Now if you enjoy this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes and enter my podcast contest where I’m giving away free one on one business consultations every single month. For more information go to www.mywifequitherjob.com/contest. And if you are interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information.

Now before I begin, I just wanted to give a quick shout out to this episodes sponsor 99 designs. Now originally I wasn’t going to take any sponsors at all but 99 designs caught my eye, because I suck at design. And in fact when I first started my online store back in 2007 the design for my website was terrible, and I had absolutely no idea who to turn to. Now fast forward to today 99 designs is a site where you can provide a description of anything that you want designed whether it be a logo, a webpage, a t-shirt, pretty much anything, and have dozens of designers compete to deliver you the best design possible. And by best I mean you get to choose your favorite design among dozens of submissions from a pool of over 315,000 designers.

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Welcome to the my wife quit her job podcast where. We will teach you how to create a business that suites your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the my wife quit her job podcast. Today I have a very special guest on the show Toni Anderson. Now Toni runs a popular blog thehappyhousewife.com where she’s created an incredible resource that teachers others how to better manage their homes. She also runs Digital CoLab which is a conference that caters to web professionals who want to expand their online businesses. But here’s the kicker, the woman has seven kids, her husband is in the military and he’s not around all that often and she home schools all of her kids.

Now is that ridiculous or what, and she does all of this while running a six figure blog, a conference and she also consults on the side. Now I had the pleasure of meeting Toni in person at the World domination summit a couple of months ago, and I’ve got a couple of confessions to make. So when I first met her, I half expected to meet a frazzled, beaten down, disheveled and ungroomed woman who is a little out of shape. Now that’s actually how I picture someone who has been worn down over the years from the rigors of taking care of seven kids.

Now my wife and I have problems with just two, so I can’t even imagine having seven. But much to my surprise, Toni looked great and she was in shape too and she was down to earth, calm, composed, and very easy to talk to. And in fact I randomly went up to her when she was in the middle of talking to someone else, rudely interrupted her conversation and said “hey are you Toni Anderson?” And at the time I didn’t think anything of it, but she was probably thinking to herself “who is this crazy Chinese guy coming up to me?” So anyways I’m looking at my inbox right now and I’m seeing a couple of emails from people complaining that they don’t have enough time to start their own businesses. So after listening to this interview you will never ever be able to complain that you don’t have enough time ever again, and with that welcome to the show Toni, how’s it going today?

Toni: It’s great, how are you?

Steve: I’m very good. So give us the quick background story and tell us how you came up with the idea the happy house wife.

Toni: All right, so I started blogging in 2006. My husband was deployed to Iraq and because of the computer systems there he couldn’t get like the Yahoo and the AOL account emails. So because we couldn’t communicate via email, I started a blog just to basically write him a letter every day. And it was you know, it was a public site but of course no one was reading it but ham or so I thought, and one day I got an email from someone who claimed to be Oliver North’s publicists, and I had written a post, it was around 4th of July and I had written a post sort of a letter to my husband thanking him for his military service.

Somehow, someone in Oliver North’s team stumbled upon it, read it, loved it and wanted to re-publish it in his newsletter and of course having not a lot of experience in this area I kind of deleted the email, it was like “yeah whatever” I’ll also send you my social security number, my bank account, move on. And a couple of days later, I got another email and I think on the third email I realized this was legitimate and they did want to republish my article. So that was my first realization that it wasn’t just my husband reading this site, and perhaps this was a little bigger than you know what I thought it was. I was a reader of blogs– actually I was J.D. Roth that would get registered in front of the first blogs that I read. I read a couple you know mom type blogs, and so I knew that they were out there, but I didn’t really understand that this could be something about a business.

So I kept up with this first blog for– well my husband was deployed and then once he came back he was actually injured during deployment and we spent about 18 months with him in rehab kind of wondering if he was able to work again. He wasn’t able to drive or get himself to therapy, and so I started doing all that. And realizing that we were just one income family that we were like what are we going to do if he can’t work anymore? And he didn’t have enough seniority in the military to retire. So they were talking about like a medical discharge, which is basically where they try not to give you a lot of money, and I realized that I needed to figure out what I could do to start working, but yeah we still had six kids you know. So I thought I can’t really like put them all in day care because that’s too expensive.

So my blog had kind of just be going along, it was very personal and I realized I needed to stop that and start something that was less personal, and more just about life and how to manage your home, because when I got married I couldn’t cook a hotdog. So I kind of learned it all as I went along, and I thought hey if I didn’t know there’s probably a lot of people like me out there that go through the same struggles, and being a military family you know not living close to my own family. So I had to kind of learn it without the help of parent’s, grandparent’s kind of thing.

So I launched the happy housewife in 2008 fully expecting it to be a business. I thought you know dreaming that it would support our family one day– not really knowing how to get there or having any idea how to monetize the blog, but realizing that I thought at some point I could get there. And so I launched in 2008– he actually ended up getting better and going back on full duty, and you know so the pressure was off to sort of make it a business right away, but over the years obviously it has grown into being its own little online empire, but yeah that’s where we started

Steve: The happy housewife– was this your original blog where you were writing personal messages to your husband?

Toni: No…

Steve: Oh, okay.

Toni: I had my kids’ names on the first blog and I knew enough about the internet to know that I didn’t want my kids’ names or real specific information about our family…

Steve: Okay.

Toni: On a blog that I was intending for a lot of people to read. So I pulled most of the old content, and I think there were a few posts that I kept on there and changed the name and everything and launched on a WordPress site.

Steve: Okay. And the reason why I ask this is because I’ve been on your site and there’s actually this really long 30 page article I would say which I spent you know 30 minutes reading a couple of weeks ago, and it’s really personal and it’s got a lot of juicy stuff. It’s was almost like reading a romance novel. Not that I read those by the way for those listening…

Toni: Right.

Steve: But very interesting stuff. So is the rest of your– like I haven’t gone through your blog you know over the years, but is a lot of that that personal, or?

Toni: No, that would be the most personal. I actually wrote that story– I went to a blog conference– I think it was 2009 and when I started my site the whole goal was to make it personal and not like I’m your friend and I want to help you, but not personal and that you’re going to hear stories about how my kid takes off the diaper and eats the poop kind of thing, right?

Steve: Right.

Toni: So I wanted it to be relatable but not personable. But I went to this blog conference and someone talked about the importance of sharing your story, and of course I bought into it because who doesn’t buy into those talks right? I thought I actually have a pretty interesting story. And so I sat on the plane and wrote for two and a half hours of just starting from the very beginning– well when I met my husband and…

Steve: Okay.

Toni: You know kind of hit publish and went to bed sort of thing and of course woke up the next day to people flipping out. I can’t believe you did this or I did the same thing or I did it, it didn’t work, or people that are like, hey I think I know your husband from high school because that sounds a lot like him, and I’ve been reading your blog for a year. So it sort of just got a life of its own and I don’t do a very good job of updating it because it’s it is hard for me to put a lot of personal stuff out there, and obviously my goal in writing that is the only person I ever want to look like a dog is myself. I don’t want anyone, my family or people that I care about to feel that I’m saying anything about them that won’t be well received. So it’s– and you know– but of course your life isn’t really like that, so it’s hard to write it and make everybody else look really good, because then not always but you know.

Steve: I’ll have to link that story up because as soon as I read it, I was reading it and I was like “oh, my God this is really juicy.” And so I pulled my wife over, and what’s hilarious is at the very end you had this little nugget like, if you want to hear the rest of this story you better sign up for my newsletter, I’m like “oh! Man, this is like…”

Toni: And that’s how I grew my subscriber base.

Steve: Yes, very clever and that is how I became a member of the happyhousewife.com.

Toni: That’s right, that’s right and I get hate mail regularly because it’s not finished. You know I get like the email with like the title of that email is in all caps and it’s like, “YOU NEED TO FINISH!!!!” I’m like you want to come babysit for me so that I can finish it. So yeah, it’s a work In progress, plus I’m not dead yet, so the story can’t end, so come on.

Steve: Yeah, but you’re a lot more successful now. So maybe it’s a little less interesting I guess. But, so let’s talk about, okay when you first started happy house– this is 2008, how many kids did you have at the time?

Toni: Six, only six.

Steve: Only six? All right, so how does one find the time to blog with six kids?

Toni: You know it’s something and this is what I tell a lot of people because obviously I work in a space where we help bloggers, but if you’re not passionate about it, you’re not willing to put in those you know 2a.m. sessions to get it done…

Steve: Okay.

Toni: And so you know for me it was about– this was an outlet. This is where I could put all my recipes fun online and my laundry tips and all these things that, it’s like being a housewife I’m just going to say it it’s pretty monotonous, like it’s not fun to do. I don’t care what anybody tells you, it’s not fun to do laundry, it’s not fun to fold sheets, I don’t care how good you are at it. But to me it was fun to find out clever ways of doing it, and then sharing it with other people. So for me it really helped to break up what I felt like it was sort of a boring job at– with it day to day. Like obviously raising kids is far from boring, but things like you know cleaning your house and all that stuff you know not super exciting, and so I felt like it was a way for me to get it all out there, and talk about it you know exchange ideas with people.

Steve: What about the home school part of it, didn’t that take up most of the day?

Toni: Yes it did, and it should– shouldn’t it? Yeah so home schooling and you know when I started I always say my kids were little; they weren’t really little, I think my oldest was 13 when I started.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: You know home schooling doesn’t take up 9 and 10 hours of your day, if you’re doing it well. So you know we would home school in the morning, and then you know until the early afternoon, and then the kids would just play and do things. It’s one of those things that I would– while they’re reading lunch, I would sign on and check things and approve comments and do all that stuff, and then– and you know blogging has gotten a lot different from when I started. When I started you basically had a blog, and I think Twitter had just started, but you know people weren’t on it like they’re today and there wasn’t a Pinterest that you had to focus on you know Facebook wasn’t really used by brands. So as the internet social networking has grown, I think people’s time online has grown a lot too, because you didn’t have to do all this stuff that I think when I started in 2008, you know you weren’t spending five hours a day on a Pinterest strategy.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: You were just writing content you know.

Steve: Right, actually you know that’s a good segway to the next topic that I want to talk about. So, let’s start with the very beginning first of all, what was your early strategy to kind of obtain traffic?

Toni: So I was in the old school approach, probably you were in this too; I don’t know when you started.

Steve: 2009 actually, so around the same time.

Toni: Yeah, so commenting on other sites, doing– getting links you know, so either submitting guest posts to bigger bloggers, participating in like the linking parties. I did a lot of guest blogging, so that was a big one for me was you know hitting up some of the bigger bloggers in sort of the home management, lifestyle type space and then I created a blogging network. I think I’m not sure when I did this, I think it was about six months in, and I just realized that there were several bloggers that we seem to always be commenting on each other’s post and that sort of thing. And I think we’re at that point, I think Facebook, and I basically emailed ten bloggers and I said “hey would you like to start a group?” And you know kind of like a mastermind group, but I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time and you know basically share ideas, promote each other, and work to grow each other’s sites together. And you know almost everybody that started in that group is now a full time income blogger.

Steve: Wow, so can you just talk about how this group was run?

Toni: Yeah, so we used– I think it was Google groups– was that what it was called?

Steve: Yeah, I think so yeah, basically that’s email based right?

Toni: Yeah, so you get a digest, you could get it– you can get like single emails or get it through digest. So we basically used that as set up and we just– I think when we started it was pretty formal and I actually would– since I was probably the most experienced blogger in the group, I would send out little like weekly lessons, like challenges like “hey let’s this week, let’s try to like work on back linking, or this week let’s try to work on email marketing” or something like that. And so probably for the first like nine months, it was pretty formal like each week being a lesson or a challenge, and then after that my site grew pretty significantly after my first year, and I just didn’t have time to look– because this was a big chunk of our time was participating in this group, and I didn’t have time to be as formal.

So then it became of more you know “hey can you all share this post for me?” Or “can you comment or can you go do this” and you know hey back when linkings were really big you know, and you wanted to be the first person to link up at 9a.m. if someone was like in the west coast. You know the east coast would link up the west coasters blog form and things like that. So that’s when it became, as we got farther on and now we don’t really do it at all, we’ve all kind of gone different directions, but we’re still friends. So it worked out pretty well.

Steve: That’s pretty cool, so would that be a good strategy today if you’re starting all over again?

Toni: I definitely think getting in a group is a great strategy. I don’t– you know I feel like the guest posting– I think it still has value, I don’t think it has value like it used to you know, obviously commentings– I think commenting is a great way to get someone’s attention if you’re a frequent reader. I know I know my frequent readers, I know the people that comment on my site. I interact with them usually on every platform. So if they were a growing blogger, I would probably put them on my radar to promote them you know…

Steve: Okay.

Toni: Based on opportunities. So I think there’s still that, but it takes a lot of time. So I don’t know if the time verses value is as good as it used to be.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: But I definitely feel like getting in a group, honestly if it’s just to bounce ideas of each other, I think it’s worth it as long as you give as much as you’re getting.

Steve: Okay and then what was your strategy for approaching some of the larger blogs in the beginning to guest post on?

Toni: You know I just– I would– obviously there are blogs that I would read or were familiar with, and so I would usually pitch them an idea of something that was really relevant to what they were already talking about. So if it was a frugal site you know, I was like “hey, can I write a post about how clock saved us all this money?” You know something like that, so it would be something that they maybe hadn’t talked about to the depth that I could write about it.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: So, you know I did some research and I think that’s really important is I think we all get these pitches from who knows India whatever, trying to submit guest posts for links and you know obviously as bloggers we tend to delete almost everything like that when it comes in. So I think when you’re crafting a pitch to a bigger blog or that you make sure that you’ve really done your research on their site, you know what they talk about and you can add a lot of value to what they’re doing. Because I mean even people like Problogger will take guest posts from people that do a good job in pitching him right, and are creating that relevant content for a site.

Steve: Yeah sure of course. And then today you know you mentioned Pinterest, but are there any particular traffic sources that you kind of focus on today, with all the different social media that’s out there?

Toni: Yes, so I actually have an assistant that does Pinterest for me, that’s one of her main jobs, and so she’s become my Pinterest expert. And when we started I was on Pinterest and I actually– when I started I had an idea that it would be really cool to create these home school boards based on themes, and so you know a theme of like oceans and a theme of pirates or whatever you know, and then basically create unit studies which is something you do on homeschooling around those themes and basically use Pinterest to create a curriculum to put on my site, but then drive back to Pinterest and then drive back to my site. So sort of this circular traffic plan which actually worked pretty well, but it became overwhelming to keep creating sort of these themed studies because we weren’t actually doing them all.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: And so, I had a I had a girl that actually worked for me last year who really worked on honing those boards down and creating that content for me, and then she ended up leaving in the Christmas time not for any reason, that then she just didn’t want to work anymore, and so my other VA now manages my Pinterest exclusively. And from doing things like ransom groups where you know your growing depends so much on content from other people every week and they are pinning your content…

Steve: I see.

Toni: You know really studying like going back on old posts and making them more Pinterest friendly either by changing the images or you know I’ll get an email from her telling me to retake a picture on a recipe because it was made in 2008 and that’s when you didn’t put in pictures with the recipes, right? So you know just creating– taking out that old content because I have so much on my site and really repurposing it so it can’t be pinned on Pinterest and get a lot of new eyeballs on it.

Steve: So how did you become a part of these groups, like how do you find them?

Toni: You know a lot of them from Digital CoLab.

Steve: Okay your conference, okay.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: We’ll talk about that later

Toni: Yeah, so I think it’s really all about networking and connecting with people and not being afraid to sort of hop in and build those relationships. I think a lot of bloggers are really introverted, and so they’re very-very comfortable behind their computer, but don’t put them in a conference, don’t have them socialize, because they’re not great at really like the networking skills that I feel like are important like in any business that you would own. So for me it’s important, like if I’m in an event I’m not around hanging out with the people that I know, but most of the time I want to meet people that I don’t know to figure out if there’s a way we can work together, because the internet’s huge, right so..

Steve: Right.

Toni: To me it’s like why would I spend half as much money it takes to get to an event if I’m not going to– just to see my friends. I mean we could just meet somewhere in the middle. So to me it’s really about getting out of your comfort zone, meeting new people and then finding people that are similar enough to you to where you’ll be able to share their content authentically like your readers wouldn’t be turned off, but different enough to where– because I mean a lot of us have similar readership you know bases. So it’s the same people that are always sharing, then it’s the same readers that are always seeing everything. So trying to find a few people that you might not know very well, and maybe just slightly outside of your niche, but same type of demographic to work with is really helpful too.

Steve: Like kind of random Chinese people at conferences, that sort of thing?

Toni: That’s my goal.

Steve: Okay, that’s what I thought.

Toni: Yeah, I’m too [Inaudible] [00:21:19] too now, so…

Steve: Yeah we all know who that other Asian is.

Toni: We won’t say his name.

Steve: We won’t say his name.

Toni: Right.

Steve: So that’s cool then, so okay so you’re starting to get all this traffic from Pinterest, what else you got– so there’s search, there’s Pinterest– are you do a lot with Facebook at all?

Toni: You know Facebook for me was really big a couple of years ago, and then I was in the group where Facebook just fell of the map. So which you know to me that’s one of the biggest– never put all your eggs in one basket, right? So I feel like one of the reasons why– I mean I think the reasons why I’ve had a more successful site, in my niche I got in early, I was one of the first people in. Whoever tells you that getting in early doesn’t matter is a liar, it does. There’s a real advantage to that because you have more experience in the space and then I think two is like every year we kind of on something different with the sites. So I think our first or second year, we really focused on our email list which nobody was really focusing on email list…

Steve: Okay.

Toni: In my niche early on. So we did that and then the next year I think it was 2010 was our big year to focus on Facebook. I think I started the year with like 2,000 Facebook fans and ended the year with like 22,000 fans.

Steve: Okay, nice.

Toni: And did things like you know free eBook for fans and you know better content and really like spend a lot of time figuring out what my Facebook folks wanted. And so it did drive a lot of traffic to my site, but at the same time we were still working on SEO, we were still building our email list and we were still doing these other things to grow traffic from other sources, and obviously just that the traffic of people coming back to your site everyday because they like you and they want to read what you have to say, that’s really important too.

Steve: So, with Facebook you did what sounds like just giveaways– a bunch of giveaways and that sort of thing to build your fan base.

Toni: I didn’t really– well I did freebies, so I would…

Steve: Freebies, sure?

Toni: Write an e-book and then give it– you had to be– like my page and then once you liked the page it unlocked the book, and you could download it.

Steve: Is there a plug in that you use for that?

Toni: You know I haven’t done it in several years. What I remember we coded it into Facebook, it was just a code you dropped in.

Steve: Okay and then when you mention that you were doing email marketing, could you be a little more specific. So let’s say you get someone sign up, what do you do after that?

Toni: So I’m not– well I don’t do it anymore, so that’s why we’re having you.

Steve: Oh me, oh okay, right on, okay just curious, okay

Toni: We’ve done lots of things. We’ve experimented with, if you’re an email subscriber then we did a monthly newsletter with completely premium content. So nothing will appear on the site, so we did that for about an year and a half. We saw really great results initially, but then it sort of– it was almost like the excitement wore off and I don’t know if maybe they didn’t feel like the content was up to par, or if they were just they didn’t want that other email in their inbox.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: So initially it helped and then we felt like it kind of stagnated. So we stopped doing it at the beginning of this year mainly because it took a lot of time and it cost me a lot of money to do it, and I wasn’t getting the investment back, yeah. So we’ve done that, we’ve done– for me it’s more like the email subscribers get premium content, they would get coupons or discounts that I wouldn’t put on the site so…

Steve: Okay.

Toni: We would work with advertisers too, they would actually pay for placement in the newsletter but then they would also be able to get like an exclusive deal. And usually that worked well with the home school part of thing, because it’s not super expensive for those companies and most of those companies are like you know mom and pop type of stores. So we’ve done things like that, you know things like– one of the things that we did early on was that since my site has like six different kind of sub topics, we allowed people to subscribe only to the subtopics that they wanted to hear about.

So if they didn’t home school they would never have to hear anything about home schooling because they not choose to subscribe to that section. So that was something we did before and a lot of people do that now. We did that pretty early on and that was something I felt like was important because my site did cover a pretty big variety of things, and I knew that I had– my home school base is not very big, and so I felt those people out there that never ever want to hear about home schooling, they don’t want to feel like that’s important to them you know whatever it’s fine, but they want my recipes, so they can only get my recipes and that’s fine too. And that was a big– that was actually a big boost for me is segmenting those email lists because you know I find that and also it’s great to research to find out what my readers really wanted because I realized people were really coming to my site for the food.

Steve: So curious are you on Aweber, what do you use for your email list?

Toni: I use Feedlets.

Steve: Feedlets okay, so is it really easy to segment with that tool, I’ve actually never used it?

Toni: It didn’t seem easy.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: I have to be honest, it didn’t seem easy.

Steve: So did you have someone like in the beginning for your first email you just say “hey are you interested in these categories?” And then that instantly just segments them to different lists, is that how it works kind of?

Toni: Actually when they go to subscribe page they choose there.

Steve: Got it, okay that makes sense that makes sense, yeah. And I was going to ask you also because it all kind of ties together, what is the business model and how does the happy housewife make money exactly? So you got all this traffic, how do you convert to dollars?

Toni: So part of my biggest source of revenue is either like influencer marketing, brand spokesman, sponsored campaigns.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: So I work a lot with brands either doing things– and one of the things that’s nice about a site like mine is that it actually puts you in that expert category. So I’ve become like an expert home economic person whatever, so I’ve done a lot of work with brands where I don’t even write anything about them on my own site, but I do things for them on their sites which pays really well. So things like interviews for magazines or TV, quote the brands. So you basically get paid to do these articles and then you actually– it’s kind of cool because you’re not even marking the waters of your own brand because it’s completely off your site, but then I have done things…

Steve: Interesting, okay.

Toni: And so I’ve done that with like the [Inaudible] [00:26:45] board and OxiClean and Arm and Hammer and several like pretty big craft.

Steve: As the model for the– like OxiClean for example is it like a commercial or…

Toni: Yeah, they just put all my kids… so I worked for their print last year. So I did– I think I did one or two posts on my own site, but I most– So I did interview I think with Women’s day ladies home journal. And it was all about stain tips and things like that, so I would create articles for OxiClean and then they would pitch those out to you know the different publications and I was the expert. So they could use my brand as being the expert mom, expert cleaning tip lady to then leverage their products in these articles.

Steve: Okay, so they were leveraging your audience right, because your audience knows you and as a result they`ll follow that brand that you are pitching kind off, okay. And then they find you just naturally through the blog. Is that how they…

Toni: Yeah, yeah and you know a lot of it is just– a lot of it is definitely having traffic and being out there in social media and being at events and meeting the right people, you know meeting those marketing and PR folks that go to a lot of the blogging conferences. And then a lot of it is just creating really great content. So one of the things for me that I think is really important is that when you do work on a brand campaign, a lot of bloggers I know you know they write a pretty crappy post and then burry it, right. So they put it up– they are kind of embarrassed if they did the sponsored campaign for a brand that they weren’t really sure about, and then they bury it under like seven posts, which to me that says that you don’t really want to work with the brand and so for me I`ve really tried when I work with brands is to do the– make the pictures phenomenal, like those pictures are Pinterest worthy and you know I`m going to give them a little extra promotion on social media.

One of the girls I was talking with last weekend and was talking about– she actually allocates part of her budget on sponsored post to actually boost Facebook posts for the brand when she puts them on the site. So she is doing some paid marketing for them as part of her compensation. So, I think that’s big, it’s just doing really quality work when you get into it, so that the brands– because the brands know if you do things on time and you submit everything you are supposed to and you are easy to work with, they will come back to you over and over and over again. And it`s actually like in the food space, they pay pretty well, so you can easily just have a full time income off of working with the brands.

Steve: So can you just give us an idea, so it sounds like a lot of work actually what you just kind of described, and so can you give us an idea what the compensation looks like for one of your sponsored gigs for example and what is– what do you have to do as part of that gig?

Toni: So if you were just doing a simple sponsored post, so it’s one post let`s just say it was a recipe creation. So they are going to say, hey we have this and actually I`m doing one in the next couple of weeks with something called [Jeep weeps] [phonetic], and it`s like they are small, small flavor.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: So creating a recipe with that, with the jeep weeps and then put up the post, you’ll promote on social media and that’s basically all you have to do.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: So the compensation for something like that and I obviously can’t say what this compensation is because I`m under non disclosure, but you know would be anywhere for a decent size blog you are looking at between 500 and 1000 dollars.

Steve: Okay and what about something much more involved where you are like the spokesperson on that other person’s site or something like that?

Toni: Yeah, so that’s between like five and ten grand.

Steve: Wow, okay.

Toni: So I mean it definitely works, and I try to break it up into like an hourly wage. So for me personally I don’t want to make less than 100 dollars an hour in anything that I do.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: So, or it’s not worth it for me because I can pass and figure out another way to make 100 dollars an hour.

Steve: Mm-huh.

Toni: So I usually take you know if a brand approaches me or really anyone approaches me and says “hey I have a project for you,” I really kind of factor in how much time it’s going to take, and if I can’t hit that 100 dollars an hour unless it– I mean if it`s Walt Disney world, I will work for free. I`ve said that many times I will work for free for Disney tickets, but for most other things you know obviously being a yoghurt doesn’t pay your mortgage. So you know getting fairly compensated is pretty important, and so for me and you know for me 100 dollars an hour is what I feel I`m earning that at this point and where I am. For some people it’s a lot more and for some people if you are just starting out– I mean, I think even if you just a brand new blogger, your time is still worth something. So even if you have a very small readership, don’t do things for free for people because all these companies have budgets to pay you.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: So even if it`s 25 bucks because you know three months into blogging, charge 25 bucks, charge something because you`ve got to start setting your worth at some level. So I think that’s really important, and I think most of the bloggers that are about my age in blogging years, we all did really stupid free stuff initially. Right, we would blog for…

Steve: Absolutely.

Toni: You know you are looking back and you are like, oh my Gosh I can’t believe I was excited when they sent me a lunch box you know. So we`ve all done it, so you know I`m not sitting here and saying, oh you guys shouldn’t do this. I just think about your time and your time is valuable and your time is valuable, and if you think yourself , if I`m going to do this post and it`s going to take me two hours and they are going to pay me 50 bucks can I make 50 bucks in an hour doing something else?

Steve: Mm-huh.

Toni: So maybe it’s like working on Facebook strategy or doing something on Pinterest or you are networking or writing a guest posts, maybe you can, maybe you can’t. And so consider that whenever you are– to me you need to consider that whenever you are deciding what you need to take because obviously everyone’s time is limited, and so you have to make decisions. To me I make decisions based on what my time is worth and what I think I`m going to get in return.

Steve: So let say you are really small, how do you actually get on the radar of some of these brands? Do you approach them or do you wait for them to approach you? How do you go about getting these sponsorships?

Toni: Honestly I know a lot of people don’t– they are not on twitter any more, but twitter is a great place to connect with the brands. They are all on twitter.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: You know several campaigns that I`ve had are because I absolutely organically not trying to get anything you know, one time– we’re a big family– we love butter, and so I`m all about butter.

Steve: Who doesn’t like butter?

Toni: Who doesn’t like butter, butter and bacon– those are my two favorite brands, right?

Steve: Nice, yes.

Toni: It’s a win-win. So I tweeted out something about butter one day like I think I went to the– I think I was at the commissary and of course when I go to the commissary, I`m going to buy like 25 pounds of butter because we got a big family. So I think I tweeted a picture of like all this butter or something like that and the challenge butter people were like, we love you, you are so awesome, you are tweeting out pictures of our butter. Well, ended up that I got a couple opportunities with them down the road because I was on their radar, and I wasn’t trying to get a challenge butter contract. I just– we love the butter. And so I think that those brands that you authentically like and you know I would say engage them on twitter, connect with PR people on LinkedIn.

I mean if you meet people at a conference, think old school like get a business card, write something that you remember about them on the back of the card and then get on their LinkedIn, send them a request and add that little fact like great to meet you, so happy that we both love pinnacolada you know whatever it is, do some networking like that because in the brand space because as a consultant I work as a brand, and I find bloggers and you are dealing with thousands of bloggers that all look exactly the same to you, right? From an aerial perspective, so if you are the pinnacolada blogger, I remember you, you know.

Steve: I see.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: Okay, if you are the Chinese blogger, then you remember me.

Toni: Exactly, exactly.

Steve: So what is the approximate time line, like obviously you didn’t start making money and getting sponsorships when you first started? How long did it take actually for your blog to kind of gain some traction?

Toni: I think I actually found when I was cleaning out my desk a couple of months ago, I found my first cheque from Blogger the ad network.

Steve: Mm-huh.

Toni: It was about 11 months in, so that was probably my first you know I think it was like 97 dollars or something. So it was probably a full year before I made any money and then I probably made like 15 bucks here and there, but nothing significant.

Steve: Right.

Toni: And then it was really probably about 18 months when I realized that it was definitely like a part time you know if I had a job I probably could have quit it sort of income.

Steve: So you mentioned sponsorships, I forgot to ask you about some of the other income sources. So you just mentioned bloggers, so that’s CPM advertising, right?

Toni: Yep and that you know those are great obviously all these studies are showing that CPM ad networks are kind of, they are sinking because people are just blind to those adds now on the side line, and they don’t click and they don’t have very effective, but that being said all those networks still exist and you can still– especially if you have something like DFP set up where your adds are rotating based on your CPM model, you are still going to– if you have significant traffic, that’s a great way to earn pretty big chunk of change.

Steve: So just for the benefit of the listeners DFP is Goggles platform which allows a whole bunch of different advertisers to kind of bid for that slot on your site, and usually it will only display whichever advertiser is bidding the most, so you make the most amount of money.

Toni: Yes and I would say if your traffic is anywhere between like 150 plus thousand page views a month, I would get that set up because you can make some significant– you`ll see everyone that I have talked to– and I`m actually getting it set up on my site this month. Everyone that I have talked too is, I`ve heard my income has tripled, my income has doubled from just CPM network income has doubled or tripled just within a month or two of getting it set up.

Steve: Wow! So what CPMs could you expect to see in your space?

Toni: You know it really depends on who– obviously like if you are with federated media that’s really sort of elite network, and so you are going to see three to five dollar CPMs. Some of the other ones like burst and I think it`s called server, it used to be legit, but they changed their name. They are still in the dollar, dollar fifty range. You know most of the time you can set up floor, so when you set up floor they are going to show an add that’s not less than a certain CPM and that’s– I recommend that because you can always back that with adsense– most of these networks. So that’s important too because you don’t want to have them– because they are going to sell as much of remnants space on your site as they can if you don’t have that set. So they are going to be selling the 20 cents CPMs.

Steve: Okay. And so the fact that you have just mentioned that you back those with adsense, does that imply that adsense is the lowest paying?

Toni: For my site it is. For people in other niches that’s not the case, but I have found for my site adsense has not performed terribly well. So I would say you just have to test your own site to know what is performing.

Steve: Okay, and then have you tried any of the other ones. Any of the other CPC type of ad networks like media net and trying to think– I don’t run CPM adds anymore, so I actually kind of out of that space.

Toni: I think we tried them a couple of years ago. We did use media net I think for a very short period of time. It just– I think if you don’t have something automated set up, unless you have and also time manage that and track it, it’s probably not worth it.

Steve: Okay, what does it take to get on federated media’s radar screen?

Toni: I don’t know, talk to Erin.

Steve: Oh, Erin yes. Just had her on the show the podcast will be published shortly.

Toni: Yeah so, Yeah I think you have there’s definitely a traffic, but they are really looking for diverse, they are trying– they really pride themselves in having like we have all these different bloggers from all these different niches and these high end people and these home decor and DIY folks, so I think it’s just a matter of getting lucky and then you know having the right site with the right traffic at the right time.

Steve: Okay, and then today if you look at your blog at a very high level, where does most of your traffic come from, like what are the primary traffic sources?

Toni: So the primary traffic sources for my site today would be Pinterest and SEO.

Steve: Okay, and then Facebook and twitter are on there, but not quite a large percentage?

Toni: No, yeah Facebook has definitely dwindled, I still get a lot of links so I get a lot of referrals from other sites you know and that’s another reason– you know honestly I think it really boils down to for most people it`s just creating really great content, because the better your content the more likely people with link to you, write about you, talk about you, talk to you, share your stuff and really everyone says content is king, content is king, but it`s really true. Anyone can just slop, put slop up there, I mean it’s just– anyone can buy post and you know I have writers that write for my site too, and we actually sometimes we’ll buy articles as well if we need to fill certain topics, but the most part putting that great content out there is really invaluable for readers, and that’s what they want. They are used to you and whatever your voice is, and it`s all these like cliché terms and stuff, but it’s actually pretty true.

Steve: So you know one thing about your blog that is pretty unique in my mind is that you have kind of completely outsourced the entire operation, right?

Toni: Yes. As I say you got be you, but I outsource everything.

Steve: So yeah, my question is your personality in my opinion is a large part of your blog after spending 30 minutes reading your life story. So how do you kind of manage to outsource the writing and still kind of remain kind of personal with your site?

Toni: You know, I try to still write occasionally.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: For me it was actually all based on a conversation I had with Jay Ross several years ago about when do you know when it`s is time to sell your site, and I just– I wasn’t burned out, but I felt like I could get there pretty quickly and because I mean when you start blogging and when you start– you have to be willing to put in 12 hours a day unpaid. And honestly I say it`s a great business. It’s a very hard business to start, but it`s great because it doesn’t require any capital upfront. So if you don’t have any money, blogging is good way to start, but you have to have a business plan and everything else. But you have to be willing to do that, and for me I was tired of doing that, I was tired of outing in you know I was tired of every waking moment being about my site.

And so for me I talked to J.D. I felt like I think I need to figure out how to stop this and we had this conversation and then I realized that I didn’t really have to stop, I just needed to replace me. And so I actually picked my writers from my readers. So people that knew me well and knew my voice, and so people that wanted to be a part of the same theme that I had. And so that’s one of the reasons why I think it worked really well, because I didn’t just go, put an ad on the internet and get writers. I actually got writers from my readers, and I think that made a big difference for my site.

Steve: So are they paid or do they kind of write articles so that they can kind of get some exposure to their own sites?

Toni: They are paid.

Steve: Okay they are paid, okay. And how many writers do you have?

Toni: I think we have about 10 now. We used to have 24, but we scaled down at beginning of this year, just because I felt like there is too much content on the internet right now. So I felt like I didn’t want to be part of that anymore, so I thought how much can one person even if I’m a super fan, how much can I read of one site? And I felt we were just churning out a lot of content, and it didn’t feel– it didn’t have the right feel anymore for me. So we cut back at the beginning of the year, so I think we are down to about 10 writers.

Steve: Which is still quite a bit actually in my opinion?

Toni: Yes it is, when you basically go in half I mean it was a big change.

Steve: So you know for my blog at least I used to have two writers and I actually got rid of them because I kind of felt like goggle was kind of rewarding those posts with a lot more engagement and exposure, and so what I found was my guest writers weren’t getting as much social love I guess, and as a result those articles weren’t doing as well so I just got rid of everyone, I just write once a week now. So my question to you is you post still a lot of content on your site, so what kind of your take on just post quantity in general? Do you need to be posting as often as you do, and what advice would you give someone who is blogging today in terms of quantity?

Toni: I think sometimes it depends on the topic, so obviously if you are a deal blogger you have to be putting out a ton of content.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: Like if you are a home décor or DIY blogger, if you are a food blogger, I think if you’re in your space as sort of the business blogging type thing, you can absolutely get away with one post a week. As long as it’s a nice meaty content type post, right. Where there is actionable items because really if you are teaching people how to refurnish a dining room table in a post and you actually expect people to refurnish the dining room table, they are not going to back the next day to then figure out how to install a window, right? They are going to spend three weeks refurnishing the dining room table before they are ready for more of you.

And same thing with like a business site, if you are teaching them how to you know do some– like the email finals I watched your FinCon talk. If you want people to actually implement some of those things that you are telling them, that’s going to take them a while. They are not going to be able to like sit down in their computer and in an hour and half, have everything finished and tomorrow they want their next job. So I think, when you are writing that kind of stuff recipes, I think you can go once or twice in a week and be absolutely fine, and still drive a lot of content based on everything else that is on your site.

Steve: Okay, and so given what you`ve just said then, with your ten writers what are they writing– like how are they split up to write on write on different topics?

Toni: So each writer is assigned in a niche, so I have writers that only write home school for me. So I have a couple– like Coleen my 740 square foot bungalow house lady, she only writes home school topics for me.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: So she writes once a month, one home school article. I have bloggers that only do recipes and so I have a girl right now, I think she is paleo vegan– I don’t know she is something, but writes– it’s very-very popular whatever it is, but she writes one recipe a month, and for me I found that by keeping the writers in these niches, they become very popular. So my recipe writer who does these paleo recipes, every one of her recipes goes viral, I mean it gets pinned 800 times and gets shared 500 times on Facebook because people have become her fan on the site. So I`ve actually noticed the opposite but I think that’s partially because they stay very focused on topic and she only puts out one recipe a month for me.

Steve: And does she have her own blog as well?

Toni: She does.

Steve: She does, okay. And is she allowed to link back to her blog from your blog?

Toni: Yes.

Steve: Okay.

Toni: With limits.

Steve: With limits.

Toni: Yeah.

Steve: Okay, now that you have kind of freed up your time since you are not running your blog full time anymore, what do you spend your time– what are you working on these days? Do you get to read at all, do you read business books and that sort of thing, what do you do for fun?

Toni: I don’t have any fun.

Steve: Besides going to conferences and just hanging out.

Toni: I buy and sell houses for fun in my free time– no I actually I`m a big remodeler. I do love to destroy houses and build them back up, so that is kind of what I do for fun and then I actually for the past two and a half years I’ve worked for a company called savings.com. And at first I worked with them really closely on their grocery initiative. They did a big grocery– they developed a grocery app and…

Steve: Great name by the way. That app has an awesome name.

Toni: So can I say it?

Steve: Yeah go ahead.

Toni: Favado, I know I can’t say anything else about that. So I helped him with that and then last year I was asked to help them develop like an influencing marketing network. So for the past year I’ve worked pretty exclusively running their sponsored campaign program, which for me I love because that means that I– that’s really been my bread and butter as a blogger. I love working with brands and it’s been really fun to work on the opposite side, and actually we do everything from doing the creative elements to the campaigns to creating the marketing and creative ideas from graphics to twitter parties and everything else, to then you know actually executing the campaign through the blogger networks, which is you know I`m going to have to brag just a little tiny bit, but you know we started from nothing and we`ve got 700 bloggers in our network. I think we`ve done 38 campaigns so far in nine months, so it’s you know it’s definitely growing, but it`s been really fun to me.

And someone asked the other day why would you want to work for a company when you’ve been an entrepreneur your whole career, and I said honestly one of the coolest things about working on this is that I get to use other people’s money to execute my ideas. So for me it`s been really fun because I don’t– it doesn’t feel like work because it`s something I`ve doing for years and I love it, and so to be able to build something from the ground up is pretty fun.

Steve: So you are just a consultant, you are not an employee there.

Toni: I`m just a consultant yep.

Steve: That’s great, do ever take your own blog and you know use your money to buy sponsor campaign for happy house wife or…

Toni: I have not, but I have thought about it, I actually have thought about it. No and I actually don’t participate in their sponsored campaign just because it will be a little bit of a conflict of interest. But yeah that’s what I’ve worked on for the past couple of years and that’s been– to me that has been something fun and different, and I’ve never worked in a corporate setting all those all those are just startups really, but it`s been a fun learning experience. For me I feel like I’ve learned a lot about business in the process which to me has been an asset for my own site and just making decisions for my own site as well.

Steve: Cool and then I also wanted you to mention what Digital CoLab is all about. Unfortunately I was not able to make it this past year, but what it that conference all about that you run.

Toni: So this is a conference that we run for people who work in the digital space. So obviously geared towards people who have websites or blogs, but we’ve worked with people who have online stores, people who just you know have a brick and mortar store and they want to figure out how to work online and increase their social presence. So basically we talk about everything from social strategies, Pinterest, to contract negotiation, to you know taxes and accounting to time management. So basically we try to cover a lot of the things that I think as entrepreneurs we all struggle with.

So I think taxes is always one that people have questions about, because you never know what you have to claim, what’s okay, who is this person going to be an employer or contractor, how does that work? You know things like that to you know Chris Tucker was at our event and he gave some great talks just on like time management and you know sort of blending the business family life, and how to make that work and how do you keep your– how do you prevent your business from taking over your life and finding that like great spot where you can be very successful, but also still have a life outside of your job, which I think is something entrepreneurs really struggle with and you know you it`s really– it`s sad you see marriages fall apart over this and all sorts of things, and families disintegrate and that’s not I think anybody’s goal when they start out.

But you just become consumed with your business, and so it think it`s important to talk about and it`s cool to get in a space with a bunch of people that are kind of doing the same thing even though we are all talking about different stuff. Because we all face a lot of the same challenges everyday as far as our business goes, and someone who is probably in a corporate setting doesn’t really understand exactly what we are doing. So it`s kind of a neat thing to just get it together and you know talk about AV testing you know, things like that.

Steve: You know if people want to find out more about this conference and kind of get in touch with you, where can they find more information?

Toni: So they can go to digitalcolab.com, and you can contact us through the site. We haven’t figured out exactly what we are doing next year. This year we had a pretty small event, it was 100 people and we loved the smallness of it, we felt like it allowed for a lot of like one on one sessions and very like eight on one type small group settings which we feel like in this business is the most effective.

You know those key notes are great for like encouraging you and getting you all exited, but at the end of the day it`s when you can sit down with two or three people and learn. Have your computer there and like open the computer and set it up right then and there you know, get out your Goggle analytics and set up your tracking and do all those things that most people aren’t going to take the time to do after they live an event. So we`ll do something next year, but we don’t know the scale of it, it`s probably going to be small like this year where people can get a lot of that one on one time and actually we don’t want people to go home with a long list, we want them to actually get it done at the event.

Steve: Cool, that’s pretty awesome. I tend to like smaller events as well yeah in my opinion. But hey Toni thanks a lot for coming on the show. I want to be respectful of your time and we’ve already been talking for 50 minutes. So thanks a lot for coming on the show, and it was really great meeting you on the conference.

Toni: Yeah, thanks for coming up to me.

Steve: Thanks for not shooing me away. All right, take care Toni.

Toni: Thank you.

Steve: Hope you enjoyed that episode, so here is my take away. The next time I feel like I have no time to do anything, the next time I feel like my kids are uncontrollable, the next time I feel like my life is just too hectic, I`m going to think about Toni because the fact that she is able to home school seven kids while running a six figure business, a conference and a consulting gig on the side is just ridiculously amazing. And after listening to this episode you have no more excuses ever. I don’t want to hear any more excuses coming out of anyone’s mouth.

For more information about this episode go to my wife quit her job.com/episode38, and once again I just want to thank 99designs for sponsoring this episode. I know a lot of you listening are waiting on the sidelines and trying to get the courage to start your own online business. I also know a lot of you out there run your own businesses already and know you website design could be better.

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And finally if you enjoyed listening to this episode please got to iTunes and leave me a review. When you write me a review it not only makes me feel proud, but it helps keep this podcast up in the ranks so other people can use this info, find the show more easily and get awesome business advice. It’s also the best way to support the show and please tell your friends because the greatest complement that you can give me is to provide a referral to someone else either in person or to share it on the web. And as an added incentive, I`m also giving away free business consults to one lucky winner every single month. For more information about the contest go to mywifequitherjob.com/contest. And if you are interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information and thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to the my wife quit her job podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

For more information go to www.mywifequitherjob.com/contest and if you are interested in starting your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100K in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information. Now onto the show.

Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suites your lifestyle so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have a good friend of mine on the show Bob Lotich. Now if you don’t know who Bob is, he blogs at ChristianPf.com, which is a very popular personal finance blog tagging towards Christians. And Bob probably doesn’t know about this, but one of the posts he wrote about making money blogging from like three or four years ago was actually one of the inspirations for me monetizing my blog in the first place. Anyways Bob’s site is really quite remarkable; he’s got a really large email list at over 50K. He’s gotten around 22 million visitors total since 2007 you know, and quite honestly his blog gets way more traffic than mine, and he’s also written several books, he offers free courses that helps others become financially secure. So without further ado welcome to the shoe Bob, how are you today man?

Bob: I’m doing great and I’m really excited to hear what you just said about reading that article, so that’s really exciting.

Steve: You know I actually went to look to look for it last night and I couldn’t find. It was just this monster post on how you made money online with AdSence a long time ago. I don’t know if you remember which one I’m talking about?

Bob: yeah, I mean I haven’t written much about blogging on the site, so I know exactly which one you’re talking about. Yeah, it’s ChristianPf4/blogging.

Steve: Okay, I’m going to find it. Okay, yeah because I know you’ve kind of organized your materials in lots of different categories for ease of finding but for some reason I couldn’t find that post last night.

Bob: Sorry.

Steve: Anyways, okay yeah seems like you know a lot of successful personal finance bloggers I know kind of started out heavily in debt before getting themselves together. Did you kind of come from a wealthy background or did you have financial hardships in the beginning prior to starting this online business of yours, and how did you kind of come up with the idea for starting ChristianPf in the first place?

Bob: All right, let’s tackle those one by one. So, first of no, not at all wealthy, had a lot of debt myself, and I found myself in a situation where I was like 20 years old, 20, 21, somewhere there, and I had moved out of town. I moved down to Florida just kind of just I don’t know– go hang out, do whatever and I ended up spending all my money wrecking up, basically maxed out my single credit card and I always laugh about how I was naive enough to think that I could only have one credit card.

So, that was my saving grace that I really believed I could only have one credit card. So I ended up max up my credit card. It just kind of brought me to this point where I realized I got to make a change, and so for me that was kind of the impetus behind the whole thing. And from that point I just started you know reading other personal finance blogs, reading magazines, reading books, everything I got my hands on just trying to figure out how to improve my own finances and my own financial life.

And so that was kind of my phase that I was going through and that kind of led into ultimately starting ChristianPf, because I was learning about all this, then I was also finding out all these things in the Bible said about money which I thought was fascinating that this old book had some relevant and timely information. And so then I just kind of combined the two into a ChristianPf where we just kind of focused on money management, but kind of geared and focused towards Christians, you know looking at some of the Biblical aspects of things and things like that.

Steve: So was your motivation for starting ChristianPf to make money in the beginning or was it to compile information, was it more for yourself?

Bob: You know I forget a little bit, it’s like I knew I remember I had read ProBlogger, Darren Rowse’s site and I knew that there were a couple of people out in the world who were making a full time living. I knew there were a few more who were making some money, so it was kind of in the back of my brain, but at the same time I knew it was a little bit long shot. But for me mostly I was just so fueled by this topic, and I was just excited about it and so I just saw it as an outlet, as a way to just kind of communicate with others and you know when they say that the best way to learn is by teaching, and so just by me talking about it and kind of writing about a lot of the things I was going through, it helped make it more sound in my own life. So, I think that was the main motivation, I think there was a little bit of man if I can make a few hundred dollars a month from this, it would be awesome, but that’s pretty much where I was.

Steve: So were you working full time when you started ChristianPf?

Bob: Yeah, I was working at– I worked in the banking industry for a while then I switched over to a brokerage firm and did that for I guess about five years I was there.

Steve: Okay, so you started it while you were working and then you eventually quit I would imagine?

Bob: Yeah, well I got laid off. So you know I had a plan, you know once the blog was up for a while, I had this kind of longer term goal. It’s like all right I want to be able to get this thing up to my– to surpass the income I’m making from my day job and I saw this is like probably three year goal, and I got laid off about a year into that phase.

Steve: Okay.

Bob: So anyway, so my wife and I talked about it, we prayed about it, we looked at our bank account, we looked how much money we had saved up, we looked at the severance package I was going to get and anyway I just– I went with it. I didn’t get a job after I get laid off and I focused full time on ChristianPf, and within about nine months, we were able to get it up to the point where it surpassed a day job.

Steve: Wow, that’s awesome. Okay so– but it was already making money before you got laid off kind of right?

Bob: Yeah, I was making a little bit but definitely not enough to pay the mortgage or anything, so it was no catch.

Steve: Okay, we will have to definitely talk about that growth. So, before we get into that you know how does ChristianPf make its money primarily?

Bob: We have about three main revenue streams, so AdSence being the cost per click is a big portion still, it’s always been a big percentage for us. And then we also run another CPM network and so we’ve been on ads and things like that generate some income. And we increasingly been doing more with affiliate marketing and finding great products that we like and talking about them on the side, so that’s become another big stream as well. And the books are increasingly as I write more and more becoming a bigger portion of the income as well.

Steve: Okay and so you mentioned– actually which affiliate networks for the banners do you actually use, just curious?

Bob: Well I don’t– just to be clear I don’t use, I generally don’t use any affiliate banners but my further CPM networks. The CPM network I’m working with right now is my bank tracker, but affiliate networks has a ton of them I mean CJ and Linkshare and I don’t know [Inaudible] [00:08:28] I guess there are a million of them that I use.

Steve: Okay, and so you mentioned that you grew your site to full time income essentially in nine months. So, this is back when your site was much younger. So how did you actually gain traffic to your site early on, basically when you weren’t getting that much traffic?

Bob: Yeah, for me a lot of it was guest posting. I mean so much and this is what I’m always recommending in a blogger’s, you know and [Inaudible] [00:08:53] came out a few months ago and said something about guest posting, it’s dead, it’s– you know and his point was, it’s become a spammy tactic and that’s absolutely true. I get emails every single day from all kinds of spammy companies wanting to guest post on my site and I turn them down.

But legitimate good guest post, which Mattes [phonetic] specifically says are fine really I think is a great way still to build an audience and build blogs and that was a really big part of my growing my traffic. And so I found any site I could write on. Some of them were blogs, some of them were article sites, I mean any place I could write and get an article in front of some eye balls, that’s what I was doing and that really helped– that really made a big difference in getting a lot of traffic, in helping grow my audience.

Steve: Okay, so you primarily attribute to guest posting and then of course the quality of the content. I still remember that blogging article, it was probably like 3000 words or something I remember but it was very well written.

Bob: 8000.

Steve: Was it 8000, shows how long it’s been since I’ve seen it but yeah that was one monster article that actually inspired me. So, in general for the guest posts have you been just making friends in the finance blogging industry in order to get those opportunities, or how have you actually gotten those guest post opportunities?

Bob: Yeah, that’s another thing that back then you know we’re talking 2008 there, it’s five six years ago. It was a lot easier you could pretty much email anybody and say ‘hey I’ll write you a good article’ and they be ‘all right, okay I’ll put it up.’ And now because it has become more spammy and so many people– so many companies trying to do it, it does really help to have a connection and to know the person who you are emailing. So anyway so yeah I mean I do think that’s a rule they help and now that’s pretty much all I do. It’s like if I send a premium article to a random blogger who I don’t know, they rarely get accepted, and so the best way to fix that is just to connect with that other blogger and get to know them and offer something and give something upfront. Be of benefit first and it just seems like things work a little bit better that way.

Steve: Yeah so just as an aside for the listener’s, Bob and I actually have gone back quite a ways in terms of just blogging, but we recently met in person the last couple of years at the financial blogging conference. And incidentally that is how Bob and I kind of got in touch with this podcast interview. He has a new book coming out, he just kind of reached out and of course since I’d met him a couple of times in the past, by all means I wanted to interview him and have him on the show, so just as an aside.

So you know Bob, hey you had a bunch of books that you’ve written, I’ve actually looked at your Amazon account and you’ve been quite prolific. And you’ve also created a bunch of these free courses for people in dead end– you write a lot of posts for the blog. What is kind of the master plan, I know that’s kind of a vague question here but I know you know there been a whole lot of people– blogging has become really popular and there’s more and more people entering the blogging space, making it kind of more and more saturated as time goes on. So are you still focusing all your energies on the blog or you are kind of branching out more to these posts, free courses, are you thinking about starting a podcast, you know what’s the long term strategy for ChristianPf as a business?

Bob: You know essentially what we’re trying to do is– I guess where my goal has been how to transition is I just want to help the readers in whatever I can do to help them reach their goals. And it took me a long time to realize that the blog by itself was not helping a lot of them reach their goals, and once I realized that, that’s when I started creating these courses and so we have like you mentioned a couple of free email courses that people would sign up for, and then it takes them through a series of articles, and it’s– they are just articles that were from the site but they are packaged together in a way that it seems to offer a lot more benefit than when they are just kind of randomly coming at you in the newsletter or you know via the blog every other day.

So that’s kind of the reason that we’ve shifted in what we are trying to do, I mean it’s the same with the books. So as far as the big master plan, I’m just going to keep doing whatever I can do to help the audience in whatever that’d going to help people learn best. You mentioned podcasts, it’s funny I started a podcast like five years ago and we did– I don’t know five or six episodes or something and we haven’t done anything with it since and now I see you and a whole bunch of other guys really getting into the podcast thing, so it’s kind of my wheel spinning away but anyway, kind of tent hitch. But yeah, as a far as the big master plan it’s just focused on the audience and whatever we can do to help them in whatever that’s going to be.

Steve: Okay, did you have a paid course or were these all just kind of free courses?

Bob: These are all free courses right now and part of how we off set the work and time invested in the whole thing is throughout the courses, there are different affiliate products that are mentioned and so they generate some revenue, and that just helps offset some of the costs of doing it.

Steve: Okay, so in terms of how ChristianPf actually makes money, which strategy is actually been the most effective. So we’ve talked about cost per click, we’ve talked about CPM banners and we’ve talked about kind of affiliate offers and selling eBooks. So, which one has worked out the best for you and which one is most lucrative?

Bob: I mean it’s kind of a dynamic thing you know it does shift year to year depending on what’s going on with Google and other things in the industry and things like that. But I mean we’ve always been heavily– our revenue is always been heavily weighted in Google AdSence, so that’s always been a really big portion of our income. Now, that said, I’ve always been fighting and working to diversify that as much as possible and minimize that.

Historically I’ve just had way too much dependence on Google. In general I’m really excited about Google because I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing, I would never have been able to do this if it weren’t for Google but still I want to diversify as much possible. So AdSence has always been a big, big chunk. Affiliate revenue has gradually increased over the last few years and so now at this point, the affiliate revenue is probably 50%, AdSence is may be 25% both since somewhere in the [Inaudible] [00:15:38].

Steve: And where do the books kind of fit into this revenue model?

Bob: I don’t know, we’re there probably 5-10% somewhere in there right now.

Steve: Okay, so this is– to the books is that something that you’re trying to grow in the future, or you’re trying to focus more on affiliate revenue?

Bob: It’s both, I mean I’m not trying to just completely focus on one or the other, I mean the blog’s going to continue with I think 2000 articles on the site now, and we’re trying to make the most out of the articles that we already have there, but we’re going to continue to publish and create helpful stuff. The books– I actually enjoy the process of creating the books and writing and publishing the books and it’s like I said, it’s just another way to get a lot of information out. There a lot of people who won’t read a blog but who will read a book and who want to be able to carry it with them or and so we need to serve those readers. And so honestly– and so the revenue, I mean we have been making a little bit from the books, but even if we weren’t I would still probably be doing it just because it helps the readers so much.

Steve: Okay and you find that you are able to drive some of the people who are reading your books back to your blog?

Bob: That’s a tricky thing to measure; I wish I had a better way of tracking that. I’m experimenting with some stuff, one of my– actually my last book I just launched last week we’re– I put a– I basically created a new URL that I’m going to be sending people from, so pretty much the only way people are going to be able to find that URL is via the book, so it’s going to give me a good idea of how much traffic we are generating from it.

Steve: Okay.

Bob: But that’s kind of my first attempt at trying to track this, so.

Steve: Okay, and so we’ve been talking a lot about traffic and I know you know Google is kind of been in a flax for the last two or three years I would say, and you’ve kind of mentioned that first a vacation, and at least with my blog I find that the majority of people clicking on AdSence ads are coming from search, so how have you kind of diversified your traffic sources?

Bob: Well for me it’s been a big– I just didn’t care about social media traffic at for really the whole time. I mean I was doing so well with Google and I was getting me so much traffic from them that I just didn’t pay attention to social media, and in about a year and a half ago or something, Google began to pull back a bit as far the traffic we were getting from them and it just kind of forced me to go out and figure out how to start getting some social media traffic. And anyway so we have been focusing a lot of energy in the last I don’t know nine months or so on Facebook and maybe the last three months or so on Pinterest and that yielded pretty good results so far.

Steve: Okay so yeah let’s talk about Facebook, I know you’ve had a lot of success in growing your fan base tremendously. So you know any tips on how to build up your Facebook fan base, and how did you manage to grow it so quickly? So I think you have like almost 40k funs at this point?

Bob: Yeah, October of last year, October of 2013, we had about 13,000 Facebook fans and that took us about five years to get those 13,000 fans and which I was like fired, I was happy to have 13,000 Facebook fans but I knew we could do better, I knew we could grow it, I knew there were other people out there who wanted to be fans and so we did put all our energy into it. And so one of the things– the big kind of revolutionary thing that I think made the most difference for us was we stopped only posting our articles. So for the longest time that’s all we did, was we just whatever article went up that day we would post it on Facebook and be done.

And you know I sat and thought about it and I was like this is just kind of selfish, it’s like all I’m doing is telling people here is what I just did, here’s what we just did, go look at it and I’m not giving this audience what they want. And we came to discover that our audience was interested in a lot of different things, and so e began sharing quotes– encouraging quotes and we’d share Bible verses that are specific to finances or whatever. We would ask engaging questions and try to get them there, we would share funny videos or whatever it was, and so some of the stuff was you know wildly off topic, but it was still stuff the people really enjoyed.

And so if the audience enjoyed it, even if it’s off topic, why not share with them. And that has made a really, really big difference for us. So we made that shift and began probably maybe one out of every seven, eight posts was about one of our articles and everything else was just stuff for the readers, just stuff for them to enjoy and that really helped us grow pretty quick.

Steve: Okay, so I would imagine though that you know this involves posting more frequently, so how do you kind of manage your time with respect to managing your different social media outlets like Facebook?

Bob: Buffer, buffer is all awesome, I absolutely love it.

Steve: So how many posts would you say that you buffer up, do you like buffer up a month’s worth, a week’s worth, a day’s worth, how do you kind of handle your social media?

Bob: It is always at least a week you know when I’m doing really well and have a big chunk of time to devote to it, and my wife helps me with this as well. She’s pretty heavily involved in our Facebook page and a Pinterest app. When I get a big chance, we’ll get out two or three weeks out ahead, but we’re always at least a week out.

Steve: So how do you decide what you are going to post there, so if you are not posting your own articles the majority of the time, what sort of topics do you focus on?

Bob: well, we just started experimenting, because I didn’t know it was going to work. I didn’t know if quote was going to do well, I didn’t know if something funny was going to do well, I didn’t know if a video would do well or you know what. So we just started trying different stuff and you know the Facebook kind of analytics is pretty good, you can see what’s working and you can see how many times it’s shared and liked and whatever else.
And so we just tried a bunch of stuff and just kind of evaluated that, and then started focusing more on the things that were working. And so for us it was a lot of quotes, it was a lot of Bible verses and you know funny stuff, and figuring all that out it takes a good amount of time and we had some mistakes and we had some things that were just complete flops that we thought were going to be success. But you just do it, do it and do and hone it and hone it and you get better and better at it.

Steve: Okay, so one thing also I was going to ask you, was in regards to Facebook when you are posting your posts, do you actually post from your old library or do you just post your new posts, how do you kind of work your own stuff in there?

Bob: Yeah, that’s a really good point. We do both actually because so much of our content is ever green, you know an article that was posted three years ago that’s just as relevant now, it’s like it’s a great opportunity to share something like that on Facebook. So, what we did is a lot of those posts don’t have good graphics, so we kind of recreated a new graphic for it just to make sure– did a look over to make sure it’s okay, it’s updated enough. You know we would post some of those older articles on Facebook as well as the newest stuff, and that really, really helped because a lot of those older articles that were really popular and really good, the Facebook audience may never them, so they should be shared. And a lot of those were some of our best traffic generators from Facebook.

Steve: Okay, and do you find that you are doing the same thing with twitter as well because it’s kind of a similar medium?

Bob: It is, twitter I– my kind of approach with this and a lot of aspects in my business is I try to find out one or two things that are working and focus all my energy on that. I mean twitter I focus no energy on.

Steve: Okay.

Bob: It’s on of the things that we– I don’t know we’ve seven or 8000 followers and we just get like next to no traffic from it and probably because I’ve never used it well and I never spend enough time to figure out how to do it well. I’m not very engaged, I’m not very active on it and the audience obviously knows that. So, we have a twitter account and so people who do follow us and want to see our latest article that’s for those in, that’s it.

Steve: Okay, so you don’t do the same thing, as you do with Facebook where you are constantly posting older twits and post older stuff and that sort of thing?

Bob: well, we are in a little bit and the only reason that we are is because of buffer and all I have to do is press an extra button and it goes to twitter as well. So we are doing some of that but the energy behind in creating and engage twitter audience is never been present.

Steve: Okay before we kind of got started with this interview, you also mentioned Pinterest, so how have you actually leveraged Pinterest for personal finance because traditionally we use it a lot for our online store because our products are just naturally suited to it you know but I wouldn’t necessarily think of personal finance being related to Pinterest if you understand what I’m asking.

Bob: No absolutely and it’s funny I mean I’ve had a ton of people tell me ‘oh you shouldn’t waste your time on Pinterest, you’re never going to get any traffic from them. It is when the girls just want to see clothes and cookies and whatever else’, and while there is some truth to that, there is a ton of– it’s just– I just had the stat the other day. The number of pins– the total number of pins that had been pinned on Pinterest I think has doubled like in the last six months, like something just astronomical like that where it’s exploding you know. It’s still on its exponential curve where it’s growing so fast and we have enough– I mean there’re definitely some articles that will never the light of day I mean wherever.

Some of the benefits have a self directed allay or something, it’s like I don’t ever expect to gain any pins on that, but there are enough articles that I think we can make work that clearly some people are pinning and we’re just trying to leverage those as best as we can. And so I know we’re not a fashion company or we’re not a food blogger or anything like that, so we probably won’t be able to get the amount of traffic that they get. But like we’ve talked about I’m just trying to diversify those traffic streams as best possible, and I want to milk it for all we can get out of it.

Steve: So, just curious which one of your finance posts have done the best on Pinterest?

Bob: Well, the interesting thing about Pinterest is when you get pinned by somebody who has a huge, huge following then it’ll get pinned by a whole bunch of other people, so it goes in its kind of viral waves, and so ironically– I mean it may be it isn’t that ironic I don’t know, anyway the best article that we’ve had so far with the most pins is an article about how to pay up your mortgage early you know which that makes a little bit of sense to me, I could see some people being interested in that, but what shocked me was that the graphic was just terrible.

I mean just terrible chissy stack photo and in tiny you know it’s like 100 pixels by 100 pixels or something, and that’s what somebody pinned and then hundreds of other people pinned it and so ultimately it’s led to I want to say it’s like well into the five figures of pins and– so anyway it’s sent us a lot of traffic. So that one has done the best, there’s another one about– that we wrote about some legit work from home jobs– it’s done pretty well. Any kind of idea Y thing like I mean that works pretty well as well.

Steve: So did you do anything to get these pins or were they just kind of random?

Bob: Well, what I’ve learned about Pinterest is there is a random aspect of it but what you and I and any other blogger or really anybody with a website can do to help facilitate it, is to create an engaging graphic for anything that we want to get pinned. And I’ve noticed that the more I’ve done that, I’ve gone back to a lot of older articles and just created better graphics for them, I’ve layered to text on them just so they– others stand alone kind of almost like a business card for that post, and in taking that approach and getting a lot more of– a lot better graphics for these posts, it just sets them up to succeed.

And so a lot of Pinterest users really only want to pin good looking stuff because it’ kind of– for them it’s almost like an accessory you know just like wearing a nice pair of jeans, it’s I want my boards to look nice, and I want there to be good looking pins on there. So, anything you do to help them really, really works and so– anyway that’s made a big difference for us. Now that said, as soon as you do that, that doesn’t mean anything is going to change because you still those people to come to your post to pin it, in which that aspect of it I mean seems a little bit random to me unless you yourself have a pretty big following that you can send stuff out, and anyway I don’t know. I’m not going to talk forever on this but…

Steve: yeah, yeah do you have a big following is basically what I was getting and how important was that in developing your Pinterest traffic?

Bob: well we don’t and that’s what’s really interesting to me, like we have 2500 fans on Pinterst right now, but our traffic– our traffic has gone up at least four times from Pinterest just over the last two months, and the main thing we did was just create better graphics for all these already popular articles. So, it didn’t come from us growing our Pinterest audience which really surprised me and we’re trying to that as well, but really even if you don’t have a Pinterest page for your blog or your website, even if you just create better graphics, you are going to get more Pinterest traffic.

Steve: Okay, you know one thing I actually forgot to ask you about Facebook was kind of how you’re leveraging that traffic for your blog as well. You mentioned that the majority of posts aren’t going to your blog, so what is your master plan with your Facebook account?

Bob: Well, that’s something– so my first goal was to grow the audience and then– and as I was growing it you know I was seeing a little bit of traffic increase but nothing that was making me excited, and then probably within the last month or two, I’ve been experimenting some more and we’ve really, really upped our traffic and interestingly and this works out really well, the same type of thing works really well. Just really good graphic and so we’ve been publishing our posts and using some kind of captivating graphics or something like that, and it’s really helped a lot.

And we’re you know not to get too technical but basically when we were posting the creating the post on Facebook to link back to our article, we post it as an image, and then we include the link in there, and then maybe I’ll say one line about it you know and or something like that. But the important thing that I’m seeing is that we’re posting the graphic as an image instead of as a post. So, by contrast if you just dump any URL on the Facebook you know what you’re writing about, what you’re talking about right now, it creates its own thing and it’s smaller and it doesn’t seem to get nearly as much engagement for us.

Steve: So, let’s get technical for a little bit because I’m actually curious about this. So I’ve seen different strategies, so some people post the graphic and then the link and the description. Some people post just the graphic and then they put the link in the comments because I think Facebook kind of downgrades any sort of post with a link in it. What have you found?

Bob: I honestly haven’t heard that, so what we’ve always done is the passing you mentioned where we post the graphic and then the link is in the description, but I’m definitely going to try that out yeah because I haven’t heard that and that would be awesome if that just come through.

Steve: I was just curious if you had tried some of those things because yeah I have noticed that my Facebook fan page– they basically downgraded the amount of reach that a post gets, at least for mine, I don’t know if you’ve experienced the same thing.

Bob: Oh yeah absolutely.

Steve: Okay and so has that kind of diminished your efforts at all on Facebook like I know when I saw that happening I was like okay why am I focusing my efforts on Facebook if it’s not returning.

Bob: Yeah, well it’s funny because for us right as we were going up Facebook was pulling down the reach, so they just like kind of crossed to where I didn’t see big drop, so I think it was like in December they made a big change and our Facebook– our fan base was growing a bit at that point and we were getting more traffic from it, so I didn’t see much change throughout the whole thing, but I guess had they not changed I would have– we would be getting a lot more traffic.

Steve: yeah, so let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about your latest creation Pro-Blogging secrets, so great book by the way. I just bought it and I left a review for you.

Bob: Thank you.

Steve: My main question regarding just blogging and I’m sure a lot of the listeners want to know this. It seems like the blogger sphere is kind of getting really saturated these days, do you– and we kind of touched upon this earlier in the interview, but do you think blogging alone is enough and kind of if you were to start your blog brand new today, what would you have to do to get it to the same point as where ChristianPf is now?

Bob: Okay first question, it is getting saturated I mean there are– I just read a stat the other day there are over 60 million WordPress blogs out there, and that’s just WordPress, I mean WordPress is the biggest I already slipped it. Yeah there is a lot of blogs, but I really don’t– I don’t see it as a zero some thing you know I don’t see it as a pie and we each have our own slice of the pie, it’s just kind of like– to me it’s like if you are sitting in a room, we’re not going to run out of oxygen, you know what I mean?

Steve: Yeah.

Bob: And I kind of feel that way about blogging, I think there’s plenty of room still for all of us. I think the most important thing is for people to find you know and here’s all time but find your own unique thing, your thing that sets you apart, your thing that you’re really good at, the thing you’re excited about, the thing you’re passionate about, and when your competitive advantage in all that. I mean what do you know that most people don’t know, and what kind of insight can you share about this that most people can’t.

I’m sure there will be some other people who can, but that’s okay but you know it’s okay to be similar to a few but you don’t want to be similar to 10,000, and that’s where I think some bloggers get themselves in trouble in when they are really just kind of adding to the noise when they are basically just doing exactly the same thing as 10,000 other blogs. So you got to find some way to set yourself apart and be able to be different.

Steve: You know we touched upon some of the different mediums as well. Do you think that blogging by itself is kind of enough if you have a unique voice and that sort of thing or do you feel like today since there are so many blogs like even if you pick anything, you probably will find you know hundreds of blogs in that same niche, and often times even if your content is really awesome it’s– you still have to get it out there. So what are some of the strategies early on if you’re just starting today, what would you focus on?

Bob: Wait, okay you asked me another question before that?

Steve: I’m just bombarding you with questions, I apologize. These are just all stream of consciousness by the way, I don’t have any of these written down so let’s actually go with that because what I’m trying to get at is if you’re going to start today how would you actually get the word out about your– let’s say your content is really awesome and that’s a given, how do you get it out there?

Bob: You know for me, okay so here– I’m just excited about the things that are working for me right now. So anyway Pinterest I’m absolutely thrilled about because we just watch our traffic month over month increase pretty dramatically by using really good images. Now obviously we have a platform that we’re jumping off of so it’s making it a lot easier to kind of get the momentum going. But if I were starting over again today I would start a blog, I would get five– probably five really good articles specific to my niche really, really helpful stuff.

And I would go out and try to connect with other people on the niche, other people in maybe somewhat related niches and find places where I can guest post, and just find any place I can go right and get a link back to the site and not even necessarily for SEO purposes, but to get that traffic like that’s what I think I would do right now if I was starting over. Beyond that I would– something else to say because I say this all the time because I– if there is anything I regret, it’s that I didn’t start building email lists at the beginning.

Steve: Okay, sure.

Bob: It took me years to get serious about building an email list and so anyway that’s the other thing I would start doing. Every single person who comes to my site, I want them to at least think about joining my email newsletter. I don’t want them to leave my site not knowing it was an option. So anyway those two things I would spend a lot of energy on and you know to be honest it’s– most blogs it’s a slow build, it’s the overnight successes I mean are just pretty stinking rare and if you’re getting into this you can’t count on that, you got assume it’s just going to be a long slow thing and be excited about having you know a hundred visits to your blog the first month. Then if you get 150 the next month, great we have some progress you know and just use that progress as momentum to keep you going, and as long as it’s going up month over month you’re doing great.

Steve: Okay and you know one thing I actually forgot to ask you about is you mentioned email marketing. How do you actually run your email list? Do you have a bunch of auto responder sequences, do you blast out every article to your audience, how do you kind of run it?

Bob: We have few different things going on, so we have a daily newsletter which is the biggest portion of our list total and then we have a weekly newsletter. The weekly one sends out once a week, then the daily one sends out every time we post. Beyond that we have the people– once people sign up for the courses they are automatically part of our weekly list, so they will get an article from us every week, and so just depends. So basically the people you’ve signed up for daily will get whatever we post sent out to them, the people who sign up for weekly will get that as far as all the email courses– those are all set up on overall responders, so it’s very automated and pretty simple ones that their niche or work is done setting it up.

Steve: Okay and in terms of the weekly guides, are all those on the auto responder or do you just kind of– how do you pick one article that goes out for the week as opposed to your daily guides?

Bob: Well, this is essentially in auto responder. It’s an all assessed driven thing, so it just sends whatever like a summary email with the three articles or four articles that were posted that week with a summary of each one of them.

Steve: Okay and then the daily one is just is each individual article in its entirety or?

Bob: Well it used to be and I’ve since changed, I mean created teasers out of them, so we send a graphic and then little teaser linking to the article itself. I used to have a whole article in there and I decided I’m going to try this and see what happens if I just put a teaser in. And we did that and instantly we are getting thousands more visits every time we sent out something out and I’m like why did I not do it sooner. And I was waiting for the response; I want to see if anybody was upset, I didn’t get a single email from anyone complaining about it so.

Steve: Okay and you know at least for me I find that whenever I said out a blast I tend to sometimes shed subscribers right and so for the daily guides I was just curious what your unsubscribe rate is versus the weekly guides.

Bob: I don’t know like the overall unsubscribe for it I mean all I know is that we were gaining more everyday than we were losing, so that’s all I’m excited about. I mean it’s considerably more, we are gaining a lot more. I want to say on the daily one, we probably lose around two, three, four, something like that each time we send out one and each day I think we’re picking up about 30 for that list so.

Steve: Okay cool and then so whenever you have like a book launch or what not you kind of just blast it out and let everyone know you have another Amazon book out right?

Bob: Yeah, yeah.

Steve: Okay, cool well Bob so we’ve been talking for like around 40 minutes and I don’t want to take up too much of your time plus I have to get to work. But you know if– so let’s talk about your book and if you can provide email address or twitter account where people can reach you if they want to ask you questions, that’d be great.

Bob: Sure email address is bob@christianpf.com and the book you mentioned is ‘Pro-Blogging secrets’ that’s what it’s called. I just launched it about a week or two ago. Essentially it was a follow up just quick story, the article you read that I told you was a ChristianPf4/blogging that bigger that big article, the 8000 word article I got started on a whole book thing because I decide I’m going to turn this into a kindle book just to give another way for people to download it and– in any way I thought I could just list it on Amazon for free and it turned out Amazon said no you have to charge 99 cents bla bla bla.

So anyway so I headed up there and I still even at 99 cents they had to turn down people downloading it. So anyway so this book now is a follow up to that and so I go into a lot more kind of specific techniques and things that I’ve used over the years to grow our audience and to increase earnings, and I get really, really specific lots of how to step by step things. Really a lot of this stuff is just the secret source I feel like I’ve learned and just kind of want to share with people so.

Steve: Yeah just for the listeners we’ve only scratched the surface regarding what’s inside this book so I highly recommend that you guys all go and pick it up. So hey Bob thanks a lot for your time.

Bob: It was my pleasure

Steve: It’s a pleasure talking to you, you know normally we only see each other once a year, but Thinkon is coming up so hope to hang out with you there some more yeah. Okay man take care Bob.

Bob: All right, thanks Steve see you.

I’ve known Bob for quite a while now, and I really love his story. Basically he was stuck in a major rut financially, decided to take action and turned his life completely around. Now today his blog gets an insane amount of traffic and his brand new book is very well written and full of useful strategies on how to grow your readership, so I highly recommend that you go check it out in the show notes.

So for more information about this episode go to mywifequiteherjob.com/episode31 and if you enjoyed listening to this episode, please go to iTunes and leave me a review. When you write me a review, it not only make me feel proud but it helps keep this podcast up in the ranks so other people can use this information, find the show very easily, and get awesome business advice from my guests.

It’s also the best way to support the show and please tell your friends because the greatest complement that you can give me is to provide a referral to someone else either in person or to share it on the web. Now as an added incentive I’m also giving away free business consultations to one lucky winner every single month. For more information go to mywifequitherjob.com/contest. And if you are interested in starting your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six day mini-course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information and thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast where we’re giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.

Now before we begin, I just wanted to share a quote from Ken Schneider who was the winner of a free E-commerce consult. Here’s what Ken had to say: It is very apparent to me, that Steve has built a wealth of the E-commerce information in a way of offering ideas and needed insight that are very encouraging. After discussing an array of different ideas and possible options, he was able to provide me with the tools and information that would help me find my own niche online and for Steve’s help and information, I am most grateful. Now, if you would like a free E-commerce consult from myself, enter my free podcast contest, where I’m giving away free one on one business consultations every single month.

For more information about this consult go to www.mywifequiteherjob.com/contest. And if you are interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six-day mini-course where I show you how my wife and I manage to make over 100K in profit in our first year of business; go to www.mywifequiteherjob.com for more information, now onto the show.
Welcome to the, mywifequiteherjob podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suites your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here’s your host, Steve Chou!

Steve: Welcome to the mywifequiteherjob podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have a friend of mine on the show, Viet Do. Now, I met Viet at Fincon and I know, I know I meet a lot of people at Fincon, which is why you should go. Anyways, you know Viet runs Dealzon.com which is a coupon sight for electronics and gadgets. Now, have you ever wondered how sites like TechBargains, FatWallet and other coupon based sites stay in business? Well, Viet does very well with Dealzon and hopefully today we’ll learn exactly how Dealzon works and how it makes its money. So, just a quick note about Viet; he’s probably one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet and his deal sight is a business model that we actually haven’t covered yet in this podcast. So, welcome to the show Viet, really glad to have you.

Viet: Hey Steve, yeah, thanks a lot for having me on the programme. I hope I can shed some light on – for those people that might be interested to the field or the kind of like how coupon sites work and maybe give them some insights on how the industry works.

Steve: Yes, so, give us a brief description of your specific coupon site and exactly which products you focus on, and how you make money online.

Viet: Yea sure! So, Dealzon.com is very much a deal site– a deal aggregate site for gamers and techies, and that’s our focus. We– you won’t find like you know, Wall mart deals in terms of like, you know, groceries and what not or like target deals on any of that kind of stuff here, so you’re not going to find shoes or clothing, that’s very rarely, when I start giving away free shoes then I guess we don’t have a choice, we had to like, let people know about this right? But we mostly focus on technologies and gaming. And we have a very core set of users that pretty much just care about these so, mostly the people that visit our sites are gamers and then –

Steve: Okay –

Viet: They rate our stuff. So, if they are a gamer, they want to buy games and maybe like a computer hardware that relates to the game right, to learn the game faster. So, how DealZon works is pretty simple as any other of those deal sites that you mentioned actually.

Steve: Just pretend that none of the listeners know anything about how anything works.

Viet: Okay.

Steve: So…

Viet: Okay, that might be a good way to go with them. So, I mean, if you come to DealZon, you’ll see a list of the best deals of the day right, and if you’re a gamer, you can see right around on the first page – oh, okay, well, this game is on sale today. So, the front page will basically show you what’s hot for the day. Now, if you want to drill it down a little more, there’ll be different categories and you can go to different categories with the type of products that you’re interested in. So, as mentioned, we’re mostly focused on gaming and technology so gaming and laptops is kind of what we focus on lately.

Steve: Okay and bottom line I when someone clicks on your link and makes a purchase, you get a cut of that transaction.

Viet: Yes.

Steve: Is that correct?

Viet: Exactly.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So this a commission based model, it’s basically lichen – an affiliate lichen, so you know, we use very typical networks such as commission junction, link share and various other networks.

Steve: So, but is that for physical products primarily then?

Viet: it’s half-half actually. So, these days, in terms of gaming – and especially if you’re not into the norm of it and I know that different industries are like this; it’s actually a lot of digital products now, so you know, well, these days when you buy a game, it could just be a CD key of a game key that you receive, and you plug into your like a DRM platform – you know, a digital rights management platform – and you’re going to receive the game that way. And you know, since it’s a digital product, you know, is actually a very little hassle involved for everyone involved, where you pay the money and you get your keys and you get the game and that’s it, and you know, there’s no shipping time or whatever right, so –

Steve: Okay.

Viet: It’s actually a pretty good way to go to– about getting a game these days, and it’s expanding lately, yeah.

Steve: Are the pay outs higher for those type of deals as opposed to the physical products because –

Viet: Yeah, I don’t think so, it’s typically higher. It’s not necessary like 2X or whatever, or like 3X or whatever, just, but by virtue of the merchant not having to store anything beyond like a digital code right, that they can e-mail out right away through the system. They’re just more willing to- there’s just more margin and leeways there, in terms of a commission split.

Steve: So, can you give us an idea of what some of the commissions look like on a physical product verses you know, a code for example?

Viet: Yeah, sure! I’m going to be very general here, in the sense that you know, some of our stuff there’s you know, different rates, so for those that aren’t familiar with affiliate models, what you make them the bulk of your money, is how you negotiate these rates with merchants actually…

Steve: Okay.

Viet: And maybe we’ll talk more about it in a little bit, but– so let’s say for physical stuff, something you can buy at BestLife.com or Walmart.com in chance of the TV or a laptop or computer. The commission rate is actually pretty low; it’s like 1-2% –

Steve: Okay –

Viet: Maybe as high as 3% if you have like the right volume and the right, you know like the right partnership going– deal going on here so, but it’s usually about 2% – I want to say and lower. Surprisingly some other sites like let’s say, a pretty big retailer, Newegg. Newegg is based in California and they mostly sell computer electronics. They can get-they can start as low as 0.5% or 0.25%…

Steve: That is really low!

Viet: That is very low so you’re really not going to make that much money there unless you’re established, you have volume and you’ve been doing well with them for a long time, right-

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So, in that sense there’s a sum bared of entry you know, because once you get in there are-you list this deals great, someone bought like a 100$ thing, but you’re only getting like 0.5% all of that right, that’s like nothing –

Steve: Yeah, that’s like nothing.

Viet: Right, so that’s tough right. Conversely, so physical products want a cheaper set right, usually. For digital products, I want to say you know, maybe anywhere– actually it might be actually 2X now, so think about so 4-5 %, I want to say…

Steve: Okay.

Viet: And then maybe…

Steve: All right.

Viet: Maybe, for some very lucrative, high margin stuff, let’s say there’s something like, like a 100$ special, super limited edition game you know, so the margins might be a little bit higher where they’ll give you some as high as 8%.

Steve: Okay, so the margins aren’t still as high as for something I might push on my say like web services where the pay-out is much higher.

Viet: Right. It very much is a volume game for deals and coupon site, where each have to make it up in terms of volume – you have to make your site, your usability, the information you present as easy as possible to convert these sales you get these commissions.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So –

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So you can’t rely on like two or maybe a 10 or 20 sales per month right, we’re doing around about like thousands of transactions on a monthly basis or even on a daily basis, right, so-

Steve: Okay.

Viet: Yeah.

Steve: So when someone buys something through you, you don’t have to provide any sort of support or anything like that?

Viet: Right. I think that’s the beauty of most affiliate and [Indiscernible] [00:08:36] business, so I mean, obviously we have to give some kind of support if the transactions or the deals we listed fell through in the sense that – oh, we show a coupon like this and it doesn’t work, you know, so we need to tell them– oh, did the coupon expire or is there a new coupon, or is there a different better deal, you know so –

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So there’s some amount of support, but after they buy you know, the products, obviously everything else is on the merchant, right –

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So –

Steve: So, there’s a lot of these tech deal sites out there, how the heck do you differentiate yourself and compete with the rest of them?

Viet: Yeah, I mean that’s a good question, I mean, that’s something we constantly think about on a daily basis too actually [chuckles]. So, I hope to see like some comments where you guys can give us tips to – I’ll be honest – that’s pretty funny that I’m asking that, but [chuckles]. But, how we kind of differentiate ourselves is, what I imagine is, straight from the start, we focus on what we do good at – what we do well at, actually, which is gamers, right—we focus on it, we have a cool audience of gamers, we kind of know what they like, we get a pretty good feel of what they like in terms of products, so we serve that particular niche.

So, instead of doing like all these different types of coupons for everything under the sun, we focus on what we do well at, and we try to provide a better service in that sense of better updated deals, more timely updates, stuff that you might actually, not so– I’m pretty confident that some of the games that we list, maybe it’s only going to give us like 10 sales, and these are pennies on our dollars, but these aren’t stuff that other sites will focus on whatsoever like, you won’t find it there on these other deal sites. So, the comprehensiveness for a gamer, in the sense that, if I’m a gamer and I want to make sure I don’t miss the hot deals, then I can go to Dealzon and I can pretty be– rest assured that maybe I’ll catch like 90% of the deals.

Steve: I see so by focusing on something you actually will probably get the deals listed first because the other sites don’t care as much and then as a result gamers will learn this overtime and then come to you first.

Viet: Right, exactly, I mean that’s basically our hope and I think it’s been doing pretty well actually.

Steve: So okay yeah. So there’s a couple of questions I have now. So one; how do you actually get the deals on your site?

Viet: Yeah, so it’s actually very similar format all across the board. It’s a very chaotic thing in terms of the coupon space in the sense that you know there’s 1000s of merchants and there’s 1000s of deals right hunches of 1000s of deals even. Most of the merchants actually– you will be surprised a lot of that stuff deals is in virtual edition now, they plaster our email and no kidding. An email with the list of the top deals for up to the week. So it’s like a feed of emails– you open your inbox it’s like a hunches of emails coming in. Now obviously a lot of the better networks still have a API where they a certain theme where they’ll send out like you know the data, but a lot of them is unnecessary human because some– You can already exactly see the data and then copy and paste to your site basically. You need to able to manipulate this second data essentially.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So there’s actually a lot of work involved in that, and I think there’s actually a few services that– so because the work looked so much because actually a few services that we don’t actually this but they make the transition easier. So they grab all the fin and all the different coupons for you and then they break it down in like a CSV file for you or what not, based on how you want to export and I think what’s this service called. Let me think, it’s not [Inaudible] [00:12:12]– I think coupon to me, so.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So that’s one of the services, you know.

Steve: So let me just try to rearrange what you just said, so you’re saying some people email out the deals–

Viet: Yeah so, the merchants would– most merchants, the large merchants don’t have like an account manager of some sort, right and they’ll have like weekly deals right. So they’ll be like hey this is what we are trying to promote on our store– on our online stores this week. Take a look at the list of our deals. And it could be any kind of format it could be just plain text email format, it could be attach excel file, you know could be just a bunch of bullet points, could be a strayed out HTML files encoding of the deal in question right.

Steve: Okay and how do you get that on to your site is that then manual then?

Viet: Yeah, so there is quite a bit of manual work involved but we build our own tool. There’s actually– so I’m not in the coupon safe spacing internet buying. I’m pretty sure there are word press plug-ins that make your life a lot easier to get e-step in but at some point you’ll still need a manual, human editor involved to like either copy and paste or make sense of these data you know like here’s some because some bit of words that come in might not– might truncate a little bit, might not that you know just spread properly. So we build our own tool we have our own platform that grabs all these feeds, whether it’s email or data you know straight from the API or our feed or X amount feed from the merchant and it’s mostly XML feed actually.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: Yeah and you know we make sense of this data on our back editor, human editor kind of adviser and properly in all that great stuff.

Steve: So what you are saying you’ll receive list of these deals in all sorts of different formats depending on the person – depending on the business and then you have tools in the backend that kind of code in all these information?

Viet: Yup, exactly so in that sense yeah there’s definitely a lot of work and then that’s kind of why we focus on what we do while we’re out too because if you expand too much more retailers it just really becomes like a major headache right?

Steve: Yeah, by the way.

Viet: And then I think for those people that aren’t aware like you know Slickdeals which is one of the larger you know deal website right, they have a massive community forum you know they have the human resources and the human you know the mob power – the social power right there in terms of users pushing up– posting audio’s in different deals on their message board right?

Steve: Mm-huh.

Viet: But even – even having all those community they still have like analogue 10, 20, 30 editors, you know working on posting deals and that’s quite a bit, right? So…

Steve: Yeah, that’s crazy and that can be fun and it’s kind of manual, right?

Viet: Right, right yeah. I won’t necessarily call it fun, but you know it really depends on how you take a look at it you know our editors and myself included, we try to– maybe that’s so much these days but we try to be able make it a game out of there like say, who can post you know the best deal the fastest in that sense right.

Steve: Okay.

Viet: So you know if there’s got very hot game coming out and we know everyone wants this game, you know we would love to be the first to find this deal and post it everywhere you know, in terms of our own site…

Steve: Sure.

Viet: On our day Face book feed or you know our Tweeter feed or what not, right.

Steve: Aha.

Viet: So.

Steve: So on the flip side also there’s a bunch of deals that expire everyday too. So how do the heck do you know when to take these things off and that stuff?

Viet: Right, so that’s half– that’s so another [inaudible] [00:15:31] right in there too like a lot of this is actually manual, but most of these thankfully the merchants themselves will let you know the expiration day in advance, so–

Steve: Okay.

Viet: We just simply send them on our backend and it’ll automatically expire mostly, and if we don’t capture you know usually a user we’ll comment and let us know that hey this deal is expired, then we know we just go out– head out there and expire that deal.

Steve: Okay, so certain services like I use commission junction you mentioned that earlier…

Viet: Sure.

Steve: And they actually have an API where you can just grab everything kind of automatically into your platform with a little bit of programming.

Viet: Yeah.

Steve: Do you guys have a preference or do you just kind of go with where the deals are at?

Viet: We kind of go with where the deals are at actually, but we definitely do utilize that you know obviously you want to make the manual work load as low as possible. So if you have the resources you get a developer to you know work out your own– what does your own platform of grabbing these things in properly to fit your– to fulfill your needs, that’s way better right than doing it manual, but on other times the ones that already make money is actually stuff that’s happening in right traditionally in email actually you know where a manager– a store manager might have– and a fully account manager actually let me correct myself– will be very in tune with what we need or what those were with our audience and they gave us a head start hey this deal is happening next week if you have some details in the email right.

Steve: I see.

Viet: We just watch out for that deal you know and yeah we can of course we can always grab it automatically whenever you know from the API or from XML deal but that’s always depending on like you know whenever we set these automatic data grab to happen right, so we very well might miss that X– the actual hour where the deal goes live right.

Steve: Aha.

Viet: So a lot of the more exclusives or the deal that people actually deal one actually happens lot in email so.

Steve: Interesting email, wow that’s horrible.

Viet: Yeah that’s horrible actually. When you even think about it and you know there’s pros and cons in there you have the good communication channel with – and you work with these people and you do good large volume with them. So there is a need for the– an open communication channel but there’s– I won’t be surprised you know if there is a better service in the next few you know whenever actually to make the job easier and you know the space is right for some sort of disruption that’s for sure.

Steve: Okay, so what you – what I’m trying to gleam off you know is, you know essentially all the sites have access to the same coupons essentially right?

Viet: Yeah, I mean you’re not going to really get like all these unique stuff I’ll be honest. If you find like a deal site you like and you use allegory you know, hey more power to you keep using, you don’t really need to come to DealZon and that sounds so bad actually.

Steve: Yeah.

Viet: But I feel like you know a lot of times unless, unless all you care about is gaming. So yeah you should actually come to us.

Steve: So I mean so each, each text like kind of has its own focus right because you said it’s kind of manual. You kind of have to pick and choose what you want to focus on right?

Viet: Sure, sure that’s for me. So but you definitely want see some of those the same stuff on most sites but the difference is may be what they highlight isn’t what’s the hottest latest right now. A lot of these stuff especially front page is very much click carried and right by the editors, right.

Steve: Right.

Viet: And some of these actually might be paid place material too and which we can talk about in a little bit–

Steve: Yeah.

Viet: So and you know so you needed to juggle between like hey is this guy really –is this really a good deal or is it just something that’s pushing you to sell because it gets in the most commission right?

Steve: Right, right okay.

Viet: So, and so it’s mostly that I think and I think because of human automatic coration [phonetic], if you start you know agreeing with what the editor puts on and chances are that’s a great deal then yes you should be comfortable with that site in the sense that they are pushing stuff that they know people like and want and not just because what’s you know shows the bottom line or converts better or what not right.

Steve: Okay, okay so that kind of actually leads to my next my question is, which is you know how do you actually get people to come to your coupon site in the first place right?

Viet: Yeah so I mean obviously marketing is like such a broad and you know broad discipline right but how we did it initially and this is actually quite a while ago, I want to say like three years back, is we started like you know so for any kind of hot products and this is kind of go back to email once again. We just email blogs these new steps you know on like called latest products to like tracking gadget size like tracking gadget blog basically news blogs–

Steve: Like in gadget?

Viet: Yeah exactly, you know like hey you know may be the latest Mark book Pro just slashed the price by 100 bucks and that’s actually very rare for Apple products, right?

Steve: Right.

Viet: And you know stuff like that basically and then you slowly and surely you build some links you know you send some else – some good new steps and you build an audience that way. And another method that we kind of use is we partner with a few different sites and if they have the right community and then if the fit is good, we post regular deals on their site and if in terms of – in the format of a blog post or a news stead or and stuff like that and that’s how we kind of like funnel trafficking sometimes.

Steve: What do they get in return for the blog?

Viet: You know the page views you know they – sometimes we have very rarely do we have like revenue share agreements you know and then when we have that obviously we have to disclose it carefully. So that works out when it fits with in terms of the community and audience right. We do this with may be like with individual sites, where, maybe some guy runs a gaming blog, right, and he knows that people like these kind of deal posts, and it helps support the website, helps support the community, you know, so it’s a win-win for everyone involved.

Steve: I see. But let’s say, I run a really popular gaming site; why wouldn’t I just put my own coupon codes on there?

Viet: Yeah, I think you should, actually, but we go back to all those hassle, all those manual stuff you know, you really have to be on the know, in terms of like what’s going on this week and what’s going on next week, to properly do something like this, I feel. So, I think, if you run a gaming blog, you should definitely do this, or use DealZon, basically, and we will be happy to help you out, and work out an arrangement that makes sense. But yes, I think, if you run a gaming blog, and your only revenue source is like the very typical display ads and stuff like that, you should start considering an affiliated model; there’s certain ways you can do this balance without coming across as if trying to sell all these games to visitors, right?

Steve: Right.

Viet: Because this really is a value in the sense that, hey you know, ‘buy this game because it’s cheap– I mean, we’re not telling you to buy it, but we’re telling you what is cheap right now, whether you buy or not it’s up to you, right?

Steve: Uh-huh.

Viet: So there’s some actually a value in terms of that service.

Steve: Okay. The other thing I did notice, when I went to your site, was you actually do advertizing also. And when I saw that, I was somewhat conflicted because, shouldn’t the goal be to have someone click on your affiliate link and buy something?

Viet: Yeah, actually, you are correct about that; for a very long time, DealZon had zero display ads. You can make the argument that the entire site’s being advertised now, because every click will generate a commission sale for us, right?

Steve: Sure, sure.

Viet: But, yes, for a long time, we don’t have any display ads, but we actually test this, a little bit. It didn’t really hurt conversion one way or another, and it’s just basically more money in the revenue so that we can keep the servers up and what not, so…

Steve: I see. So you just add them on, just to see if it’s going to affect your affiliate revenue; it didn’t affect it, brought in more money, so you decided to keep it on.

Viet: Yeah, we kept it on. We can probably do with two more banners– I mean, two three banners, to be safe, but at some point, you’re it’s just you’re clouding your site with a bunch of banners, so we’re okay with just one. And here’s the thing about this– and this is a tip for anyone that runs anything– any similar or is interested in affiliate space; When you have inventory, in the sense of like banner ads, or whatever slots, when you create inventory, that gives you the ability to sell these slots to advertisers, when the right time comes along– you know that might be a seasonal thing. I mean, in holiday seasons, all the merchants have the right budgets to work with, like promotions, so if your site’s the right fit, they might throw you a bone, give you a little bit more money, just to put a banner on your site to your [indiscernible][00:23:55] and you know whatever the heck that you might be getting from, whatever display network you use, you know whether it’s something like adsense or whatever else, right. So, by the virtue of having a banner, it gives you the ability, in the future to sell that slot, does that kind of make sense? So…

Steve: Yeah so, sell it privately to an advertiser.

Viet: Right, exactly. You know if you never have that in the first place, it’ll be a hard pitch to tell people, ‘hey, I’ll put you here’, while you didn’t have that before, so…

Steve: Okay, so what percent– is the breakdown heavily skewed towards affiliate revenue, or what’s the breakdown, between advertizing…

Viet: Oh yeah, by far, by far. The advertizing is just there really, because it pays for the server bills I want to say, so it’s not– it’s not exactly like zero dollars, but it’s also not something that we really stress about or focus on a lot, so…

Steve: Okay, so in terms of getting traffic, you mentioned working with other bloggers; are there any other traffic sources that you use?

Viet: Yeah. So, eventually, you know, we still get plenty of Google traffic – we try to rely less on Google these days, in the sense that we don’t really bother with optimizing that much anymore, in terms of SEO. If we have Google traffic, great, it’s because we have the right information and the right value, if not, whatever, right?

Steve: So, by information sorry– is this your blog post, or are these the deal pages themselves?

Viet: Both, actually, but mostly the deal pages themselves. We try to provide as much information as we can on a deal post, especially on the hot stuff — on the stuff that’s trending. So if there’s like a super old laptop, you know, two years old, obviously you’re not going to find the latest information there, right, because at this point, no one is going to buy that kind of particular laptop anymore. But for the latest stuff, yeah, I think so, we might have like hey more information on a particular computer model, hey maybe you should buy X over this because of these features, so stuff like that, basically.

Steve: So do you guys have that sort of content on your site where you’re comparing different items, and that sort of thing, or…

Viet: It’s mostly in the edited notes; we have a lot of it back in the days, but, like I said, we try to rely less on Google in a sense, so we only provide those information that is useful to our users. I suppose you can make the argument that what’s good for the users is good for Google too, but that’s always a bonus in the sense that I mean, there’s a lot of sites that bounce just a lot of key words in content, and by the virtue of their domain authority, they will rank for it, right?

Steve: Sure.

Viet: The coupon space is kind of iffy that way in the sense that sometimes and I’m sure a lot of users will know this– they search for a particular coupon in the other site, and there’s really no coupon!

Steve: It happens to me all the time, it’s very annoying.

Viet: It’s very annoying! We try to stray away from that as much as possible. Yeah, it makes us a little bit less money, but I’m a little bit more happy about it – I sleep a little bit better at night, you know. Yeah some people can say that you’re throwing away money, but if the coupon doesn’t exist, we say so; it’s expired. You can still click through it if you want to, you know, if you want to check if there’s something new, but there’s no coupon, so that’s that.

Steve: Okay. And I would imagine you don’t do any paid advertising, because the price just doesn’t work out economically, right?

Viet: I think it does, actually, but we don’t do that. I’m not sure if I’m giving too much information in that sense, but [Inaudible] [00:27:03] pretty much all of our revenue in a sense, is very much organic, it’s very much the users on DealZon, and some portion of it for our partner blogs.

Steve: How would pay traffic work? I mean, you’re paying an amount that seems like it’s a lot higher than your affiliate products.

Viet: It’s tough, right? I mean we’ve dabbled in it, and I can see it can work, but I’m not a PPC expert in the sense that, I can’t juggle that on a daily basis, and it’s very much average where you have to make sure whatever you bid is obviously a lot less than the commission you get. And it actually does still work well; you’d be surprised like how some of these large retailers just don’t do a good job advertising their own products or their own stores. So, there’s still a lot of space for the middle man, in a sense, the whole system still works. Instead of having their own internal team, they just pay it out by the affiliate model that way. So it’s kind of funny, I think going to change in the future, especially– if I run any one of these– If I’m like the business guy, or the revenue guy at one of these larger companies, I will think strongly about having my own PPC team to do the– and they do have them, don’t get me wrong, but between them and the affiliates, it’s an interesting space where you’re just throwing a lot of money, to try to break even, or to try to make like, the actual dollar out of your 50 cents spent– ask them.

Steve: Sure, sure. Do you guys do a lot of email marketing?

Viet: Lightly. We have our email list that’s fairly large, in a sense that I’m planning to trim it down to the guys that don’t really open our emails anymore, to save our costs. We do email marketing, we send out daily emails, and we’re starting to do a better job segmenting these. Some people actually only want to see video game deals, some people only want to see computer deals, some people only want to see HD TV deals. We find that that helps conversion a little bit more. So if you can segment it and if you have the volume that justifies it, you should definitely do it. And, hopefully the whatever email service provider that you sign up for has the segment ability.

Steve: How do you get people to sign up for your email list?

Viet: I think it’s very similar to what a lot of sites employ, so you know, there will be a pop up overlay, telling you to sign up. We try to be less– we try to balance between being annoying about sign-up and trying to make sure we convert these sign-ups, because if you’re just having a side-bar box, I’ll be honest, a lot of people aren’t going to see this thing, right?

Steve: Right.

Viet: The conversion difference there is like astronomic– could be something like 0.1% versus 3%, so that’s a big difference.

Steve: So I see. I would imagine that your sign-up rate would be kind of high– everyone wants to get good deals on stuff, right? I would imagine it’s pretty attractive.

Viet: Yeah, I can make the argument that’s okay. I really don’t know what it looks like on the other sites, I try to take a look at what the industry averages, but it’s kind of hard to guess that right in terms of…

Steve: Sure. Yes.

Viet: But you know I think when you do an overlay like this, if you provide good value, you should– for a long time we actually were very hesitant in having an overlay pop-up for email grab. But after a while we– again, just like the banner ad, we did an epic test; it didn’t affect the sales, and it didn’t affect any other noticeable matrix, so we kept it on. And, to be honest, when we axed it out, we still ended up cooking we don’t bother you for quite a good amount of time too, so…

Steve: Yeah, I know from my site I mean the pop-up is what actually converts the best.

Viet: Okay yeah, exactly.

Steve: Okay so, towards the beginning of the interview, you mentioned that sometimes you can get exclusive deals from affiliates, and it’s all about negotiation. So how does all that work, exactly?

Viet: Yeah, so I mean this is very much about chicken and [indiscernible][00:30:59] right, in the sense that, an exclusive is great – you get like an exclusive that people can only come to your site to get it, right or it might leak out get it elsewhere, but mostly people will come to your site to get this exclusive deal. But if you don’t– in order to get the exclusive, you need to have the right volume, to start negotiating with these partners, right and to introduce these merchants. You can see the dilemma here, in the sense that if you don’t get the exclusives, you won’t have the volume, and if you don’t have the volume, you won’t get the exclusives.

Steve: Right.

Viet: So I would definitely start– for anyone that’s inc. like a region space– my recommendation is basically just ask outright. Ask them hey what kind of volume we need to get to get some kind of exclusive deal or something that might be– and to be fair some of these exclusives are not exclusive in a sense that they will not happen again but it will be fogging you for that time period basically. Does that kind of make sense?

Steve: Okay, yeah. So how does an exclusive deal work exactly? Is it the pair on hire or is it just by virtue of you being exclusive that’s good enough?

Viet: Oh no I think it depends on how what the — it’s very much merchant dependent so sometimes he has to pay as you higher sometimes they give you a better deal like a better percentage coupon, right.

Steve: I see.

Viet: So you know it converts even better because why use this other coupon this other site if this coupon gives you 25% versus 25% this other side right?

Steve: Right.

Viet: So there is a lot of that– and sometimes it makes them both, sometimes it’s just simply this deal is only offered through this site at during this time frame through this link.

Steve: So walk me through this; let’s say you gain an exclusive, what’s your first course of action. So you email your list, do you also still reach out to bloggers about your deals?

Viet: Yeah definitely. If we manage to snuck an exclusive we want to promote as much as possible simply because we are hoping that’s the best deal right?

Steve: Right.

Viet: So yeah the first course of action is actually you should get your own site, you blast out to the people that convert the best which is usually your email people and sometimes your social people. You know maybe for some people the measures are– it is that’s where your audience lives. And you actually basically mention the full cause of the action and then we blast it out to your partners and then finally you want to blast out to the rest of them. So I think anyone in any kind of space should always have an excel sheet or whatever of regular people to email blast things to and on top of like the new tips sites you know TipsAtWhatever.com right, in whatever industry and category you are in. So that whenever you have something interesting and note worthy you can always rely on the list to get at least a few mentions of whatever you know exclusives or promotions that you have at the time right.

Steve: So what are your top traffic sites right now?– sources of traffic.

Viet: I think I will be mum on that in a sense that…

Steve: Okay no that’s fine.

Viet: Okay yeah, but to be honest most of our traffic is still coming from DealZon actually. We have a very healthy amount of users on DealZon and in terms of revenue numbers a good chunk of it is still coming from DealZon too. So like I said we are doing a very decent job theses days of diversifying our traffic source and income source. Three years ago, I want to say, Google would bring about like 50% of our traffic right, and 70% of our revenue. That’s actually quite a big chunk right.

Steve: Wow.

Viet: Just because it converts better. These days we make way more than we did before and Google is like what, 20% of our traffic visit and, maybe exactly the same amount, 20% of our revenue too. So at some point you already want to move away from a Google mentality and I think you definitely mention this a lot of times you know whether in your podcast or in blog post right.

Steve: Yes.

Viet: Two thirds and you know and email list is one such great revenue source right. These are people that opt in the people that already want the information right. So if you can build a channel like where no one else can mess with, I want to say that’s a good comfortable spot to be at.

Steve: Okay, so if there is someone out there who wanted to start their own coupon site how would you suggest they start. So one thing I forgot to ask you about is that actually what platform you run your site on?

Viet: So we actually– we built our own site. It’s on rails, we’ve been on rails. We built our own platform essentially. We have our own backend and our own frontend. This is actually more household than it’s worth–. Well, okay I think it’s working for us for our own usage but this goes to your question if you are starting a coupon site today, you know to make your life easier you should really just get a word press blog and there are various amounts of coupon plug-ins. I haven’t been keeping up to date on them but I know there’s obviously two, three pretty decent coupon plug-ins and coupon site templates that you can use right. And then really you should just find a specific niche that you do very well at right, and that you are very familiar with, that you are an expert at instead of trying to cover everything under the sun, you know try to cover that one thing that you can do a good job at providing information at. So that’s kind of where I’ll start.

Steve: Okay and then in terms of — you guys have a blog too right. So what use has the blog been in terms of…?

Viet: So for us we’re actually doing not too good of a job in terms of a blog, when you have a blog you really should update it regularly in a sense of like you don’t have to write every day. I’m not a believer in that but you should write consistently like let’s say if you are going to do a post per week, you should do a post per week on x day right–

Steve: Okay.

Viet: And for a blog you already want to do it so you supplement information in terms of deals that you’re– So for the coupons site I feel like the best way to do that is that you do price comparison or price prediction stuff like that basically.

Steve: Okay and one thing I also forgot to ask you is what was the source of your inspiration for even deciding to do a coupon site as opposed to some of the other business models out there?

Viet: So I think there is a lot of different things but I don’t think was ever marrying into the idea of like starting a coupon site and actually I did not start this. There is a different partner that left since then actually but I decided to join DealZon because I thought it’s interesting and there’s all things I can bring to the table in terms of the categories that we are focused on at the time and that was my expertise and this goes back to what I mentioned about how if you have expertise in terms of a particular category you know, I’m a gamer I’m a computer user, I know my computers very well maybe I know less these days than before because I don’t have time to read about this stuff anymore but if you are more comfortable to talk about a particular product and you enjoy talking about that particular product, it’s just a lot easier to try and sell those products too right.

Steve: Yes.

Viet: So it’s mostly that I think and you know I think at a time, you know, it’s kind of like- this goes to what we had mentioned earlier- if you search for coupon you run to your site and it’s just bunch of links but there is no coupon to be found, that’s annoying right. We wanted to try a little bit better than that basically.

Steve: Okay and so you do this full time?

Viet: Yeah I do this full time.

Steve: So were there– what was your source of your inspiration? Was there any books that kind of gave you the inspiration to say,” Look I want to start my own site and run my own business”?

Viet: I will be frank, not really. I think I am one of those few that started their own site back in the 90s right, and they would just miss the bow in terms of like becoming like one of those dotcom millionaires so I– but then we learn a lot in the process and we enjoy working online building websites, interacting with users and readers. So I think it‘s essentially that really verses like any one book or any one particular thing.

Steve: And are there any resources or services out there that you can’t live without with your site?

Viet: Yeah, so let me think about this of the top of my head. I think because we build our own platform a lot of the tools that we need, I have my developer build out the stuff but then there is definitely a few services obviously. We are hosting Heroku, so without Heroku obviously it’s– we used to have our own hosting services our own– and then the system that main portion is very much of a headache right–

Steve: Yes.

Viet: So that did obviously allocated to Heroku now, so that’s good. So we can’t live without Heroku. I guess you can argue that mailchimp is essential for us too in the sense that without mailchimp we don’t have an email list, I mean there is a lot of services out there but we are comfortable with mailchimp so we are sticking with them

Steve: Okay.

Viet: And I guess you know definitely that there are free other networks you know without them obviously that won’t work too right. You know without Commission Junction, without link share, you know, without these larger networks it gets a little bit tough right. So–

Steve: Okay, cool so Viet we’ve already been talking for quite awhile, where can people find you online if they have questions?

Viet: So if you head to dealzon.com there is contact form there but just email me at viet@dealzone.com and I’ll be honest, I mean I don’t mind giving up that, I think it’s a public email actually so yeah viet@dealzon.com and if you have random questions like this I will try to take some time out to try and answer them as best as I can.

Steve: Awesome well thanks a lot for coming on the show Viet.

Viet: Yeah, no problem I will talk to you later Steve.

Steve: All right talk to you later, have a good day.

Hope you found that podcast episode interesting. Now I for one have always wondered what it was like to run a coupon business online and at least at the back of my mind I always pictured a very hands off site that made money on auto pilot by automatically grabbing deals from a feed and displaying them online and as it turns out it’s not that simple and I probably should have known better. Now Viet shared some very useful tips on how to get traffic to a coupon website and I’m very thankful for his candor and revealing how his business works. For more information about this episode go to MyWifeQuitHerJob.com/episode 28 and if you enjoyed listening to this podcast please got to iTunes and leave me a review.

When you write me a review it not only makes me feel proud but also helps keeps this podcast up in the ranks so other people can use this information, find the show more easily and get awesome business advice from my guests. It’s also the best way to support the show and please tell your friends because the greatest compliment you can give me is to provide a referral to someone else either in person or to share it on the web. Now as an added incentive, I’m also giving away free business consultations to one lucky winner every single month. For more information about this please go to mywifequitherjob.com/contest and if you are interested in starting your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywife quitherjob.com for more information and thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to the Wife Quit Her Job podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.