This Model Should Not Work… But It Does

Key Takeaways

um [Music] hello there hello and welcome to the copyblogger podcast oh you're not talking to me we are recording on a saturday this week so ethan and i are are very thrown off or at least i'm not gonna speak for you ethan i feel very thrown off i think this is gonna be a fun a fun episode since you and i are very um you know creatures of habit were like routine habitual people and so this could get wild i was gonna try and hide it but just so everybody knows tim and i have been chatting here for a few minutes and like yeah we're definitely thrown up you've got your son back at home like this was going to be yeah sometime where like things were a little quieter which i think you're actually probably more excited to have the family home based on whatever yeah yeah [Music] and um like for people who didn't hear a couple episodes ago we were actually thinking of stranding him on a desert island because he didn't know what to do with himself during these days where his wife and son were away and then i just got back from a bachelor party so i'm literally running like an hour and a half so this could get real real interesting stick with us we're gonna get through this yeah all right welcome everyone thank you for tuning in this week we are going to jump right in where we left off with last episode because we're just doing a really fascinating mini case study here and i don't know if this means anything we want your guys's feedback on it i'm going to well actually before i share my screen we noticed that it was interesting in my personal newsletter has about 7 500 subscribers so not like a huge audience but a big enough audience to get you know some like some reasonable data points to pay attention to and when i share the podcast every week on my newsletter i share three links i share a link to the itunes i share a link to the spotify and i also share a link to copybloggerpod.com which has multiple ways to listen to the episode including a link to the youtube video but it also has the show notes on it and check it out ethan um ethan doesn't know what i'm about to show him by the way we just wanted to run through this but um same thing so last week yeah copy copybloggerpod.com the link to the website which has all of the media and the show notes got the most clicks it got 14 clicks and then the link to the spotify came in second with six clicks and the link to the itunes came in third with five clicks but this is also really interesting too like let me show it with you i intentionally did this with the calls to action and the links to see if it would make a difference so i put click here to listen on itunes i know that click here seems a little bit trivial but it's actually like very very compelling when you put click here on the link to actually click and then click here to listen on spotify and then underneath it i put in addition you can click here to see the full video with show notes so so something to him man well yeah so last week we cheated this up and we for anybody who's listening to this going like is this did i already listen to this episode we we started with a similar thing last week where we had just noticed this tim had just noticed this and this pattern holds true across his newsletter as well as the copyblogger newsletter and so we just called it out we said hey if you're one of the people who's clicking these links holler at us and let us know why because this is kind of surprising we would have thought a lot more traffic would go to itunes and spotify and the reason that we wanted to start here this week is because some of you did so and i just noticed again i'm wearing the exact same shirt that i'm wearing in that last thumbnail i really need it okay so here's here's the deal this week if you're still clicking on this let us know we have a couple people who did reach out and if you have a great source for like good shirts for guys let me know because apparently i need like a much more diverse sport okay next level bro next level is that is that a brand or no uh it's a brand that sells blanks we call them so if you own like a t-shirt company you can buy next level in wholesale and it's where i get all of my shirts because i have like i'm shaped like a gazelle basically i'm like super long but like i have swimmer shoulders you know so my shoulders are kind of wide yeah so it's the only shirt that actually fits the width of my shoulders but there's also long enough to where like i when i left my hands over my head the t-shirt doesn't come above my belt line so they're my favorite shirts next level all right i'll check them out that's the jam all that though to say that we had a couple people reach out with some kind of interesting feedback so april hollard april mclean holliday tim and i over on twitter uh in like a little group chat to school i worked with april over at the hustle and she said this is largely like a ux thing like the ux on apple like so our hypothesis was people are paying more attention to the video and like videos becoming the experience and i don't know about oh sorry no no keep going i just said maybe think about what the actual uh note was from april or no no just what the numbers were for the video yeah and i mean i guess that's cool oh yeah no kidding so uh so april hollered at us and she said that wasn't necessarily her like why she was clicking it she was flicking it because the ux on the other two options sucks and then i heard so my dad's actually also a listener and him and i were talking about it and he said something that was kind of interesting which is he says people are so busy that it's faster to [Music] click on a link where i'm going to be able to see the show notes scan the show notes and see if there's anything that i want to listen to and then go from there and since you mentioned the show notes in that link like that's the only one like technically you can see the show notes on itunes and i'm not sure i'm pretty sure they're also in spotify but he his thing was or at least his hypothesis or maybe even just his reason was because that's where i can see the show notes i can scan through and see if i want to listen to the episode so it sounds like it might not be video it might be something about the interaction with the show notes that's more helpful which is kind of interesting to me because it's actually going to change how i do show notes this week knowing that i was just saying i was just thinking that we should try to be yeah a little bit more copy oriented when we do the show description to see that makes sense i personally use spotify i was surprised when april said that to us because i think spotify is great like i think spotify is my favorite and i think about it a lot when i'm going for my walk and i'm thinking what podcast i want to listen to today and i never have an episode in mind i have a show in mind and so then you go to that show and you start really really scanning the titles and i'm trying to think like how many times do i click that show more button to get the expanded view of the show description yeah yeah this is interesting like we should start paying attention to this so we get yeah we're getting some interesting insights and i think the reason we started here again is because we just wanted to say first of all thank you to people who reached out and offered their thoughts if you are sort of listening to this and you have unique thoughts on either why you're doing this or what we could do better to kind of make this easier to navigate for you or like more interesting let us know i'm damn ethan on twitter tim is at tim's dad's just like a holler at us yeah please we actually and now that you mentioned that it's a little bit far back in my timeline so i don't want to take the time to find it but somebody who did share the show this week shared the link on the website and that's interesting too so uh so yeah let us know was that uh john john bartos that you were talking about yeah i mean you know what we can edit this out no i think i've already got it lined up so i've got it oh you got the guy yeah the guy yeah because i wanted to i wanted to shout him out at some point i wasn't sure if we were going to do it now but is he the guy who's like hey tim you and ethan are killing it and then i'm not making this up for people who are listening to me the uh do you have me the um yeah i'll just send it to you but he's like he said some really nice things about the show i don't remember if he shared a link though so anyways uh i'll send this to tim but as we go just know that like we do pay attention to a lot of this stuff so if you guys so if you guys have opinions on yeah so interesting john john bardos at idea economy yeah uh he gave us a shout and posted the link to copybloggerpod.com interesting yeah thanks a lot john would have thought that i looked into his stuff too he's got some cool stuff so as tim mentioned his uh his user his handle on twitter's idea account is idea economy too yeah he writes a newsletter for creators it's definitely worth checking out i was just cruising through some of his stuff before we hopped on here and one piece that i really liked that he did and i like it because i already i have one example of this from somebody else and i want i'm really happy to be able to add another version of it to this content library that i kind of go back to over time he wrote a piece about how he got his first 2000 subscribers and it's super detailed uh he kind of breaks it down by tier so like here's how i got the first 100 then the first 200 the first 500 then he as he kind of crossed that 500 line he moved into advertising in other newsletters and so he does a whole breakdown of what his cost per acquisition was across different newsletters that you can advertise in yeah so it's a really detailed piece so people who are sort of just getting the ball rolling on audience we'll link up to that piece in the show notes and just shout out again to uh john for writing that because it's a pretty cool piece thanks john appreciate you yeah enough pre-roll what are we doing this week okay i struggled to find something that could possibly top loot.com and like i felt a lot of pressure i was like man that it couldn't have gone any better the timing of it and what we were talking about and especially the fact that on that particular day they were selling vibrators i was like i can't top that and so i looked around a lot i would troll read it a lot and i decided what i wanted to do actually was take a little bit step back and talk about my favorite company ever really it's a company that is very very famous but i would say also flies under the radar a little bit and that's because it's not it's not very social media heavy it's not like a personal brand it's just a freaking brilliant brilliant company and the evolution of this company totally fits in line with what we love and what we talk about you may have heard me talk about it before the name of this company is psychology today so i am going to share my stream psychology today was founded in 1967 by nicholas charney and i want to note that it was founded as a magazine and it's it's one of the most successful magazines really in history and i put this link on here because i i wanted to just read it and i wanted to give some context as to how like under the radar but how important in like the public lexicon this has been so this is this is an article that was written by nicholas charney with a badass picture of him with these huge like thick glasses on he looks so cool it's called a note from the editor published on july 4th 2017. i'm assuming i want to be accurate with this i'm assuming that this is like the day of the 50 year anniversary of the publication that's at least what i could gather from this article well it's a short note shouldn't have caught an article but i'm just going to read it in full because i think it really highlights how cool of a company this is okay quote 50 years ago in my first editorial i wrote psychology is a fascinating and alive subject ready to thrive outside of academia i hope to make it lively clear and technically accurate it is a time to let the air fly in 50 years later psychology is even more important with more research more tools more applicability to more areas of the culture if anything it is now time to let the gale in at 50 psychology today while still graphically exciting authoritative and informative is check this out older than rolling stone new york magazine mrs magazine and people magazine older than sesame street and saturday night live older than woodstock music festival and stanley kubrick's 2001 a space odyssey but it's not as old as scientific american the nation's the nation's longest-running magazine published in 1845 and the model i use in developing psychology today i thought that was so cool because i love how even your heroes have heroes you know like it's just it made me feel good that even then everybody has like an inspiration okay what started as a highly acclaimed print publication is also a dynamic interactive media destination for tens of millions of people each month seeking solid information about the science of living and for millions more seeking professional help in leading a healthy productive rewarding life from psychology today's groundbreaking directory of licensed therapists uh thanks to the staff president pass thank you thank you okay it's pretty remarkable right here's why this business is so fascinating to me because it doesn't make any sense like this model should not work because it tries to do way too many things at once but somehow it just does them flawlessly so again this show is is really catered to youtube because we share the screen and so i'll make sure i'm like pretty articulate in the way i explain this when you go to the homepage psychology today it's it's a media company it's helpful articles written by written by phds and clinicians and if anything i think they basically follow the same exact model as bloomberg and i mean that like quite literally like bloomberg has these key points at the top of the articles which help a lot to create what are called rich snippets in the google serps so if somebody searches for something like this you know however once in a while you'll see like the search result and then you'll see those little bullet points underneath it so these rich snippets really incentivize click through and it's an article in the same sense of media so there's ads it's google ads on the sidebar there's an in-text google ad another in-text google ad another one and then a footer ad and and that's it cool it's an online media company which means that the monetization is completely dependent on volume of traffic which we've talked about before it's a tough business to be in and not only they're killing it in that business but they also do the thing that we love which is like content marketing so the content also serves as a mechanism to still to still sell their magazine which is still one of the top magazines which and i think you and i have talked about this before how magazines like could and may be making a comeback they still use the website to sell their magazine and on top of that they use their website as a legion directory professor saw that all over the world this is the coolest part of this website because when you create a website that is really really technically seoed as much as i love it and one of the things i want to talk about maybe like encourage people to try to adopt this model because i think it's very there's a lot of opportunity in this model but one of the problems with it or i shouldn't say one of the problems one of the things to be mindful of is that once you build it if you build it the wrong way the first time building it the right way is very difficult i like to think of it almost as a it's like technical debt you know it's it's something that happens a lot with cities where when you build a city it's fine but you build it for the population that's there and so all the sewer lines and the electric lines and the civil services are built for a particular way and it's not like you can take all of that stuff down and then just like rebuild it for what it needs now like you're always basically adding more on top and that's one of the problems that these directory sites run into is it's really hard to build it for what it's going to be 10 years from now and so it can get like clogged up you know just imagine i don't know why the analogy of the city always makes sense to me but however the hell they did it it is so goddamn perfect so i am on the navbar and on the navigation bar there's a link it's a drop down that says find a therapist there's a drop down that says get help there's a drop down that says magazine there's a drop down that says today on the find a therapist drop down what they have is links to the top um 12 cities probably in search volume for therapists i would assume and then there's a link with uh or field where you can type in your zip code here's the real tricky part about it and this is the part that like blows my mind in the field where you can search for find the therapist there's also a drop down that allows you to search for psychologists treatment centers and support groups so you have to understand when you do this the only way to do it is dynamically it's like so impossible to create static pages for every single one of these but still they've managed to figure out a way to filter it so that you're searching the same directory except the directory automatically creates these child slugs so that like there's literally five directories on this website that don't compete with each other and it's so good it's it's like it's just the most brilliant site i'm gonna fanboy a little bit on the site because of how well it's built so can i call therapists can i ask you a quick question yeah go ahead okay so this is really interesting so what we're for people listening what you're really getting here is sort of a master class in not just like a particular company but this is this is tim's bread and butter content marketing plus lead gen and here's a company that started as a magazine and is now doing it like a really diverse set of or has a really diverse set of revenue sources my question for you is looking at this as somebody who comes from this space if you had to guess what do you think is the primary revenue stream for them these days do you think it's the content side okay so the just the therapists yeah that's the therapist that's really interesting i wonder if that was baked in the entire time i guess in the old days it probably would have been ads in the news in the um in the magazine right they would probably still be advertising therapists there so it's interesting to me it would be interesting to kind of figure out at what point that became like specifically lead gen became a big part of their online strategy that's exactly why i think this business is so cool because i i guess that's why i compared it to bloomberg because bloomberg actually makes most of his money through the bloomberg terminal it's like 26 000 a year to use the terminal something insane i don't know they got thousands and thousands of people who use it and so when you think of bloomberg like you don't think of that back-end product you just think of the front-end media right and same thing with psychology today you don't think about this back-end product but dude i don't know a single therapist i don't know a single one who isn't actively trying to grow their psychology today profile and in addition i know many many therapists where if psychology today decided that they didn't want to list them anymore would really really struggle to be able to market themselves to the point where they could get the same amount of patient volume that they get from psychology today really can i ask you a follow-up question it sounds like you're pretty familiar with them do they happen to do um annual lists almost like uh the inc 5000 or anything like that do they do that for therapists i don't think so oh okay i can i couldn't tell you i'm only familiar with them i don't know anybody from the company by the way i don't know anyone from psych today i just know how they built it because i mean just look at these filters yeah so right now i'm on the therapists directory which is quite literally a directory inside a directory which is really hard to do because in order to do it you need these breadcrumbs because you need to be able to put like a sequence of events to tell google like this is where you are in the website you're also just going to see so many pages that are you know this is therapist in nashville tennessee how's that any different from online therapists in nashville tennessee you know so organizing these breadcrumbs is really important but even with the breadcrumbs they have all of these different tags and so this allows them to rank for bipolar disorder therapists in nashville tennessee sex therapy therapists in nashville tennessee so like every every single combination of search queries that you could combine to find a therapist they've solved all of them through their dynamic directory hold on a second okay so as you're talking through this i'm kind of i'm plugging this site into a couple of different tools and just kind of trying to get an idea of how they're doing some of what they're doing so i just pulled them up on similar web which for people who don't know similar web tool that'll kind of give you rough estimates of traffic for pretty much any website that you want so these guys are getting 20 million visits a month that's stupid is insane and then here's something that's kind of interesting i also drop them in built with so builtwith.com you can drop any website in there and it will show you all the tools they're using to kind of run the website and they in addition to like all the typical website stuff they've also got alexa verify built into their site which is kind of a new thing for me i haven't seen that but what um i'm i'm looking in the background i don't know if you've seen this on other sites recently tim um have you because what i'm seeing is it's well alexis certify and alexa verification are for smart home related things so that gets me thinking like are they why are they alexa wait amazon bottlex oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but what i'm what i'm getting at here is like this site is built it seems like it's built from understanding this properly to work with smart home devices and so that's got me thinking that they're probably trying to do something in terms of like capturing the need to find a therapist using smart home stuff not just webs yeah it seems like it i don't know i don't know if that's if i'm understanding all this properly but it's kind of a unique tool that i hadn't seen come up yet and i wonder if that's part of what's helping to drive all that traffic uh no it's well it could there's an alexa rating which is basically like the mcdonald's of traffic metrics it's it's basically just like an assumption on how popular the website is and so even though amazon owns alexa which is the voice command hardware basically they also bought alexa.com and alexa.com was a company that existed autonomously of the alexa that we all know that you know people talk to in their living rooms so i think what you're thinking of is like a it's like a credentialing system from amazon but the reason why they bought alexa.com was so that they could start connecting voice to analog i guess we could call it so i i think there's definitely definitely something there where maybe these like little verification things are are ways to like solidify that if somebody you know i'm looking at miranda poor right now she's a therapist in nashville so maybe this is a way to solidify like hey alexa find me a therapist in nashville tennessee and it'll bring up hi i found miranda pool who oh maybe whatever whatever would you like me to call her for you i think that would work maybe maybe maybe okay i i see the uh the distinction between those two things now i cut you off you were talking about something else in terms of their structure though yeah well this is what's so wild about it you have to understand the way the url structure works you know so psychology.com psychologytoday.com is the root domain and then this slash us this kind of also brings you to the root domain but this is like the american version of the website i think therapist is the parent category okay tennessee this is just the child category and then nationalism child category of tennessee but then you got these filters so what they do with these filters is they make it so that it adds on a dynamic variable at the end of the page so it doesn't create a new page well i shouldn't say that it's not as though there's a new page that exists it's that psychology today like creates a new page and then just says like hey google here it is so i got these filters let's say i go to types of therapy and i go to emdr so watch what happens to the to the url do you see how all of a sudden there's this question mark well if that question mark were a slash that would mean that it's like a new page but this question mark is that the dynamic variable that says category emdr so like i'm technically still on this page i'm still on the page that i was just on but now that every listing can be filtered and you can see it right here it's still miranda poole uh because she offers emdr now psychology today gets to rank for like all of the therapy and natural keywords but in addition they get the right for all the therapy all the therapists who offer emdr and natural keywords so there's there's nothing that they aren't that they don't have their hands in huh that's pretty [ __ ] dope right yeah okay so oh sorry you just said what so no no i was gonna move on to another reason that i wanted to talk about directories but it's actually a perfect timing for you to hit us with a question well i'm not sure i had a question as somebody who doesn't come from an seo or legion world i was just going to kind of recap real quick like why this is so fascinating but before i do you know it's kind of uh i won't say odd but i'll just say unusual for like psychology today to be one of your fa like somebody's favorite company right how did you first realize these guys were killing it at this game like when did this come on your radar and how long have you kind of been tracking them yeah i've been tracking them since the very beginning so this was in 2010 and psychology today was still killing it with this model in 2010. so i learned about it then and it was just looking at it every single day basically dreaming of like i don't know why maybe it's just like serendipity where this company was put in front of me as a way to like model after you know but i just thought the idea here's what i loved about it i loved that it was a business that monetized itself because you don't have to create a product the product is built into the media you don't have to sell it because the sales is baked in to the website through the transaction you don't necessarily have to write copy for it because the fact that the category already ranks at google makes it the most valuable real estate ever so it's like self-generated advertising it's a self-generated product and it's a self-generated merchant application like i don't have to send paperwork to fill out a credit card i don't have to really do anything all you got to do is is create content and get the category at the top of the keyword so that just fascinated me and that's that's how the whole entire thing came into my head and since then i've just learned more about the model that they were a magazine like wow when have you ever heard of a magazine actually successfully transitioning itself into like a a monster digital brand that isn't you know like gutting out its numbers like buzzfeed like they're actually a successful media brand off the back of traditional print so that was it's just a fascinating thing this is one of the reasons i love having these conversations is because your background and my background overlap but we come at it we come at content and small business or like large business from different directions so the first thing you notice here is the revenue model and their seo uh setup which for people i again who i think are familiar with seo or at least know the importance of it this is a really interesting case study that you need to go check out i think people who maybe are a little less familiar with seo just understand that like the thing that tim's really keying in on here is that their site is set up in a way that's pretty unique it's difficult to get these sort of link structures right and there's a lot of people who do it wrong and actually i don't remember if you said this on the air but a couple of weeks ago we recorded an episode where you actually walked me through a business that i was thinking about buying and it was a vgen company and i i can't remember if you said this part on air or after we were done recording but i had asked you something about like plug and play uh tools that are used to build these types of directories and you said well yeah there are some but the problem with the plug-and-play tools that exist out there is that they don't get the link structure right like there's they all suck for seo and so all these people who are doing their own directories they're mostly building or not i don't think you said mostly building from scratch but they they struggle with this issue where this this link structure is not done well which seems to be a huge part of seo so this is a really interesting case study from that perspective but there's something else that's going on here so like when i started hearing about these companies i instantly dropped them into this sort of feedback loop i just mentioned a couple of them like similar web is one that i love to look at i look at built with to try to get a feel for actually like what's going on behind the scenes i look at the archive and so as we were talking here a second ago i said it would be really interesting to know at what point they started doing lead gen and i plugged them into archive.org so if you just go to archive.org way at the top there's this thing called the wayback machine for people who don't know you can plug pretty much any website in there and a lot of them have been crawled and screenshotted by this archive tool so you can go back and you can look at old versions of websites what's unique about this though is that it's actually been excluded from the archive which is so odd because this company's been around forever and at first i thought maybe that's because they're a media company and there's some issue with that but i just checked new york times the new york times is in the archive and so they're too big it takes too much bandwidth for for a wayback machine to crawl the whole thing do you think so though because it's new york times like new york times has it's and i'm just typing in the home page which i don't know i don't know how archive works behind the scenes but my guess would be that all you have to do is land on the homepage and screenshot it so that's kind of unique from a content company perspective and my first thought was well maybe you know they've just got like there's that whatever that file is in your website structure box but i'm like absolutely not if they're killing it on seo so i have no idea why they've been excluded from the archive but it's definitely a really interesting case study in terms of like a media company that has transition and i've only seen at scale uh you bring up a great point which is that there aren't many that have successfully gone from the old model of print media which was largely like newsstand purchases door-to-door subscriptions and like advertising inside the publication not many companies have really successfully pivoted to anything other than that new york times is one so new york times now makes more of their revenue from online subscriptions than they do from anything else even though they still run ads they still do online ads and they still have like physical subscriptions they're their digital first company and they made that switch successfully a lot of companies have struggled with this so here's the thing that kind of got me about this early on too when you started talking about the history of this company and just how old it is compared to other really well-known media sources when you really go back and look at how those companies were built they're fascinating and i think a lot of them are under appreciated these days like i don't know and we i think we've talked about this we talked about it right when i first saw this but there's a docudrama all about playboy the playboy magazine it's called i think it's called american playboy but people can find it it's one of those docudramas but what's so interesting about it is it shows you how cutting-edge playboy was early on and like there's this joke that goes around now where it's like oh i read playboy for the articles but what you see inside that documentary is that there was a point when that actually was kind of a valid argument like playboy was doing stuff with editorial strategy that was totally new totally cutting edge and they were one of the first ones to go into radio one of the first ones to go into television one of the first ones to do like in-person sort of event experiences around a media company they were just they they're on the cutting edge of every single media revolution over the last 60 years or so but now you know nobody thinks of them for any of that and so it's so interesting to go back in time and just look at these old media companies who've been around for decades and really break down how they started and how they pivoted and stuff if you have the time to do it super cool this is another good example of that for sure and i would love to see that documentary i want to also give my insight on two things i like talking about this because this is the reason why i think anybody who wants to start an online company should start with like a local media site and then i'll share my screening again and i'll show you the two examples that i've had like moderate success with i just the only reason why i haven't had real success with this is i don't have the time but like take this model and copy it seriously but then i will also show you the downside of not being able to custom build your directory and i'll give like a solution on how if you really really wanted to do it you could do it so if you're if you're thinking like man i want to start something i just don't know what it is this is what you should do and by the way i've been trying to talk ethan and doing this with me for for quite a while so maybe this will be a good opportunity all right so i got two websites right here one of them is called yourboulder.com y-o-u-r-b-o-u-l-b-e-r it's a local media website based on boulder colorado and there's another one called bokehdigest.com bogo digest is is based off of uh boca raton they have two separate themes and the truth is one of the big mistakes that i made with your boulder is i rebuilt the thing and i shouldn't have i should have just left it alone which is like a common thing a common huge mistake that i've made in my life um and here if you want to see something funny ethan check this out look at how bad i [ __ ] destroyed my website oh no so organic traffic was like 20 000 a month and and now it's like a quarter of that yeah it's even worse when you look at the all the time just so that's just from the change of structure or was that an algorithm change structure because like i was trying to solve for the fact that the plugin i was using wasn't ideal for domain structure and so like this did teach me a really really valuable lesson and that is that sometimes you can think about things too hard and you can get over technical with it where like i just this is another reason why i'm more and more convinced about how sophisticated google is with maybe the technical seo doesn't matter so much as much as it's like are you solving the user's problem and if you are like we'll kind of forgive you for the technical stuff just because we know that this is what the user searching for okay so here's the here's really the model you can just make a straight up directory and that's cool the problem with it is that it's very very difficult to drive any meaningful traffic that yellowpages.com just can't get and so like it's hard to build a really legitimate business if you're just building a directory and so what you need to do is this like today model which is you combine the media you use the media to basically send traffic to the business directory maybe even write articles that can also rank for keywords that would send some traffic to the directory so an example is if it's a local media site and you got a category for like restaurants and then you have a sub for burgers you can write an article that's like the five best places to get a cheeseburger in boulder colorado and then somewhere on that article you could link to the category and now all of a sudden every cheeseburger shop who's reading that article it's like oh my gosh like i can advertise on this category and people are going to find me you know so to really get success you want to do the work in tandem i'm going to show now the bokeh digest version because although this is such a simple simple theme but when i lived in boca and like i was giving a little bit of effort on this it was just killing it man it was killing it so what do you mean when you say killing it like it was getting a ton of traffic or this was like a great revenue driver for you a little bit of both i was selling i mean a ton of traffic that's relative right boca i think has 150 000 people on it actually probably more i don't even know why i came up with that number i was generating about three or four emails a day you know i had a pretty cool autoresponder that was selling the um the directory listings and in addition i created well this is a little bit of my like entrepreneurial stuff i built a another website for stasi that i called stadzi media and i i ranked that website for digital marketing in boca raton so it's a little sub company that i did to just try to capture the bokeh market i figured screw it i got all this attention in boca let me grab a couple local media or local businesses and i advertise my own company on here okay so that's really interesting and that's actually something that i don't think i have seen many people talk about i have seen people more and more start talking about the opportunity in local newsletters local websites stuff like these two sites for the reasons that you're saying which is that you know the competition is a little bit it's it's not the same you're not competing on the same level for sure also you know local businesses need better solutions for advertising so there's a big there's a big opportunity there especially when it comes to content like um so many cities just like just take the us alone there's so many places that you can go they're all they've all got businesses in them and you know practically none of them have good content right now exactly there except for you know big cities okay so there's a huge opportunity there but what i don't think people talk about enough which is really cool you did here is how you could use local media to build a service company and just like build these local companies these like super local directories which can be businesses on their own but can also rank you up for the service that you provide within a specific location yeah and that was the majority of where the revenue from this came from because they're they're local businesses so i couldn't charge the five thousand dollars a month plus that i can for first odds but for stadzi media that it was a granted my company is called statsy the second website i made was stadzimedia.com i threw it up and i just did internet marketing boca raton and like a couple of the surrounding cities and these were clients that i could charge you know 1500 2 000 a month for and i was mostly just managing to google my business profiles and so like i'd be making like 800 bucks a month and built a small team around it so yeah so there's an idea i'm not necessarily trying to highlight that although you being ever observant and you are you always find like oh i see how he's actually making money from it but what i would do first off this theme is really great if you go to studiopress.com it's a genesis theme it's called the magazine theme it's very easy to use it's super seo friendly anything genesis is seo friendly and in this business directory i laid out the categories so it is quite literally called the business directory plugin that's what the plugin is called and the reason why this is the best option is because all other business directory software makes it so the entire website is a directory and the media is kind of an add-on but you want to do the opposite you want to build a media company where the directory is the product you know and it stinks because business directory plugin has some major major flaws one of them is what i'm about to show you so if i'm on the directory i'm at boca.js.com business directory this is fine this is basically like the homepage of the directory but now i'm going to click on a category so i'm going to click on the advertising and marketing category and you can see what happens so the plugin itself needs this because without this category the website wouldn't be able to tell the difference between one of the blog categories and the directory categories so then it has this awful url parameter in the middle it's wpb db underscore categories so it quite literally means wordpress business directory plugin underscore category and then the actual category which is advertising and marketing so if you did it right it would look like this it would be bokeh digest.com advertising and marketing that would be the parent category so what happens when you click on a listing this isn't bad and i had to custom code this so the the listing is still the child category so it's still bokeh digest.com business directory slash click media incorporated which is fine you know that's fine but the real problem and god i'm telling you this because if anybody has some software skills and understand wordpress you could build one of these things and make so much goddamn money the real problem is this the real problem is that it doesn't allow for you to create individual sales pages for whatever like tier of the directory that you're buying so the conversion rate on it was so freaking low because somebody signs up for the email list they're like oh i'm a local business i want to advertise here we're the only place i can send them is this page is this submit listing so there's a drop down where you have to choose your category and then there's a drop down of like the different options so i only have one option here for this exact reason because i have to like funnel people into the option that that i want them to see as opposed to all these different choices and then they click next and then there's all the information they're going to fill out and then they click next and then there's the credit card and then they click next again and then they have to submit their email and a password because they have to create an account in wordpress to create their listing right so like it sucks because it is so close but all it needs is a sales page that says like give us your email create a password here's your credit card and then when you sign up for it then you just get straight up access to your listing and the business can fill out the listing afterwards but it just makes it so hard to actually sell them because it wants to sell them on the front end of the website as opposed to the back end once you've already created your your your profile that's why that's a great opportunity i'm really glad that you actually highlighted that how many like if you had to guess just based on what you know this industry my guess would be a lot but like how many websites do you think are trying to do something like this right now really no dude i'm telling you like people cannot get their head out of the newspaper gutter like people need local media and local media as we know it is gone it's never going to come back like it's never going to come yeah okay you know people just still want to create these local media sites and they're just like more and more traffic more and more traffic which means more and more junk and if you want lots of junk where do you go you go to facebook right so like it's the same conversation as last time like you can't out amazon amazon and local media companies keep trying to out facebook facebook and it's just not going to happen so you have to build a local media site that has like an identity and that has like that is actually in the community you know like if you want to do these show up for local business launches and maybe pop your head into the local chamber of commerce which is really what you should do because this is that's how i sold all my listings and then like create a product around your local media site and this is the way to do it because again the product sells itself the product is valuable just by nature of the site existing so there's not like an extra add-on like if you like this you're really going to love this the whole thing is you love this because it exists it'll work but this was always my achilles heel with it man and so that's why i tried to do it with your boulder and we did it i mean it's i spent a bunch of money on there but i killed all my traffic by trying to do it so real quick that's so interesting wow okay so psychology saying fascinating case study yeah like we went all the way down the rabbit hole on that one this is biggest this is like the biggest because you can do it with anything like it doesn't have to be local media you can build directories around anything the problem is that people in their minds just think it's either got to be media or it's got to be directory and like no the media is the advertising is the marketing for the directory can you just take a minute and walk people through the thinking process behind choosing a topic for one of those so because you you said like it could be anything and i'm curious to hear how you actually think through what types of directories are worth spending your time on versus which ones aren't so we've talked a couple of times in the past about things like well one of the reasons you're focused on healthcare is because there's sort of like a relatively high well part of it is there's a personal connection there but also there's a relatively high customer lifetime value inside of that range so you know you can build a business that that can send leads and sort of thrive what are some of what are some of the ways that you think through what actually makes a good directory topic so that people are sitting here going yeah tim's right i'm going to do this for xyz like give him two or three questions they can ask to just battle test that idea yeah that's like a really great question and i've never done that thought experiment well i've already doubled this down and i'll say it one more time local media is the obvious one and the reason is because people are starving for local content like people love to read about their neighborhoods all of these articles i would write would take off can i i'll let me just add a little detail to clarify too i'm thinking let's say we're gonna the media side of it is going to be local media but in terms of who i'm driving leads for by these directories if you were to do this you said it doesn't just have to be actually i forget your exact words but you said something along the lines of like you can do this for anything it doesn't just have to be what we're talking about here so assuming i'm going to write like pieces about local events that are going on places to eat all that kind of stuff how would you think through who you're actually selling the directory listings to in order to target like the most successful opportunities in the space yeah well it would be it's business owners that don't know marketing right like us digital marketers take it for granted because our job is to market ourselves and so like by the nature of that we're surrounded by people who are naturally good at marketing well actually you know what what i did and the best thing to do is go to google my business and pretend like you're creating a profile and just scrape all of the categories that they use in their own google my business listing so like if you want to create a google my business listing you have to submit a category and so all of the categories on bokeh digest and your border are nothing but scrapes from that that's how i would do it that's brilliant okay that's how i would do it i heard this uh term used the other day on a different podcast the i was done a couple appearances over on content is profit those guys are hilarious luis and luis they're two brothers and they just got like great energy but they always talk about golden boulders they're like oh so many golden boulders are gonna fall today uh in this conversation and then when you say something cool they're like that was a golden boulder and i think tim that was like a golden boulder so shout out to louise and elise and uh and shout out to that idea uh which is like just he noticed that saying it like good artists what is it yeah good artists whatever and then great artists steal so go steal people's categories that's that's a great way to just kind of narrow it down was there anything else that you wanted to point out about this like business model or this case study only that you should do it like it it's perfect for three ways you can run ads on the content itself you can run ads on the newsletter and make your newsletter local events by the way it can't miss just a weekly newsletter about all the events going on this weekend and you can make it so so obvious like friday bullet points of events saturday bullet points of events sunday and sunday is usually like yoga in the park and you know like the 5k walk and stuff like that so the content monetizes itself the newsletter will monetize itself the newsletter serves as a function to sell listings to the directory and then the directory monetizes itself like i told you though it's just the arrow through the heel of our hero achilles is the fact that it needs a better sales process because people just don't got time you know if you're a local business owner and you run a juice shop and you got like eight minutes in between customers and you're looking at this stuff like you are not gonna take nine minutes to fill out your profile before you even put in your credit card like the credit card needs to come first and then they need to get an email that says like you've created your profile now i'll fill it out you know it's just would it be who you asked me so much would it be legal and maybe you know this because you come from this world there's a i think that it could be really cool as part of that process to just be like when you're filling out you know maybe there could be a very very very brief form it's like what's your name what is your business name and what is the city that you're in and then it just pulls the google listing for that can you just do that and be like hey here's the google list we're going to use this basic information for you just give us your credit card number and then you can edit it afterwards if you want to that would be a way to do it right yeah you could probably even use thrive cart you could use thrive card to complete the transaction you wouldn't be able to like api into the google listing itself um no yeah but but yeah if you're just pulling it you're just searching for the google listing you're not saying that you can help them update their google listing but if they wanted to update it you could sell them that service on the back end boom [Laughter] that's our golden boulder tim we can't steal that we're gonna have to come up with our own version we totally can't i love already stolen thanks luisa louise i love that uh we should have them on they're a lot of fun okay this was really cool i'm glad you i'm glad you walked through this and for people who are interested in doing this go do this it seems like there's a big opportunity here let us know if you do it and before you go do it go watch the video of this episode because like i think you did a great job of talking all the way through this but just visually you'll be able to see some of the url structures a little bit quicker and stuff like that it'll just save you some time so go do that uh this was cool man yeah this is really cool i can uh i hope somebody takes advantage of it yeah me too i hope we hear about it before we wrap up can i shout out one or two things that i think people might want to check out yeah please did you see that uh article that tim ferriss shared a couple weeks ago about the dangers of audience capture oh but he said that a while ago right where he talks about like you know people email him and they're thinking about committing suicide and stuff no he did sure i've seen what you're talking about that was a really interesting one yeah that was probably two years ago like right before kovac kicked off or something like that no this was just this just came out in five bullet friday like a week or two ago and he didn't write it he somebody else wrote it but it's a really interesting i wanted to talk about this with you and maybe we'll have to save the bigger conversation for next week yeah for people who want to check it out and i'll just tee this up so that maybe you can come back next week and we'll talk about it more it's this really interesting article about site it i think actually ties into this whole issue of psychology like the psychology um magazine it's talking about the issue that creators face when they sort of play into their persona too much and their audience begins to drive their life and specifically he talks about this person like have you ever heard of this guy nico cotto avocado no but he looks familiar yeah it's i don't want to bag too much on him because it seems like he's going through a tough time as like a like just a person in general and a content creator and he's got a huge audience and there's a ton of pressure that comes with that but he's kind of this unfortunate case study of somebody who like started out yeah because yeah he started making like videos about health food or like vegan food and then just slowly kept adapting to what was performing better and better and better until eventually he's like now well known for these just incredible amounts of food that he eats on camera and it's had a really negative effect on his health but he uses that as an example a broader example of the challenges that content creators face when it comes to really defining what your own path is going to be and how to manage expectations inside this arena which i think could be really fun to talk about so we'll cheat that up for next week i'd love to that's important um we all struggle with that i think so and it's actually it's changed how i'm thinking about things like twitter and stuff like that so we'll get into that next week i think there's a whole conversation there to have then just one more thing just jumped out at me right right before we jumped on here a lot of people listening to this will already know neville medora but i wanted to i wanted to shout him out and just say that i think he's going to be a really interesting twitter follow for the next couple of months well i mean he'll probably always be an interesting profile like specifically right now he set a goal of going from about 24 000 followers on twitter to a hundred thousand do you see that no yeah he wants to get to 100 000 by the end of the year so that's about four months you know i i don't i mean i i sort of know him a little bit just from interacting at some like events and stuff in austin and consuming some of his like content over the years but i'll tell you he he seems like kind of a troublemaker in a good way you know how these people there's like people out there who can create content that's really eye-catching and stirs stirs stuff up he's already executing on this plan to get like 100 000 followers or whatever 70 000 followers 75 000 followers over the next couple of months and i just wanted to share some of the things that he's done in in doing that because i really really like it so one he just did this tweet thread a take that takes this famous image there's a famous image of a guy during the depression and he's wearing a sign that says i know three trades i speak three languages i fought for three years i have three children and no work for three months but i only want one job this is a really famous image and people use this a lot as like an example of copywriting an example of ad strategy stuff like that well neville posted this picture and goes can you spot why this guy's still totally poor and then did this entire breakdown about like how he would change this sign uh in order to be like better copywriting so what i loved about this was that you know he takes a very i would say like playfully confrontational stance on these things uh so i think he's gonna be fun to follow for that reason and the other one that he did recently i think you just posted this today did you see this where's the pilot that's the copywriting dude yeah copywriting course he's like the og copywriting course guy now everyone's got their copywriting course but i think everyone basically learned from neville so he just posted this entire thread on he says right at the top semi-illegal marketing idea you're quote-unquote sort of allowed to write on u.s money it's a gray area of the law but technically if you do something like this and he's got an image it's within the law and so he lays out this entire smart yeah but both of these share something in common which is that they're like kind of like troublemaker type content you know he's not he's not here to take prisoners he's uh he's here to stir things up and i think he's gonna be fun to just keep an eye on him in the course next couple of months so it's at nevmed on twitter go check him out uh and if you haven't got into his stuff like we talk a lot about copywriting here he's definitely an interesting person too i follow him he's a smart guy i've read a lot of his articles i just haven't followed him yeah i hadn't followed him either until recently but i've just been paying more attention to this stuff and i'm like yeah he to me he shares he has a lot of traits in common with sam in that they're both very good at like that mischievous kind of attention-getting yeah types of content where it's like it's not or like mischievous i'm not even sure mischievous is the right term because it's never malicious but it's it's it's always out there to kind of yeah it's providing like an antagonistic trend yeah it's just sort of it's like stuff that's got a high likelihood of gathering velocity people are gonna talk about it you know what it is like people are either gonna love it or hate it and that's i think rare for content creators when you find people like that you gotta keep an eye on them so anyways those are some things that i thought would be kind of fun to just tack on at the end here this was great dude yeah yeah thank you i really enjoyed talking about this thank you to everybody who followed along i got my kid crying in the other room so i gotta bounce but before i do everybody i should say everybody a lot of people know that neil gaiman has been like a really really influential person for me and my writing and the sandman the graphic novel series is like an absolute literary masterpiece and everybody should read it and the show adaptation is trending number one on netflix right now and i was so so nervous that they were gonna [ __ ] it up but it's brilliant and this is really uh quintessential with neil gaiman he's done this with like basically all of his adaptations american gods he was really like on uh i don't know like on production making sure that they stay true to the scene there's another one bad omens where he didn't he he co-wrote it um and the netflix show was really really on point the ending was slightly different but not really it was it was pretty on point and man sandman is so good it is so good so everybody listen to this if you haven't read sandman i i highly suggest you go and you read at least the first novel because the season one of san man on netflix is is basically like exactly the first novel uh with some variations but if uh if you can go read the first novel and then or skip it i don't care watch sandman on netflix because it's dope but yeah that's my shout out all right i'm gonna check it out man i've heard people rave about sandman forever and i've never gotten into it but now there's like an easy on-ramp i think maybe today's the day yeah uh everyone thank you so much i gotta get out of here all right thanks for jumping on on saturday bro and uh we'll talk to you next week likewise later people [Music] you