32 Internet Marketing Questions

Key Takeaways

welcome to our YouTube live I'm Jim and this is Ricky and we're gonna do 30 to internet marketing questions forgive the lighting and quality and stuff it's YouTube life first question Ricky how do you keep track of your family budget I use every dollar calm this is a Dave Ramsey tool it's free just use the free version the only thing is you just have to be disciplined enough to actually put in every transaction I just spend probably a total of an hour a month plug into my transactions and it all right Jim how many hours a day do you work it depends you know full-time internet marketers we're obviously selling setting our own schedule um some days I work at normal eight hours I kind of shoot for that but some days like I just want to spend time with family and so I just won't get anything done and then at night all get some work done and some days I'm working like a 14-hour day we're working on something and I've got to get it done in them up till midnight a question from Nick Murphy on YouTube you have 17,000 subscribers on YouTube how much money do you earn from that from YouTube directly just under a thousand dollars a month from our views it wouldn't be worth it if we weren't also using that to drive traffic to our own information products and stuff so that's where the real value of YouTube comes in Jim what is your favorite book how do ends and influence people what's your favorite WordPress plugin I am really liking Imagi PHY it reduces the file size and optimizes all of our images without making them look crummy speeds up the site quite a bit Jim what is your favorite video YouTube video that we have mean the one where I pulled you binds the truck on old not a tricycles your kid your son's bike that was just hilarious yeah alright next question what movie could you watch over and over again I don't rewatch very many movies probably the movie that ivory watched for the most or movies is the the Bourne movies I don't know just kind of an action guy Jim question from Ashish how would you go about earning a full-time living from Adsense I hope this isn't cheating but I wouldn't I have ad since I you can make it work well but I've always found something that's a little bit better for monetization so I'll kind of change your question a little bit how would I earn a living just from ads on a website which is a great way to go ads had revenues just keep going what I would do is I would look for the type of website that has low competition because there aren't many products to recommend if there's if it's very product focused something that people are going to do you know Amazon affiliate sites there's gonna be a lot more competition so I'd do something like septic tanks we lived in I moved to a new house here in the country and we have a septic and I don't know anything about it how to take care of it and make sure I don't have issues and so it's like the least fun kind of website you could make so I've got to think there's pretty low competition for that and so that's the perfect recipe for an ads only kind of website Ricky what is the most exciting thing happening in our internet business right now man we're working on so many big things that it's super exciting one of the ones that really stands out to me though is we're working on a YouTube summit with us and a few other YouTube channels that are doing similar things where we're going to all be posting out content and linking to each other and hopefully doing like a panel discussion and stuff it'll be totally free available to all of you who watch our YouTube channel I'm kind of crazy right now because we decided until October 1st well really September 1st we're kind of in a moat phase where we're not creating any new websites any new products anything like that we're just taking what we already have and trying to make it better more secure more marketing lines to those products and so we're kind of driving ourselves nuts because we're eager to try new things and yeah we've just got to slow down and make sure we're doing everything right yep all right Jim what is the best tip for getting your content to rank charts is what is jumping out to me right now anytime I'm writing a blog post and I can see who there's data here kind of spread across a bunch of forums and different things like that and nobody's like actually put this together in a nice little truck for people I say perfect because I can probably get this to rank really quickly by doing that little bit of extra research it will take a little bit of time but I usually think it's it's totally worth it what app do you go to on your phone to waste time I probably waste the most time in my Google newsfeed reading news stories but also just kind of the topics I'm interested in I keep getting notifications about the World Cup games that are going on which is funny because I'm not a huge like fan but it's been fun to kind of see how Brazil's do and then yeah all right Jim question from Ruby Noelle on YouTube what is a simple process for getting the blog trained or getting blog the blog trained as of today you know I would say make promises to yourself that you can keep so that you don't fall over too much and get discouraged if you start really anything new by thinking about the end or I've got to write 60 blog post whatever and it's just it's demotivating when you're in that beginning process and you're just having a hard time thinking about topic for today and so I would make just make a simple promise that you can keep to yourself today today I'm gonna select a niche for my website tomorrow I'm gonna pick a domain name by at the end of tonight I'm gonna pick one and I'm gonna buy it it's gonna cost me 10 bucks just take what could you do today to get yourself a little closer and just do that one thing for today just pick a niche for your website pick what your topic is gonna be and just get ready to go for it don't know overanalyze next question what is the worst business investment you have ever made yeah some years ago I had a friend and I had this brilliant idea that we were gonna make a bunch of money selling men's leather bags you know they're not person they're not personal they're man back there I actually still have a couple of these we tried we were gonna buy just like a whole bunch um you know have them branded and then fulfilled by Amazon and the guy that was making him he said he was halfway through the process of making and we'd already paid for him and he's like hey by the way it's costing me more than I thought I need to raise your price on you and it was substantial we're like no we have an agreement he said well I've already started making I'm sorry you've already paid me your stuff well that is why I paid him via PayPal and not via Western Union because we just went to PayPal and said hey look this guy didn't hold up his end of the agreement you know all of our money back we then went and just bought a few bags kind of on a smaller scale somewhere else look at my purses we did get our first somewhere else we did eventually manage to sell most of them we kept a few as demos we got our money back out of it but it wasn't an investment didn't really earn anything never been a fan of it I filled my Amazon thing just it didn't work the way that I would yeah all right Jim you have to write a blog post today on which site would you enjoy writing the most dirt bike planet really enjoying that one kind of vehicle do you drive I Drive a 2003 Chevy Suburban and I love it and I own it a hundred percent Jam question from Tenzing on youtube I want to start a soccer football website can you suggest a response post for me I would what's coming to my head off hand is something about rules for soccer especially for Americans most people I mean generally know how it works but don't know all the details so especially you know parents are at the side of the soccer field watching their kids we're watching it on TV watching the World Cup and people Google things like you know what happens to require a corner kick or something I don't know the answer to that so it's a reasonable question I think I post on something like that could work great you don't know the answer to that you lived in Brazil for two years yeah how do you get your websites out of the Google sand let me tell you something there is no such thing as the Google sandbox this is not just our opinion this has been stated by Google there is no sandbox there's no play pen that they put a brand new website in until a certain amount of time has passed it's totally something made up by SEO and internet marketers what they do do is with with new content whether it's on an existing site or a new site that new content needs time to be tested to figure out where it belongs in the rankings and Google's usually not gonna or pretty much never going to take brand-new content and just put it right at the top of the rankings they're gonna test it out here and there the best way to get out of that phase with new content is to write really good content and to start by writing content that is in very or not at all competitive topics yeah people I invented the sandbox to make them feel better about hey why it takes a while for a new website to rank yes Google has already said that doesn't exist and so it's just it's just it takes the time for a website to build up a reputation and some traffic if I have a five-year-old website it's still going to take time for the new content to rank there's more Authority and there's more linking in between and stuff and so it might be faster but it's still gonna take time to schools gonna put the new content through the same kind of testing process all right Jim what is your favorite TV show the office I go to Netflix and it's like what am i doing just go back to the office good question from ketogenic Kim on YouTube I'm having financial issues how do I start a site with the smallest possible investment the only thing you absolutely need to pay for from the very beginning is hosting Bluehost is gonna cost you about 3 bucks a month a little bit more if you pay month-to-month versus paying for a whole year upfront if you're willing to pay for a whole year up front though you're talking like 40 bucks you're gonna have a whole year of hosting and if it's your first website you're even gonna get your first domain included price your theme your logo all that stuff can wait just get a good free theme we've kind of tried out Texas by who themes it's it's a perfectly good free theme we like the premium things better but you can get by without it don't worry about going and getting a fancy logo yet just focus on content and you're gonna start making money soon enough that then you can go buy a little bit yeah we have people in project 24 who spent on hosting and nothing else they take cell phone images for the images on there they use a free theme and guess what it's not gonna hold back their website at all I honestly think it won't make a difference in the revenue it's nicer I think if you can get a cool logo get a nice theme and stuff but honestly it's just about the good content yeah I agree bikers yeah a hobby that you could never see yourself getting into dancing oh my gosh I'm so bad questions from Noah Mitchell on YouTube you don't recommend keyword tools how do you determine if a keyword will have sufficient search volume just use your intuition does it seem like something that people would reasonably ask that alone gives me a lot of information also if you start typing in something into Google and they autocomplete it with a search phrase that means that people are out there searching that term and so again that's another that's another way that you can sort of validate that there's there are people actually searching for this stuff I don't worry about how much search volume there is for that specific key phrase even if you write an article that lets say 50 people are searching that exact term per month you know of course for the of a year that's 600 people and if it's a very low competition search term and you can rank very high for that that's 600 page views to your website it's it's absolutely worth writing that article even if it's gonna be a super low surf on like that and chances are that you're gonna rank for other search terms as well maybe not number one or two and you're gonna get traffic from them as well yeah let's say you're panning for gold we'll go back to the 1800s you know you're trying to find gold you can either spend a back of a lot of time trying to find a huge gold nugget or you could go out today with a pan in the river and find a whole heck of a lot of flakes and what well I just constantly find is just find a reasonable query that you think could have search volume of course you're trying to do your best but just right it doesn't take that long we've shown you can write a blog post in 40 minutes we have a video about that and go write it if it brings 600 people okay it's a little bit of a dud next one's gonna be hit and all the time I have some that's like yeah I've brought 10,000 people a month I just can't believe that that brings 10,000 just try it just keep helping people out keep doing things and you're gonna have some big hits and some misses you try to minimize them but just keep moving forward exactly and sometimes when you're panning for gold nugget does pop out sometimes we do write something not knowing that there's much search volume and we do get a ton of traffic from that article and what's your ringtone I was gonna ask you a question first Oh what's your favorite quote the heights by the the heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but they were all their companions slept were toiling upward in the night yep yep work hard thanks ring John let me just play for you there never choose the default ringtone no you here's something in the line at the store and everybody has to look with well I'll be honest 99 plus percent of the time my ringtone is yeah because my phone is like never the volumes never turned on alright a question from Wyatt Fenner on YouTube you guys should do a giveaway for a free membership to project 24 period would be fun yeah it would be fun frankly the price of project 24 is gonna continue to increase and so I I don't think that I give away something that would make a whole lot of sense for us right now because it's just we have a lot of people interested in it but what I will say the we will do for a giveaway is all of our YouTube videos from 2018 until December first all you have to do is just write a comment and we're gonna pick one random comment at the end of the year and they're gonna win us for a weekend like we're gonna fly out to where wherever you are you're in India whatever we're like gonna come to India and we're gonna spend a weekend with you just blitzkrieg working on your website building it out with all three of us together so you know a lot of our videos are getting like 50 comments or something if you comment and on all of our videos for the year like you have actually a pretty decent chance of winning so we haven't talked about that enough for this year but pretty cool giveaway that we're going and if you live in like Jamaica or someplace really tropical please go comment on yes my wife would love it if you happen to live in Hawaii and it is possible that we won't be able to make it out if it's just too hard or whatever so we already have something worked out we'd give you some money and do it virtually so yeah alright next question what is the biggest threat to our online business cool question yeah anytime that you don't own your own audience there's a threat the threat years ago was Facebook Facebook changed the way that your posts appear and there was a well-founded threat and it was a real threat and and it totally destroyed a lot of a lot of businesses drop traffic on websites a ton because facebook just made it so that your content wasn't getting to your audience right now for us our biggest audience that we don't own is on YouTube if you two were to make a change similar to Facebook where our new videos weren't being shown to our own audience then that would be a threat to us I'm not foreseeing that immediately I don't think it makes a lot of sense for YouTube to do but it's always got to be in the backyard every single time if you gotta follow me on Instagram even email email we say you own your email list mmm-hmm only until spam filters get more aggressive yeah well in GDP are basically nixed a lot of your your audience everybody in Europe that didn't actually comply to be on your newsletter that just signed up for a freebie well now all of those people cannot be on your email lists anymore yep absolutely so you just gotta go where and as soon as you see the tides starting to turn you got to move yep you got to take that audience and push them to whatever is enough ship yeah alright question from Ecuador abroad on YouTube Jonathan yep how do you think of great ideas for headlines ooh I find people who are really good at it I'll find guys in the industry who I respect and I know right good stuff and I'll go to their websites and find a kind of a recipe for a headline and I'll repurpose it for my own site so you know BuzzFeed like they're getting millions and millions of page views a month they know how to write a good headline and so you know it'll be something like 15 essential tips for this or that and I'll say oh cool I could write you know essential tips that's a cool phrase and I'll just it'll write that about dirt bikes or whatever you're not stealing it's really just a recipe for a headline it's not even even similar to the type of content and so you know go to a BuzzFeed go to other really good bloggers and just see what they're doing yeah cool what is your favorite Knick Knack on the shelves behind us there are some really good knickknacks and a lot of empty shelves I just new office there it's a bigger office more bookshelf space we're gonna get even more knickknacks order the sweet one yesterday I haven't told you about it it's an 1800s like metal scuba helmet I saw it on ebay Knoblauch yes and also I ordered in 1837 while I'm ordering tonight an 1837 pepper box pistol my grandpa dough with one of those helmets he was an Under well they're in World War two and so the the welders on the ships like in Pearl Harbor that's where he was stationed they they wore those kind of suits with the big helmets up 18-hundred zero one that's a little bit more modern but anyway kind of cool my favorite Knick Knack I think on the Shelf though is one that probably doesn't stand out to most of you it's a framed newspaper clipping of when Jim and some friends in college broke the world record for tiddlywinks for that I think it was it the distance traveled yeah in a game of tiddlywinks uh-huh that's the one a real thing world-record holder right here for tiddlywiki okay um let's see has anyone ever recognized you in real life who knows you from your website yes and I've got to say like this is the coolest thing it's so fun when this happens I can remember the first time it happened and eventually like it's actually pretty common now like it's even I've had a couple people like recognize my voice like way especially if I'm traveling and I'll be talking on the phone in Airport and somebody's like I think I listen to your podcast what's your name it's like it's that's just really fun it's cool it's amazing like you know cuz every day like look at my office it's a disaster like I'm in boxes we just moved in and stuff all the time I'm usually hearing like a nice shirt and basketball shorts because it's not showing and so like like so often I just feel like it's just such a mess in my office just doing things and you can reach the whole world it's like so cool all right what do you work on after work is over I am a project guy my wife and I both actually love to do projects so Julie and I like an example recently we went up to the cabin and there's an old mine up there a lot of gold-mining happened in the state of Idaho so there's an old mine up there with lots of just pieces of granite sitting around so we brought home like and we built a little fountain out so in front of our house like I could go buy a fountain or I could go build a fountain and we like to build sculpting a statue because I do no this was you know stacking rocks together but it turned out really cool question from ramble jr best tip for selecting which niche to make a website about who am i okay this is something that has i've been so glad that we've done when we're selecting a niche for a website i find a place where i can rank you know i'll think of an idea whatever septic tanks and then i'll go do some competitive analysis actually think of you know 10 or 20 things that i could write about and I'll just google them and say you know do I think I could rank for this how good is the content out there and then I'll say great it's septic tanks and then before we buy the domain we always say okay what happens if we go one step broader with the name of the website so that we don't get to locked in but we could still create that type of content about septic tanks so an example for that maybe it's living in the country and you make living in the country calm or whatever and you talk about having well water and septic tanks and all that kind of stuff and I've been so glad every time we've done this I can remember when I started to improve photography died just do a landscape website or portrait and I always say go really nice on the type of content you're planning to do for the first you know 30 articles and then just one step out so you don't lock yourself in with the name of the site absolutely how would you invest $1,000 and turn it into a million I'm a pretty avid investor I love investing I like real estate I like the stock market a lot real estate takes quite a bit of money to be able to invest in it well the stock market is great but it's it's a little bit of a long name for sure and so taking a thousand turning it into a million absolutely doable just gonna take you about thirty five years yeah no problem the best investment from a financial standpoint that I scene is actually building websites I know that sounds a little bit maybe self-serving or that we do a plumber is gonna say start a plumbing company yes but the thing is to you know starting a website you're gonna do four if you go all in a few hundred bucks and then if you want to buy some content to add to that you can spend a thousand dollars on one site or start three sites with a thousand dollars and those websites over time are gonna start earning you some money you know six months a year in you're gonna be earning thousands of dollars a month from these websites if you reinvested that money into the into your business again and just bought content hire some writers however you want to do that to build up your websites taking that and turning it into a million dollars could be like a three year thing and there you go then you have three websites you own and then thousands and thousands of dollars every month coming in that's what I would buy content 100% question from Rhian Katzie on YouTube what is the click-through rate on your affiliate offers there's no way to answer this because it depends on each individual article each individual affiliate offer what I will say that's maybe more substance substantive or helpful is most people when they write a blog post they go to Clickbank or whatever and they find okay let's say I write an article about how to survive a snow storm when you're camping is the article I write on a survival site then somebody goes to Clickbank and they say cool I found this awesome tactical flashlight this content would be great to push that affiliate offer I really want people to click it and so they have a huge image and a border around it and I click here and stuff and our eyes are so well trained when you're on Facebook and you're scrolling through when one's an ad you I mean we're just ninjas when we're online we're good at Oh as soon as it's an ad we skip it and so that's what you've done when you made it stand out all like that is you just encourage everybody skip right past that and so what I find best just be real with people go buy the stupid flashlights before you're gonna recommend it it's gonna cost you 20 bucks and you might earn 20 thousand from it if this is a great clickbank product so buy the stupid flashlight take a picture of you using that flashlight and then just in normal language like if I were talking to you Ricky I just say hey I bought this flashlight online I kind of thought all flashlights were the same I was totally wrong this thing is awesome I took it up camping with me last week and you can like see the beam for 50 feet and it's this tiny little flashlight super cool go check it out that is gonna get five times the click-through rate as trying to make it look like an ad with a big button and everything on there so I don't know what the click-through rate is it depends how you sell it in the article but that has been hugely helpful for me and it makes me feel less gross about recommending affiliate products question from Mike M on YouTube does Google test new sites by sending a handful of visitors a day I have a brand new site and he's getting a little bit of traffic he's wondering how that's happening yeah not exactly a little bit of traffic you're seeing when your site is brand new is going to be almost entirely bot traffic it's computers that are scouring the entire internet just looking for stuff just doing stuff I mean they kind of have different purposes and so most of that traffic is not real people now what Google is doing is rather than sending I mean when you go use the internet does Google just send you places that's not the way that the internet works what Google is going to do though is with new content they're gonna test it out they're gonna put it where they think it goes in the rankings based on the content itself and then some people are gonna click it and depending on how they behave on your web site if they stick around for two three minutes if they click through to another another article on your site that signals to Google that it was good content answered the question they move it up in the rankings and so it's not uncommon for a brand new article once it's indexed by Google to be ranking somewhere and to have some people that click to page four of Google or maybe page to wherever and are gonna get ever going to get there that's how Google's testing out your content so sorta yeah Google's kind of sort of sending you traffic but it's it's just to test out the content itself has nothing to do with how new or old your site is if it's brand new it's probably mostly about traffic unfortunate that true sorry hey things are