Full show notes for this episode can be found at https://jakehower.com/blogging-for-success-in-2013-and-beyond-with-yaro-starak/

You're listening to the multimedia marketing show.

This is episode number 15.

In today's show, we bring on Yaro Starak from Entrepreneur's Journey.

Now, Yaro was one of Australia's earliest.

Bloggers, or should I say one of Australia's earliest bloggers to monetize.

So we take a look at the history of Yarrow and how he's gone about

creating such an amazing brand.

We talk also about blogging 2.

0 and what that is.

This is a phrase that Yarrow has coined and it's quite an interesting topic.

And we also then discuss a little bit about how he goes

about marketing and monetizing.

So let's get stuck straight into that interview right now.

Yarrow, how are you?

I'm really good, Jake.

Thanks for

having me.

No problems.

And thank you very much for coming on.

I really appreciate that.

Okay.

Listeners today, what we're going to look at that Yarrow is one of the pioneers,

really, particularly in the Australian scene with blogging and certainly blogging

for profit and what I'd love to really speak to Yarrow about today and provide

you with this information is we're going to really run through what blogging

was and what blogging is becoming.

And I think that's a really interesting topic.

And Yarrow is the man to be discussing this with.

Thanks.

Yerro, for those listeners who don't know much about you, do you

mind giving us a little bit of

background?

Sure.

The hard part here is being concise.

So I went to the University of Queensland here in Brisbane and I

did a business management degree.

And it was while I was there that I got my first taste of the internet.

We're talking late nineties.

So I got my dial up account.

Prior to that, I was a Nintendo Sega kid, so I didn't have computers quite so much.

And i fell in love with the internet that was the dawn of my experience started

a website i enjoyed having some sort of destination online started to make

a bit of money from it was about a card game called magic the gathering that i

played while i was in high school and university and i started trading forum

and e commerce store on that site and I almost, had a magazine style blog there,

even though it wasn't a blog, because blogging hadn't been invented technically

yet then the dot com boom happened, I really wanted to get a bigger business,

so I got into a proofreading service that was basically connecting university

students with People who are very good at academic writing to help with editing

and proofreading and I acted as the middleman connecting those two groups,

which is partially inspired by reading the book about how eBay got started.

I was looking to have a business that could scale, we could have as many

people buying as you can have selling.

So that was exciting to me at the time.

And that all went well, made some money from that.

That was my sort of first full time income after university, which.

Led to blogging, surprisingly enough because someone told me that a blog

was good for searches and rankings.

This is about the year 2004.

So just before it became mainstream.

And I started one for the proofreading business, but it wasn't the most

exciting subject to write about.

And it quickly died.

But I did get the blogging bug.

So I started my own blog as a hobby site just to talk about what I really

enjoyed, which was entrepreneurship.

And since I already spent the last.

It's sort of seven years having these two successful online businesses.

And I also had an English school that wasn't so successful, but it was a

learning experience as an entrepreneur.

I took all that experience and content and put it into the blog

and wrote it really as a hobby.

But amazingly enough, people started reading it and then

it became my main business.

And long story short, I ended up selling everything else off.

Continue to produce entrepreneurs journey my blog and that spun off

into some training products as well as I'm a software service.

I'm running more currently and I've been doing that for the last seven years now.

So it's the second half of my career.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

Certainly what really jumps out at me is the fact that you were

writing e commerce back then.

What was it

like?

When I say I'm writing e commerce, I had a list of cards for sale and I bought

a little bit of wholesale product as well from a distributor down in Sydney.

And then I'd run to the post office every day, sending cards in the

mail and I'd get checks in the mail.

I get kids sending me like, 5 bill, 10 bill in the mail as

well to pay for their cards.

And, it was great for a while.

The margins were terrible, but because I would win cards at actual tournaments,

I could make some money from it.

And then I got hit by credit card fraud from some people in Thailand and that

pretty much shut down my business when all was said and done because I just

was naive and I didn't really consider the fact that these could be purchases

coming from stolen credit cards and they turned out to be that way as I

found out six months later when The chargeback started coming in and that

was a pretty dark period actually because i just graduated university and i found

myself in debt to about the tune of eight thousand dollars so not a good

way to finish your university career.

No

Not at all it's amazing how far we've come since even the early

two thousand just incredible i can do now operating pretty much everything

off a mobile phone and even run transactions through the phone as well

it's just crazy yeah there was no mobile when i was.

Maybe just actually, probably certainly not smartphones.

We were talking the old gray and black screens with a centipede running on them.

That was it.

All right let's go a little bit deeper into entrepreneurs journey.

So you're talking about it was a hobby.

So I guess how often were you posting to the site back when you first

started?

When I first started I was almost daily it was weird actually, I didn't

Think of that as something I had to do.

It was just something I wanted to do.

I was enjoying writing and I was a bit lucky.

I still kept a casual job at a help desk at the University of Queensland while I

was making money from my other businesses.

But I don't know, I didn't have a lot of places to go to, so it was a

great job, paid well, I kept at it.

But the best thing about it was I got to sit in front of a computer for long

periods of time and I'd actually use that time to moonlight by writing my blog.

And I just had these stories in my head and I want to get them out.

I, I had this magic site, which I had started from scratch.

So I talked about how I built it, how I got traffic to it.

I had this English school and I talked about how I got office space for it.

And then I started this proofreading business and I talked about how I was

learning about customer service and learning about marketing with posters

and whatever I was interested in, it was purely a passion based subject

because I was loving entrepreneurship.

I was still.

I guess lost a little bit in terms of not sure where a stable income source

would come from and I didn't love my businesses, like all aspects of it.

I like parts of it, but I didn't like until I hit blogging and teaching.

I found that I wasn't really hitting all the things I wanted to do with an

online business, but As a blogger, I was sitting there every day, telling a

story, 1, 000 to 2, 000 words, roughly.

And I kept that up for probably the first year.

Maybe not every day.

I might have had weekends off, I think.

But pretty much, probably more so because I didn't have much of

a life as well outside of that.

Writing my blog was a bit of a highlight for my day, I think.

And one of the biggest areas I could socialize, ironically

enough, because it was online and sharing with people that way.

Yeah, that's really

interesting.

So you talk about, you didn't have a clear monetization strategy.

How did it come about that this become your full time earner?

And did he follow like a particular path, like a, for me, I would

think a traditional path would be something like an AdSense into

your own products and away you go.

What's what sort of path did you follow?

Yeah, you're right.

I definitely saw AdSense as the way to go about it because pro blogger

Darren Rouse had just posted up his 15, 000 ish AdSense check from his

photography blog on his church blog.

So that was impressive and he was the first person to really

publicly talk about making money with blogging on a public scale.

There were other people doing it but not talking about it.

And I'd also had my previous experience, I'd run this Magic cards

website, which I'd made money from selling banners directly to sponsors.

I had an email list through the forum, so I had made money sending

advertisements out through the email list.

And of course I had the e commerce store as well as a way to make money.

And the forum also was a place where people bought and sold cards

and I could sell cards there too.

So I got how websites could make money.

Blogging was a bit different because it was a content based medium.

Use this new format called a blog.

So I first had to learn what made blogging different to running

just the standard website.

So once I got my head around that, I really did start to read a lot about

other people making money with blogs.

And in general, actually that's when I started to also read

about internet marketing.

So I started studying.

It's funny.

It was two groups of people that Turned out to be very distinct groups

of people that I actually ended up being like a mix of the two.

And when I say two groups, bloggers and internet marketers.

So people who write blogs and put up ads and that's what they do.

And then you have internet marketers who grow email lists

and promote affiliate products.

And it's all about getting people onto that subscription.

And it seemed to me that these two groups really didn't talk

to each other at the time.

They didn't.

Direct response email marketers really didn't do any sort of ongoing

content creation in a blog, maybe in a newsletter, but really they

didn't have a presence beyond that.

And bloggers were like these content machines who were just putting

out so much stuff, but not getting nearly as much return on investment

compared to an email marketer.

Cause like an email marketer could send 1 email for a promotion and make 10 back.

Where a blogger would spend the entire six months period writing,

20, 30, 40, 50 posts a month over six months to make half of that money.

So I was like I wasn't sure, which is the right path, but I was enjoying

blogging and I started to mix the two.

And that's why I did eventually start a newsletter after a year of blogging.

But to answer your question, AdSense.

Just didn't work for me, so I tried that first, and I made

about a dollar a day at best.

This is when I really did start to look more at the internet marketers, and

I started affiliate marketing next.

And initially, that kind of bombed as well, but it slowly started to work a

little bit, and I saw the potential.

If I increased my traffic, then I could make more money.

For example, my first ever affiliate promotion was for Perry Marshalls.

Package, which included the definitive guide to Google AdWords and a

bunch of CDs and things like that.

It was like a 25 product.

I get, I think, 20 commission.

Actually, probably like a 40 product and I get 20 commission.

And I wrote a blog post promoting it, saying it's a great offer.

Harry's stuff is amazing.

I published it and I went to bed and I expected to wake up

with, 600 in my PayPal account.

Or at least in emails telling me I made money.

When I woke up to zero, so I got a bit disheartened from the potential

to make money with blogging and, to be fair, I only had maybe 3 to 400

daily visitors, but still, that's hard even to get up to that level.

I only ever reached about 500 daily visitors with my magic site.

Starting to get close to that number again with my blog and I was disheartened, but

I decided, you know what, I'm enjoying blogging for the fun of blogging.

And a sale came through two days later.

I got my 20 commission email came through and I was like Okay, this is working.

And then another sale came through and another sale.

I think I ended up making four or five sales from that one blog post.

And then I did the math.

So I thought, okay, if I can make four or five sales from this one blog

post with three to four hundred daily readers, what if I have a thousand daily

readers or two thousand daily readers?

Does my income double, triple from each of these promotions?

And that's what happened.

I just kept working, kept growing my audience, started

to test more affiliate offers.

And there was a period actually where I remember I was out playing pitch

and put golf with some friends and I had a blackberry and it was the first

time I ever had email on my phone and by that stage I had more money coming

from affiliate marketing I still hadn't released any of my own products on

my blog but I was doing better with affiliate stuff and Perry had this

offer that was for a an event that he was charging two thousand dollars for

and he was giving away a laptop because I think he was having trouble selling

tickets so he basically got a free mac.

But pro or something if you join his event for two thousand dollars and a commission

as an affiliate was like seven hundred dollars us and back then you know as an

australian seven hundred dollars us when we're talking five or six years ago was

probably about a thousand dollars when it was converted so it's a one one sale

i get a thousand dollars which is huge because i could have to work a job for

two weeks to make that kind of money.

And I remember sitting there with my Blackberry and this email comes

through and it said you'd made a sale and it was for one of these

tickets and it was 700 and I was like.

I'm living the dream i'm playing golf with my blackberry getting an email saying i

just made seven hundred dollars when i wasn't doing any work for it i think that

was probably still is the most single exciting moment i've ever had an internet

marketing because you get a little bit.

Maybe I don't want to say used to it, but you get a little bit more

numb to it because the first time it happens, it's wow, this is amazing.

It actually works.

And then it starts happening more often and more frequently

and you get blase about it.

You really shouldn't.

It's an absolute gift to go to make money this way.

But that led to, really going down the blogging path.

And I did eventually create product as well as I don't know if you want

to talk about that, but certainly affiliate marketing and not AdSense.

Still don't use AdSense, but I did start selling advertising directly to

sponsors using banners and text links.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

And for me, what resonates are these two camps, the bloggers and the internet

marketers, because I've followed both camps relatively closely because I

enjoy both camps and it's almost like now we're seeing these guys on each

side of the coin coming together.

And it's almost like everybody realizes that the bloggers are probably writing

that content is king and bloggers are realizing, oh, okay, these guys

over an internet marketing space are right in that you need to look at what

you're doing as a business and focus on these other things, which they

potentially weren't in a few years

ago.

Yeah, the internet marketers are a lot better at making money.

I think, no offense to bloggers, but bloggers work a lot harder and

get a lot less in return most of the time, as a, a generalization,

certainly in my experience.

And internet marketers do better because they're just better at conversion.

They just know how to make a sale and they go for things that have a higher return

on investment like create a product and sell it for a thousand dollars and you

know you make your hundred sales and you just made a hundred thousand dollars where

a blogger will sit and spend the entire year writing an article a day, never

creating a product, never even necessarily doing an email list and just hoping to

make enough money from AdSense and maybe make, 20 grand at the end of a year.

So there's an opportunity for both to learn from each other, I think,

and that's what I tried to do.

I've never been the highest trafficked blog in my space.

I have a good personal brand and I got a lot of people talking about me, but

it's never been, I've never had a site that's had 5000 visitors a day even with

my blog, but I've been able to really Take what internet marketing's taught

me and build an information product business around my nice little core group

of followers and because of that, turn over a million dollars over a few years

where I don't think most bloggers with the kind of traffic I had would even get

close to that because they wouldn't have the email list, they wouldn't create

the products, they wouldn't do product launches, they wouldn't have affiliates

promoting their stuff, all that extra layers that you put into effort as an

internet marketer, not as a blogger.

But certainly the lines are getting blurred because yeah, like you said,

finally, internet marketers and bloggers are it's funny, internet marketers need

to learn from the content creating world because I think it's certainly in our

space in making money online topics and blogging for profit topics and

anything to do with that sort of space.

There's a, it's a very mature customer, so they're very used to the launch formula.

They're, they want more for.

Their attention nowadays.

So you can't really use what internet marketing used to use

with just one email saying here.

This is a great product.

Click here and buy it.

And you get the commission just because you signed up with someone onto an email.

Now there's a lot of distrust.

There's a lot of jadedness and what bloggers are great

at doing is building trust.

And that's why they make the sale because they've And they spend all

this time building a relationship and they have the trust, but they just

don't get the conversion as well.

So if you can mix those two, which and I've always been teaching people then

yeah, it can work out really well.

Yeah, that

really, it is very interesting because that is one thing that I see,

the internet marketers are all about traffic and as you say, conversions,

but they're not building bloggers are.

Pretty much the opposite.

They focus on building this relationship with their readers and have almost

in the past forgotten about trying to sell them something or feel like

they can't sell them something.

So yeah, I think it's really amazing.

And it's an interesting time for us right now.

So what does brand Yarrow.

Right now entail what does it look

like you caught me at an interesting time actually jake i've been

working i was in maintaining my block that's something that i never stopped

doing i like to blog i like to do podcast interviews like we're doing now i'm just

recently i've added more video to what i'm doing i'm definitely trying to get all

three formats of written audio and visual content happening on a regular basis my

grand plan from the blogging information publishing side of the fences to.

Really practice what I preach this year and build a proper sales funnel and

by that I mean have a product suite that targets the main things that I

know my customers need help with and I always have something of my own.

That's a value that I can recommend and have a front end series of products

in a back end series of products and then link all that together with

a an effective marketing system.

Yeah, Which starts with a really great blog at the front end, which gets them

onto a really great newsletter with a really great free report, all great free

information, building trust relationships.

So I have a lot of that built, but I haven't got all of it done.

So that's what I'm doing a lot right now behind the scenes while maintaining

my value that I give to people.

So doing all that content creation, but I've also spent the last about

two years now working on a software startup, which was a completely

different experience for me.

I Just basically two years ago, I said, you know what, I've had enough

of being an information marketer.

I want to have a startup.

I want to do something that could be potentially much larger

than just me teaching and it's obviously like the dot com boom 2.

0 at the moment, a little bit with maybe not all the false dreams and

hopes and companies that don't make money, but certainly a lot of investment

money, a lot of talk about it.

And the crows are talking to the, okay.

So to start a software company was something I wanted to do

and I got a couple of partners.

One's a developer and one's a designer and we created this thing called

cranky ads, which is an advertising management system for bloggers.

So I'm staying in my space.

So though we are opening it up to all website owners as well.

It's basically something I've wanted for my own blog for a long time.

A simple tool to rotate.

Banner ads, text link ads and video ads and hopefully soon sponsored

reviews as well, but really make it simple to use and have a few strong

marketing psychology pieces in there.

Like the way I sell ads and I have sold ads on my site since the very early days.

That first magic site was.

Primarily making money from banner ads and that's 10 years ago plus now so

actually 13 years ago now to be actually honest so i've always had advertising as

an income source so having this tool is very synergistic with what i've done over

the years so that's working on the side.

I had some problems with that, it's a whole new experience.

It's a lot hard to make it work because software development is a

lot difficult compared to writing an article or producing a course.

It's something I can't do, I can't program and it just takes a lot more work than

I thought to get something out the door.

Like we're about to reach, I think in the next sort of six months, we will reach

the point in Cranky Ads development that I thought we'd be at about six months.

Eighteen months ago, so it's a bit of a development lag there and that there's all

kinds of reasons and a huge back story.

I could tell you about that, that's probably a separate interview

altogether, but personally, I'm spending a lot of time building out

my information product funnel and just getting my stuff out the door again.

I got my blog mastermind course and how to make money.

Blogging has been closed for 18 months because it needs to be redone.

I've got a membership site training program.

Same story.

I'm trying to get that.

Out the door again and a current, so I just want all of this to

be built on a solid foundation.

I, one of the things that I've trying not to do this time is be launch

based because a lot of my marketing in the past was all about 2 weeks of

excitement and releasing great free information and having affiliates

promote me and then here's my course.

It's only open for a couple of weeks, then close it down and that's

brilliant like Jeff Walker and his product launch formula that it's.

Really a great marketing system and it's a great way to make a lot of sales

quickly which i've done now probably ten to fifteen times through opening campaigns

and closing campaigns and reopening campaigns and specials and deals and so

on and so forth but i don't want to be.

And it's not a great way to run a sustainable business because you have to

always be creating and doing launches.

So I'm trying to build something a bit actually closer to an ebony pagan system.

Like he's got his double your dating david de angelo product or rich chef friend

with his strategic profits and he's got.

Webinars that go automatically so once the parks created once the sales

funnels built your job is just to get new leads and if you ask me what's my

goal here in terms of the big dream is i want to do what i do already sitting

cafes and live the laptop lifestyle write articles do interviews just have

fun creating content knowing that.

When I do, so the machine behind my content is really a well

converting machine and I've got valuable products that help people.

I make sales, I make money.

It's just all about me producing more content to make it work.

And that, that I like.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And that's what I personally noticed this and I guess in a very basic

way, trying to implement it myself.

And it seems to be that the product launched.

It's almost like you've got this really small funnel, which are trying

to funnel all these traffic into and coming in this, there's only

one entry point into the funnel.

And then at the backend is the upsells or whatever, but it

now seems to be a lot broader.

It's almost like you've got different points in the funnel customers

can enter when they're ready.

And that seems to be, to me, it seems to be.

A lot better way to do it because you're not burning customers out as quick or

you're not burning them out as all because you're offering them value and you're

not forcing them to make a decision when they're not ready to make a decision.

I never met a really good point when you talked about launches

and he said there's no better brand or company or even personal brand.

Launching tool creation tool like if you want to say hello i've arrived this is

what i'm a specialist that this is what people trust me and enter the marketplace

with a big hello and make a lot of money make a lot of sales and do that if you

wanted to have an ongoing sustainable business you have to move beyond launches

and come up with basically something with the numbers work so you can always go out

there and even buy traffic at a dollar per lead knowing you'll make a dollar ten.

On the back end through the system, so you know your numbers, you've

got everything lined up and working well, but the launch process like

I have to give it a lot of credit.

I think most people who know me is because I wrote the blog profits blueprint.

The reason why they got in touch with the blog profits blueprint

was because I did a launch.

Which included at the time, we are going back to 2007, six years ago, it had

Darren Rouse, pro blogger, recommending it, and John Chow recommending it, it had

Brian Clark from Copyblogger recommending it, it had all the names, the biggest

names at the time in the blogging space, as well as a few internet marketers

Jeff Walker eventually promoted me and so did Rich and a few others, and

lots of affiliates, it has been great.

And.

They helped to put my name as a guy who teaches people how to make money

blogging out there now it's harder to do that now because it is more of us be

people are more hesitant to promote the launches because like you said there's

a burnout effect you don't want to basically ruin all your relationships by

just promoting stuff after stuff which some people still do but most bloggers

won't do that they don't want to do that.

And most bloggers finally, certainly the people I just mentioned there, Brian

Clark and Darren Rouse and John Chow, they've all got their own products now.

They promote their own stuff.

It's, why not?

It makes sense.

They get to keep 100%.

It's they're in control of the product.

There's no risk about customer service because they control it all.

In a lot of ways, everyone's caught up with the internet marketing

world and the product creation world and they've got big businesses.

Brian Clark's got a huge business behind Copyblogger now.

All of his plugins and SEO services and hosting and WordPress

themes and everything like that.

And yeah, it's like I couldn't get Brian to recommend the Blueprint now.

Unless we were really close buddies hanging out every

weekend, it's not going to happen.

You do have to find different ways to launch yourself into a market.

But it's still possible.

Look at Pat Flynn.

He's a guy who came not by doing a launch, just by working hard through blogging,

through podcasting, through video.

Really finding, I think, a resonance with where a lot of people are at.

Choosing the best keyword you can ever think of, passive income online.

If I had my chance again, I would not name my blog Entrepreneur's Journey.

Pat nailed it.

He puts passive income in it.

And just obviously being a genuine nice guy, which is

resonating with a lot of people.

But also doing some really good.

Experiments that show people how he's making money and that's always worked.

Case studies have always been effective and through a combination of, I think,

just consistent exposure through multiple channels, like being interviewed on

podcasts, getting invited to talk at events, he slowly built up the name and

the brand and he's done in two years what one launch would potentially do for you.

But, it's just as effective and perhaps more sustainable long term as well.

He's got a lot of people who will just follow Pat regardless of what he does.

And he doesn't need to launch a great product.

In fact, he doesn't even really have his own product.

He's the guy who bucks the trend in a lot of ways.

But it does show that it's possible.

But I still think melding the two worlds is the best way to go.

I'm not against launches.

I love what Pat does.

But I also think For a lot of people, it's not accessible to, to get his result.

They just won't replicate that.

So you do need to get better at your marketing, especially because you're

going to be working with smaller numbers.

So if you don't have as big numbers and you don't have the exposure,

you need a tighter message, you need better marketing, you need

to launch techniques and you need direct response marketing techniques.

But yeah, I think we've I've gone off track a little bit here.

No,

this is good though.

I think it's all very valuable and yeah, I totally agree with

everything you've just said there.

Yeah, exactly right.

Now, why don't we continue down this path about how you go about

building this great marketing funnel?

And I guess it's a phrase that you've coined recently, blog content 2.

0.

What is this?

I've been a teacher of a good blog writing since the early days

and I coined the phrase pillar content and to my surprise, it caught on as a great

way to describe what you can hope is an outcome from writing blog content or any

kind of blog content you produce and.

It's changed since i did the initial coining of that phrase in two thousand

and seven the outcome from it hasn't changed i should really be to actually

correct the term it hasn't changed because when you do something that

creates a pillar event all that means you get an influx of readers you get

a lot of people sharing your content.

Back in the day, they might have shared it through email and through posting

on their blog, where today they do it by liking it on Facebook and sharing

it by retweeting it and adding it to their Pinterest or putting it on stumble

upon whatever, the tools they use.

So the tools have changed, but the outcomes haven't.

Plus, of course, you've still got the power of Google

and getting search results.

So the more people who share.

And the more links that come in, the more likely that content will rank

well and have long term traffic.

That was really the two goals with the pillar, a rush of traffic to your

blog content and long term stable.

Not quite as big as that initial rush of course, but hopefully, 10, whatever it

is, visitors per day will keep coming from search to that article and then, interact

with your blog, join your list, etc.

So for me I've been writing about writing, teaching the meta, how to do

good blog content was one of my subjects.

And I felt that it needed to be updated.

Like for me, I think we all know what our options are for content creation.

We hear it every day.

Create a podcast, do YouTube videos, write great blog articles with lots

of pictures, put a lot of research into them understand your audience.

So you're getting the exact subjects that they want and combine all those mediums

into one piece of content where back in the day, you could write a 700 word

article with six dot points, publish it.

It would get shared across a bunch of sites.

As soon as you hit the front page of life hacker or tech crunch or whatever,

you've just suddenly got, or back in the day it was dig, you just get 10,

000 visitors and away you go, that's.

That was like a launch for a lot of blogs.

I think John Chow got his start by really gaming dig in a lot of ways.

That's not the same.

It's not as easy.

It's not as multimedia as it seems to be required today.

That being said, in certain markets it's always going to

be the value of the content.

The medium is it's the magnifier.

If you have a great idea, the idea itself is what sells.

But if you do release that idea through video, through audio, and through text,

then you hit all modalities of learning.

So you can reach more people.

And that's been actually my own experience.

It's been interesting for me.

I've increased video.

That's the one area where I've been doing more than what I used to do.

I've always done writing and I've always done podcasts, but videos increased.

And I have had people who watch these videos and they're not like, most

of my videos are me talking in front of the camera for five minutes, just

about whatever I've done that day.

It's not high production value.

It's record upload done, but people.

Who don't read my blog who don't listen to my podcast are watching the videos because

they're video people and they leave comments on the video that you too, they,

I have conversations where they say, yeah, I was watching your videos and I realized

I'm tapping into a third channel there that I really didn't have before, which

certainly is exposed me to new audiences.

So as a content creator, you've got all these options and I

want to be careful here because the concept of blog content 2.

0 just means that you're.

Providing more value through more mediums, and I don't want people

to think that they have to master all these mediums straight away.

In fact, I think if anything, the biggest lesson that I

think compared to the old days.

Writing five times a week, getting something out the door

was the most important thing.

That's still the most important thing if you're a news blog.

Most people I think listen to this won't be news bloggers, they'll be a

specialist at a certain subject area, so they're trying to establish their

brand, build up a nice following of what I I don't, I didn't coin the

phrase, the 1, 000 true fans or the tribe, Seth Godin from, for tribe and R.

Kelly for 1, 000 true fans.

And That's not a lot of people, but they have to be really focused evangelists

for you and what you stand for and what you do and what you produce and

obviously buy everything you do produce.

That's how you make your money from your business.

So in order to get that sort of following, it's actually more effective if you.

Touch them really powerfully once or twice with your content, even if you

just do it once or twice in a month.

So I think the way blog content is changing and where I would teach now is

don't necessarily do it five times a week if you can't, like we have to factor in

people's lives into the equation here.

It's just not realistic for some people, but if you do produce content,

let's say once a week, make that once a week article really kick ass.

So put the video in as well.

Convert it to an audio file, write 2000 words instead of 700, put in

some amazing pictures I recently wrote an article on blog content 2.

0 and I pointed out some formulas, you can use what are they called

Those graphics infographics, yeah, so there's really long pictures of, they

explain an idea often statistically, or they visually present an idea, and

one I recently republished was the one on how sitting down can kill you,

and there's been all this research into that, and there's a very long

infograph about all the factors of that, so that's something that's been

shared a lot, so you can do things like infographs, you can do things like that.

Thank you.

You can do entire video series, five videos to cover a topic in one blog post.

That's a lot of work, but that blog post will more likely hit a lot of people,

especially if it's a fundamental subject, like how to do something that's really

important in your market using audio.

I think like you're doing this podcast, and I think the people who are really

going to do well in the future, I think david siteman garland is a good

example of this with this rise to the top podcast, which is one of the

most successful ones at the moment he's had success because he decided

to do daily or at least he was daily.

He decided to do video interviews not just audio like i'm you and i doing audio

right now i've always done audio but he's prepared to sit in front of the camera and

get someone face to face which is slightly better plus he releases it as audio as

video in two different streams and itunes.

As well as obviously having a transcript and it's hitting every single medium

there, so you have the text people, the video people, and the audio people,

the portable people, the people who want to sit in front of your computer,

the iTunes subscribers, the RSS subscribers through blog content.

You're just giving yourself the chance to reach everyone.

These sorts of ways to augment.

Just what you do when you produce good ideas is how you can really have more

of an impact on the world, but you don't have to do it as frequently.

That's really the message here.

Better value, less frequently Tim Ferriss, one of the best examples, his

blog, it's sometimes updated once a month, but man, when he publishes a blog

post, it's always wow, that's really 5000 words long, or a mini documentary

sort of video or something like that.

But yeah.

It's really engaging and interesting stuff and he's got probably more traffic

than 99% of all blogs on the internet has, but he doesn't write every day.

He's not a TechCrunch or a Mashable or, Verge or whatever, these media sites are.

He's just an individual who has a great following because of

his books, but, I don't know.

The blog is not updated frequently.

Of course, there's always the counterintuitive person like Seth

Godin, who writes, what is it, 100 words for blog post every now and then.

And he's massive, but that's because he's massive from all

the book writing he's done.

So everything has a combination of things that result in an outcome.

And you have to figure out what works for you, what works for your lifestyle

What works for the way you produce content and build that platform.

And I think for most people, that goal of 1000 true fans is really

the most important thing to look out for and try and reach that point.

Cause then you can have a full time income from your online business.

And that's the most important thing.

Yeah, definitely.

It

really is.

It's so interesting, the different strategies you can take and Seth,

just from the sheer volume that he puts out means that he's going

to be producing amazing stuff.

But I reckon probably 50% of the stuff he does put out isn't

fantastic, but because it's.

I'm such a regular schedule you almost forget about it because you got a

new piece to focus on the next day

and it's him i mean yeah you know if the some guy with no reputation

posted these little smart ideas every day they're not going to reach that

many people and certainly not short term maybe eventually but he built a platform

through books that's the thing that everyone has a breakthrough mechanism

some people use books some people use a tv some people use live events.

Talk about events, some people get it through other people like for

example, I just listened to Pat's recent interview and he gives credit

to my interview with him as his flashpoint for putting him on the map.

And I certainly think for me that my flashpoint was the release of the

blog prophets blueprint and having all these other bloggers talk about me.

And that was six years ago.

So everyone arrived somehow.

And then people pay more attention to you.

That's the important part.

Why are people paying attention to you?

And then you get to play around with the different formats and find

something that suits your style.

In Seth's case, 50 words a day.

It's all you need.

All right,

Let's shift gear a little bit.

And let's go back to the platform you're using to be able to build your funnel.

I'm really interested in the systems that run a business, and I recently

saw that you've posted about you moving from Aweber across to Office Autopilot.

How did you learn that?

So that was in a video, wasn't it?

It was.

Yeah, so why did you decide to move from just a traditional email broadcast

and autoresponder system to something more complex like Office Autopilot?

Before I answer that question, I'm curious about, Jake,

do you read blog posts or do you?

Mostly do read, watch videos or listen to podcasts.

It's

personally, my consumption time is while I'm

driving, I drive 40 minutes each way into work five days a week.

So that's the best time for me to consume.

I can't work and listen at the same time.

I tend to zone out of what's in the background and focus on work.

And video is the same thing.

I need to have 100% focus.

So for me, audio is.

Probably my best mode for learning because I can actually be doing something and

listen, have a good decent block of time where I can tune in and listen to what's

going on.

So my YouTube video where I talked about moving to Office Autopilot, was that

just playing the audio somewhere in the background while you were driving?

No, that's quite interesting and I think the different forms of

media are best in different formats and your videos, James Shremko's videos,

are small enough you can consume them.

In a 10 minute break somewhere here and there throughout the day.

So that's generally where I'll consume it on YouTube, subscribe to

a number of people on YouTube and I'll two or three times a day, just

head across there and watch something else if there's something new.

Interesting.

No, I do very interesting.

Yeah.

I find the different modalities cause I can't stand watching videos

most of the time, like it's so slow.

I want to fast forward, but they don't have the technology

to make that easy to do yet.

But anyway I just.

Just trying to make the point I guess that you do hit people like I would have not

touched you with that content video last year because I wasn't doing it and it does

surprise me how often you underestimate the people that are ignoring you because

you fail to transcribe your podcast as an example or you're like most people is

what I'm not doing right now but I want to is I want to get an audio version of

every blog post I write and get it into iTunes and get it as a video in YouTube.

Which shouldn't be that hard to do.

I'm working on that at the moment to develop a system to

get that happening automatically.

Very much profit hacks from Pete Williams and Rich Jeffrin.

But anyway, to go back to your question, Jake the switch.

Yes, like you said, I am moving from AWeber, which has been my email

autoresponder for the last eight years.

Something like that.

It's a scary move because it's been my main income source for that time too.

I have most of my money comes from my list.

So the reason why I decided to move to office autopilot is because I'm

building that sales funnel like I told you about earlier in the interview.

So if I want to do more advanced things, for example, really have some structured

tunnels for people to go through.

So As an example, my front end will be, join my newsletter,

get my blog profits blueprint.

It flags people as interested in making money with blogs.

That's my main positioning strategy.

That's my best subject to teach on.

I've got the most experience.

It makes sense.

I can help those people the most and it's a popular way to make money.

So it's meeting a need as well.

Then when people come into my funnel, I want to have tunnels that

branch out depending where they are.

So I will be having a basically an entry level ebook on mindset and productivity

because I think that's the first area where people usually go wrong.

We'd stop some succeeding and everything else they do from that point forward.

So I want to promote that first whether or not they buy, I

don't know, but it'll be there.

And then I want to have, I will have a guide on buying and selling blogs and

websites because again, at the entry point of this, you either decide to

build a site from scratch yourself if you're new or if you've got a little bit

of cash available, speed up the process by buying a blog or buying a website.

So I want that option to be made available and I have content on that

subject and I've done it myself in the past so I can teach that area.

Then often what happens is once you've got your blog, whether

you bought it or you create it yourself, the next issue is traffic.

So I've got an intro introductory guide on building traffic to blog.

So all those are my front end guidebooks and each of those will have a follow

up sequence if they buy that product.

And I've also got a subscription.

Club i'm on the back end is an upsell to each of those products now one of the

wonderful things but office autopilot is being able to tag people based on actions

they take it to the granular level like if they click a link in this email move

them from this list to this list even if they click this link on your website

move them from this list to this list or add them to this another list one of the

best examples i can think of that i'd really like to do is because i have a.

A training product on how to make money with blogs, but also a training product on

how to make money with membership sites.

I'm not known as a membership site trainer, but I've done a couple

of those and I've got a product that's got some good stuff in it.

But I don't want to be promoting.

Membership site training to people interested in making money from blocks.

So what will make sense is that in my sequence at some point it's it'll be

like click here to download my guide on how to make money with membership

sites and that'll then flag them as a person interested in membership

sites and i can have them go on to.

And you follow up sequence on that subject telling them my membership site product

so this is a lot of control like if you actually get to play around with office

autopilot there's a lot of different things you can do especially with the

if then actions not just moving from one list to another but you can also have

them get sent a postcard in the mail.

You can have them get moved to a different type of membership sites because it's

integrated with membership sites as well.

And I'm talking like in hypothetical speak as well, because I haven't

built most of these features yet.

I am very much at the transition point where I've just moved all my contacts

from a webber into office autopilot.

And in fact, today I'll be sending my first ever.

Large broadcast using Office Autopilot instead of a Weber, so it's a pretty

big, pretty monumentous day in terms of testing Office Autopilot and seeing

how if I get the same response in terms of my emails being opened and my emails

being clicked and things like that.

So I'm excited to do that.

But what I'm really excited about is it is an all in one solution.

If it can do what it claims it can do.

I won't need to use anything else other than Office Autopilot for my

email, for my shopping cart, for my affiliate system, for sending direct

postcards in the mail, which is something I'm not done, but I would

like to do more of that sort of thing.

For drip feeding content through a membership site, there's two plugins

that work directly with WordPress, so I'm already a WordPress user.

Theoretically, it should handle my entire information product business.

And I have high hopes, because I know For example, Marie Forleo and Eben Pagan, and

I just saw recently Frank Kern is using as well as a lot of people who seem to

have decided to go with it as opposed to maybe Infusionsoft, which was like the

next level up for most people from Aweber.

They almost always would switch to Infusionsoft, but.

So many people struggled with it, like they just find it too confusing, and I

didn't even bother looking at it for that reason, because I knew if these people

were struggling it's going to be too hard for me as a one man sort of operation,

because I I don't want to be the person that's doing all the work, I want to know

how my system works at least, so that when you lose a person or something like

that, you can go in there and, fix things in emergencies and things like that.

So far, from what I've been working with Office Autopilot,

I get it, I understand it.

So that's a really good sign.

I can see how I can use it.

So it's nice to be in a position right now where I see this sort

of castle that I have to build this year and the tools are there.

It's just a case of sitting down and building everything step by

step, making sure it all works.

And hopefully by the end of 12 months time from now next year.

If someone comes to my blog or any of my landing pages and opt into my newsletter,

there will be a sequence of messages and a sequence of products that's optimized

and delivers a lot of value, converts really well, makes a lot of money, and

I can just sit and write articles and do interviews and reach more people

knowing that They will enter that system and the machine will deliver the value.

Yeah, definitely.

I, and what really excites me about these marketing automation tools is

that in essentially the same way that you can add people to funnels into

sales funnels, you can actually remove people based on their non actions and

put them back into a nurture funnel.

They're not ready to buy it because they're not showing

interest in the clicks.

So you can put them back into a more of a nurture funnel,

deliver extra awesome content.

And then when the time comes where they are showing interest, they can.

Pop them back across into one of the ad

sales funnels.

I really some of this is so laborious to set it all up, but what you can do

with office autopilot is if they opt into the newsletter, but never click

the link to go download the actual resource you give them, you can have

them move to a list that then says, why haven't you downloaded the resource yet?

So you've got.

So many granular levels of response that you could like if you really got

good at this every single action if it's not taken you could have a reminder

series to go what are you doing why aren't you acting on this so you can

try and keep people more active than otherwise like i've certainly been

slack in the past my email sequence has been here's some content here's some

content here's some content not really.

Sort of caring whether they click the links.

I look at the numbers, but I haven't been proactively trying to improve them.

Yeah, it's really

interesting.

It's obviously literally taken a plunge a few weeks going into Infusionsoft.

So I'm enjoying the exact same thing that you're talking about here.

So it's

You obviously haven't found it too confusing then.

No, I haven't.

The learning curve was initially, it felt steep, but three or four weeks into

using the software, I probably liken the learning curve to that of WordPress.

Nice.

They just raised some funds.

So I'm sure they're, anyone who complains about things, they're well aware of it.

And I know that's been the biggest complaint people have had, they

call it confusion soft for a reason.

But yeah, I expect.

People will get a better and better user experience with it over time now.

Yeah, we better move on from this subject.

So I'm sure we're boring our listeners.

It's a mad scientist side of the marketing and I really enjoy

it, but it's not for everybody.

All right.

Yeah.

We've been going for close to 50 minutes now, so I really appreciate

you taking the time you have.

So you're setting up your funnels again.

Where do you see blogging going into the future?

It depends on your goals.

I think, blogs will always be multimedia and not say multimedia, but the new media

source for the big sites, but that's.

Not really relevant for most of us i don't think most of us want to start a

new tech crunch or whatever it is in your industry it's possible i love the case

study from one of my friends with his card vice blog here in australia which was

one guy just writing articles about cars.

And now it's a team of 20 and a whole writing team, and they're covering every

news event they get flown into Europe.

It's worth 20 million dollars.

It's a magazine online.

And that's amazing, and that's a possibility.

I've got a couple of examples of people I've worked with

who've reached that point.

And that's huge.

It doesn't work for most people though, because getting to that

level of traffic is very difficult, especially as an individual.

You ramping up your content creation if you follow that model.

So I think for most people, if you're interested in making money

with blogging, getting better at internet marketing is so important.

You really do need to get more from fewer people because you're not going to have

tens of thousands of daily visitors.

You need to be able to make a living off of your 1000.

Daily visitors and, build the newsletter, build a funnel behind it.

That converts, find out where your best point of leverage is,

where you provide the most value and then go deep in that area.

Too many bloggers, I think, follow that formula of just produce more and get

more eyeballs and I'll make more money from advertising or I'll make more

money from selling affiliate products.

But if you actually build a funnel behind it.

Your visitor values much greater, like a blogger who has a thousand readers

who just has advertising affiliate income, they're often making 20 cents

on average per user, where if they turn that to an information product

business with a series of products.

It gets into the multiple dollars per visitor instead because one person buys

a 20 ebook then goes on to a 50 a month subscription and then maybe if they're

really an ultra responsive dedicated 1000 true fan type person, they're going to

buy your 500 course and attend your 2, 000 live event if you go down that path.

And that's the difference between making an okay income from a blog to

you're now making six figures, multiple six figures, even seven figures.

And that's, I think an outcome for anyone who's interested in

making money from a blog, if they can really learn all these steps.

And most of it just comes down to making sure you understand what market you're

going after, getting your positioning really right, getting the problem

and understanding it really well.

Then going through a process that all of us have to go through of slowly building

the platform that can make you money.

I think in the future, just as today is the future for me compared to six

years ago, and I started blogging or I started blogging about eight years ago,

but when I started making money from it and seeing the ways to make money back

then, the fundamentals didn't change.

It's still about audience attention, still about conversion points and selling

things, the tools we use to reach.

People and the tools we use to analyze those things, the conversion

points, they've changed, they've increased the social media.

There's really good metrics tools.

There's really good shopping carts and customer relationship management tools.

Like we talked about this before, there's new blogging tools and it's really

possible to reach so many more people now because there's so many people online.

But if you don't get the fundamentals right, it doesn't really matter.

You're not making any money from it and you're not reaching any people.

So you learn the fundamentals.

And then decide which of the tools you want to use.

If new tools come along, you can decide to use them.

Like I decided to use Twitter and Facebook, but I decided to pretty much

ignore LinkedIn and stumble upon, but some people love LinkedIn and stumble upon.

So it's up to you how you use what you use.

Just get the fundamentals, right?

That's a fantastic summary of it all.

All right, Yarrow, thanks very much for coming on.

Where can our listeners find out more about you?

I

tell people to Google my name, Y A R O, because it's

easy to remember and I'm trying to be like Oprah and Madonna.

My actual website is entrepreneurs journey.

com, but that word entrepreneur tends to throw people.

So if you just remember Yarrow, Y A R O, you'll find everything, my

blog, my YouTube channel, my podcast, just by looking around for my name.

That's brilliant.

Yara, thank you very much for coming on the episode.

You've shared with our listeners a whole heap of really awesome

content and I really appreciate that.

Thank you very much for having me, Jake.

I've enjoyed the chat and I hope everyone got something from it and can

go out there and make some money from whatever they're doing with blogs.