whatever. It’s like, okay, how do we convince people that they are worth being heard? Because that’s the rub, right? It’s like, well, no one would care what I have to say. Or we get like,

14:33
Do think people will be interested in it? And it’s like the most amazing idea we’ve heard, right? We’re like, are you kidding me? Like that’s a gold mine. Please start it right now or we’ll steal it from you. So I think that needs to be like our first step and I’m not sure how we get there, but we have to get people to believe that the information they have in their minds is sellable. That’s all we’re doing. We’re selling information, right? You know what’s funny about all this is, you know, when I got started, I was obviously a little skeptical too, but

15:03
I went into it with the mentality, hey, if I just do this long enough, people will see me all over the place and then the money will just come. I don’t think that philosophy works for the average person. No, it does not.

15:22
What does that mean? Do we pull examples from students or, you know, other real life case studies? But like, I don’t want to, I don’t want to mislead people. Like I know, like just let’s take a look at just Pat Flynn, right? He just launched a YouTube shorts channel that has, it’s only been around for a couple months, but in his like third month or something, he made like $1,200 a month on shorts of all things, which is extremely difficult.

15:51
It’s a great story, but I don’t think there’s no way I don’t think I could replicate it unless I did something completely different. Like he’s doing Pokemon cards for his channel. So I suppose if I did some sort of lifestyle thing, but even still, it’d be tough. He’s obviously helped by who he is, right? If Pat Flynn starts something, it’s going to be successful.

16:13
Or did he not leverage any of his own audience? he didn’t leverage his own audience. Really? People do know who he is, he didn’t use his audience to promote it. He tried to make it as independent of a case study as possible. I think what he did though is very replicable if you have a good idea.

16:39
If I remember correctly, he buys packets of Pokemon cards and when you buy these packets, you don’t know what cards are in there. And so it’s always like a surprise and there might be like a valuable how Pokemon cards are even valuable. don’t understand, someone could start a channel and explain that to me. But to me, it has all the elements of a good story.

17:00
Right. First of all, 60 seconds. So you’re not like even someone like me who could care less about Pokemon, it would probably watch it. Right. Like, oh, this is kind of interesting. Like, what’s it going to be? You know, and then this the fact that lots of people buy Pokemon cards, right. Like the audience is huge. It’s that gamble. It’s the risk factor. Right. Like, who is he going to get something that’s it’s like watching someone scratch off a lottery ticket. So I think all those factors, you know, make.

17:28
that a channel for success, and I think the 60 seconds is like the genius part of it because I don’t wanna watch four minutes of someone opening up a pack of Pokemon cards, but I’ll watch 60 seconds, right, or 59 seconds or whatever it is on YouTube. So I think it’s, but I think anyone who has an idea that sort of fits in that framework could find success pretty quickly.

17:52
I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

18:21
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.

18:33
I 100 % agree with you, except for maybe like the quickly part, depending on what your definition is. And my definition of quickly is within a year, which is doable. It’s doable. I think about there’s this girl on TikTok that I don’t even know if I follow her, but I see her in my feed all the time. And basically she bought some like ocean side quadruplex or duplex. don’t know. And she’s basically renovating it, but she has literally no renovation skills and she’s literally ripping like clapboard off the side of the house and

19:01
She’s in there like taking stuff out. I mean, it’s not like, her videos are well done. Like it’s not like professionally edited, but she’s, you know, she’s got a mic. She’s talking through stuff. It’s decent quality videos. But the fact that she’s doing this with no knowledge and doing so much of it wrong, like people are stitching her left and right and duetting her with like, hey guys, please never ever do this. When you unscrew a light socket, this is what you need to do. This is what you need to make sure. Like she’s grown.

19:31
I mean, she went from like zero to huge in the matter of like six weeks just ripping apart this house because everyone’s like panicking that she’s going to kill herself with the project. So I think if you can find that angle, it is possible to grow definitely within under a year. If you if you can do the right, if you can find the right niche for yourself. I mean, here’s what we need to convey, really. Whenever you put out content, good things happen.

20:01
Yeah. And sometimes that isn’t even monetary, but it’s just hard to make people believe that. Like any sort of, if you just, anything that you’re doing that’s even remotely interesting, you just document it. Yeah. This is the philosophy that I’ve always taken with my content and good things have always happened. I remember when I first started my blog, I didn’t really think that a lot of people were going to, it was meant for my friends. Yeah. And then just random people started

20:30
reading it and then they asked for the course. I never in a million years wanted to create a class. Never in a million years. Then enough people asked, I was like, fine. If 10 people sign up or whatever, then it’s on. That’s how it started. Incidentally, that’s how we launched our class in a way too. Yes. People were begging you for the content side and then profitable audience came about. How do you strike that balance? Yes.

21:00
I think the key is we have to get, we have to let people know it’s possible. So we probably need more examples. And definitely like, I think we mix the examples of people in our course, as well as people that we know, right, personally who are doing these things. Because I think there’s a balance too. Like people in our course, you know, are all in different phases of what they’re doing. Some of them are at the very, very beginning. Then we’ve got people,

21:29
Like I can’t, I can never remember her name, but she’s got the the YouTube channel with like 60,000 subscribers where she just posts the prayers every day. Right. So it’s like people are just like, it’s so vastly different. So we can, we have a lot of success stories in the course. We need to leverage those. And then we also need to leverage people that we know personally, our own stuff that we’re doing.

21:51
It’s hard because our own stuff is usually skewed by the fact that we have an audience, right? That we have stuff we can tap into. When we try something new, it’s not really, it’s hard to do the path. Unless you’re doing something totally anonymously, it’s hard to not leverage. Also, the other hard part is we worked really hard to build an audience, so sure as heck going to leverage it if we’re trying to do something to make money. You know what I mean? It’s like, not doing this for fun. I think we probably need to do that.

22:23
Really, it’s about people believing in their own talents. I’m definitely better at that than you are with people. I’m just a natural skeptic. That’s the problem, think, with all this. Then people seem to resonate with the skeptic part with my other workshop because I’m just telling you straight out, these are the things that you need to worry about and whatnot.

22:49
but I think it takes less convincing that it can actually make money. Whereas with content- Because it makes sense. Everyone’s walked into a store in their life. Most people have shopped online. I think that’s the next thing that we need to do is figure out how to get people to see their own potential because in the content game, it’s really about what you can offer.

23:14
Like I am definitely not a believer in like to be an influencer for influence sake. Like we don’t teach that. I don’t think that’s something that you or I will ever like, I mean, I think it’s something you can do, but like that’s not what we teach. Like we teach you how to teach other people to make money, right? Like whatever it is, whether it be in mental health or like her friend Christina getting a divorce, like, you know, she’s.

23:38
teaching people how to go through that. We’ve got David Crabill who’s teaching people how to do the cottage food industry. We’ve got Kevin who’s teaching people how to do IT stuff, right? So everyone’s leveraging their talents to teach. And to me, that’s the easier way to make money online. It’s much harder to make money online just for being your own personality. Most people don’t have that kind of personality to make money from their personality. And I think that’s what people think of when we say, oh, you can make money online. Well, I’m not.

24:06
so-and-so. I’m not Charlie D’Amelio. I can’t dance on camera and get 80 million followers or whatever Doesn’t mean you can’t try, but yes. Doesn’t mean you can’t learn the moves. I think we need to do that. The other thing that we talked about this earlier, and I think this is a real sticking point, is because the concepts that we teach are a little abstract. It’s all very much in your head until you do it.

24:35
Everything’s in your head until you film that first video. Everything’s in your head until you record your podcast or you write the blog post or you develop your course outline. We offer a single pay one time or you can pay, I think, in three payments. It’s a lot of money. I think it’s worth every penny. I would have paid this in Everyone who joins says it’s worth it. Yes.

25:02
The thing is if I wouldn’t have had to figure all this out by myself, I would have easily paid that back in the day just to have a cheat sheet. I think the price point is a lot for people who already are like, I’m never going to make a video or I’m not a good writer or I hate the sound of my own voice or whatever it is. I think we used to offer that $99 a month and we set it up

25:32
This is where it got weird. We set it up as like a trial. Like, pay $99 a month, take it for a month. If you don’t like it, cancel. And we have a cancellation policy that’s like, if you cancel, we cancel. We don’t like hound you. We’re not like trying to cancel cable. We’re not gonna follow you to your next house, do all this stuff. But people would sign up for it and then just keep paying.

25:57
Right. And then that’s where it got weird because we pride ourselves and like, hey, we don’t nickel and dime you. It’s not like you take this course and it’s like, but if you want to learn how to create courses, you have to take our course creation module. And that’s another three hundred dollars. And if you want to learn how to record video, you got to take our YouTube model. It’s like, no, one fee. You get everything. And every time we were adding stuff every week, you know, everything’s included. But then with that hundred dollar, ninety nine dollar a month model, you’re essentially paying forever.

26:26
Like and we yeah. So so we took it out. Like we were like, OK, we should probably take this out because like I think twice we’ve had someone go like, I’ve been paying for like 17 months. And you’re like, and I’m like, I mean, we’re still delivering. But it’s then it’s hard because it’s like, well, do you just do you want to pay a thousand dollars? You want to pay nine dollars for the rest of your life? Like, I don’t know. I don’t. I’d rather pay the thousand dollars. But the ninety nine dollar price point is just so much easier to swallow.

26:55
when it comes to like, especially if you’re not like sold on it because you don’t believe that you can do it.

27:02
Yeah. I think a lot of our failures are due to the fact that it’s the type of workshop that I would want to attend. Yeah. No, I’m being serious. Whereas I think in this case of content creation, I’m actually not the target. No. Whereas for, but you know, I did it that way also for my other classes, because that’s the type of people I want to attract. Yes. Right.

27:32
and then just content is just different. When we have our one-on-ones, half the time or even the majority of the time, we’re trying to convince the person that they’re good enough to do it. These people are always far more talented than we are, far more attractive than we are, far better spoken. They have every quality that you need to be successful. We’re over here like two idiots, like, can do it.

27:58
Share your vast amount of PhD knowledge with the world. What’s ironic about this, and I’ve done a lot of one-on-ones in both classes, usually with Profit Online Store, I’m usually trying to talk people out of doing something. Whereas with Profitable Audience, I’m always trying to talk people into doing something. It’s just really weird. The one-on-one disparity is crazy. I think it’s because…

28:25
of confidence issues, whereas people feel very confident they can probably sell something. Yes, and actually, you just gave me a light bulb moment. Okay. People tend to be confident that they can sell something. They’re never confident they can sell themselves. Yes. I can say everyone needs a red pen.

28:47
Right, everyone needs this in their life. You needed to mark up things, you needed to write notes, like selling a red pin’s easy. Selling my own talents, really hard. Why should anyone wanna listen to me? I’m not that, I’m an okay cook, but my kids don’t like everything I make. Why would anyone want a recipe from my website? Why would anyone wanna watch me cook? I probably don’t cut things correctly. You know, like.

29:08
you start thinking about stuff. And like I think about this and I don’t have a huge issue making video, but every time I make video, I’m always like, oh, I probably didn’t do that right. I’m going to get some comment like you didn’t wash your hands after you touch the chicken, whatever. Like you’re like, you’re right. I didn’t. My whole family is going to die. You know, it’s just it’s really hard to convince people that they’re a marketable, you know, commodity basically because you’re selling your knowledge. So how do you do it?

29:36
You can give all the examples that you want, but ultimately, people are going to have this deep complex about this, right? Yes. I think people need an aha moment during the webinar, and I’m not sure how to get them that or give them that. I had no confidence in all this stuff until it actually started working. I just kept at it. That was my philosophy. Seriously, keep doing it. You’re like a-

30:04
You’re like a donkey. You’re just like, keep going. Like you’re like on the little farm and you just keep going back and forth, pulling the I’m not doing the same thing. I’m like trying to improve each time, but still like I didn’t see results for a long time back in the day when I had no one was helping me. I didn’t know anything. And then I remember just one day I had this $50 a day and I was like, whoa, okay. Now we’re talking like over a thousand a month.

30:32
Okay, this is worth doing, but it took me a while to hit that point. I don’t know how to it. Part of me is like, should we make it more interactive with people? Where- Like a Zoom call? No, oh gosh, no. I don’t know. I feel like that would be a disaster. I mean, I honestly, I’d like to try it actually. think it would be, I want to try everything because I want

30:59
I want people in our course to learn from what we do. In fact, the office hours that I’m doing tomorrow is like how to get ChatGPT to write your entire emails for your business. And I’m trying some stuff that I, like I don’t, I use it a little bit, but I’m taking this from a like, I hate to write. So I’m like going through this entire process. Like I would never be able to write an email. And it’s interesting, cause I’m like learning so much as I do it.

31:26
and I’m also learning some like little tricks and hacks. But anyway, like I wanna try stuff, because I wanna be able to tell our course like, hey, y’all should really try Zoom call for your webinar, right? Like, or never ever do this. It was an absolute disaster. We were blocking people left and right, turning cameras off, mutant. Like, I don’t know what it would be, right? So I’m willing to try it just so we have something to tell people, right? And talk about, because everything that we do gives us something to share with everybody else.

31:55
You know what’s funny about this conversation too is before we launched this class, I used to watch webinars of a whole bunch of people teaching similar stuff and I absolutely hated all of them. We would dog on them together. I hated all of them because I end up with nothing. Yeah. Nothing actionable, but you end up maybe feeling good. Maybe that’s like the key.

32:22
to their success. Don’t get wrong, these people are really accomplished and they’re making a ton of sales, but the whole webinar almost is just like a rah-rah Yes, so it’s not the actual teachers. The teachers themselves, once you buy into the membership or the course, the information is in there, but they give you very little information pre-buying in, and they do all these other things, right?

32:50
And so we’ve had this conversation a lot, like, do we need to be more rah-rah? Do we need to be, because you and I are the same in that like when I was blogging, I went to my very first blogging conference and I was dying to know how to use affiliate links. Because I had heard about them, I kind of knew what they were, but I wasn’t quite sure like how it worked and how you got, like I didn’t understand it, right? And I went to a session on affiliate marketing and it was all rah-rah.

33:17
Right. And I left that session like furious because I was like, someone tell me how to get in the Amazon affiliate program. Like that’s all I want to know. Like tell me how to find, you know, impact radius back in the day. Like how do I, you I just wanted like a step by step. But the other thing is like for both of us is that we were we were blogging before we knew what to do. Right. So we started our websites. We were blogging. And like remember you said on on some webinar that we did that you didn’t have an email sign up form on your site for like

33:48
Nope. A significant period of time. think. Yeah, a year, right? Yeah. So you didn’t need to go to an email webinar and be told that people want to listen to what you have to say. You need to figure out what email service provider to buy and how to embed the form on your site and what strategies work best for forms, right? Do you put them in the content? Do you put them in the cyber? Remember, first off, that started all the forms were in the cyber. No one had email forms in their content, right? Yep. That’s what we wanted to know because we had already like…

34:16
gotten over the no one cares what I have to say. We didn’t really care if anyone cared what we had to say. So we’re now taking that same like our same perspective to people who are still in the do people care what I have to say mode.

34:32
So there’s two things that we could do. One, we could just reframe the whole class for people who already have audiences but don’t know how to monetize it. Right. Or we do a better job of making people feel good. I don’t feel good about giving a rah-rah workshop. That’s just my personality. So it would have to be a combination of the two somehow. Yeah, because I don’t feel good about only…

34:58
Give it like I because I was listening to this podcast the other day and I sent it to you and I was like this guy was basically like you can’t teach anything in your webinar and like I’m listening. Yes, and I’m listening to him say this and it’s like hurting my heart, right? Like I’m like no, that’s not who we are. And I do think that we are known for teaching people in webinars. So like if you attend our webinar.

35:25
you will walk away knowing how to do something. So if you don’t want to buy our course, you don’t have the money, you don’t like our personalities, whatever it is, you’re still going to have something that you can take and implement to help your business. And that part, I’m not ready to give up, but like, how do we teach less, more focused, one thing? Like, what is it, right? That we change it a little bit. So it is more focused on the

35:52
getting to like, how do you actually get over the hump to do this? And then this is like the one thing that you need to do. Right. Maybe just focus on the whole getting started bit and figuring out what you’re good at and maybe a framework for that and just getting started. Yeah. As opposed to what we’re doing now, which is pretty advanced, I want to say on the second day. I know if of guys have listened to We’re answering like,

36:21
We also answer, we talk about, well, how do you exclude certain ads from your website? We go more in-depth than just a cursory affiliates or sponsorships. I even think on the first day we are in-depth in things that maybe we don’t need to be. We can try a more rah-rah workshop. I wish people could see your face.

36:51
Just based on our one-on-ones though, I think something needs to change because the fact that like my experiences with the one-on-ones that I do are the complete opposite. Yeah. Makes me realize the type of people that sign up are and what they’re looking for are completely different from a confidence standpoint. Yeah. Like on one hand, people are a little overconfident or they’re just not overconfident. That’s not the right word, but they’re like, I have to talk them out of stuff as opposed to the other way around.

37:20
Whereas with the course that we run together, the fact that we have to just spend so much time pumping someone up and giving them the confidence just says something right there. I think it takes a whole lot more to put yourself out there than it does to just order a product and put it online. If it fails, you can blame everything. You can blame the product, the listing, the competition that you got knocked at Amazon.

37:50
You didn’t, your ads didn’t work, that you didn’t get any traffic. Like there’s a million things. If like, I think about our friend in the course who’s doing the mental health webinars. Like she’s truly like discouraged when people don’t like follow through with her because it, because to her, it’s a reflection of her ability to help people. And that’s not really what it is at all. Right? She, it’s, it’s like this, can make up these same, like you had the wrong audience. You didn’t have the right offer.

38:18
you were too complex in your teaching, right? It could be all these same things, just like selling a product, but that’s not what we do. We immediately internalize it and are like, well, people just don’t like me. And that’s a lot harder than people just don’t like your product. It’s true. There’s also been a lot of people asking about doing faceless stuff, where it’s just like AI generating and pumping out these, what I consider almost video spam, honestly. It’s just a way to make a quick buck. And you’re not really developing

38:48
audience for yourself, you’re developing an audience for this AI content. I don’t know how I feel about that. Like we actually added one lesson in the class on that. And I honestly felt a little dirty about it because I don’t, I think it’s a short-lived thing. Maybe you can probably make a couple bucks off of it and whatnot. Although like, if I look at my TikTok now, it’s probably 40 % AI generated shorts. Is yours like that?

39:18
No, but we’re in very different algorithms. Well, no, if I look over at my wife’s TikTok also, same thing. Really? Okay. I don’t know. I feel like for what we teach, I want to teach what we actually do, which is really to build an audience and a personal brand or a brand for whatever we’re selling and not just some AI-generated stuff, although there seems to be demand for that also.

39:46
Well, I think people see AI as the easy way out. I can do all this, I did. Then once again, you don’t have to blame. It’s not a personality issue. That’s correct. Yes, it removes the rooted baggage. I honestly think it is. I know we’re running short on time, but I want to wrap it up with our $100 a month question. What do we do? What do we do with that? Do we bring it back? Do we cap it after you pay for

40:16
12 months you’re in, like we don’t say that, but we just like convert them. Like now that we don’t say it, but you know what I mean? Like we don’t publicize. Like, cause I just, I don’t want to charge someone $99 a month for 10 years. Like that feels gross. When we already have a one, if we were just doing membership and it’s like, Hey, you joined for $97 a month. That’s what you pay as long as you want to be in it. And everyone was on that plan. I would be fine with it. But the fact that some people are on like a different plan is the problem.

40:45
for me. I’m not concerned about that at all because you take the risk, right? It’s like when I saw a month a month for my wireless plan instead of paying a year upfront and saving 20 % right. You make that choice and we always give the option to upgrade the lifetime after a month anyway. That’s true. Yeah. Right. So I don’t feel bad about that. So I think the lower price point matters. And once they get in, you know, they’ll realize pretty quickly that they’re in the right. Very few people ask.

41:13
Very few people quit after a month. Yes. It’s never because of the content. It’s never because of like what they’re learning. If people decide not to stay, it’s usually because they’ve been in for like seven or eight months and they’re like, hey, I just don’t have the time to go through this right now. That’s almost always what and when you go look at their accounts, you can see that they haven’t really viewed anything. They’re not like engaging. They’re not showing up to office hours. But it’s very rare that we have someone come in for a month and just be like, I watch this stuff. It’s not for me.

41:43
I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone say that. All right. If you guys have listened to Tony and I ramble for this past 40 minutes, we actually want your input. What would you like to see in a workshop on this stuff? Because there’s plenty of interest, right? Because the benefits are clear. Once you have an audience, you can sell something that isn’t physical and doesn’t require any amount of work to deliver, and you can sell the same digital product, membership, or whatever over and over.

42:12
The model is very appealing. The problem is convincing people to even give it a try.

42:23
Hope you enjoyed that episode. For more information and resources, go over to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 556. And once again, tickets to Seller Summit 2025 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’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course.

42:50
Just type in your email and are set to the course right away. Thanks for listening.