Full show notes for this episode can be found at https://jakehower.com/how-justin-cooke-started-monetizing-his-podcasts/

In today's episode, we have got Justin Cook from

Empire Flippers on the call today.

So we're going to be looking at how he went about starting

first, the AdSense Flippers.

And then of course, now the Empire Flippers, and we'll just have a general,

I guess you saw a chat about his.

Experience in business and a little bit about online marketing.

Let's get stuck straight into that episode right now.

Justin, how are you?

Good.

Jake.

Great to be here, man.

Really excited to be on the show.

Yeah, fantastic.

This is certainly an episode I've been hoping to bring to our listeners for a

while now, because the Empire Flippers podcast is probably one of my favorites.

It's in my weekly listening schedule, and I'm sure some of our

listeners are familiar with you.

And so I'd love to get you on here and speak a little bit about

podcasting and how you've been able to really monetize the podcast

as well.

Yeah, so here's the funny thing.

I wasn't a podcaster.

My business partner and I, Joe, were never podcasters.

We'd started listening a little bit to the lifestyle business podcast, and we

met up with Dan and Ian, and they both highly recommended we do a podcast.

He said, Oh, you guys would be great on a show.

You guys bounce ideas off each other.

Be fantastic.

And we were like, I don't know.

That's a little out there, on a podcast or hearing, I don't know.

What if we can just stay behind the scenes?

And so we said we'll try it.

Yeah.

And there was a really good response.

So we got a good listener base built up and funny enough, it's become

one of the major draws, I think, to empire flippers is us being on the

podcast and doing a weekly show.

Yeah.

It's amazing, how podcasting is for building your own authority

and building the brand, because it's such a powerful medium.

We've discussed it in a few earlier episodes of the show, but certainly

it's probably one of the quickest ways to build a following and to

really, to build your authority in a

market.

I think it's great because you can tell pretty quickly those that

have chops versus those that don't.

In a blog post, you get time, you can think it through or reference other

sources, but you have to know what you're talking about on a podcast,

or it's gonna be pretty clear that you're talking out of your ass, yeah,

absolutely.

And your model with Empire Flippers, he's certainly one where.

That really is the case.

I've got it easy here because I'm interviewing people.

So all I'm doing is really relying on the guest being excellent.

And then most of my job is done.

You've got it harder because you've got to come up with the content yourself.

It's a lot easier when you talk about things that you know about.

And so we have guests on our show too, especially for areas that

we're not so strong ourselves.

We'd rather bring in people that are experts in that area.

To explain it to us and our audience.

In fact, some of our better shows are things we're trying to figure

things out for ourselves and you'll see in later episodes how we actually

implemented some of those strategies, to add another profit streamer to

build out, our empire even further.

So a lot of times our guests bring ideas or, give us a suggestions or strategies.

They end up making us more money a couple months down the road.

Yeah, cool.

Cool.

So let's go back to the start.

You just mentioned that you're a listener of the Lifestyle Business

Podcast and Dan Andrews had mentioned that you should get into podcasting.

So you have to have some sort of business before even thinking about

getting into podcasting, I think.

So let's, how about you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, Justin, and

what you do and what has got you to where

you are now?

Yeah, so my business partner and I, Joe Magnotti and Justin Cook, we we were

originally working as middle management for a local SEO company in the US.

They had a need for offshore outsourcing.

We'd had a little bit of experience with sending some work offshore.

And we said, look, we think we can handle that for you.

We started working with some agents that were offshore and

eventually we outsourced ourselves.

We put a proposal together, said, look, why don't we take this build

something offshore and we can really expand the business there.

Cause we were hiring like mad in the U S.

We said, look, why don't we hire agents offshore?

It's much cheaper and our, profit per employee is much higher because

they're not direct employees.

Joe and I set up an outsourcing company with our previous

employers as our major client.

So we moved out to the Philippines.

We're in deval city in the South of the Philippines.

Now, open an office, set up a Philippines corporation and went to work.

So we started working as outsourcers originally.

That client months down the road ended up canceling on us.

We picked up other clients and stuff, but we needed a way to apply our agents to

still make enough to cover their salary.

We were worried that we had these smart talent and agents that

when that client dropped, we didn't want to get rid of them.

So we tried a couple of different things.

And the one that stuck was building niche websites.

So we started creating these small niche websites and they were

profitable monetized via AdSense, Google AdSense, and they started

to make a little bit of money.

And so we, we took a different approach with our content around the niche sites.

We said, look, why don't we just be completely transparent, like the kind

of stuff that we would never do with our main business because it was too scary.

Why don't we just tell everyone exactly how we're doing it.

Explain where we're going and see what happens with it.

And we did that.

And that's when our brand really started to take off.

People started to really pay attention.

We started to build a larger audience and and it was great for us.

Yeah, cool.

That's awesome.

I know, certainly from my perspective, I don't have a real interest in

AdSense and building niche sites, but.

Listening to, what was originally AdSense flippers and now the Empire

flippers, Oh, I really resonated with it.

Even though I wasn't even looking to, replicate these AdSense sites.

So where does that connection come from with your listeners?

Do you think when you're podcasting?

So we found that, we have three different types of listeners, the

ones that are looking to build niche sites and don't really have all that much cash

themselves, they're looking, they just want us for their free content and the

process, another group of people that are.

I'm listening because they have cash and they're looking

for good investments sites.

They can purchase.

They're possibly looking to sell sites with us on our marketplace.

And there's a 3rd group that's more kind of like the expat entrepreneur crowd,

or they dig the fact that, we talk about business strategies and ways we've set up

our corporation and that kind of thing.

And they don't care so much about the niche side or authority site stuff.

They're more there for the business content.

So really, we try to balance with our content all three different groups and try

to make sure that we're giving information that, helps all three different groups.

And I think, that's our appeal.

And, I guess we could probably break it down to, okay who, who do we make the

most money off of out of those groups?

But I don't know, that just seems, it just seems wrong.

Like I, I like all the, all three of those groups.

And I like to talk to and work with all people on all three.

So I don't care so much that we need to focus on one particular group.

I'm happy to support all three.

Yeah, cool.

Okay.

So you had this business building AdSense sites, or we're building up

this other stream for your employees when I went over the top busy and you've

started this podcast, what was the aim of starting the podcast originally?

We wanted to have a better way to connect with some of our readers.

And the suggestion was, or the idea was, is that it's a great way to

move people down the value funnel.

I look at it this way.

We have like our casual reader, someone who's read us a couple of times may

come back and read us in a few months.

That's great.

And then we have the regular readers that will read most of our blog posts and

follow along with our emails and stuff.

And then we have the fans and the super fans, right?

The fans read every blog post.

They're always commenting and the super fans are checking

out our stuff on other shows.

Anytime we're talking or putting out content anywhere, they follow it.

And really this helps move people down the chain.

I'd say from the, regular reader to the fan.

And the more we can do that, the more we can build that connection, the better.

And listening to someone hearing their voice in your earbuds while

you're in the car or you're at the gym is just a much closer connection.

We for the outsourcing business, we have clients contact us and they know exactly

how we do business because they hear us talking about it all the time, so we don't

have to explain where we're coming from.

They know where we're coming from already, so it makes the client engagement.

Much easier because they already know you know what we don't do it's just a

fantastic way to drive inbound leads prospects customers that we wouldn't

have had if we wouldn't have the podcast

and was that initially what was that mainly for the outsourcing

company or was it for your sites

etc.

It was for the net site so we didn't do much content for the outsourcing

and this is it's completely wrong looking back and it's actually funny

that we viewed it this way but we thought it was better to look like a

large organization with the outsourcing company so we're very corporate

very stuffy or content was not very.

Friendly and we figured the niche stuff with just a project.

So we do a podcast.

We write some crazy content.

It's, it's fine because it's not very serious for us.

Funny thing is that was such a better way to do business.

I really wish we would have done that with the outsourcing company from the start.

We've now combined it all under Empire Flippers because we want to

do the same thing with outsourcing.

With all of our other business interests, we want to apply the same methodology as

far as content marketing to all of the different business practices that we have.

We've seen the light and we're definitely heading down this route.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Okay.

So initially you were selling your sites, did you have any information products or

anything that you were selling as well?

No, we really went down the free route.

We believe that information wants to be free.

And so trying to just bottle it up and charge for it is not going to give us

the greatest audience to get it out to.

So rather than charge for information products, we figured we'd rather

give away great information for free and charge around that information.

Now, We don't have an ethical or moral issue with charging for information.

You can, have great information charge for it.

I just I, we feel that there are better ways to promote your business.

For example, we had a build a niche site, empire ebook that

we could have charged for it.

And he probably could have charged a hundred, 200 bucks for it.

But instead we decided to give it away for free and it's detailed

exactly how we build our sites helps people from start to finish.

We gave it away for free.

And because of that, I think we're able to get more than 20,

000 downloads on this ebook.

So it was really, it was saving money or losing money on the

short term for a long term win and the long term win is exposure.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

So if you're not selling information, you're selling some sites.

What have you added now?

Yeah, so we started off just selling sites.

And so we would sell sites on flippa.

com, which is like the it's like the eBay for buying and selling websites.

And then we realized a lot of people wish that we weren't revealing the URLs.

There's a downside.

When you sell and you're revealing the URL to the world, because you end

up, especially if it's a good site, you end up with a bunch of copycats.

So we had buyers ask us, Hey, is there any way that you can, sell to

us and not share the URL publicly?

We said, yeah, sure.

So we started selling on our site now empire flippers.

And we were just selling sites, but we started to get a lot of questions about

Hey, I don't, I followed your process.

I know the general idea, but I'm a little nervous about the keywords.

Can you help me with the keywords?

And our first answer was, no, we just don't do that.

We have a whole process and it's the whole like human machine knocking out

sites on a regular basis for ourselves.

We don't really have it set up for other people.

And then we started getting more of those requests and we started thinking that's

silly since we're in this business.

Shouldn't we be able to take pieces or chunks of what we do and offer

that as a service to people, but we just need to figure it out a bit.

Yeah, that's something I see in my businesses as well.

It's I guess there are certain things which aren't ready to bring on customers

and do, but realistically, if you're setting yourself up to take on customers

for all of your internal jobs, it really means that you've got really

strong standard operating procedures.

And that, is where you get the biggest

leverage from.

Yeah, that's absolutely true.

We have designated process for all of our different agents to

follow in each step along the way.

And so with all these requests to actually do it for them, we figured,

I listened to James Schramko quite a bit and I listened to, I think it was

him on the foolish adventure podcast.

And I swear I listened to that episode maybe 2 or 3 times.

And he was talking about how to break your business down as a

productized service approach, right?

How to productize the service business.

And offer it that way.

I said, if we can just figure this out, it would probably make sense for us to do.

So we looked into it, put about a month behind, like trying to make

sure we're able to deliver that for customers and then started offering it.

And seriously, within a 60 day period, we were able to add about a

7, 000 a month profit stream to our business by offering these productized

services to our audience, basically.

And they loved it.

And most of our buyers were repeat customers in that area.

It's been a fantastic revenue stream that we didn't even, at first we were saying no

to, we were like, ah, I don't know, man, that doesn't really make sense for us.

But yeah, silly, it's so much easier to go back after the fact and go, Oh

my God, we should have been doing this.

What were you thinking?

I think this is very interesting because if you look at

the conversion rate from a website viewer to a service of yours against

to a piece of information and look at what you can actually, I won't

say extract, but what you can make.

To deliver a service versus to sell a piece of information, you'll find

the conversion rate is a lot higher selling a service because you're

selling something a lot more tangible.

And I guess to really make any decent money selling information,

you need a lot of site visitors.

And I don't know, I'm sure I'm similar to a lot of people out there.

Traffic is damn hard to actually drive to your site.

Yeah, I actually like not charging for information because

it's also a little disruptive, right?

Because when people are.

There's a lot of people out there, gurus and say, Oh, we need to

charge for this and sell this ebook or package it this way.

And when you can take that away, give better information away for

free than what they're selling, then, it makes them look a little

silly for selling a lesser product when you're giving it away for free.

So that's, it's a fun it's a fun thing to do, honestly.

Now they could try to do the same thing and offer products and services.

The problem is that there's work behind everything that we're selling.

And that, someone has to actually do something.

So it's harder to give that away for free.

I'm sure there's a way to do it.

It's just a bit more difficult.

Oh, that's right.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

All right.

How have you gone about then building the team that allows

you to offer these services?

So we had an outsourcing team on the past and really, what our team

did, we started doing for our original client, which was our previous employer.

Was we started outsourcing pieces of the process that Joe and I

were responsible for in the U.

S.

We started taking chunks of that and sending it to our offshore team.

So as we grew the offshore team, we started sending

more and more chunks of that.

So they became, tightly integrated.

With the US team and what they were doing and offering and being

a part of the assembly line.

And being able to do that, apply that same process to our own business.

Wasn't that difficult because we had that experience of chunking it down and

then offering it off to someone else.

Basically, we just chunked down what we're currently doing with niche

sites and started offering that in addition to a couple of other things

that we were doing internally and offering that away as a service too.

So we plan to continue doing the same thing as we have

clients that we work with.

We regularly ask them, Hey, can we take a piece of your process

and offer that away as a product?

And if they agree to that, as long as say, for example, that you have four agents

with us and they're doing something.

We would ask, can we offer this as a product?

Do you mind and, offer it to you as a product?

And, most of the time they're okay with that because they're playing

paying a flat price for what they're offering rather than a monthly fee

for every agent that they have.

So it's a lot easier to balance your expenses or monitor your expenses when

you're paying a flat fee per in product.

Does that make sense?

Yeah,

it does.

It does.

Okay.

So I guess now, so you're producing a podcast.

How often are you blogging on

the site?

Oh my God.

No, that's not great right now, man.

I haven't done a blog post for about three weeks.

But we do write content.

I've been writing content.

For Flippa.

So I'm a guest poster over at the Flippa blog.

And then I've been a part of some recent books that came out.

Cody McKibben came out with a, an expat, business lifestyle type book.

And we were guest contributors for that.

And then for another book that should be coming out in the future,

I'm doing a, an article for that.

Some of my content writing has been on other platforms recently, but yeah,

I've been neglecting the blog a bit.

Normally it's about probably three to five posts a month which is what

I need to get back to here soon.

Yeah.

What do you find gives you the biggest impact?

Do you think it's the podcast for yourself or do you think it's the blogging?

I think the blog the blog posts drive more traffic.

But the podcasts have a more engaged audience.

Whenever we do a new podcast, we get a lot of emails.

We get a lot of questions.

The blog posts get a lot of comments as well.

And probably more traffic because it gets that long tail traffic.

So yeah, I'd say for traffic we definitely get more from the blog posts, but

engagement is key with the the podcast.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I know it's certainly I guess an engagement isn't

necessarily very easy to track.

It's like intangible, what you get from the podcast against writing a blog post.

But there needs to be some sort of service which helps you, track and measure

the true impact that a podcast has.

Yeah, I know Dan Norris was working on that a bit and then he

stopped it to focus on other projects that he had going over to informally.

I think SEO Moz, the new Moz.

com has some tools that will help with that.

But I haven't dug into it much yet, but I was looking at their their beta on

their new product and it looks like they may have a bit more of that actually.

Yeah

all we got podcasting about blogging bringing traffic to the site do

you have a sort of like a back end final or final moving people into your products

and then cross pollinating the products.

That's the idea so you know we've been using a office autopilot

we just signed up with office autopilot slowly, but surely we're doing some of

that and being able to add, tags when they click on a certain link and, when they

show interest in a particular product, one of the things that we really want

to do, and we haven't been able to do it silly that we haven't, but anyone

who's bought a site from us previously.

We didn't actually have them tagged or, be able to offer

them special offers or anything.

So we're doing that.

Now.

We have a list of previous site buyers, and then we can give them

lead scoring based on other products.

They purchase from us the amount that they've spent with us.

And so we can offer special things to them.

Another thing we're thinking about is, if they've bought a site from us in the past.

We might have a staging process where we let previous buyers know,

let's say 24 or 48 hours before we push the sites live because most,

many of our sites that we list sell really quickly within a day or two.

So if we gave a day or two extra or before we actually put a public,

there's incentive then to be a buyer because you get, first dibs on

the new sites that are coming out.

So I think that's a nice incentive to, become a buyer.

But also support previous buyers by giving them first look at new sites.

Yeah, that's

a really good idea.

I like it.

So where do you see empire flip is going

now?

So definitely we've moved into the brokering space a bit So we have

people listing their sites and it's not just niche ads insights.

We're talking about Dropship sites, e commerce sites, affiliate sites, and I

really see us moving a bit more in that direction selling 50 70, 150, 000 sites.

So I see that happening.

We just, I'm not sure if we broke it, but we're right about 100, 000

in a brokered sites last month.

So in June, that was pretty exciting.

So I see this as definitely heading that direction.

Supporting the market a bit more, the buying and selling

of sites market, I'd like to to get into that a little bit more.

And so I've been joining some forums recently.

Andrew uterine has a forum that I joined recently to be, the

buy sell sites information guy.

So I can help people out there and possibly doing something

like that for ourselves.

Joe and I talked about this quite a bit recently, but.

From now through the end of the year, the real goal is to work

on some of our back end stuff.

So to clean up our S.

O.

P.

S.

To better integrate office autopilot into the way our business works today so that

we can have, hopefully double our revenue.

The following year.

So in 2014, we're looking for big growth.

So yeah, it's a lot of backend work over the next five, six

months to prepare for 2014.

Alright, Justin, you've shared a heap of information in this episode.

I've really enjoyed it and I know our listeners certainly will.

Where can our listener find out more

about you?

Awesome, Jake.

Appreciate it.

You can check us out@empireflippers.com.

You can also check us out on Twitter at Empire Flippers.

I'm I'm on there regularly and I love to to chat so, Yeah, absolutely.

And make

sure if you haven't listened to Empire Flippers listeners

that you do head across there.

It's certainly one of my favorite podcasts and it's there's a lot of awesome

information on there and you actually learn a little bit about Justin and Joe,

you're, you really connect with them and it's great seeing what works for them and

what doesn't.

Awesome, Jake.

I really appreciate being on the show, man.

It's been fantastic.

If your listeners have any questions I'd feel free to answer them on

your blog, or you can come over to Empire Flippers and give us a

shout.

Fantastic.

Thank you very much, Justin.