This week, Michael speaks with Ricky Kesler of Income School!
Ricky is an internet entrepreneur, influencer, and co-founder of Income School. He has helped numerous others become financially independent by helping them create online businesses.
Income School is an internet marketing company that teaches people how to create an internet business through blogging and creating Youtube Channels. Income School is best known for its popular internet marketing and SEO channel on Youtube.
To learn more about Project 24, visit http://incomeschool.com/project24/
Learn more about IncomeSchool at https://incomeschool.com/
Check out the IncomeSchool YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/incomeschool
To learn more about Domain Magnate and find additional resources to buy or sell an online business, visit https://domainmagnatecapital.com/
READ THE EPISODE:
MIchael 0:11
This podcast is sponsored by the main magnate, go to the main magnet.com and join our newsletter to follow other recent developments in the space of buying and selling online businesses. And today we have Ricky from income school hierarchy. excited to have you there, Michael,
Ricky 0:28
I’m glad to be here.
MIchael 0:29
So you teach people how to start a Profitable Blog and basically from scratch and build it up to a point that we can earn enough to quit that job. Is that right?
Ricky 0:44
Yeah, basically, the the main goal at income school is to help people to be financially secure. And so a big part of our audience are people who are in the space of blogging, and building niche websites. And they’re trying to learn more, some are total beginners, some have been doing it for a while, but just not quite successful yet. And so we’re helping those people to build those up, usually to a point of replacing their full time income. And that’s, that’s really the goal.
MIchael 1:12
That’s pretty cool. Let’s start by just tell us briefly about income school. How long have you guys been doing it? Like how many people have you been able to help build successful profitable websites or even quit their jobs and replace their living with that
Ricky 1:28
income school has been around for about six and a half years, I was started by my former business partner Jim Harmer and myself about six and a half years ago, I say, former is actually just in the last couple months that he’s decided he’s going on we, you know, we met about this and he, speaking of buying and selling online businesses, he’s moving in the direction of building up his own and focusing more on the the building up of his, his business, his websites, YouTube channel, etc. And I am building income school. And so just as of a couple months ago, now, income school is my business, but I have an excellent team there. So anyway, a little bit of history there, I guess. But over the last six and a half years, it took a few years to really hit our stride, and even really get noticed. But in the last few years, we’ve, we’ve had our project 24 membership, and that’s where, you know, we actually do really start helping and mentoring people besides just, you know, broadly on our YouTube channel. So on the YouTube channel, you know, we’ve helped 1000s of people to be able to learn things, but again, we were they’re not our members, we don’t get to really track that, within the membership within Project 24. Over 100 members have their self reported and reported that they’ve achieved their full time income. And with us, the goal is we’re we’re starting from scratch and building up on a really organic business. The goal is 24 months. And so considering the membership spin around about three years, we see that as a good success rate. And now we’re excited to see as we go forward, and and more than just, you know, three years have passed, they’re starting to come in quickly. Every week, we’re having new people report. And then we’ve had hundreds of people report earning over $1,000 a month from their little blog. So these are people who started from scratch started from the beginning. And they’re on their way. So it’s really exciting. And the handful of members that are well in the seven, seven figures, or sorry, five figures per month. And you know, meaning in the six and even seven figures per year. So it’s it’s pretty awesome to see some of those early members really hit those high levels of success.
MIchael 3:46
Very nice. And so what exactly is a member of income school? Do they go through a series of courses? Is there certain, like timeline or how does it work?
Ricky 3:58
Yeah, we have inside of our membership, we call it Project 24. Because the goal is 24 months to replace your full time income. That’s just kind of the the average goal that we that we created based on a timeline that Jim and I decided upon a few years ago that we thought was reasonable. Some people it’s more like a project 36. They admit that right off, they say, you know, I’m not putting as much into this, but but basically that is how it works. We have a series of courses that provide basically, the whole roadmap. On top of that we provide a we have our own private podcast, that’s for members only where we talk about the things that we’re doing in testing right now, that maybe aren’t quite polished enough for a course. But they’re the things that we’re testing, keeping people up to speed on just everything that’s happening in the industry. And then we have a community a private Community for members only where people are just in there every every day supporting one another that we all of us had income school participate in to help members. And so between that the courses, and then a handful of just additional resources, anytime things come along, we found a couple years ago, we had the request, can you guys just make like a glossary of terms, a little dictionary of internet marketing, SEO terminology, because some of the things you say, I don’t know what they mean. And so like, as we started putting it together, we realized there are well over 100 terms and acronyms that we use in this industry that a beginner just does not know. And so, some people find that really helpful. So we, we just try to add in additional resources whenever we find something that people would find beneficial. But it really is built around the step by step coursework that helps people build their sites.
MIchael 6:00
Right, very nice. And how big is your community currently? How many members do you have now?
Ricky 6:07
So currently, the exact number is? Well, partly, I didn’t bring it in part, because it’s, it’s a little bit of an insider thing. But we do have a few 1000 active members in Project 24. Today, I would say who are active participants in our community. I mean, there are some who just really like, they’re just getting to work. And they don’t they, they kind of watch in the community, but but they’re spending most of their time working on it. Within the community. There are several 100 members, though, that are just in there every day helping each other out. Which is fantastic, because we have a handful of members who just pop in to ask a question. And we’ve got just tons of members who are in there who have been around for a little while, who are jumping on top of answering and helping out. So it’s a very, very active group with a few 1000 members.
MIchael 7:01
Nice, that sounds like a really wholesome place and people helping each other grow their businesses. And what what kind of businesses do people start how they, how they all doing more or less similar, like blogs, content blogs? Or is it all kinds of different things,
Ricky 7:16
the majority of them are, it’s focused around the blog, or, you know, the niche website, right, which is, really it’s a blog with it with focused on this particular niche, a particular topic, but we do have several members who maybe are coming from a different place, we have a handful who started off with an E commerce business. And you know, the E commerce business was relying mostly on paid ad traffic to get people to the website. And were by building up the blog now following the exact same methodologies. Now they’re getting all of their traffic from just organic search. And that traffic is turning into customers. And so one member in particular, we interviewed on our YouTube channel about a year ago who he’s he’s getting way more sales now than he ever did through his ecommerce business, but he doesn’t pay for any, any ads, he doesn’t use paid traffic anymore. And so really, the way we look at it is we just teach people how to use content, to drive traffic to their sites. And then monetization can go really any any direction. We have people who their businesses are built around service consulting, etc. So and others who are built around digital products. And so when a lot of people think of blogs and niche sites, they’re thinking of really passive income models. And I’d say that’s the majority of people, you know, affiliate marketing, and then you know, the placement of ads on your sites and just kind of leave it as pretty passive business, great content, let it be, but others are building businesses of all types. And just using the content as a means to drive traffic.
MIchael 9:04
Right there good. Do people who who start services businesses, for example, tend to to get a certain revenue Mark much faster? Versus ad business at generated revenue businesses or affiliate? I have seen some trends like that, or is it more or less similar?
Ricky 9:23
When you add in a more, you know, professional service, or digital product or oftentimes, when I say digital products, oftentimes, it’s more like a course, or even other people’s memberships of different types. We find that those types of offerings do bring in a lot more revenue typically than the totally passive income streams. So I mean, we we like to consult with and interview members pretty frequently, and we’ll see people in some of the most random niches that you thought and they started off with the passive income But somewhere along the way, they realized, I have a lot to say, this is working really well, I have a lot of traffic. So now I’m going to turn this into more of a service business, I’m going to provide some level of consulting, or I’m going to provide, you know, a coaching that’s paired with a digital product, of course, or something like that. And we see this in all sorts of industries, hobby industries, just really across the board. And, and we find that that’s where people usually are able to jump from, you know, five to $10,000, a month type passive income website, to a $30,000 a month website pretty well overnight, just by having that sort of an offering, and adding that to their to their business. And that’s what a lot of people just say, Okay, I’m, I’m doing this full time, I’m leaving the job, because all I have to do now is create courses within my industry, and then, and then I’m good to go. Others take sorry, I should add to that others take the passive model. And the way they grow is by adding a second site. And they kind of treat it as a portfolio. And it’s just, I have multiple interests, I’m going to build multiple sites. And if each one earns $5,000 a month, that’s great with me. So we do see both.
MIchael 11:20
That’s very cool. So you know, I start in online business about 16 years ago, and I had no money I was a student. And I learned there was no courses. And that was the the the online business world was coming in the different there were no courses, you know, ebooks, like no one could teach you what you were to do. The only way to learn was just by tinkering and trying yourself and trying to find some people who seem successful, and asking them and following them. And eventually, somehow, I figured out how things work a little bit and started making some money and building some websites, getting some traffic, monetizing them, and so on. And then went into flipping. And, and all that and, and now like buying bigger businesses, but I was always very curious to follow the journey of people who start and then they follow a path that’s more structured like like if income school versus a completely random one, like I did just doing a lot of different things, and then eventually seeing what which projects into work and which don’t. And so it’s very interesting how that path really works. So I am curious to see to go for those 24 months to look to see how, like, more or less each step might look like from a person’s perspective. And but the first question is hard to get to a certain revenue Mark, where they feel like the business is making a profit, right? How long does it take in terms of time? And let’s say that mark is, I’m not sure, maybe a couple $100 per month? Because you you probably at this point, you’re probably profiting versus whatever you might be spending, right? And then how long would you say it usually takes to get there? Which is the place where you know, okay, this is working, this seems to be working, I can keep going? And then the second part is, how much money do you think you can actually, you need to invest in order to get to a point where you feel like this is working and start making profits?
Ricky 13:22
Yeah, to get to that point of profitability and saying, you know, even just a couple $100 per month, it does vary, but it is usually somewhere in the six months, to even a year for most people. And it varies a little bit just based upon, you know, how well, you you kind of understood your industry, and crafted that original content in the beginning. And a lot of that just comes from, you know, we, we trust, a pretty organic model, when we build sites. And so we you know, we don’t, we don’t do anything, to try to speed up the process of getting content to rank on Google. That could be potentially harmful to the site later on. And so we teach people to create really good content crafted around search queries, rather than just whatever you know, is on your mind. And then we kind of trust Google to do their job. And then at some point, once you have a critical mass of content, start doing some real industry outreach, being you know, getting yourself on a podcast, that type of thing to just build some credibility and get some contextual links. And so it does take really about those six months for most people to even earn much of anything at all. But usually, once you get to that point, and your your articles start hitting the rankings. From there, it starts to move pretty quickly. And so I would say it’s in that around that six month mark, and then, you know, the question around, kind of what does it take to get started, that’s the kind of the beauty of this business is almost everything you have to invest is sweat equity, it’s just the it’s the work. And it is work for sure. But we’re talking about, you know, registering a domain name, which, a lot of times, you can get your first one for free with your hosting account. But if not, we’re talking about 10 to $20 a year, we’re talking about hosting, that’s when you’re starting off with a brand new site, five to $10 per month, a WordPress theme, we have one that we’ve built, specifically, mostly for beginners, to make it very, very simple, but still have a very fast light website. And so we provide that free of charge. But there are other themes out there that are free, some that are paid, but even so if you were to get like one of the top professional teams out there, maybe $100 a year, and so there just aren’t that many investments that you have to put into it. You know, you might invest $300, in your first year. And if you want the structured approach and join Project 24, you know, that sort of learning side of things, you know, that’s going to add to that cost, for sure. But it’s, it’s, again, the upfront investment in this business is very small. And so getting to profitability really happens within a couple months of starting to earn any income at all. So again, in that six to probably six to eight month mark for most. And obviously, it just ebbs and flows, we had a member who was there from the beginning. And his first website, I mean, he just, he, he hit it right off the bat just found the right kind of hole in the market. And within six months, he was already already earning about $3,000 a month. But I would say that’s not typical, it’s usually in that six to eight month mark, that you’re, you know, you’re hitting that 100 $200 a month.
MIchael 17:09
So what about working with writers content? Providers, instead of writing yourself too? You know, if you don’t like writing, for example, like myself, maybe English is not not your first language?
Ricky 17:25
Sure, no, I totally understand that. Yeah, we do recommend to everybody that follows us that at least your first batch of content 20 to 30 articles, we recommend writing yourself simply because in the process of doing that, I think you learn a lot about what it takes to craft good content, nobody’s gonna care about your site as much as you do. And so we do find that there’s a lot of benefit in doing that. However, we have a lot of members who, you know, at that point, some earlier some later, but at some point, they start outsourcing some of that content, we find that if you’re going to do that, which is totally fine. In fact, we have our we actually have our own service that we write for other people as well as for our own sites. With we have a whole bunch of actually college students who, who do that. And, and it works really well. But we find that there are there are some topics that are specific enough, technical enough, etc. Where you know, more in depth knowledge of the subject is important. And so to get good content, in some of those top on some of those topics, you either have to provide a lot of information to the writer, which is fine, especially if you just want somebody who’s going to do a good job of crafting a good article, but you provide kind of the main information to them, and they go read a good article. Or in some cases, it kind of works the other way around. They do research, they write a good article, and you get back and say, Okay, now I need to, I just need to make some adjustments to make sure that it is consistent with with whatever I would say. And so really, it’s not it’s not an opportunity to totally hand it off. Although sometimes people do and it still works. So it kind of depends a little bit on the niche a little bit on the topic, but it does work. And there’s a there’s a growing industry in that. For sure in content creation. For bloggers, I think a lot of people after they’ve written 3050 Even 100 articles themselves, say okay, I know this works, but it’s kind of grueling and I’m ready to to pass the torch and let somebody else write for me. And I’ll just, I’ll just own the content and put it all together, build the site, etc.
MIchael 19:52
And do many of your members by sites by established site. For example, go and find one for like free five $1,000 $10,000 with is already earning, like $100. And then you know that this is something that’s working, and then you, you know that you can continue that model and improve and grow it further.
Ricky 20:13
Yeah. And we’re, we’re definitely seeing more and more of that, as we have more members that are hitting that stage where they’ve built a site once now, they know how this works. There’s, I can think of one of our members in particular, who I’ve talked with several times who I know he’s, I’m pretty sure he’s done some purchasing at sites. But the other thing he’s doing is the the content, paying for content. And he’s just building sites as fast as he can. Because he knows it works. And so he, this is a person with a financial finance background. And he sees this as just, you know, an amazing investment to diversify his portfolio. But yes, we do, we do see members who kind of take that Headstart ticket concept that they know works. Because somebody’s built it out to a certain level of traffic a certain level of income, and then grow it from there, it’s something we certainly do, we fairly regularly buy sites. And oftentimes, we do look for those sites that are somewhere in that, you know, 5000, in our case, we’re willing to go up a bit higher, but we do often find some pretty good opportunities at that side of the spectrum. For especially for, you know, for a lot of our members who are, who are a little bit earlier at this, and maybe don’t have a lot of capital to invest, but just want that Headstart is definitely something we do. And we see a lot of,
MIchael 21:41
yeah, and I find that there’s a lot of opportunities in those in those ranges. Because there are so many things you can improve. The easiest thing is you you buy a website that’s making $100 for Google AdSense, and you you set it up, if azoic That often pays just double that, or you find an affiliate program that converts well. And, and that’s instant improvement. And I think there are so many opportunities like that. And And the interesting thing is in that small range, it’s it’s very, very wide widespread. When you go a little bit bigger, and you look at sites and in five, six figures are still sound opportunities, but But fewer. And and it’s often different, right? But then if you go further, again, there is more portraitists, that’s what we are focusing on now is like mid six figures, and low seven figure businesses which we acquire. And this see that the opportunities are a bit different, right? Instead of just replacing ads, or adding more content, you, you have so many things that you can work with, like you can look at the current team at current expenses to optimize, then you could look at adding more traffic opportunities, traffic methods, monetization. So there’s a bit of everything. And that’s, and that’s often exciting.
Ricky 23:05
That’s true, I, I do find that very exciting. And they are very different, we do see that on the low end, oftentimes, we find the quickest and easiest turnaround on a flip for a website is often when it’s the monetization, when you see that very easy, low hanging fruit, where almost with the flip of a switch, you can double or triple the income of a site. And then either keep it in your portfolio or turn around and flip it a few months later, you know, again, for double or triple the what you paid for it. But then on the high end, sometimes it’s little things that you can do. But like you said, there’s more opportunities. But that little thing in sheer dollars has a bigger impact. Because it’s it’s, it’s more established, you’re starting at a bigger point. And so a small change could increase the value of a website by, you know, 1000s 10s or sometimes even $100,000.
MIchael 24:04
Yeah, absolutely. And like 510 years ago, it was a big thing that people didn’t know how to optimize their Google Adsense ads. And you would buy a website and you would simply take their ad unit for the bottom of the page and put it up the top of the page and the CTR increases by you know, 3x. And now that’s not the case, because most people use automated Google ads. And that’s what’s interesting, like, some opportunities disappear, but others come up. And I think there is probably always going to be some of those things you can optimize. Although the margins are probably shrinking a bit so it’s probably going to be harder and harder to find those. Yeah, that’s probably true. And so let’s let’s walk through the that 24 months journey In the beginning, when you start, what is the first step? I imagine you have to decide the type of business and niche? How do you do that?
Ricky 25:08
Yeah, so you know, in the very beginning, we do have a process to help people sort of identify a niche that’s going to work well for them, we do find that I, one of the, when you’re building a site yourself, and you’re going to be creating at least a fair amount of content yourself, one of the most important factors in picking a niche is picking something that you can enjoy. It used to be we would be pretty focused on how are we going to monetize this? How, you know, what, what’s the competition like, and now, we’re a little less concerned with some of those things. Because we find people are more likely to succeed, if they have some enjoyment, and some bat, maybe some background in that niche whenever possible. So we help people pick, you know, what’s the right niche for them, what you know, so that they can get started. And then, you know, picking a domain name, and all those things that kind of go with it, we find that now, you know, as SEO has really advanced over the years, it’s less and less important to pick an exact match domain name, I mean, you don’t need a domain, that’s purely just descriptive of the topic. But rather, we shoot for something that’s maybe a little bit more brandable, something a little bit memorable, or, you know, that, obviously, within the realm of what’s appropriate for that niche, but that’s, you know, just kind of evokes the concept. You know, one of the websites that I working on that we bought, it’s called patent rebel.com. You know, it’s so you’re like, Okay, it’s about patents, but rebel, like, where does that come from, but it’s just kind of something that they felt was, you know, reasonably brandable. And so with that starting point, we help people set up the technology, we keep it very simple to get a website going. And then they jump right into content, we teach how to identify the topics to write about what people traditionally call keyword research. We, we call it search analysis. And the biggest reason is, the search engines aren’t aren’t built around keywords anymore. It’s more about queries and topics. You know, the Google in particular, has just gotten really good at the semantic search, where synonyms mean the same thing. And so the search results end up really, really similar, even if you type in a search multiple different ways. And so we focus less on keywords and more on topics and search queries. But we teach our method to come up with a list of topics, a list of articles to write about. And then we teach exactly how to write good blog posts. We have several kind of different formats, but it’s all built around what we call the post recipe. And basically, it’s just a way that helps people organize their thoughts, organize their research, and then just get it all out in a structured manner in an article. And at that point, it starts to become a little bit like, Okay, now repeat, do this, on the next topic, do this on the next topic. And so there’s a phase in there, where, for about the first 60 days, usually for about two, maybe three months, we have people writing about their first 30 blog posts. And we see that as sort of a launch off point with, we have people I mean, publishing on their sites from the beginning, we don’t wait until you have a certain amount of content to hit publish. But until you kind of get to a critical mass of content, at least 30 articles or so you don’t really have much to go on. And so we try to get those first 30 in in about two to three months. And then from then on, most people are writing a couple articles a week, and building up their sites. So the first 60 to 90 days is kind of where a lot of work gets crammed in. At that point, you can kind of start to get into a routine. And then from there, it’s a lot of continuing with content creation. But at this point, it’s hard. It’s really hard. We call it the ghost town phase. It’s kind of like, you’re, you’re the mayor of this little ghost town, and there’s nobody there yet. It’s it’s I guess it’s like a reverse ghost town because it Ghost Town is after the boom. But this is it’s just a time where you’re still your content still being tested. You don’t really have any authority yet. But you’re writing content and you don’t really know which articles are going to work. And so that’s where that search analysis process is pretty important to, to learn it and get it right from the beginning.
MIchael 29:46
But then in that, you know, really six to nine month timeframe, your early content starts to sort of hit where it’s going to about where it’s gonna land in the SERPs. And that’s when it starts to get even more exciting because you Now, we can start evaluating a lot better. And we can use what we learn to drive, or to drive the way that we continue to create content on our websites, the types of articles that we write, we do a lot of interlinking, between our content to help. It’s really to help get people really get more pageviews, right, get people to click through more, but also to tie different pieces of content together to help build authority within that kind of sub niche within that topic. And then, you know, there’s just kind of we’re in an optimization phase, we can take the things that we’re learning from our original content that’s starting to really hit, and we can learn from it. And we can improve the site at about a year, we have a process that people go through to evaluate the performance of, of their early content, and determine if some of those articles would benefit from being sort of revamped and improved upon which articles are just doing really, really well. And which topics were just a miss. And again, we use that to inform sort of the next batch of content. But we also use that to update and improve upon the content that’s already on the site. And so year two is just kind of more of that every few months, taking kind of the next batch of content that sort of hit its stride. And, and re evaluating that. And we find that the more established a site is, the shorter that timeframe is, it doesn’t take, you know, if I write an article today on an established site, it doesn’t take 689 months for it to perform well in the SERPs. But when you’re first starting out, I mean, we do we definitely do some techniques to try to, to speed that up, we we focus a lot on on winning Google Rich Snippets, writing content that’s written in a way to in those snippets, we find that those can rank very quickly, we find that if we’ll create some video content, but on YouTube, oftentimes, that’s able to rank very fast, and then use that to drive traffic to the site. So there’s just so many different techniques, but that’s kind of what that timeline looks like, the first six months is the most work, but after that, then it’s we get to start optimizing and improving. And monetization comes in pretty much from the beginning, on, especially those passive income streams, you know, putting ads on your site, you know, finding opportunities for good affiliate links, that sort of thing. But oftentimes, you know, once people start to get real traffic, within about that year timeframe, then we start looking at other possibilities, we start considering, should we have an informational product? Should we consider consulting opportunity, etc. And so again, it’s that’s like, where it starts to turn into a business. And not just like an online magazine full of content?
Ricky 32:58
Right? Okay, cool. So that’s the first year you start with, you get a domain name, you decide on a topic that you actually enjoy. You write some content, you use a simple WordPress theme that you provide. And and you keep adding more content and then just wait to see the results. What about backlinks? What about social or any other ways to promote your content? Do you usually advise that
MIchael 33:27
there’s really what we advise is, the importance of a lot of those things depends a little bit on the niche, there are plenty of niches where you can really just kind of put out content, and it’s it’s probably going to do great on its own. There are other niches where it becomes more important to have some authoritativeness in order to even rank well. And so, you know, at some point in there, when you do have at least those first 30 articles, if not more, then we do we actually have a course within our membership that talks about how to build EA T with Google the expertise authoritativeness and trustworthiness. And that does include outreach within the industry. And we call it that rather than like, you know, backlinking or link building, in, in large part because the goal isn’t just to get links for the sake of the algorithm, the goal is to, you know, build real trustworthiness within the industry to build a little bit of a name. Now, that’s not necessarily to say that you as the as a person, have to now become, you know, some sort of persona or something within the industry, but rather, you know, your site, etc, that that needs to start being viewed as a trustworthy source of information. And so, you know, that might look like some outreach to, you know, write guest posts, etc. But oftentimes, I still find that I’d rather write an article for my site and then for somebody else’s, and let Google do the do the job of putting it out there. And so we do take a different approach there than most people. For me, I’d rather you know, meet with somebody and get on a podcast, and use that as a source of outreach. You do get a link, oftentimes that way, usually. But even more so by speaking on the subject on somebody else’s podcast, it shows a level of authoritativeness a level of expertise. And so that that does a lot. And then in terms of social, we do recommend some forms of social depending upon, again, the industry that you’re in, some industries do really, really well on Pinterest. A lot don’t. And we’re finding that oftentimes, we’re getting to where it’s harder to do Pinterest than it is to just put content on your website and let Google rank it on its own. It’s just gotten very, very competitive in Pinterest, like many social media platforms, their interest in keeping people on the platform is only growing. And so if you create pins that drive people to your website, Pinterest doesn’t really push them unless you’re, unless you’re using paid pins. Now, you’re actually, you know, paying to have your pin seen, it’s just more on when Facebook used to be such that you could post, it gets seen by everybody that follows you, or that likes you and follows you. And it didn’t matter. But again, now, Facebook’s more interested in keeping people on the platform. And so unless you’re, you know, paying to boost your content, it’s not getting seen that much, if it’s the type of content that drives people away. And so social media is a tough one, it’s a tough one to crack. And so for a lot of our members, there, we’re not doing a lot, in part because if you you can waste hours and get no benefit of it. If you’re not really nailing it, and it just vary so much from niche to niche, one that’s a little bit different is video, we find that, that video content can do a lot in terms of building up expertise and authoritativeness and trustworthiness. You build a lot more rapport with an audience when they when they see you or listen to you than you do just when they read your content. And so for people that want to build an informational business, do consulting, sell a course etc. It’s actually a lot easier to sell when the people feel like they know you. And it’s also a great place to rank for searchable, very searchable terms. YouTube in particular, but other video platforms as well. And so that’s one that we do recommend to a lot of people is, you know, go build a YouTube channel. And we actually have a whole course in there in Project 24 for people that want to go the YouTube route, and focus that direction instead of blogging. But most people that do one, eventually incorporate the other to some extent. So there’s, that’s really the biggest one. Podcasting is one we don’t talk about as much these days. But it’s a platform I really like
Ricky 38:22
for a lot of the same reasons for building, building rapport with an audience and building expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It’s a great platform, it’s not. It used to be that getting your podcast discovered was a lot easier than it is today. So it’s not a great discovery engine like YouTube is. But it’s a great platform for getting a message out. And so that’s another one that I recommend to people, but we don’t formally teach as much. So there you have it. I mean, social media is it’s a it’s like running on a treadmill, you don’t really, you can run and run and run and not get anywhere if you’re not doing it just right. Whereas when we create blog content, we write it today, and we have an article that can potentially be ranking for for years. So it’s definitely a different animal.
MIchael 39:13
Yeah, that sounds similar to what what I found that with social media, it can be hit and miss. But we had episode 44 with Kate from simple pin media, that she actually manages to consistently drive Pinterest traffic, and really cut it down to size. And how important is topic selection Selection? Let’s say you’re someone who really likes cats. And there’s a million other websites or blogs about cats, all the briefs and everything there is to know about them. And they all love cats too, and they’re pretty good at writing. So how would your content, generate traffic and get better than others?
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