How important is it to have a map? Does it matter who you buy your map from?

We will get into all of that below.

The ‘Free Map’ versus the ‘Paid Map’

My family and I went hiking in Santa Fe this week.

The entire time we were walking on the hiking trails, my family kept joking about the ‘free’ map we were all using, versus the ‘paid’ map a man in the gift shop had tried to sell us before we went on our merry way.

The man trying to sell the map mentioned that the free map wasn’t accurate and complete and that you had to pay for the map to get all the information you needed.

Of course we didn’t buy the paid map and we started our hike. Right away, we were looking at which trail to start the hike on. The free map didn’t have this information marked clearly on it.

My dad remarked jokingly, “Guess we should have paid for the map! Then we’d know which way to go.”

As we kept walking, the map jokes continued.

One of us would say, “I wonder what those rock formations were used for? I guess we’d know the answer if we’d paid for the map!”

and my sister would say, “Yeah, that type of information is definitely not included on the free map!”

Guess we should’ve paid for the map!

We’d all laugh and say, “Guess we should have paid for the map!” and make all these jokes about the free map missing information that the paid map included, but we were obviously kidding.

It was way more fun to joke about all the things the paid map had that the free map was missing than it would have been to actually have purchased the ‘paid’ map.

Jokes aside, having a map, whether that map is paid or free, can be useful in any endeavor, especially when you’re trying to reach an end goal you have in mind.

If you don’t know where you’re going, and if you don’t have a clear plan written out, then there is no way you’ll get there.

How can you reach a goal if you don’t have one?

One thing that every single goal, website and non-website, I’ve ever reached has in common, is that I knew I wanted it before getting it, I wrote it down, made a plan to get there, and then worked toward it.

The point is, if you don’t clearly identify your goal, make a goal action plan, and work toward it every day, then you will never get to your goal, or any goal at all.

Create a map to help reach your goal

You need to create your own map, and it can be a free one. You can also get a special ‘paid’ map, by paying someone who’s been there to help you create a map, but the main takeaway is you need to identify a goal and create a map to reach that goal.

Otherwise, you’ll be drifting in life directed by other’s goals and wishes, such as your boss’s in your 9 to 5. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of.

You simply need to realize if you have your own goals to work toward and if yes what they are, or if you would rather be present and live life without specific goals.

Who should you hire to help you create a map?

If you want to start a company like Amazon, then paying Jeff Bezos to create your map would probably be a good idea. Although hiring him to create a map would likely be out of most of our price range.

If you want to be a teacher, then sure hiring your first grade teacher to create a map is a great idea. If you’re doing anything but becoming a teacher, then likely you’ll want to pass on Ms. Jenny’s map since she won’t know how to get to where you’re looking to go.

My first website goal

For example, my first website goal was to make $1,000 a month with a website. That is the reason I made my first two to three site purchases, all with this goal in mind.

I looked for sites I could take to this level on Flippa, would buy the sites and then work on improving their revenue.

At first I would switch ad networks to improve revenue to get to the $1,000 a month goal.

Then I worked on keyword research and adding new content to scale the sites farther past that point once I hit my goal.

If I hadn’t had my specific goal in mind of $1,000 a month, then I never would have spent as much as I did on website #2 and #3, because I would have had no reason to without my having my specific goal in mind.

Website Goal Map

1) When creating a website goal map, first figure out what you want and why you want it. You can spend time thinking about this in silence, or go on a walk outside and sleep on it for a few days.

Don’t make any decisions when you’re in any emotional state other than calm. If you’re angry, frustrated, depressed, excited, or emotional in any way, sleep another day or two before making your decisions or goals to avoid rushing into anything.

2) Next write down your specific goal, such as website revenue per month.

3) Then write down how you will get there. You can be specific here and write down if you will buy a site making X amount or start your own site from scratch, then what you will do to increase traffic or revenue and get to your goal:

Examples of action steps:

• Change theme to speed up site
• Test new ad networks
• Test new ad placements
• Keyword research 100 keywords for website
• Write and publish one piece of 1,000 word content per day for the next 100 days
• Backlink strategy
• Promotion strategy
• Email strategy
• Other traffic / revenue strategies

Fit your goals into your daily routine

I’ve found it is best when you can fit each into a specific daily routine, and take time to reflect each week and analyze progress and results, then shift your strategy in the direction of what is working the best

Obviously, this entire goal mapping process may not work for everyone etc, *insert whatever disclaimer here* and this is not advice or financial advice in any way it is simply my own experience and what has worked well for me.

You can comment here and let me know if you have ever reached a goal you set, or your own specific goal-mapping process if it includes anything I didn’t mention!

UPDATE #3: November 28th, 2022

As a small business owner I would recommend not doing Solidarity Healthshare.

For anyone considering Solidarity, I would think twice and simply pick a less expensive, higher deductible plan that lets you do an HSA and is more regulated by law. Solidarity is too risky. Especially if you have a high healthcare expense. You also can’t do an HSA when you have Solidarity.

Since they raised prices Solidarity Healthshare has become very expensive with the majority of each payment going toward unnecessary admin fees.

Crazy that the majority of each payment goes toward administrative fees and a reason on its own not to use Solidarity.

I just switched to an HSA eligible, very high-deductible plan that is only $133/month versus Solidarity which has recently raised prices to $247/month with most of it going to admin fees.

$130/mo of the $247 a month goes toward the share amount. The rest goes to administrative fees. A huge $50 goes to admin and $67 to services.

That is a huge amount going toward admin which is not necessary and not where I want my money going at all.

When I tried to cancel, they also made me pay for 2 full more months even when I requested ending it earlier, which is not right especially as the contract says all donations are ‘voluntary’.

Legally Solidarity cannot take my money after cancelling as all donations are purely ‘voluntary’ in nature. If only I’d read this more carefully upfront and realized I didn’t need to pay this entire time! Haha just kidding! But actually, I’m sure some people do that.

See contract below:

I did open a dispute with my bank for the $247 paid for my cancelled month. I also setup a stop payment on the account so they cannot withdraw any more money as they are trying to withdraw an additional month as well.

I am fully backed by my signed contract with Solidarity and they have no legal right to be taking money out of my account once cancelled. Or even while my account is active as all donations are purely ‘voluntary’.

Additionally as a small business owner you can’t deduct any healthshare expenses for tax purposes and you can with health insurance. You can also put money into an HSA with a high-deductible health insurance plan which you also can’t do with a health share plan.

Wish I had cancelled Solidarity sooner. I didn’t think about the tax and HSA implications the past few years which was my mistake. I had thought all health insurance plans were $400+/ month which is why I hadn’t considered any earlier.

Very happy to have made switch now.

UPDATE #2: January 13, 2021

Solidarity redid their website and their customer service model, and I just called with a billing question and had no wait time.

The customer service person went above and beyond to figure out the discrepancy and was able to do their job quickly and effectively.

They seem to have fully turned around to offer exceptional service to all customers without the hold time and other issues of the past.

I am very satisfied with them now (although they did increase their price, which probably allowed them to get more customer support representatives), and am happy to be their current customer.

Huge improvement so far this year, and I would recommend them to other freelancers as well and those looking for a lower cost option, especially since their entire service and platform seems to be operating at a much higher level based on my recent experiences.

You can read about their older model and my experience below, but am happy they have taken feedback, improved and are now a service I am happy to be a part of:

UPDATE as of 6/19/20: The below experience was my initial Solidarity experience, but after a year, a very helpful representative did reach out to me and fixed my concerns including any miscommunication and full eligible reimbursement for my plan.

I now think much more highly of Solidarity, and am glad I did use it for the past few years as I have been able to save considerably as opposed to getting traditional health insurance, even though it was hard to get used to using at first.

I now do highly recommend Solidarity, however it simply took a long time to get my initial bills reimbursed & communication fully figured out.

My full experience below:

Is Solidarity Christian Healthshare a good choice for entrepreneurs? Or for anyone? I describe my own experience with Solidarity’s Healthshare and opinion on who, if anyone, should use it, below.

I was so tired I could not run for longer than 3 minutes without stopping to walk for at least a minute. And when I say “run”, I mean hobbling a long at an 11 minute mile pace, barely faster than many people can walk.

I’m a fairly athletic person, and always have been, swimming High School Varsity section and state meets since middle school, running two marathons and being the type to go on a run even when it is pouring rain or in any cold temperature except ice on the ground because ice makes it too slippery.

After more than a month of 3 minute slow-motion running followed by a minute walking, I decided to go in for a blood test to see if there was anything wrong with me.

At first I had thought my slowed down running was just me getting older, but when you can’t run for more than 3 minutes at a time, are only 27 years old, and are used to being able to run marathons, you start to realize there may be something wrong.

Wanting to be able to run again, I went in to get my general checkup and blood test for the first time in over 5 years since the mandatory college tests.

I got the test results and found out my red blood count and iron count were incredibly low and I had iron-deficiency anemia, which was the reason I had been so exhausted I could barely find the energy to “run”, if you can call it that, at a crawling pace for more than a few minutes.

To fix the iron-deficiency, I took iron pills for 8 months, got re-tested, and found out my blood count was still slightly low. Then I took the pills again for a few more months. Finally I got re-tested and found out my blood count was fine, which I already knew because at that point I was running for 30 minutes straight at 8 minute mile pace daily on my building’s treadmill.

The doctor visit + the blood test added up to ~$500 + two more blood tests for a total around ~$700.

Not a health expense that would break the bank by any means, with or without insurance, however, I had been told *in writing* via email multiple times before going in for the general checkup that Solidarity Healthshare covers general checkups 100%, and any reasonable follow ups 100%.

I was under the impression I would submit these bills via the Solidarity portal, get a reimbursement check, and be done with it.

Nope. Not even close.

Christian HealthShare Bill Processing Experience

I submitted my bills and forgot about them. My mom asked me a few months later, “Did Solidarity ever reimburse you?”

I logged back in to check, nope, still “processing”, 3 months later. Still processing 5 months later.

From the day I submitted May 12th, 2019, it took Solidarity 5 and half months to process the first iteration of the bill which was finally incorrectly processed on October 30th, 2019.

After waiting for months, I finally I got an email notification they had been processed 5 and a half months after I submitted the bill.

I logged in and found Solidarity had “re-priced” every single bill that I had already paid full price for, meaning after my $500 deductible, they decided to “re-price” all the bills I had already paid in full so they could reimburse me for only the arbitrary “re-priced” amount, not the amount I had already paid in full.

Their strange “re-pricing” strategy meant they were only reimbursing me for around half of the rest of the general checkup and blood test bill.

Note: The way Solidarity processes and prints out the processed bill PDFs is also super confusing.

Make sure you save your welcome packet so you can check what plan you have, if it is the one that reimburses 100% or 70% like I have, or another variation.

A deductible means what you have to pay out of pocket each year no matter what. So I knew I would be paying the first $500 out of my own pocket and was ok with that.

Reimbursements & Customer Service

Here’s how it worked out for my ~$700 checkup and blood test:

I submitted my claims and waited 5 and a half months for processing

Then for the next “eligible” $200, they “repriced” the bill to be $100…even though I had already paid, in full, the full $200 bill.

I called to ask why they repriced it and only sent a partial reimbursement

They told me the documents I had submitted weren’t proof of payment so I had to re-submit them.

I resubmitted all my proof of payment documents (so much for *trust* in a Christian Healthshare I guess)

I called again 3 weeks later to check in.

They told me to re-email everything.

I called again 3 weeks later to check in.

Still processing.

I waited every month or few months to call in again and check, and no one was ever able to help me get the bills finalized or paid.

The support representative would always say in a sing-songy sweet voice, “oh, it is still processing in billing, we will call you again in 10 days to follow up with an update”.

And I would say back as nicely as possible “oh I don’t think you will call me back, just because I’ve been told that many times before and it has never happened.”

They would say, “oh, of course honey we will call you back”, and I would laugh quietly in my own head because of course they would never call me back, and they never did.

Finally, it has been over a year and I am writing this at the time of C-virus lockdown, so of course they have practically shut down even though they are a remote phone-based business.

In a few months I will call again and see if my bills from over a year and a half ago have been processed as was promised.

UPDATE: 6/19/20 A few weeks after publishing this post, I was surprised to see that a Solidarity representative did reach out to me via email to schedule a call to discuss my situation.

We talked on the phone several times to clear up any confusion, and she was extremely helpful as well as had the knowledge as well as power to help and get the rest of my reimbursements.

She explained to me that the re-price was because I had chosen the lowest plan level which is only a 70% max reimbursement rate, which makes sense and was ok with me. If you are looking to get a 100% reimbursement, you simply have to choose a higher plan level.

She also sent the two checks that I had never received which I just got the other day in the mail, so I did end up getting 70% of my eligible medical costs covered, which was great.

I have to say I was surprised to receive the pro-active outreach and help from her, and she was exactly the kind of customer service I had previously not seen in Solidarity but had been looking for.

I also have to say I do recommend Solidarity based on my most recent experience with them and how they cleared up any confusion on my end as well as sent the rest of the eligible reimbursement money.

Conclusion: Should You Choose Solidarity or a Christian Healthshare?

The answer is it depends on many factors, but I now think much more highly of Solidarity and will consider staying on the next few years, however my monthly subscription fee is increasing this October, so I still need to decide if traditional insurance is a wash or not cost-wise or worth it in other ways.

Before getting the pro-active customer service outreach from Solidarity, the worst part for me was having this hanging over my head for months and months and over a year. I simply wanted to submit a bill and know it has been taken care of. I would rather have an honest, upfront, easy to work with health insurance provider, and for a year Solidarity had been the opposite of this. I have to say they are now the opposite of what I previously thought, I now see them as much more upfront, honest and capable due to my recent experience.

I am happy this is no longer hanging over my head, having to resubmit bills, wait months and call every month for over a year and still not being reimbursed for a small amount. Solidarity as a Christian HealthShare has met and exceeded my expectations with my most recent experience.

I was very happy to be able to speak with a Solidarity customer service representative who was on point and had the power to deliver while I was on the phone with her.

Christian shared health insurance is a good idea in theory, but has some serious flaws in the way they can be set up. I recommend building a strong relationship with them if you do get their insurance so you can get priority support and have a good experience like I had a year after my initial experience.

There are still valid use-cases for shared health insurance such as those who have very little to spend on health insurance or are willing to take the risk of not being covered.

I likely will continue to use my Christian HealthShare for at least one more year due to its low cost & now good support.

However, I recognize that because of this low cost, getting any money for submitted claims can be like pulling teeth unless you get a good customer service representative on the phone.

I currently use Solidarity Healthshare for my insurance, and started doing so when coverage was mandatory under Obamacare laws, when my mom recommended it to me due to the faith-based nature and low costs when compared to traditional health insurance plans.

I work for myself and did so at the time, so I wasn’t covered by an employer, making health insurance a cost that I wanted to keep as small as possible, similar to many self-employed people.

I have paid $107 a month for my Solidarity Healthshare membership these past few years, plus an annual $75 renewal fee which adds up to $1,359 a year.

Looking up other standard Health Insurance plans such as Blue Cross Blue Shield it’s easy to see how health insurance costs can add up to over $350 or more per month or a much larger expense of $4,200 or more per year.

Solidarity did a great job proactively reaching out to me a year after my initial concern and completely fixing any miscommunication and reimbursements.

My Solidarity renewal is coming up in October, and with it comes a raise in my current price to almost the level of a traditional health insurer. I may stay with Solidarity after my recent experience with the wonderful, knowledgeable customer service representative and how they clarified any miscommunication and sent the full reimbursement.

In conclusion, using a HealthShare can be a good short term health insurance solution for some people, but you’ll need to think carefully about the costs and benefits relative to your own situation.

Let me know your experience with regular health insurance and healthshare insurance in the comments below and we can compare the two.

First, this is not investing or financial advice. Anything you do is at your own risk and your own decision. This is simply an example of a mental model I use when I invest in websites. You can read and learn and start thinking about developing your own website investing and general investing mental model.

The VSOT method, also known as the Website Value Investing method, is a framework you can use to help determine if a website is a good buying opportunity and to scale growth and earn back your investment as quickly as possible.

This video goes through the VSOT method and explains how the different pillars came to be through my experiences. The article also goes through the method in-depth.

VSOT – Value Website Investing Method

The VSOT method is one way you can walk through a website purchase before making it to help determine if it makes sense for you.

The method allows you to look at the purchase from different angles to help set you up to buy an online business that can actually return money and profit month after month.

The first two sites I purchased I didn’t put through a rigorous method and ended up making poor investing decisions. That’s when I started thinking more carefully about how to fully vet sites and what makes a truly good website purchase.

This is when I started thinking about a mental framework to think about what makes a good site purchase, and started developing the VSOT mental model even though I didn’t think of it that way as an official method yet.

The second two sites I bought more than paid for my two mistakes as well as grew to the point where they paid for and pay for my current lifestyle, so its safe to say I learned a lot from my first and second mistake purchases but that I was able to parlay them into knowledge that has given me a great structure and method I use to make my successful website purchases that fund my lifestyle today.

The method I developed is called the VSOT value website investing method and I’ll go through each step below. It is designed to help you make good website purchases by buying sites that will earn your initial investment back so you can start earning profit from your website each month.

Verification

The first step in the VSOT method is verification:

First you need to verify all revenue and traffic sources explain how, so you know the site is being truthfully represented and its traffic and revenue and profit.

You’ll need to get access to all analytics and revenue and cost sources and it is best to get added as a primary or secondary user on each account, and screenshots and live video shares can also be supplements at this stage.

Source Evaluation

The next step is Source evaluation where you can determine where the traffic and revenue is coming from and how risky the number of channels are and the type of channels are.

Here is where you look at where the site’s traffic is coming from:

You can evaluate the traffic sources and look at how dependent is the site on a single traffic or revenue source. You want more than one traffic source and you want to fully understand how that traffic source works. You also want to understand how you can maintain and increase that traffic source once you own the site and how to add new sources into the current mix.

You’ll look at how diversified is the current traffic mix and revenue mix. If one affiliate program gives the site all its revenue, is there a risk of that going away and how can you prepare for this happening? Same with traffic sources, you need to think this all through and it can help to write this all out. This will be one way to flesh out the risk level.

Is traffic all from Google, or from a certain ad type, or from a specific social channel or an email list? This is the time to dive deep into all traffic sources and determine how healthy it is.

You’ll need to check what country and language the traffic is.

Ad providers pay more for US and UK traffic and English speaking traffic bc these countries are more affluent, and take the time to check if the traffic is high quality and staying for a long time on the site. If everyone is bouncing or not sticking around you’ll want to know.

It is important to know where all traffic and revenue is coming and going from, and one way to do this is to get out an excel sheet and list the following:

• List all traffic sources
• List all revenue sources
• List all expenses
• Do you know all the expenses?
• Are you dependent on a single affiliate network? Or a trend etc
• Are you dependent on a single back link or few back links or PBN or bad links? Link audit is important here too
• This is where you dive deep to find what could easily stop your traffic or revenue or profit so you have a clear understanding of the risks
• See how dependent your traffic And profit are on A single source this helps you evaluate risk and create a growth plan

Opportunity

The third step in the VSOT method is O for Opportunity
Opportunity means looking at the opportunity you have to increase the site’s traffic and revenue. Here you can look specifically for ways the site is currently undervalued or under-monetized.

You can also look specifically for traffic and monetization opportunities.

Opportunity means looking at the the site’s current input, AKA traffic, and its current output, aka monetization, and determining the different possibilities and ways you can increase each as the new site owner.

Your own skills and talents will come into play here. For example, I am experienced with SEO and paid ads, so these are both areas I always audit and look to increase traffic, and profit and decrease costs on.

There are often many Organic traffic opportunities after you buy a site: before buying you can do an SEO audit – there is often an opportunity here to clean up current keyword targeting, cut dead pages or change keyword targeting on current pages.

You can do a current keyword ranking audit and plan how you can direct more powerful internal and external Links to areas with opportunity for ranking boosts

Additionally this is the time you can start to do keyword research and create a new plan for keywords and content to grow your site over time, think long term and how much room this site has for content and keyword growth.

This is the least sexy or flashy part but the part that has the most benefit over time as you figure out what search engines see your site as an auth for and then continue to publish in that area and see traffic growth slow and steady over time

The site I bought that has been the most successful with the highest ROI got that way not from a flashy ad network switch or a quick hack, but from me adding hundreds of keyword researched articles over a few year time period and I was able to see huge organic traffic and revenue growth over time.

Then if you’re good at ads or social media or whatever you know how to do, you can think about how you would approach that with the new site and what the growth potential for that would be.

For example, does the site currently sell high ticket items and are they running either super expensive ads and wasting ad spend you can quickly cut? Or are they not running ads and missing the opportunity to add a ton of profitable sales each month.

These are things you can test and change once you own the site and are potential opportunities to quickly increase the site’s monthly profit and value.

Another opportunity to look at during this time is to ask the questions:

• Is this asset a supplement to something you already own? Another site in a similar niche it can support in brand or in SEO?
• Will it boost your brand in a non tangible or even tangible way?

Think about how it fits into your overall vision, brand and portfolio and if it adds value in any less obvious way.

Lastly and arguably one of the most important opportunities to think about is monetization. What is the current site doing to monetize and how can you add to this and improve upon it?

Anyway you can add a monetization method or switch monetization methods to be more profitable, do it here. Test test test first and then find what works best for the site.

Organic traffic opportunity: Do an SEO audit – there can be an opportunity here to clean up current keyword targeting, cut dead pages or change keyword targeting on them.

You can do a current keyword ranking audit and direct more powerful internal and external Links to areas with opportunity for ranking boosts.

Start to do keyword research and create a new plan for keywords and content to grow your site over time.

This is the least sexy or flashy part but the part that has the most benefit over time as you figure out what search engines see your site as an auth for and then continue to publish in that area and see traffic growth slow and steady over time.

Ad traffic opportunity Here are some questions you can start by asking:

Are currently making a littler visitor or sell high end products? Consider running ads to your site and test if could be a profitable opportunity.

Is this asset a supplement to something you already own? Another site in a similar niche it can support in brand or in SEO?

Will it boost your brand in a non tangible or even tangible way?

Think about how it fits into your overall vision, brand and portfolio and if it adds value in any less obvious way.

Monetization opportunity:

Anyway you can add a monetization method or switch monetization methods to be more profitable, do it here. Test test test first and then

Some examples:

Is your monetization currently affiliate? If its amazon can you switch to a different affiliate network that pays more and Test it
Or can you switch completely affiliate or wholesale?

Are there ads on the site?

If there are not currently ads on the site even if it is monetized in other ways you can often add ads especially on high traffic sites and get a big revenue boost without hurting your other areas of revenue including affiliate or even e-commerce depending on what you’re selling.

May not always work but always a good idea to try and look at overall profit for a few weeks compared to few weeks before and year prior and just see if there’s a lift or not

Test ad networks:

Ad networks pay different rates for different niches. I’ve seen 2-4X increase from switching ad networks and different ad networks pay different amounts per niche so there isn’t one best network overall. Key is to test here, rpm specially if ads are your site’s only revenue source .

Reach out to brands to put banner ads on your site for a monthly fee or in your email newsletter or as a social shoutout.

I was getting $500 flat fee in euros actually when that was higher than USD for a header banner on one of my sites that was also making a few hundred a month from the other ads running on it in addition the flat fee banner
Having brand sponsors can be hugely profitable and often they’ll reach out to you but you can brainstorm who would be a perfect fit and reach out to them to.

Remember when reaching out is not all about you, it’s about how you can help them, they are the hero and winner in the story if you want to close a deal

Social Media & Customer Communication

Next you can look at how the site communicates with customers, look at social media, are there areas you can improve and automate, then look at email.

Does the site have an email list? Start regular emailing build up trust and intimacy.

Use this an an opportunity to build real connections with your Audi be and reply and have conversations. Having conversations also puts your email in more people’s inbox and not promo or spam folders as email providers see that as a real person trust signal.

That’s why my Her.CEO emails have such high open rates (right now 42%+ and land in a lot of main inbox folders), I have other lists I didn’t do This with and took over when I bought with much lower 10-13% open rates and get pushed into the promo folder as a default.

Add more value than trying to sell in every email or social post. Every so often you can send a sales email for something you know your audience actually wants and people will stay because they like your emails, even the sales ones because At that point your sales emails aren’t selling Anymore because you’re giving your readers what they want to pay for anyway.

Create a product

Then there’s the under-appreciated monetization opportunity which is to create a product- Your site has traffic in a spec niche but no revenue or only ad or affil rev? you can start offering a wholesale product or even take The step after wholesale which can actually be more profitable than wholesale which is to create your own product.

Your site has traffic in a spec niche but no rev or only ad or affil rev? The step after wholesale and can actually be more profitable than wholesale is to create your own product.

First of all, do you think the people running ads on your site are doing so out of charity because they like handing you free money Each month? Obvs not! There is so much tracking available online these days they know what they’re spending and the profit they’re getting from running ads on your site.

What if, you decided to sell what they’re selling using your traffic generating site as the vehicle?

What?

I never thought of that you’re thinking! Genius!

Why thank you,

You can always step your site monetization game up a level from ads to actually selling something whether that is wholesale or your own physical product or even service or ebook or non physical product .

If you have traffic you can monetize it all you have to do is brainstorm every possible way then test every possible way then pick the winner.

For your long term revenue source, and try stacking revenue methods by doing more than one at the same time.

For example you can even triple dip and run ads on your site while promoting affiliate products while selling your own products on your site and you may find you make the most money while doing all three at once as opposed to only picking one at a time and you’ll never figure that out unless you try and test it.

Create supplementary videos

More opportunities include generating traffic through other channels, and you can do this by repurposing content or crating new content in the form of videos.

Think about how you could Create supplementary videos in the website’s niche.

One site I own I created a viral 600K video for expecting the video to drive site traffic and sales, which it did in a small way but this also added an entirely new monetization method to the site and the video itself ended up earning more in Youtube ad revenue than the website earned the first year in affiliate income.

Getting more eyeballs to your site with videos can drive more sales and more revenue just from the videos themselves in some cases worth a try

Sponsored posts

Reach out to brands to put banner ads on your site for a monthly fee or in your email newsletter or as a social shoutout. I was getting $500 flat fee in euros actually when that was higher than USD for a header banner on one of my sites that was also making a few hundred a month from the other ads running on it in addition the flat fee banner.

Having brand sponsors can be hugely profitable and often they’ll reach out to you but you can brainstorm who would be a perfect fit and reach out to them to. Remember when reaching out is not all about you, it’s about how you can help them, they are the hero and winner in the story if you want to close a deal

You can always let brands reach out to you for sponsored posts or reach out proactively to start getting sponsored posts on your site. Having more traffic helps with this and having an uber specific niche also helps.

Lastly, you can always think of more ways to monetize the site, there isn’t a limit on what you can do. My list includes ones I’ve personally done or thought of but the list is endless and only limited by your creativity and what your audience does, wants or needs, and think of how you can best serve them in a way that also allows your site to generate revenue.

Timeframe

The next step in the VSOT method is Timeframe.

Timeframe is how long it will take to earn your money back. You can determine the timeframe and the subsequent Value of a website by looking at what multiple is the site priced at? If nothing changes how long will it take you to earn your investment back?

For example, if the site is priced at 30X its monthly profit multiple that means if nothing changes it will take you 30 months to earn your investment back assuming your site is not hit by a traffic or monetization penalty that you already evaluated the risk of in the step 1 the Verification step in the VSOT method.

I always plan for say none of my optimizations work or nothing changes, I’ll make it back in X months.
You need to be ok with that because nothing is ever guaranteed.

I’ve bought most of my successful sites at either 10 or 20X monthly profit valuation. New French Affiliate site I bought Was at 30X valuation but was lower price so I knew it’d be ok even if my plan to wholesale didn’t workout, but also easier to justify because going from a few dollars profit to 10-20X+ that per sale would mean earning back my investment in less than 2 months If my wholesale and estimates worked out.

Run through a few situations using the opportunities you found as well and figure out best case scenario earn back time period as well.

Using These estimates as a range can help you decide if the investment seems worth it to you.

I’ve bought most of my successful sites at either 10 or 20X monthly profit valuation. The new French Affiliate site I bought was at a 30X valuation but it was also a pretty low price and there was a huge revenue opportunity to move from affiliate to wholesale so I knew it’d be ok even if my plan to wholesale didn’t workout. It is also easier to justify because going from a few dollars profit to 10-20X+ that per sale would mean earning back my investment in less than 2 months If my wholesale and estimates worked out.

Everything is risk reward and you can use these steps to help you make an informed decision but you also have to realize there are risks involved in any purchase.

Let me know what you think of the VSOT value website investing method – this is something I’ll be continually updating and adding more detail to as I go along – let me know in the comments the #1 thing you look for when buying a website.

Get the Website Investing Checklist here.

How to Sell a Website – Tips How & Where to Sell Your Website + How I sold mine. You can learn how to sell your site watching the video below or reading the rest of this article.

First things first, I am here to be a resource for you and if you are looking to sell a website send me an email, stacy@her.ceo.

I’m always looking to buy high traffic and/ors revenue generating websites, and I have a website investing email list who are also hungry and ready to buy websites. So if you have a site that gets traffic, or any type of revenue send me an email, stacy@her.ceo.

You can also sign up for my email list if you want to buy a website, as I send website buying tips and deals.

Starter Sites vs Established Sites

There are two types of sites you can sell, one is a starter site, which is one that you either custom make or that you’ve already made that has all the pieces in place. It has content and structure or is a custom site for someone, but it has no traffic and no revenue.

Depending on how you position it you can still sell it for a lot of money, especially if it’s a custom site for someone.

Th second type of site is one that has traffic and is making money already so it’s actually worth something on its own.

Personally, I only like to purchase the second type of site which is a site that already has traffic and already has revenue.

If you have a starter site you can always try to get it traffic and optimize it for SEO and other traffic sources and then if you start getting traffic or revenue you actually might be able to sell it for more than what you’ll be able to sell it.

Basically if you make a website and want to sell it, anything you can do to get more traffic to it or monetize it more fully will allow you to get a buyer more quickly and to sell it for a much higher price.

How to Sell a Starter Website

Sell on Motion Invest for Quick Cash:

If you choose to ignore my advice then you can still sell a site not getting any traffic. Motioninvest.com is one site that sells both websites that are earning a small amount of revenue and brand new starter sites that aren’t earning revenue. You can try contacting motion invest and selling your starter site, although I believe they prefer sites that do have some sort of monthly revenue.

Sell on a Facebook Group:

Another way to sell your starter site is to join website investing and passive income and retirement income facebook groups and once you establish a relationship with people in the group by helping answer questions and have value-add posts, you can post about your starter site that is ready to go and see if anyone is interested in purchasing it.

You’ll want to ask the group admins first if this is allowed or figure out a creative way to phrase it where it doesn’t seem like you’re selling anything but you’re still gauging interest if anyone wants it.

For example you could post, “I have this beautiful, 10,000 word, finance website, but I don’t know what to do with it. What do you guys think? Should I renew the domain or let it go or try to sell it somewhere? “ the beauty with this type of post is you’re not actively selling but if someone is super interested in your site they will reach out to you via DM and you can start a sales conversation there.

If you have a site that does have some sort of traffic or revenue then you have a lot more options to sell it.

You can email me, stacy@her.ceo and I can either make an offer on it or send it to my website investing waitlist to see if anyone there has any interest in buying it.

How to Sell an Established Website

How to sell a website that already has traffic and revenue:

Email Stacy@Her.CEO

The first thing you want to do is email me stacy@her.ceo, and we can start a conversation and see if there’s some way that I can either buy your site or help you sell it. As a first step, always I have a huge email list that always wants to even if it’s something I’m interested in.

List Your Site on a Website Selling Platform:

You can also choose to sell it on a website investing platform.

You can list your site to sell on Flippa which has a starter site listing fee of $15 or an established site listing fee of $49 PLUS a 10% sale success fee that goes down in a tiered structure for sites that sell for over 50K, you can also apply to sell your sit on Empireflippers.com they don’t accept all sites like Flippa does so you have to send in stat and revenue verification data and they have to choose your site to list on their platform.

When I went through the process of listing my website for sale on Empire Flippers they made me pay a $250 deposit that they ended up refunding when they didn’t choose to list my site for sale on their platform.

I’m not sure but I think they might refund the deposit after you sell your site but you’d need to check with them to verify how that works or even if they still collect that type of deposit because I checked their website and they don’t publicly post about requiring sellers to send in a deposit even though it was something I had to do. they also take a 15% success fee for any website that sells for under $1 million dollars which is quite hefty, and that also goes down in a tiered structure for more expensive sites.

I don’t have personal experience selling a site through any other platforms but you can also apply to sell your site at FEinternational.com, investors.club and quietlightbrokerage.com.

I ended up selling my site using a broker at Latonas.com.

It’s important to do your research for each platform to figure out the fees you’ll have to pay for listing and sale success fees as it differs by platform.

If you choose to sell on Flippa.com for example, they have $49 listing fee and then they take a 10% success fee of each sale, and that goes down as your site price goes up, like, the percentage that they take goes down so the number they take still goes up but the percentage will go down.

You can also sell your site on Empire flippers.com Flippa accepts every site that lists on it, Empire Flippers is more choosy and they’re going about your site and going to make sure it’s exactly what they want to sell to their audience. You might not even get accepted with Empire Flippers since they don’t accept all sites to sell.

Getting accepted by them is also not a a guarantee of a sale, although you’re going to get more visibility from listing on Empire Flippers, Flippa or any of the other site listing platforms because both of these platforms have a huge audience so there’s a really high chance that someone will want your site.

I was looking at EmpireFlippers.com and it says that out of all the sites they’ve approved, they’ve actually sold 89% of the ones that they’ve listed, so still your site could be in the 11% that doesn’t get sold.

Empire Flippers also makes you pay a $250 deposit when you list it which I think they say they refund after the sale or return of the site. I only know about the $250 fee because I went through the process of listing the site with them although I didn’t end up listing it on their platform, but I still had to pay them the $250 and then they refunded it when they didn’t approve my site for their platform. They actually don’t post about this fee publicly but I only know about it because I had to pay it when I tried to list with them.

They also take a 15% success fee which is pretty hefty it goes down if your site is over a million dollars in price, they take a pretty big success fee so that’s something you want to take into account if you can try selling it with a broker first that takes a lower success fee, you’re going to get to keep more of your total selling price.

It’s something I’d recommend listing all your options and then seeing the potential amount you could get for the site on the different platforms and start with the ones that have the highest potential and then apply for the ones that have lower potential.

Where to sell your website

There are many platforms and places you can sell your site. Here are a few you can research and try:

• Her.CEO
• Facebook Groups
• Private Deals
• Flippa
• Empire Flippers
• Latonas
• FE International
• Motion Invest
• Quiet Light Brokerage
• Investors.Club

My Experience Selling a Website

Latonas.com is where I actually ended up selling my site.

I had a very good experience in the sense they worked hard to sell my site and were very communicative and responsive. They also have a pretty big audience so I had a buyer within a few weeks, an interested buyer, so we got on a call and everything was great. After the call he made an offer and wanted to buy it.

We went through the process. The buyer put the money in Escrow and I transferred everything to him. We signed multiple airtight contracts. After I transferred everything to him he had everything he had the domain he had the host he had the database. He sends an email and says, “You know what, I just I can’t, I don’t want to do this anymore and I want to take my money out.” He got cold feet, and he said it was because the site didn’t comply with GDPR.

He said, “You need like a controller, someone to manage the data GDPR”. GDPR is very complex, however if you don’t think a website complies with GDPR, you probably aren’t going to be able to buy any website, because even Google has had the GDPR lawsuits and they’ve had to pay huge fines.

If Google has its huge team of lawyers and they weren’t even incredibly able to correctly, prepare for GDPR, any small website or any website on any listing platform is likely not even close to prepared for literally any GDPR lawsuit. At the end of the day, this person just got cold feet and wanted to pull out and they were trying to pin the blame on something so they chose GDPR. The takeaway here is that even if it didn’t have anything to blame it on they still could have pulled out of the deal.

The buyer was able to take their money out of escrow, and then I transferred everything back even though we had airtight contracts. It’s not worth it to get into a lawsuit over something like this – I’m not going to go after them with a lawyer to try to make them follow through with the transaction.

I guess it’s good to know that contracts, at the end of the day airtight contracts don’t have that much value. I mean if you take something to court I would guess that contracts have more value. It took a few more months to find another interested buyer.

This person did end up buying it for less than the already very low price I had originally put on it, and this buyer had tons of red flags. I shouldn’t have sold to that person and there ended up being issues later on which I won’t go into here.

At the end of the day I don’t regret selling the site however I do wish I had waited for a different buyer and went for a higher multiple.

Website Selling Takeaways

Takeaway 1: Choose a high-multiple broker with low fees

When selling my site I do wish I’d chosen a higher-end broker so I could have sold at a higher multiple.

Takeaway 2: Be Patient, there will be a buyer

I do wish I’d been more patient waiting for someone, or does that so I could have gotten a better purchaser who would have done more work on the site and not cause issues that we ran into later on, as well as a purchaser who was willing to pay a higher multiple take all those things into consideration when you’re selling your site.

In conclusion, if I could go back in time and give my old self advice before selling the site I would say, “Be patient, choose a higher end broker and work out the math on the different brokerages and platforms to see what makes sense for you to list your site, and just know that contracts aren’t really airtight until the money has been not just put in escrow but literally released from escrow.”

Comment below if you have ever bought or sold a site and your experience with your listing platform.

How can you make a viral YouTube video when you have ZERO subscribers? This article goes through a case study of my video went viral and teaches you the process to make your own viral videos and get free organic YouTube views.

You can watch the case study and viral video process tips below, or read the article for more detail:

How to Get More Views on Youtube

You can make a viral or semi viral video in really any niche, even boring ecommerce ones like I did.

Viral videos have a few things in common – the first being they inspire people to share the video. This is the #1 characteristic of viral videos, when a video gets shared it starts to go viral. People want to share videos that cause them to feel any emotion strongly, whether that is:

• laughter
• happiness
• sadness
• fear
• surprise
• or any strong emotion

If your video makes people feel something, they will naturally want to share it with others.
People also share videos that are super helpful, such as how to videos, and videos that helped them with a specific problem or solution, so even if your video doesn’t evoke strong emotion, you can still make it helpful enough to go viral.

Viral videos also have a unique angle that makes people want to watch that specific video even if there are other similar videos out there. Meaning you need to make your video different from any other similar topic video out there – you can do this by injecting your own case study or experience into it because no one else has had your exact experience with a situation.

You can also curate other people’s data or experience in a unique way that’s never been done. The key is to take a unique approach that makes people drawn to your video over any other video in your niche to increase the chances they choose to spend their precious time watching your video as opposed to any others.

People have a lot of things vying for their attention so if they don’t have a clear reason to watch your video over all the others, they simply won’t watch it so give them a reason to watch yours.

In addition to strong emotion, if you make them learn something about themselves or feel a strong bond they will also want to share and watch your video:

• Identity
• Bond
• Learn about yourself
• This is us
• Family

How to Increase YouTube Views

The way to make a boring niche viral video, like I did with my ecommerce store product demonstration video is to make it super relevant and exactly what the watcher is searching for, make it interesting, make it helpful, and optimize it specifically for youtube search.

If your niche is boring, you actually have an advantage because you can have fun while making your own video and make it interesting and fun.

When you make it fun and start incorporating your own experience and story into then people watching it start to have fun with you, and then suddenly your boring niche becomes more fun and people start to emotionally connect with it, making it even more likely to stand out from your competition and go viral. So don’t assume your boring niche is actually boring and make a boring video to represent that.

No, instead, have fun with your boring niche and make your video be helpful in a way that is a compelling story for your audience so they stay engaged and want to watch the whole thing.

A compelling story can be from your own personal experience or it can simply be a transformational before after visual story such as a makeup tutorial presents- people are always intensely interested in before after visual stories as you can see from any makeup or home improvement channel, as well as engaging personal experience stories which you can inject into any niche, not as a side note, but as a way to tell the entire video in a story arc to keep people engaged.

YouTube SEO

You can have a viral video that goes viral from just people sharing it, and you can have a video that goes viral from being correctly optimized for YouTube SEO.

Here is how to optimize a video to go viral through YouTube SEO, which is how my specific ecommerce video went viral:

• Keyword research

  Keyword research is a huge part of viral YouTube SEO. Search for keywords in your niche on YouTube and choose a video topic, keyword and title that is not overcrowded.

  This means choosing one where there are not too many videos uploaded for the keyword already, and especially not too many good or similar videos already uploaded on it. You need to know you can make the best video, with firsthand experience preferably so yours has a chance of living on the first page in a high-ranking position. It is important there isn’t already too much super good competition because otherwise you’ll never rank organically without an ad budget, and why add more noise to some thoroughly and well covered already if you don’t have anything unique to add.

  If you can take a super interesting unique angle on a well covered topic, that is a good play to stand out as long as you make that super clear in your title however.

• Video Title

  The video title is very important for ranking in YouTube.

  For your keyword research in the title, the key is to have your most specific keyword at the front of the title because that will carry the most weigh tin search results, and this will increase your watch time which increases your video rank which I talk about more later on.

  After the specific keyword you want to rank #1 one on then put an interesting short phrase that highlights your unique experience and results try to include an interesting question or number or something that makes people want to click, then you can insert one or two more broad, more general keywords in the title so later on once people start liking and watching your video, youtube will start to rank you for your broader keywords in addition to your general keywords. This is a great way to structure your title for maximum views so you get people’s attention so they want to watch and click, and you get the super specific high quality views plus set yourself up with the opportunity to rake in broader keyword rankings and views as well.

  The title has to be relevant to the high traffic keywords with as low comp as possible so your video will show. Try putting a specific number or result in your title when possible so people see you as credible and with experience. People like watching those who have direct experience in the area so they know the advice will actually work and it makes watching the videos more interesting, make the title something they want to click.

  I create a standout title by looking at the currently ranking page of YouTube videos where I want my video to show up based on the keyword I’m targeting. I then picture my title on that page near the middle and ask myself, “would I click that title to watch it? Would I click that thumbnail? What would make me want to click and watch that’s NOT clickbait?”

  Not having a clickbait title, but actually being able to follow through on your title in the video is key because visitors have to click and watch and then be hooked and want to watch more and trust you, not feel duped into thinking they clicked and then go to a horrible video that is boring and not relevant.

• Video Thumbnail

  The video thumbnail is super important for YouTube SEO because without a good one, even if your title thumbnail and keywords are spot on, you’ll never rank long term.

  It’s important to look at the videos already ranking on the page you want yours to rank and then see how you can make your thumbnail stand out.

  Choose a different color, choose a captivating statistic or word you can add to your own thumbnail. The key is to make your thumbnail stand out and be the best on the page, the one you’d want to click if shown the search result page.

  This will increase your video CTR which will increase its ranking long term as long as people actually watch your video and it’s not clickbait.

• Captivating Content

  Having insanely interesting content that draws the viewer in for the majority of the video is the #1 ranking factor and without it your video has no chance of ranking even if you ace every other single ranking factor.

  You have to make your video interesting with no pauses or ums or boring filler pieces. People will stop watching if you even have a second or two of filler or confusion.

  Let me say that again. Every second of your video has to have a purpose. Every second has to capture attention, add value and be interesting. The second you start rambling or didn’t know what you were going to say, or didn’t edit a pause or put in excess filler info, the viewer will stop watching.

  Youtube videos are different from podcasts in that people want an answer or help and they want it now, they don’t want to listen to you ramble for an hour and then get a few key takeaways like people do on podcasts or longer form content.

  You probably know from your own experience, if you’re watching a youtube video for a specific reason and the person starts talking about something else or is super boring you simply stop watching and find a different video. The youtube algorithm takes this into account in a huge way because of the enormous volume of content that is uploaded each day and the fierce competition for each keyword.

  Youtube wants to give viewers the best possible content and they do this by measuring metrics including click through rate on title and thumbnail and even more so by measuring view time and video engagement including likes and comments.

  Youtube will drive more traffic to your video when people watch most of it or the whole thing because this is a huge signal to them that your video was good because someone took the time to watch the whole thing. If your viewers are all clicking out because you clickbaited them, or because you’re boring or pause a lot then you’re not giving your video even a chance to start ranking.

  Another huge bonus When people love and watch your whole video, youtube starts expanding the keywords it shows for so you can start gaining more views than you even originally tried to target

• High Production Value: Lighting & Sound

  Probably the least important ranking factor, but it will help, and it will add to how long people watch your video which will help boost it in results.

  Lighting is key because if people have trouble seeing you or think you look strange they’ll likely click out and find another video with good lighting to watch. My first viral video had insanely good lighting even though it was my first youtube video because I bought lightbulb lamps at Home Depot and a white tarp for my background so it looked professional and clean and super well-lit which was even more important for a beauty product video, but is also important if you want any type of viral video.

  Sound isn’t as important and my first viral video had OK sound from my computer, but if you’re producing more than one video you might as well invest in a lavalier mic to increase your production value.

  Let me know if which viral video ranking factor you think is most important in the comments!

  ]]> https://her.ceo/how-to-increase-youtube-views/feed/ 0 https://her.ceo/flippa-scams/ https://her.ceo/flippa-scams/#respond Tue, 17 Nov 2020 21:11:05 +0000 https://her.ceo/?p=1312 Flippa Scams

  What are Flippa scams and how can you avoid them? Keep reading or watch the video to find out.

  How do you know if a website owner is lying? There are many signs but the best way to figure it out is to verify everything they are saying independently and on your own.

  My Experience with Flippa Scams & Good Sites

  In this article I’ll go into my experiences with Flippa, both good, bad, and the scams I’ve encountered and give you insight into how you can avoid scammy Flippa listings and make good site purchase decisions.

  I have fallen victim to one Flippa scam, as well as made one poor purchase on Flippa that wasn’t a scam simply a bad investing decision on my part.

  The other sites I have purchased on Flippa have been great purchases that I’ve made many times back what I paid for them and many more times what I lost in the scam and poor purchase.

  I want to clarify that the Flippa platform itself is not a scam, but like any platform or any activity where money is changing hands, there are some people who will try to take advantage of others and not represent their sites accurately in order to do so.

  The only reason I’ve been able to make a handful of good purchases on Flippa is that I had the experience first with buying a site that was represented untruthfully and was a scam, because that firsthand experience made me realize how important it is to dive deep into site stats and revenue and verify everything before making a purchase.

  It all started when I received an email from a Nigerian prince telling me I needed to buy him a specific website on Flippa so he could regain access to his bank account and send me a million dollars. Of course I went right away to Flippa and purchased the site so the prince could regain his bank account access and send me a million dollars!

  Guys I’m kidding – but on another note don’t give your bank details to any Nigerian princes who email you.

  How I Fell for a Flippa Scam

  I fell for a Flippa scam on my first Flippa purchase due to a number of factors, and one was desperation and feeling the need to purchase a site that would start making money right away, similar to people who fall for Nigerian prince emails, they are likely desperate for money so they look past the obvious red flags and wire the prince money or do other not super smart things.

  Even though I would never fall for a Nigerian prince type scam even in a desperate state, my desperation put me in a poor place to be making any type of buying decision, but I didn’t realize that at the time.

  When making that first purchase I scrolled through pages of listings on Flippa and ended up buying a small $1,300 that compared technology and iPad case coverings monetized with amazon affiliates site, and the owner claimed it was making $350 profit a month, so I thought oh this is an incredible deal I’ll be able to make back what I paid for the site in less than 4 months, this is great! The owner even showed me revenue screenshots from his amazon account that showed over $300 each month in affiliate commission, and I had Google analytics access to the site before buying it.

  I remember my gut telling me right away there was a red flag. When I looked at the amazon affiliate screenshots, the majority of the purchases were not technology related, they were bible or other related, and the thing about amazon is they pay affiliate commission on all purchases someone makes after clicking your link, not just the direct purchase of the item you inspired them to purchase. This means logically there could have been a lot of other non-related commissions being received.

  But I had a feeling there was something off, but I ignored it out of desperation to buy a site that was making money. And I told myself, worst case scenario it has to be making something.

  At this point I’d never evaluated a site to determine how much it is currently making and what its potential is via google analytics so I saw it had over a thousand visits a month and thought maybe it just had a very high conversion rate etc, I wasn’t diving deep to verify things and I was way too trusting.

  Another red flag was he was selling it for a 4X monthly profit valuation and I knew that the going rate for sites at this point in time was 20X monthly profit valuation, another “too good to be true” signal.

  I put in my offer and bought the site and transferred it into my hosting account. I remember getting the first affiliate commission from it for a few dollars and how excited I was. And then there were crickets.

  I realized pretty quickly he had lied about the site profit and revenue and that id fallen for a scam.

  The site was only making around $20 a month, and he had said it was making $350. Turns out I had paid a 65X monthly profit valuation multiple, and had been lied to about site revenue.

  I reached out to him and he never responded of course, and to Flippa to report his account, and they were able to take action, but I had been lied to and had fallen for one of the many Flippa scammers who try to lie about revenue to sell sites for a lot more than they’re worth.

  Looking back it ended up being a great first lesson for me because I’d only lost a small amount of money to learn such an important lesson that has likely saved me from losing tens of thousands I could have lost if I’d made that mistake on a bigger site purchase.

  How to Avoid Flippa Scams

  The lesson I learned is, if you’re buying any type of investment, including a website, you need to go deep to verify revenue and stats and make sure the seller is honest and telling the truth and that your investment is not based on lies or a scam. You need to deep dive into traffic and revenue verification logically to make sure everything checks out. You also need to listen to you intuition and gut which will also give you clues if something is off or ifyou’re falling for a scam.

  I also now use something common sense test to determine if stats add up with what the site owner is saying they actually get for revenue.

  In the common sense test I combine Google Analytics, average RPMs and conversion rates to determine what the income numbers should be if the site owner is telling the truth. Then I compare the common sense estimates to the numbers the site owner provides and see if they are in the same ballpark.

  Learn from my blind trust mistake and always verify traffic and revenue before purchasing a site.
  Not everyone is an honest fairy God-mother and some people will try to cheat you out of your money.

  You also need to listen to your gut if it’s telling you there’s a mismatch, like in my example where a technology site was getting its main revenue source from bible affiliate products and when a site is only getting 28 visitors a day but the owner tells you it’s making $350 a month Which doesn’t past any type of gut or common sense test or even logical test if you site down and work the numbers out and truly think about it.

  What you need to realize is there will always be people trying to lie to get more money, yes on Flippa, and yes even when you’re buying a house or buying any type of business or even product.

  People lie if they can get away with it. So you need to assume that is the case up front and go deep to verify everything on your own before making a purchase to avoid falling for any type of scam.

  The other lesson I took away from falling for this site purchase is to only buy a site when you are calm and have a clear, non-desperate mindset. It’s similar to making a decision when you’re angry, or texting someone when you’re drunk or angry. None of those actions will end well. You should only make a big decision or purchase when you’re in a good, clear state of mind.

  It’s also important to listen to your gut even after verifying everything with logic. If something feels off, it probably is, and your gut is a lot smarter than you give it credit for, so if everything checks out on the verification end but you still feel something is off, then my advice would be to not buy the website.

  In this case, even though I was a website buying newbie and had no idea even how to verify revenue or what a site getting 28 visitors a day in the tech affiliate niche should be making, if I had listened to my intuition that was screaming red flags I wouldn’t have made the purchase.

  However, only listening to your gut can only get you so far, you need to have a handle on revenue verification if you’re buying a website, no matter how good your intuition is.

  This website wasn’t using any of Flippa’s verification features which help weed out scam sites and include google analytics verification and google Adsense revenue verification, and I now only even consider sites on the platform that have these two features enabled, so I can weed out fake sites sooner to only dive deep into ones that already have basic traffic and ad revenue verification enabled.

  Is Flippa a scam?

  The main takeaway here is that Flippa is not a scam, they are simply a platform where anyone can list a site for sale.

  The lesson is to not take anything a seller says at face value. you need to dive super deep into analytics, traffic, revenue, costs and every facet of the site, getting details on every level until you have proof that the site has the traffic and profit that the site owner says it does.

  On Flippa and in life, it is your responsibility to look deeper than face value to avoid scams and make informed decisions and purchases.

  Have any of you fallen for a scam on Flippa or anywhere else? Let me know in the comments and I’d love to hear your story and reply!

  ]]> https://her.ceo/flippa-scams/feed/ 0 https://her.ceo/how-do-websites-make-money/ https://her.ceo/how-do-websites-make-money/#respond Tue, 17 Nov 2020 20:41:24 +0000 https://her.ceo/?p=1310 How do Websites Make Money?

  Websites can earn money in many ways, I explain 5 of my favorite methods in the video and article below, as well as how you can set your site up to make the most possible:

  Any website that gets traffic can make money. Attention is money whether you leverage that attention from visitors into your own products and services or get paid by someone else to show your audience their products and services.

  I’m going to dive into 6 ways a website can make money, and you can see if any make sense for your website and figure out what your favorites are. You can even monetize a site with more than one method at a time so dont feel stuck like you can only use one option at a time.

  1. Ads

     One way and one of the most common ways to monetize your website is using ads.

     As long as your website is getting traffic, monetizing with ads is a very viable option
     I personally use ads as the main and most effective way I monetize my websites and have found them to be great, hands-off ways of turning a site into a passive income machine

     One of my favorite things to do when purchasing a website is to find one that doesn’t have enough ads or good ad placement or one that is using a lower paying ad network, and then to buy the site and change ad networks or add ads to see its revenue jump overnight.

     I’ve done this with two sites I have purchased, and have been able to double the ad revenue simply by switching ad networks and adding video ad types both times.

     One site doubled from $500 a month to $1000 a month and the other doubled from $370 a month to $600 and up to $800 a month, so switching ad networks can allow you to earn your money back if you bought the site twice as quickly, and allow you to make more money each month from your website.

     If you currently have a site and are running ads, it is worth it to switch ad networks for 2 weeks to a month and try this with a few ad networks so you can see which one makes the most revenue for your site. Many people dont even think to try a new ad network but it is worth testing especially if your site gets a lot of traffic.

     Once you have an ad network running, you can look into the stats they give you and see if it makes sense to switch a specific ad type or targeting method on or off based on the revenue per page view you’re getting.

     If you’re wondering how Google Adsense works, Adsense gives you specific stats on the revenue per pageview for image vs text ads and other types of targeting.

     I’ve seen large revenue jumps by paying attention to these stats and then turning image ads off and switching targeting types, so there is always testing you can do and you should be diving deep into the data to be increasing your ad revenue if you choose this monetization option.

  2. Affiliate income

     Affiliate income means you promote other people and companys products on your own website via tracking links or discount codes and every time your link or discount code leads to a sale on the other persons site, you get a pre-determined amount of money from that person.

     You can find affiliate products by reaching out to website owners and asking if they have an affiliate program and by signing up for affiliate programs on cj.com, amazons program, and clickbank.com and other affiliate sites.

     Most companies offer affiliate programs and if they dont they are likely to say yes if you ask about it because it is a win-win for you and them because they get guaranteed profit for each sale without the potential to overspend on ads and you get a commission for each sale without having to have or deal with having your own products on your site. You can run ads and affiliate program at the same time on your site as well so you can double dip in that sense to make money from both at the same time.

     When you are selling another’s products through affiliate however they hold all the power and if they pretend you didn’t make sales or tracking is set up wrong you may not get payouts you should get.

     Also they can cut or take away your commission at any time like amazon has done year after year with their affiliate program, and it’s funny because people always act surprised when they cut it each time but its funny like, is this the first time? No? they keep doing this?

     Then why are you surprised — other companies cut their program all the time too so being dependent on any affiliate solely can be risky so always add more monetization than just affiliate to diversify your site’s income.

     Amazon’s program is nice though because they give you a percentage of all sales in the persons cart, not just the one the person clicked your site to buy and amazon has a high conversion rate both of which make it hard for some amazon affiliates to change programs even after each affiliate rate cut.

     Affiliate monetization is nice bc it is hands off and you don’t have to worry about any selling regulations or rules and get paid but how you get such a Small percentage for driving all traffic, you can sell all types of affiliate programs, physical products, services, hosting affiliate income, credit card sign up affil, program sign ups, pretty much anything can be sold via an affiliate link.

     If you think about it, if it is at all a possibility and youre having success with affiliate links, why not just start selling your own product or program in place of your affiliate one? Thats honestly going to 10X your profit percentage and give you control over your prices and rates, which is the perfect Segway into the next website monetization method, which is selling products. There are several types of products you can sell, one being physical

  3. Sell Physical Products

     You can sell physical products directly on your website, which is something I have done using both Woocommerce and Shopify, and am doing more of right now with my Etsy shop t shirts, and two physical product niche sites right now. one I created from scratch and one I purchased that already had a traffic and sales base I am switching from affiliate to wholesale. Love the margins of selling physical products.

     However selling physical products Is way more hands on than an ad or affil site. In many cases you need to buy inventory and there are more upfront costs and you take full responsibly of shipping, customer service, complying with ecommerce, tax and privacy laws, but there is Way more potential to make more money than an ad or affil site because traffic is so much more valuable and worth so much more when it can convert for such a high amount directly on your site.

  4. Sell Software or other cloud-based Saas product

     If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of physical products you can also sell a digital or software or cloud based product, one option is to:

     In terms of selling software, if you don’t know how to build the software you want to sell but know it would fill a gap in the marketplace and that people would want to buy it you can always outsource its development by simply hiring someone from fiver or upwork to make it for you. Just be careful who you choose. I actually hired someone with no reviews and the lowest pricer and skill level off upwork to make an app for me and they scammed me out of $400.

     They quoted the whole project for $800 and we even got on the phone but I had a weird feeling but still chose them to do it because they had such a cheap offer.

     They had the first milestone for $400 which was just the app screen mockup creation so they created two images and then I had to approve it and pay them $400 then they ghosted never to be heard from again. I reported them to upwork but upwork said I had released the payment milestone so nothing could be done. I even did a chargeback on my cc for goods not received but the kicker is upwork fought it because I had released the milestone even though I hadn’t received the promised work so I ended up getting my chargeback denied and had to eat the $400 loss and luckily upwork gave me back the other $400 that was in the upwork escrow. A year later I decided I still wanted to make the app so

     I went on upwork and filtered for the highest skill level and price and chose someone with hundreds of 5 star reviews. His quote was only $1300 because he was more skilled and could do it more quickly. He did an amazing job and it was amazing to work with him , he also had a 24 hour response rule that we both had to follow and it worked out so well.

     I learned from this experience that if you ever hire someone from upwork choose someone with hundreds of detailed 5 star reviews and choose someone at the highest price range and skill level because they will do the best job and it wont necessarily cost much more because someone more skilled will take less time to do something than someone cheaper and less skilled so it might end up costing the same amount and be better quality.

     You can also- sell digital products – I have sold courses. I made a few hundred but never took off or focused on it.

  5. Sell a service

     Another option is to- sell a service – I’ve done this with selling marketing freelance services, can be high revenue value but it is so linked to the time you spend as opposed to results in most cases so for me it is too capped and why work on other people’s sites for a fixed amount when you can work on your own for way more exponential growth, passive growth and a huge return.

     If you even remotely know what you’re doing there is absolutely no reason to ever freelance for others or work for others in marketing when you could scale your own business to the moon and back. Simply doesn’t make sense unless you have no idea how to actually grow something, then makes a lot of sense to get hired by other people so you can have some form of income.

  6. Sell your entire website

     When you sell your entire site the monthly income stops when you do this unless you do some sort of partial ownership deal or payment plan deal, but you can get a larger chunk of cash and free up your attention and time for another project.

  There are variations of what I mentioned above and tons of ways you can monetize your site, feel free to comment any I missed below.

  Comment your favorite way to monetize your site below so we can see what the most common method is and I’ll reply to your comment!

  ]]> https://her.ceo/how-do-websites-make-money/feed/ 0 https://her.ceo/how-to-make-passive-income/ https://her.ceo/how-to-make-passive-income/#respond Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:50:02 +0000 https://her.ceo/?p=1302 How to Make Passive Income

  Get familiar with 9 passive income stream ideas in the below video, or choose to read a more in-depth analysis in the rest of the article.

  9 Passive Income Streams

  If you are reading this right now it means you have both an internet connection, and access to a phone or computer, which means you have everything you need to make passive income in a variety of ways.

  Before I go into my own passive income website investing case study , I’ll go over 9 of my other favorite passive income ideas you can try and start thinking about:

  1. Dividend Stocks

     The first and most obvious passive income idea is to invest in dividend producing stocks to get a nice check every month or quarter. I love picking stocks that have nice dividends especially when they’re great companies and I even recently invested in an MLP stock which has an insane 14% dividend. My current dividend payout each year is at $7,184.75 which is nice completely passive income. You can use a trading site such as TD Ameritrade or Etrade to do this.

     

  2. Royalty Income

     Another of my favorite passive income ideas is to create any type of creative product you can earn royalties on such as art or music or write a book and license it to collect royalties, one easy way I do this is using Amazon’s t-shirt design licensing platform called Amazon Merch where you upload your own designs, and amazon handles the marketing, selling, apparel printing, shipping, taxes, ecommerce laws, customer service, customer returns and refunds and 100% of the business and ecommerce side and sends you a royalty check each month based on how many of your designs they sell. They used to send $7 per shirt sold but keep decreasing it and now I get around $4 per shirt sold but it is still a cool concept and completely hands off.

  3. Course Income

     Another passive income idea that does require work up front is creating your own courses or products and selling them on your own website or a platform such as Udemy that does some of the marketing for you, creating and selling a course and products on websites is something I have done and made a few hundred dollars with but I’ve found it to require a ton of marketing legwork to be effective and prefer other passive income methods more.

  4. Affiliate Income

     Another passive income idea is to promote products or services via affiliate links which is when you promote other people’s products and services and you get a percent commission for every one that your referral converts. This can be very lucrative and the pull of it is it is completely hands off and can be very passive because you simply drive traffic and sales and the person you’re referring the sales to has to fulfill the sales and deal with all the customers and business side of things. I’ve done a bit of affiliate marketing but there are people who do it way better than I ever have including Pat Flynn who is over six figures a month with affiliate promotion. If you have a large brand or audience or a site that gets tons of traffic promoting affiliate links. One site that does this is CJ.com or Clickbank.

  5. High Yield Savings

     Another passive income idea that is considered truly passive and is technically low risk according to many people even though I personally don’t consider it super low risk is to sign up for a high yield savings account although those don’t really yield that much anymore at it’s high I was getting around 1.7% per year from my capital one account so you might be better simply choosing a great company with high dividend stocks, you can invest in
     Lastly, if you have any type of large brand or traffic base already you can quickly turn that into passive income by monetizing it in any of the ways I previously mentioned or by selling sponsored ads, website ads or even starting a physical product brand– you may have seen celebrities or your favorite artist start to sell merch, or even start their own beauty brand *cough cough Kylie Jenner and all the copycats like Selena Gomez etc*, or sell ads or sponsorships.

     All this starts to get slightly more active, but the easiest passive way to monetize traffic you already have is by setting up ads on it where you don’t even have to reach out for sponsors, this could be simply starting with google adsense google’s ad platform and then branching out to other ad networks that have a higher revenue per page view once you start getting more traffic. Those with a large following can also start paid communities including a paid email newsletter where subscribers pay to be on the list or a paid community such as Patreon or a forum site where you share content in exchange for subscribers who pay monthly.

  6. Invest in Real Estate or REITs

     Finally one of the other most well known passive income ideas is to invest in real estate and REITs which are real estate stocks – I’ve never personally done either of these because the concept at its core is so similar to website investing but if you invest directly into real estate you have a ton of property taxes, maintenance costs and a higher up front cost for the real estate to make less per month than you would with a website – so I have chosen to put more money into websites as opposed to real estate to get a higher return on my money when I didn’t have as much to throw around.

     A website and real estate are very similar assets in the sense that every month actual realized income goes into your pocket every month that isn’t subject to the unpredictable ups and downs of other passive income types like the stock market.

     As I mentioned Real estate also has extra costs including property taxes and maintenance that you can actually avoid with a website purchase, but real estate does have other tax benefits that are not extended to website investing so there are pros and cons to each.

  7. Website Investing
     

     Investing in Websites for Passive Income

     The main advantage to website investing over real estate investing is that websites are undervalued in comparison to real estate – sure they are riskier especially if you don’t know what you’re doing- but real estate is sold at higher multiples than real estate, for example you’d be lucky to make your money back in 6 or more years in a real estate investment and two of the successful sites I’ve purchased have made their money back in 10 months where after that all their income was pure profit.

  The average time to make back a website investment is going up and the current average time to make back your site purchase is now closer to 30 months, assuming you don’t optimize or improve the site’s return at all which I never buy a site without having a clear optimization and revenue improvement plan.

  You also have the option to create your own website from scratch, drive traffic to it and start monetizing it. This is actually how I started out, and I made a website that I thought would be super successful because I had done my research and found a gap in the youtube market where I knew I could create a really good video that would go viral or semi viral. It did end up going viral in its own way and now has over 600K views.

  Sure it drove some site traffic and I’ve made over $100 in affiliate commission from that site and even more money from ads on the site and my youtube video, but it never ended up providing enough for me to live on, it was and still is basically a hobby site that happens to also have a viral video.

I chose to purchase a site because the sites I’d created weren’t at the level where they were providing enough passive or non-passive income to live on.

I thought it would be helpful to buy something that was already working and making money and see if I could grow it from there. This turned out to be the best idea I’ve ever had because buying a site that was already making money allowed me to see why it was making money and get a behind the scenes peek into what made it so successful. From there I was able to help it grow and even create a few other of my own sites using the principles I’d learn from getting the behind the scenes peek at the site that was already earning passive income.

For anyone having trouble starting a successful site or business on their own, a good shortcut can be buying an online business or website that is already working and making money so you can piggy back on its success, learn from it and then go on to create more of your own successful sites.

One thing to keep in mind is when you buy a website for passive income is there are always risks, one way to mitigate risk and increase the passivity of your investment is to:

a) make sure the site is one that is not super hands on, meaning not a news type site that needs new content daily unless you want to outsource writing to a group of writers or spend hours each day crafting new content yourself, another way to decrease risk is to do a revenue and stat deep dive before purchasing the site

b) you need to make sure the site is actually making in both revenue and profit what the owner says it is because people will lie about what the site is making or simply misrepresent it because they’re confused or they’re trying to get more money from you than their site is worth. This happens in all areas of life not just website investing so it is nothing new. Sometimes people are also confused about the difference between revenue and profit. For example a site that is making for example $10K a month, IN REVENUE, and has tons of traffic, but they never consider the site is spending $10.1K a month in ad spend or promotion or product cost and that their profit is actually negative. You don’t want to buy a business that is losing money unless you see a super clear path to cut wasted spend so its making money, AND if a seller is lying about the site’s profit, then you’re likely to way overpay as opposed to getting a great deal if you truly understand the site’s revenue vs profit numbers.

c) like any investment you need to evaluate the risk and make sure you have a clear path to optimizing and increasing its revenue off the bat so you can make back your investment as quickly as possible so your return each month becomes pure profit

Website Passive Income Case Study

Before I go over how you can make a website investing purchase on your own, I’ll go over the numbers of one of my own website investing purchases:

Now I’ll dive into the numbers of a case study where I bought a website for $6,400 and was able to let it run hands off and passively to make a total of $24,288.54, effectively quadrupling my initial investment:

The third website I bought really does qualify as a passive website investment because all the content was user generated and there were a group of unpaid admins who loved the site and community and did everything for me. I would only log in to the site every few months or if something came up – I really didn’t touch it much and I didn’t even do any SEO or anything because I wasn’t interested in the site at all or even growing it which is kind of funny but also true and that’s also part of the reason I ended up selling it after owning it a few years even though it was still going strong making around a thousand in passive income each month:

I bought the site for $6,400 at a 20X monthly profit multiple and when I bought it it was making $370 a month profit. After buying it I switched ad networks and added a few ads and revenue doubled and it started making $600 a month for month 2, 3, 4, and 5, and then, went up to $800 a month for month 6 and 7, and Then an ad company reached out to meand wanted to buy a flat fee ad for 500 euros a month that I was able to run in addition to the ads already on the site, so months 8 9 and 10 it was making $1,200 to $1,300 at its peak . The ad company switched from a flat fee to RPM based model a few months later so revenue from them decreased after a handful of months but the was still going strong in terms of traffic and revenue.



After 2 years I sold the site, and in total from regular ad, banner ad and site sale revenue I endedup making a total of $24,288.54 from the site, with the only expenses being $50 for website transfer costs, $15 a month for hosting and $12 a year for domain name, and a small amount for a few other maintenance costs that popped up along the way.
That’s a 379% return in less than two years, which you won’t find anywhere else at this risk level which is super mititgated if you know what you’re doing, not something you can find even in real estate unless you’re super leveraged which to me doesn’t count because you can technically leverage any type of investment you have to compare apples to apples.

How to make a Website Purchase

Now that you know part of my story and what’s possible with website investing,

Let’s dive into how you can make a passive income website investing purchase;

First, you’re probably wondering, where do I buy a website that produces passive income?
There are a few platforms that specialize in this:

Including flippa, latonas, empire flippers, FE international, motion invest, website investing club at investors.club, quiet light, and there are a few website investing facebook groups where members post deals that you can find by searching on facebook, you can also sign up for the her.ceo email list on the about page and I occasionally send deals, there are other email newsletters that send deals including Richard Patey’s paid subscription newsletter where he sends deals he vets himself, and if you start to build a relationship with a seller or broker they will often reach out toyou before they go to market, so there are a ton of buying options.

Flippa.com is the biggest website investing platform and the website I’ve made the majority of my purchases on because you tend to be able to find the best multiples here. The main thing to note is you have to do 100% of the vetting yourself which is why I got burned on my first purchase because I didn’t go deep enough to verify revenue – but if you do verify stats on your own I’ve personally found you can get the best deals here.

Latonas is hit or miss and you can find good deals if you keep an eye out, this is where I sold one of my sites, empire flippers tends to have crazy high multiples meaning you tend to overpay for sites but they are more thoroughly vetted and I almost sold a site through them they asked for monthly revenue screenshots and analytics access and an excel sheet with profit and loss statements so they’re much more thorough when vetting sites however it still would be easy for them to miss something as I’m sure they have in the past and you’d get burned even more if you didn’t do your own due diligence there since you’re also paying a premium for their sites, motion invest is created by Spencer Hawes whose blog introduced me to website investing. They have more starter sites and smaller sites which can be great for those looking to get into website investing however I’d personally never buy a starter site with no revenue which is one they do offer because the only reason you’d really buy a site is for one that is already making money so you can learn from how it is doing so and grow it form where it currently is, investors club is a paid subscription platform. I’ve never personally used it but you can check it out if interested, and quiet light brokerage has some great listings as well.

Once you start buying sites and creating relationships it also becomes much easier to find good deals. One of the sites I bought recently was from a previous relationship I’d started where I’d made an offer and they sold the site to someone else, but then had another site and reached out to me asking if I was interested and I bought and am actually happier I bought their second site than the first one that they sold to another person because the niche of the second site has much more profit potential.

Before buying a site on any of these platforms I can’t stress enough how important verifying revnue and stats are , you can do this yourself or even higher a company to do this. When I spoke at the flippa exit conference, Brian Diener of Centurica gave a great talk about pre-purchase due diligence & his company is one that offers a website due diligence service which at the talk he mentioned costs $5K per website.

To verify you should always get google analytics access and dive deep into where the traffic is coming from location and source wise, how much traffic there is, look at industry conversion and RPM rates and compare to what the seller is telling you they’re getting in terms of RPM, conversion rates, revenue and profit, and doyour own calculations to make sure everything matches up. Make sure you have and understand all their monthly costs and how the website is making money. Get video screenshares of all revenue and screenshots. Get access to all their accounts that receive the revenue and parse it out so you know exactly where it is coming from and match it to all the analytics channels you have access.

Every website will have different metrics you need to focus on so this is where your own mind and analytical thinking ability come into play. If you fully understand the website and how it makes money, and then get access to every statistic and revenue channel and do a deep dive you will be able to figure out if it is a) making what the seller says it is making and b) if it is a site you are interested in purchasing.

Personally I view a site purchase in two ways A) I have to be fine with the site humming along making exactly what it is making after I buy it meaning it will take the monthly multiple I paid to make it back for example I pay 20X the monthly profit for the site I am always willing to wait 20 months to make my initial investment back. HOWEVER I never buy a site simply expecting it to hum along making the same amount I paid for it – I always have a short and long term plan to increase its traffic and revenue so my goal is usually to double revenue off the bat and make my purchase back in half the time I would have if the site continued to simply hum along. This perspective is great because it allows you to have a mindset where you’re not overpaying for sites expecting miracles after you purchase it, and because it also allows you to look for undervalued sites you can quickly and long-term increase value on to make your money back more quickly and to increase the amount you earn per month from the site.

I also created the VSOT value website investing method, where I explain the process I personally use to buy high value websites where I’ve been able to earn my money back as quickly as possible with a good ROI. You can watch my how to purchase a website, VSOT value investing method video to learn more and I’ll leave the link in the description as well.

What do you guys think about website investing as a form of passive income? Let me know in the comments? Do you guys think it is truly passive or should it be considered active income?

Personally I think it can fall into both categories but it depends on a lot of factors including the type of website if the content is evergreen or user generated, and if you’re directly investing, outsourcing most of it, or even investing in a third party that manages everything for you. Anyway that could be a whole other video that we are not going to dive into right now.

Comment below if you think website investing is actually passive or more active and if you are planning on ever investing in your own website below! I will reply to you guys in the comments!

]]> https://her.ceo/how-to-make-passive-income/feed/ 0 https://her.ceo/momtrepreneur-beaugen/ https://her.ceo/momtrepreneur-beaugen/#respond Sun, 18 Oct 2020 18:13:22 +0000 https://her.ceo/?p=1082 Beaugen

Listen on Apple Podcasts here (or search on your fav podcast app to listen there).

Tu-Hien Le is the Founder & CEO of BeauGen, a mommy lifestyle brand whose mission is to make mommying feel good.



Inspired after having her first child, Tu-Hien and her husband started BeauGen to address the pain and struggle of breastfeeding. Since launching into the market in 2016, BeauGen has helped tens of thousands of women find success with their breastfeeding journey.

Tu-Hien has a passion for connecting with motivated entrepreneurs and is now coaching business owners how to build, scale, and make money in their own product-based ecommerce business. Tu-Hien lives in Orlando, FL with her husband and daughter.

Connect with Tu-Hien via Instagram @tuhien.le and @beaugenmom

Watch this conversation on YouTube:



Tu-Hien Le 0:00
I’ve never run a company before. So it was a lot of self doubt of Who am I to think that I can do this? Or I’ve never done this before. Am I good enough to be able to do this? And once I realized I was thinking that way and like limiting myself before I even tried. I was like, why am I limiting myself? And that’s why I really seek out the different coaches and mentors to help me kind of break that mindset and say, you know, why can’t you who’s to tell you that you cannot reach these big goals that you have? And like, yeah, that’s right.

Stacy Caprio 0:37
Hi, and welcome to the Hurst SEO podcast with Stacy Caprio. The best advice comes not from your critics, but from those who are already where you want to be. Listen along with Stacy each week to learn from those who have already built their dreams. So you can learn how to build your two hand is an incredible businesswoman and we get to talk to her in this episode of the podcast. She started her company Beaugen and has grown it to incredible heights. You’ll love this episode, if you’ve ever been interested in starting your own original idea product based business, especially if you have no idea how you would ever get started to hand shares how she came up with the idea of Beaugen to solve her own problem. And you’ll learn how she was able to go from product idea to physical production, how she tested and iterated to get to her final sellable product. Even though she was solving their own problem and was her own target market. She talks about how thorough she has been about market research and making sure she’s putting out a product that exactly what her target market wants. In this episode, I was trying to get her to share the one thing she has done to have a successful business. And I’m so grateful, she was quick to call me out and explain. There are so many things that go into having a successful business. It is not just one or two golden nuggets, you’ll enjoy this conversation if you want to get into the mind of someone who has built a successful business based on her own idea, not one that was built using one tip or trick, but one that has been built over consistent effort and hard work overtime. Like all successful businesses really are. Let’s hear what she has to say. hi to him, thank you so much for coming on. I love your company. And your journey is so inspiring. I was hoping we could start with a quick overview of how you started and your background and why you started Beaugen.

Tu-Hien Le Founder of Beaugen

Tu-Hien Le 2:50
Yeah, thank you so much for having me on the podcast is super exciting. And I would love to share a little bit of my story with you. In 2015, I had my first daughter. And from that I experienced my own personal difficulty and pain from breastfeeding and pumping. And that’s the sort of the genesis of Beaugen. And how, in my discovery, I found that I wasn’t the only one that felt the same way. And I talked to many other moms and moms could meet in the mom community.

Momtrepreneur Solution

And a lot of us had shared this, this same pain and discomfort and breastfeeding and pumping. And I was like, Well, if I’m not the only one that has this problem, all these other moms have this problem, why can’t we do something about it? So my husband and I actually kind of decided to develop something, a product, we didn’t even exactly know what it was when we started develop a solution to solve the issues of discomfort and pumping. And we really took a grassroots approach. So instead of us taking the I have a solution, and here it is, I hope everybody loves it. We really actually, you know, spoke with hundreds of moms to really hone in and figure out what was the pain point. And then and then kind of back into salt solution from there. And that’s how Beaugen started. And so it’s we’ve always been a very customer centric company. And we always really listened to what our customers wanted and and their pain point and try to solve it from there.

Stacy Caprio 4:33
That’s awesome. I think many businesses fail because people don’t take into consideration the customers and what they really want. So that’s really cool to know that you did that. Where did you find that? customers to kind of talk to to figure out their pain points.

Tu-Hien Le 4:52
Yeah, so that’s a great question. I start off with just talking within my own network, talking to other mom friends and You know, my cousins and my sisters that just recently had babies. I asked them, like, how do you find solutions? Or where do you find information about mom things? And they always said, Oh, try this blog, or that or Facebook community. And it turns out for new moms, Facebook groups are huge. So within these Facebook groups, there would be like, 10 20,000 moms in these different groups, I would just pose the question like, what’s the most difficult thing about pumping? Or what is your biggest challenge with breastfeeding? And then they would comment and and I would just really be methodical and documenting what people would say as far as what their pain points are, find like the common denominator, and then really hone in like, okay, it’s actually this specific pain. So like, what can we do to solve this? And really just having a lot of open conversations with different moms and their experiences and seeing if we could find like, a common denominator really, and then testing it out?

Stacy Caprio 6:01
That’s awesome. I am curious to know, what were the first steps you took when creating your prototype? It’s something that if I were manufacturing a product, I would have no idea even Where to start?

Starting Her Company & Production Iteration

Tu-Hien Le 6:15
Yeah, that’s a really good question. So my background is in finance, so I don’t have an engineering or manufacturing background at all. So again, I just googled and started talking to people in my community, in my thing, like the entrepreneurial community, and just ask them like, Okay, if I want to start to develop some sort of product, like, what should I do, I’m not a, I’m not a maker, I’m not an engineer. And so they would point me to these different resources. And one of them is a local maker shop. And that’s when we, for your audience who may not know maker shops are where people go, and they’ll do like wood work, or like electronics, and robotics and sewing, they do all sorts of tinkering, and invention, inventing of things. So we went to maker shop and ask them like, Okay, this is our constraint, this is a problem we’re trying to solve, like, What? What can we do? This is what I think this product will look like. And then kind of brainstorm with them and developing the product. And the the, the product development phase is like really interesting, because I really took into consideration all the information that the different moms have told and shared with me about what their pain points were, and then try to distill that to the maker who was like helping us develop our prototype. So yeah, and it was like a really fun journey. I mean, in our first, the first version of our product, we probably developed over 40 prototypes. And I probably, I think I tested every single one of them. And like each one, it was all about testing and getting a little bit better each time. And then, yeah, and then, you know, we got like a very small set of like 20 or 30, moms who were really wanting to help us find the solution, we and we’d send them the prototype and ask them to try it out and give us feedback. And with each feedback, we just kind of keep refining to get better and better.

Stacy Caprio 8:20
Wow, that sounds like a really intensive process.

Tu-Hien Le 8:25
Yeah, it’s a it is it can be it’s also fun. And you like learn so much during the journey too. So you might have a preconceived notion of what you think the solution is and what people want. But then when you give it to put in the hands of the customer, they’ll tell you something totally different that maybe you didn’t even consider. So then you then you start to, you know, tweak and change your prototype, or maybe even the messaging of your product based on their feedback. So a big thing that I took into consideration when developing, building out our breastbone cushion for Beaugen was, we had a, we had a problem solution fit. But then it was also important to have a solution market fit to we can I mean, we solved a problem, but does the market actually want it? So we really took that into consideration by talking to as many customers as we could.

Stacy Caprio 9:24
Awesome. So how did you know like when it was the prototype, like when it was finally ready.

Tu-Hien Le 9:31
At that time, we were probably on version like 42. And we had a good set of data from our testers and they gave us a lot of feedback like this is, you know, it really helped with comfort, it really helped with fit. And that’s when we knew like those were the two key selling points of our product and that’s when we say like okay, now it’s time to go to market. And what we actually did was for our first version of the breast pump cushions we did a Kickstarter campaign. And a Kickstarter campaign is a crowdfunding campaign. And so we launched the crowdfunding campaign and said, Okay, if we can raise $20,000, then the market is telling us they want this solution. And if we can’t raise that much money, then the market doesn’t want the solution that was kind of our test of product market fit. And then, you know, after our Kickstarter, Kickstarter campaign, we we raised a little bit over $24,000, I’m like, okay, so there’s something here, the market wants a solution. So let’s really build this out. And that’s when we took that money from our crowdfunding campaign. And we started going into manufacturing and building our tooling. And, and being able to produce an in mass quantity.

Finding a Manufacturer

Stacy Caprio 10:51
Wow, that’s really cool. So did you how did you find your manufacturer?

Tu-Hien Le 10:57
So the manufacturing, search is, I must say, it’s not easy. It’s really just about like, calling around and talking to people. Um, you know, we went to a couple of trade shows where they had, like, different manufacturing and materials, companies, and just having conversation with them and really seeing if they understood, understood our vision, understood our product. And, and then, you know, just trying it from there and seeing who could produce and make our product at a reasonable cost in a reasonable time.

Stacy Caprio 11:39
Exactly. That’s really cool. So once you started manufacturing, and everything, how did you kind of figure out how much product to make at a time? Mm hmm. And did you that whole process?

Tu-Hien Le 11:54
Yeah, that’s actually a really good question, too. So we did limited small runs, not knowing how big our market was. So honestly, it was kind of like a guess. Like, we had pre orders from our Kickstarter campaign. So we knew that we have to at least make a certain number of breast pump cushions. But beyond that, we’re like, you know, I think that we could sell more if we really ramp up our marketing and advertising campaigns. So it was kind of a guess, like, a lot of it was just trial and error and testing, and seeing how we can penetrate the market and like, increase brand awareness, doing it methodically, and keep testing our audience out.

Stacy Caprio 12:41
So how long were you guys profitable? Like, right off the bat? Because you had your Kickstarter? or How long did it take you to hit like when you’re finally making profit each month?

Launching on Kickstarter

Tu-Hien Le 12:55
Yeah, I would say for us, the Kickstarter campaign helped. And we probably broke even, like, pretty quickly, just based on our demand, and the cost of fulfilling all the orders, the pre orders that we had, so if we at least broke even from our initial investment. But from there, it was all about Okay, now that we broke even how do we, how do we grow this company? How do we grow Beaugen to like, the next level? And? Yeah, so it took a lot of like, talking, seeking out mentors, seeking out coaches, a lot of reading surrounding myself with other successful entrepreneurs, and asking a lot of questions, asking a lot of questions. what works, what doesn’t work? Why didn’t work? Why did it work? Being very curious, and then willing to try new strategies as well?

Stacy Caprio 13:53
Interesting. Yeah. And I was, I was just listening to your TLC podcast, and you kind of had mentioned a similar kind of mindset shift where you were at five k months, and that you’re able to get to the 65 k months. Uh huh. Really awesome. And I was wondering, what was the biggest part of your mindset shift that you think contributed to that?

Tu-Hien Le 14:20
Oh, that’s such a good question. Um, you know, I really kind of had to look inside myself and think about what was it that was limiting me and I would say, like, my limiting beliefs of what I could and could not do really held me back. For a long time. I was almost like, being very conservative. Like, you know, I didn’t have any, I’ve never run a company before or built a company before. So it was a lot of self doubt of, who am I to think that I can do this or I’ve never done this before.

“Am I good enough to be able to do this and once I realized that I was thinking that way, and like limiting myself before I even tried. I was like, you know, I shouldn’t even Why am I limiting myself? And that’s why I really seeked out the different coaches and mentors to help me kind of break that mindset and say, you know, why can’t you who say that who’s to tell you that you cannot reach these big goals that you have? And like, yeah, that’s right.”

So I really just shifted my mindset like, well, let’s try, there’s nothing wrong with, quote, failure. That’s how you learn. So with each failure is just a stepping stone to get better and stronger, faster, smarter, so so I changed my mindset of like, I needed to get it perfect to let me just try and see what happens. And then I just started taking more risks. And then which, with the more risks I took, the more reward I got, but it was all calculated risk. But I was willing to at least, like take that leap and bet on myself and my ability to figure it out.

Stacy Caprio 16:08
Awesome. Wow. And do you find Do you have a goal setting process? Or do you kind of play it by ear?

Goal Setting Process

Tu-Hien Le 16:17
Oh, I definitely have a goal setting process in within my company. Within Beaugen, we do our OKRs, which stands for objectives and key results. And we’re really a firm believer that you don’t improve at things unless you measure them. And one of our big objectives is customer loyalty. And, you know, expanding our market, and then which within each of those objectives, we have key results in KPIs key performance indicators that we can measure to make sure that we’re moving in the right direction. And I’m a firm believer in setting goals because you don’t have goals. And you never know, when you get there, or even you don’t even know where you’re going. So it really gives you have good direction on in the progress that you’re making.

Stacy Caprio 17:12
Awesome. So what do you find, has contributed to increasing your customer loyalty?

Beaugen Customer Service

Tu-Hien Le 17:19
customer loyalty every day, a lot of different factors. At Beaugen Customer service is a huge, huge part of our customer loyalty, we really value the experience that the customers have, when they’re interacting with our brand. We really take into consideration how what they think and especially how they feel because our product, isn’t it during this very sensitive time for a woman. It’s like a big transition time you just gave birth, and now you’re feeding a tiny baby, that’s depending on you. So yes, so we just want to make sure that we really take into consideration how they feel. And so all the feedback we get from our customers, we really take that and incorporate into our brand and how we how we communicate back with them. So we’ll you know, we’ll put that in our social media posts and create blog content, video content that addresses how they think and feel. And that hopefully, like creates a stronger bond between our brand and our customers.

Stacy Caprio 18:28
Cool. And so what could you kind of describe what marketing channels you currently use for beaugen?

Beaguen Marketing Strategy

Tu-Hien Le 18:38
Yeah, so we take an omni channel approach for Beaugen we have we have a content marketing strategy. So we do a lot of blogging, and we create YouTube videos, we have Pinterest, different social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and we even do a little bit of Tick Tock as well. And we try to be wherever our customers are, and want to be a relatable brand that has fun. Like, you know, we want to have laughs because being a mom, like you have to have a bit of humor in it. That’s all like all the sacrifice that we make. And but at the same time, we want to convey that we are at Beaugen we are there to support the moms and show empathy for how they’re feeling during this time in their life.

Stacy Caprio 19:32
Do you find that you have a lot of mom customers referring other customers to your store?

Tu-Hien Le 19:39
Oh yeah, definitely. Beaugen was built on grassroots um, word of mouth organic growth. A lot of it was just within the very active and strong Facebook mom communities just them talking amongst themselves. Moms would ask Hey, I have like that’s a really great Painful pumping or I need? Is there a solution for pumping and other moms would say, hey should check out Beaugen. And that’s how a lot of our initial traction started. And it’s just, you know, almost recently, maybe the beginning of 2019, when we just started seeing a lot more attraction, and that’s when we started doing more intentional marketing and the different channels and advertising.

Stacy Caprio 20:28
Oh, and what type of ads do you run? And which have you seen the best results from

Tu-Hien Le 20:36
you. So we have a pretty detailed ad strategy. But we do all sorts of ads, mostly on Facebook, and a little bit on Pinterest as well. Traffic ads, conversion ads, and then when we run videos, views that helps with our account growth and just brand awareness as well. Yeah, so it all it all definitely helps as far as increasing our brand awareness and helping our account grow.

Stacy Caprio 21:04
And what would you say that your biggest marketing success has been? And what have you learned from it?

Tu-Hien Le 21:13
Oh, our biggest marketing success. I don’t know if I could pinpoint to one thing that’s been successful, I can say that for marketing, and it’s just been a series of testing, what works and what doesn’t. So we would constantly run quick experiments on maybe this copy, or a video instead of images, or on this platform versus, like on Facebook or on Pinterest, and just really constantly refreshing our content that we’re advertising. And being very methodical and being intentional. And measuring the results, we’re able to see what resonates best with our customers. And then and then kind of doubling down on what’s working and then cutting loose what what doesn’t work.

Stacy Caprio 22:10
Exactly. Testing is huge. And that’s great to hear that it’s helped you guys really double down on what’s working.

Tu-Hien Le 22:18
Yeah, totally.

Stacy Caprio 22:20
What has there been anything that you’ve had really high hopes for? And that maybe hasn’t worked out in the way that you wanted it to?

Tu-Hien Le 22:29
High Hopes? I mean, we’ve tried so many different, different strategies, I would say that I’ve never really had like specific high hopes on one thing, it’s always just been like taking it small steps and building from there. Like I wouldn’t just be so laser focused on one solution and like everything had to work, or else for this one solution, or else everything’s going to come crashing down. I feel like that could be a recipe for failure in a way that would might make you like disheartened and might make you quit just taking like small steps to get closer to the right solution. So I would say even like it product development, in marketing, and advertising is all about just taking small steps to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Business Mindset

Stacy Caprio 23:23
That’s great advice, because you don’t want to get discouraged by one thing, and then just kind of quit right away when it doesn’t work.

Tu-Hien Le 23:30
Right. So I would say like one of the worst things to do is to spend, like, you know, so much money in so much time building one solution or sticking to one strategy. And then after all that time you realize it doesn’t work. I feel like there’s definitely faster ways to find indicators and answers of whether that solution or strategy would work. So if you get a little bit of feedback along the journey, you can continue to tweak, get better. And then that way you’re not, quote failing in one big firing ball flame, you just have a little bit of feedback and just continue to get better.

Stacy Caprio 24:08
So what would be your advice to anyone who’s currently struggling with marketing or growing their e-commerce store?

Tu-Hien Le 24:20
That’s a really good question. As far as struggling, I would ask them to really look within themselves and see and ask what is holding them back? Are they looking for perfection? Because my motto is always progress over perfection. Even if your idea your solution or your marketing campaign might be 70% ready, I would launch it because the faster you can get feedback, the faster you can get, like, tweak it and get better. So I’m always a proponent of just launching your idea launching your campaign, putting out in the market and the market will tell you whether they like it or not. And not to not to strive for perfection, because in my opinion, perfection doesn’t exist.

Stacy Caprio 25:12
Are you guys still iterating and improving your product as you get more feedback? Or is it kind of said how it is right now?

Tu-Hien Le 25:20
Oh, definitely, we are actually constantly improving everything in the business from our marketing campaigns, our content, our product, our product offerings, we’re always in tune with what our moms and our customers are saying, and taking that feedback and getting better. So yes, we are currently in more product development, and coming up with new content, and coming up with new marketing, advertising campaigns and everything. So it’s like a constant, constant process.

Stacy Caprio 25:58
Yeah. Wow. So I also I noticed your site has a few partnership products, it displays a could you kind of talk about how you choose your partners and what the benefits of those partnerships are?

Tu-Hien Le 26:14
Yeah. So this, again, kind of came from the feedback we get from our customers, we’d ask them like, what else can we do for you? What? How can we make your your experience with Beaugen better, and people would name like, Oh, I wish you’d offer storage containers or nipple balm, or, you know, these different products. So once customers started telling us this, I would go in and try to source products that might fit that solution. And I was just lucky to be able to find a couple of these companies that were partnered with. So Junobie are the reusable storage bags, tiny human supply makes organic skin products for moms and babies, and bow keys, another like parent started company that helps with breastfeeding solution as well, and add it to our store. And I said, I’m not 100% sure our customers like this stuff. But the only way to find out is to launch it onto our website and see what they say. And so far out to all of them have been a success. The moms love those products. We’re happy to continue to offer them. This goes back again to the I don’t have the answer to everything, but the market will tell me if they like it or not, and just launch it and see what happens.

Stacy Caprio 27:29
Awesome. So is that set up? Where are you wholesaling? Or is it kind of an affiliate partnership? Yeah, we are partnering with them as a wholesaler. Do they also wholesale your products on their site?

Tu-Hien Le 27:43
not currently. No.

Stacy Caprio 27:45
Do you guys have an affiliate program? Or have you tried the influencer marketing at all?

Beaugen Affiliate Program

Tu-Hien Le 27:51
Yeah, so affiliate program has been really huge for us. And we’re actively looking to expand our Beaugen affiliate program. The mom influencers have been amazing, cuz we all know that people love following influencers and seeing what products they like and what they do. And so they’ve been really been great at driving more brand awareness to our company.

Stacy Caprio 28:19
Do you guys track the sales attributed to influencers? Or is it more just a brand awareness campaign?

Tu-Hien Le 28:27
Oh, for the affiliates, we have a program that keeps track of all the sales that they influence, and then they get a percentage of the sales that they they influence.

Stacy Caprio 28:37
So do you guys just do affiliate for the influencers? Or do you have an affiliate for just regular moms?

Tu-Hien Le 28:45
Right now? We’re just doing affiliates for influencers, but we are open to for moms as well, that’s going to be in the future.

Stacy Caprio 28:54
I was interested to get your perspective. When you guys run ads, do you measure success based on break even acquiring a customer based on customer lifetime value? Or how do you measure like whether an ad is a success? Mm hmm.

Tu-Hien Le 29:14
So our biggest measurement for any ads on any platform that we run would be our return on investment. So as long as that number makes sense, I would call that us quote success and just continue to run that ad or maybe make tweaks to see if we can improve the performance.

Stacy Caprio 29:33
Have you guys seen success using Tik Tok so far?

Tik Tok Strategy

Tu-Hien Le 29:39
So the funny thing is, I’m the primary content creator on Tik tok, and it’s fun, but since Instagram reels has come out, I think Instagram reels is algorithm is really trying to compete with tik tok. So, if I film a video on tik tok, I also upload it reels and actually the views on reels is much higher than on tik tok. So, for example, one video I uploaded on Tick Tock might have had maybe 300 to 500 views. Whereas when I uploaded that same video to Instagram reels it had, you know, 80,000 views. So, I mean, I use both just to see and because it doesn’t hurt, I made the same video so I can just upload it on Instagram and on tik tok. And just to see what does the best but right now Instagram real seems to have more views because obviously I think they really want to promote that functionality. But I do enjoy Tik Tok because I think it’s fun.

Stacy Caprio 30:44
Yeah, cuz Tik Tok. It’s actually kind of good that the reels are getting more views, because Tik tok, maybe bought out or even just kind of changed in the US anyway. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think I’ve also personally found like, when you’re one of the first to hop on a new platform, it seems to work better too, because they try to promote you. And ads are usually cheaper. Yeah, definitely. Awesome. So I think last question here is, if you were going back to yourself, when you’re first starting your business, what would you tell yourself?

Tu-Hien Le 31:26
What would I tell myself? I’d probably say, believe in yourself. And don’t try to be perfect. Just try and progress over perfection. If you just try. You’ll learn so much from that. And you’ll continue to progress and get better.

Stacy Caprio 31:46
I love that advice. Awesome. So where can listeners connect with you? And find you online?

Tu-Hien Le 31:53
Yeah, so you guys can find me on Instagram, my handle is at @tuhien.le. So that’s TUHIEN dot Le. And you can also follow my company Beaugenmom, also on Instagram @Beaugenmom

Stacy Caprio 32:15
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. I really enjoyed learning from your journey. And I hope to talk again soon. one takeaway from this episode is that to end didn’t assume she knew everything she needed to know, to create the perfect product. Even though her solution originated from her own pain point. And she was technically her own target market, she still went out of her way to talk to mom she knew and networked in Facebook groups to figure out how she could provide the absolute best solution that would help not just her, but everybody with a similar problem. This seemed to really help her down the line with her marketing message.

And knowing what people were thinking and saying about the problem. So she could present her product solution in the best possible light that would appeal to her ideal customers, and that she would have the best possible product because she had gotten feedback from so many of her ideal target market, and had really tailored the product. So it was exactly what everybody wanted. It’s so smart, really, and it seems so basic. But there are so many entrepreneurs, or would be entrepreneurs who skip this step. And don’t take the time to truly understand their customer, and figure out how to best serve them. If a business is serving their customers needs and knows exactly what those needs are, as well as how they can best package and present the solution to the customer.

That is a business that will stay in business and flourish like two hands. It is when business start to assume that they know what the customer needs that they also start to fail, too. Han was able to double validate her idea by launching the Kickstarter that allowed her to get not just people’s word that Oh, I like your product. Yeah, this is a product that I want. But also their money backing their word as well. And it allowed her to truly see her idea was something that people not only wanted, but they were also truly happy to pay for. validating your idea with your market is so important and so often underestimated. And to hand is a great example of someone who really goes above and beyond and who went above and beyond to validate her business’s product market fit.

Another key takeaway is she didn’t let any inexperience or lack of knowledge stop her. Not that she truly had either, but when she wasn’t sure about How to develop a product as she had never done that before. She started talking to others and asking how she could go about doing so. Which led her to finding her local maker shop something that to me sounds like it is straight out of a Harry Potter novel. And the local maker shop allowed her to make her first few or really 40 iterations to develop her initial product offering. How many times have you had a really cool business idea, and then stopped thinking about it or working on it? Right when you came to a roadblock of something that you’d never done before, such as develop a product prototype? Probably a lot. If you think about it, at least when I’m thinking about my own experience, that’s happened to me quite a bit. An important lesson from two hands journey is that you can always ask those around you for advice and for help. And you can always take steps one at a time to bring the business in your mind to reality that or you can visit your local maker shop, and have them just help you make your first prototype like two handed.

It’s also important not to get frustrated. If your first prototype isn’t perfect, I love how to hand talks about making and trying over 40 prototypes. And then sending all of those prototypes to a group of 20 to 30. Moms, so they could try them and get their feedback, as well as she herself trying every single prototype. Imagine the patience and just the time that would have taken to really get every single person’s feedback on 40 different versions of your product, trying 40 different versions yourself and giving feedback, changing the prototype slightly, and then getting a new one and repeating that process 40 times it really shows her dedication, and how focused she was on bringing a product that was really good. And that actually worked really well to market.

Thinking about this if you are interested in starting a product based business, just know that there will likely be a lot of trial and error involved and a lot of testing and iterations that you have to go through before you develop your final product. I found it interesting that both Michael asik in episode one and two hand in this episode, both mentioned how they both went to trade shows as a key part of the process that jumpstart did different parts of their business. asac was able to use a tradeshow to find a licensing partner so we could expand his design distribution and to hand went to a trade show to find different manufacturing and material companies to see who would be able to understand her vision and produce her product at a reasonable cost and timeframe.

The takeaway I got from this is if you’re stuck, or if you need a partner for distribution or production, or any other type of your business, try googling trade shows in your industry area and finding someone to work with at a trade show it’s always worth looking into because there are lots of business partners and potential business partners who do go to trade shows that you can connect with at a trade show two hands answer to the mindset shift question of what changed when she was able to jump and grow from her regular five k month months to 65 k a month months, really struck a chord with me. Since she had never run a company before Beaugen, which I pronounce incorrectly the entire episode. Sorry about that, guys. So she had never run a company before Beaugen. And she had an inner voice telling herself Who am I to think that I could do this? Am I even good enough to be able to do this? And this inner voice, which I think we’ve all had at some point, especially when we’re doing something new. It was limiting her from attempting to set bigger goals. And that was limiting her from even attempting the bigger goals. And if you’re not trying something, there’s no way you’re actually going to get there.

So it was making it impossible for her to take her company to the next level. She seemed to ask questions to dig into her mindset. As she explains in the episode she asked, Why am I limiting myself and trying to dig into that to really get to the root of it. What really seemed to help her was finding different coaches and mentors that helped her reframe her limiting beliefs in mindset to a more limitless mindset of who is to tell you that you can’t reach those big goals you have. And that really allowed her to actually shift her goals from playing small To bigger, which allowed her to actually take the steps to accomplish it. It’s crazy how our thoughts, goals and beliefs have the power to create our reality. And it really is true if you don’t think something is possible. That is what defines your reality and your upper limits, you’re kind of trapping yourself in your own box, it’s when you start to expand what you think is truly possible, that you even give yourself the option to get there. I love how to hand talks about becoming comfortable with trying and failure so you can learn and get better and get faster and stronger. She talks about this throughout the conversation, how you should focus on progress over perfection. And this is great advice for anyone starting a company.

I love how she talks about if you think your marketing campaign is 70%. Ready, launch it, then. Because then you get faster feedback, and you can make it better and then launch it, as opposed to trying to make it 100% ready, because how will you really know without getting the feedback from the market, that it is actually ready, you won’t, you’ll just be spending more time getting something that isn’t actually much better into the market. So if you’re able to launch, get the feedback relaunch, you’ll be able to make your product much better, much faster. And this is something to hand has really taken to heart with her company and her products and her marketing. And everything to him sums this up in a great quote when she says you put it out into the market and the market will tell you if they like it or not. Perfection doesn’t exist. However, there’s the other end of the coin where some entrepreneurs today have started glorifying failure as an achievement in and of itself. And that’s not the point of this, you’re not just supposed to fail for the sake of failure.

And to not emphasizing failure in and of itself, but rather, what she’s able to learn each time she fails, and how she can apply that to her next try. So each time she gets better and better. So she’s not just failing and failing for failing sake. But she’s able to learn from each iteration and keep improving something which is important for all entrepreneurs, similar to her viewpoint on taking risks, it’s not worth it to take wild, crazy risks just for the sake of taking risks. Instead, it’s about taking calculated careful risks, where you’re betting on something that’s not a crazy risk, there’s actually something in it that you’ve either seen others be successful with or that you know has a chance of being successful for whatever reason. And you’re betting on that and yourself and your ability to figure it out.

And you’re also going in knowing what the risks and the rewards are to give yourself the best chance for actual success. I think the key with taking risk is not going all in meaning you know that if you fail, it doesn’t mean your bank account is wiped out that you have to file for bankruptcy, that your business is wiped out. Instead, you go in knowing that if you fail, you simply get the markets feedback, incorporating that into your next version. And you’re able to keep going, not putting all your chips on the table with failure. And that’s not what the point is about.

The point is to use the potential for failure, or semi failure as a learning experience. And knowing that you have chances to try again, I also liked when two hand explained how if you get laser focused on a single solution, and that comes crashing down, it could be a recipe for failure in a way that would make you disheartened and quit. It’s much better to take small steps to get closer to the right solution and figure out what works and what doesn’t, then to put all of your chips on one basket again, and hope that the one thing you’re doing works, something that two hands company envision really embodies is that your business is never static. She’s made so many iterations, she’s always changing her product and her messaging, and improving her business and talking to customers.

And I think this is representative of any business that wants to stay relevant and keep improving and growing in the market, like her company Beaugen you have to be in tune with your customer, get their feedback, change your messaging, change your product. It’s all about getting feedback and getting better. Constantly. I think a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking myself included at times, that once you have a successful business, it is done and it will be successful forever. But things are constantly changing and evolving. And you can always be testing improving to grow your business and serve your customers more effectively. It’s beautiful how to handmade her company to support moms, and how Beaugen does its best have empathy toward customers and support them at every step. Which is likely why her company has been so successful and has so many referrals and her Returning customers.

An important takeaway is that businesses who value and support their customers like Beaugen are able to build strong customer relationships and have a lot of returning customers, which at the end of the day, is the lifeblood of a successful business. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Her.CEO podcast. I hope you took something away that you can implement in your own life or business. If you want to make me smile today, you can leave a five star review on the podcast player you’re listening to. Thanks again for listening and feel free to shoot me an email with any questions or comments.

Contact Tu-Hien Le

Instagram @tuhien.le and @beaugenmom

Beaugen Site

]]> https://her.ceo/momtrepreneur-beaugen/feed/ 0 https://her.ceo/how-to-create-a-podcast/ https://her.ceo/how-to-create-a-podcast/#respond Sun, 18 Oct 2020 18:12:46 +0000 https://her.ceo/?p=1081 How to Create a Podcast

Listen on Apple Podcasts here (or search on your fav podcast app to listen there).



TOOL CHANGE NOTE: I made one tool change from when I recorded this episode to when I actually started using the tools, here they are and why I made the changes:

Podcast Transcription Tool

Also, I decided to use Otter.ai to create my podcast video transcripts because it works (pretty much) flawlessly, and is only $10/month that you can use when you need on a monthly on and off basis, so I got it for this month to transcribe all 6 of my episodes. You can also use it for free for small audio files, and that’s how I tried it and saw how amazing it was so I had to get premium which is something I don’t usually do.

You literally upload an audio file to Otter, it takes a few minutes to process it, and then gives you a perfectly transcribed text version ready to copy paste, with all punctuation, amazing spelling, and speaker names and timestamps. I couldn’t believe how perfectly it worked, especially because I’d been playing around with Google’s Demo transcription tools, which had so much trouble getting punctuation right, among other issues. If you use my referral link to sign up all I get is another month of Otter.ai free, no affiliate money or anything like that, and I love it so feel free to send the free months my way because I’m sure you’ll love it as well.

My Podcasting Story

Because it was my own rule that I didn’t listen to podcasts, I thought they were a waste of time. And things that could be summarized in much shorter bullet points. I just really disliked podcasts, which is so funny because now, I obviously have a podcast. Hi, and welcome to the Hearst SEO podcast with Stacy Caprio. The best advice comes not from your critics, but from those who are already where you want to be. Listen along with Stacy each week to learn from those who have already built their dreams so you can learn how to build your own. Welcome to the episode where I’m going to walk you guys through my podcast story.

Starting with why I ended up starting my podcast to what tools I use for each step. And to make it easy for anyone thinking about starting a podcast to get started. Or if you’re just curious about the behind the scenes of how podcasts are made and what goes into it, then this will be a fun episode to listen to. I’ve been thinking about starting my her SEO podcast for over six months, from six months ago from now. And I kept pushing it to the bottom of my to do list. Because it was such a daunting task with so many variables and moving parts.

First, I’d have to decide exactly what guests I wanted on, then I’d have to email them and see if they were interested, then workout scheduling, and then eventually choose times to record put that in my calendar, then I’d have to have all the proper equipment. And what type of recording software would I use? Choose the type of recording software, choose the hosting for the podcast, which I didn’t even know was a thing until I really started researching it, I’d have to edit every single episode, or hire someone to do it.

And I have to say, editing podcast episode takes so much time. I only interviewed guests for 30 minutes apiece, but it took me hours to edit each episode. I keep getting better as I go along. But editing podcast episodes is a very very dull, dull task. And it takes a long time.

It’s the same with editing YouTube videos, it takes so long to really do a good job. And it’s not my favorite activity, which is my least favorite part about starting this podcast is editing the episodes. And it’s actually the one reason that I might not film as many episodes in the future unless at some point, if the podcast does start making money, and I can hire someone to edit. It’s very, if you ever have edited a YouTube video or a podcast video, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. But before you actually do it yourself. I don’t think you’ll ever understand what I mean when I say it’s a very difficult task, it’s not something you want to do and it takes a lot of time. Anyway, the editing the episodes you have to either do it or hire someone to do it. Then there’s the keyword research for YouTube keyword research for blog posts, keyword research for the podcast name, the podcast description, then there’s figuring out how to post it on the different podcast networks and getting to rank for organic search, you’ve got to transcribe the episodes, you have to record the audio, video and video intros and outros. Record the actual audio of the sessions and use a tool to do so. And then you have to figure out how to post the podcast and promote it. You also have to make sure you have a good branding, figure out what images you want to use, maybe have a mini little photo shoot or other things and make sure you’re setting up a brand for long term success. So much goes into each episode. And for me, it was daunting to think about, so I just kept pushing it to the bottom of my to do list. Since I wasn’t sure when starting my podcast this month, I decided to finally dive into it.

I wasn’t sure if it would or ever will make any money at all. Or if I even will enjoy it enough to keep doing it past a few episodes. My goal was to keep my costs as low as possible. That’s also my philosophy with everything I do even when something is making money. I tend to keep my costs pretty low or at least try to because anything can happen at any time and it’s always better to have higher profit margins. Maybe that’s something I take away from my days running ads for companies in my nine to five. But my goal is always to keep costs pretty low, but also to use tools that are very high quality. And I will spend money on things if they do work better than the free tools. So let’s dive in the goal of my podcast. However, it was never an isn’t really to make money from it. It’s been able to talk to people who have done things that I admire, and to use the podcast as a learning opportunity that will help me and others listening, grow their own businesses, and really get inside the heads of people who are successful and have done things that I want to do personally or I simply want to understand how their mind works, and get takeaways that I can use in my own life in business.

First, I want to give a huge shout out to Nick Loper the owner of the Side Hustle Nation Podcast, which you should all go listen to that really I’m going to be talking about Nick and his podcast quite a bit in this episode, because he’s had a huge influence.

He’s pretty much the inspiration for me starting a podcast and I’ll kind of go into why that is. Before Nick a few years ago. I never listened to any podcasts ever. I would always listen to music instead, if I ever had any downtime. If I was on a bus or at the airport or just walking or getting groceries, I would either have silence or music. I had been on next email list for a few years the side hustle nation email list. And at first, I never listened to any of his podcasts. Because it was my own rule that I didn’t listen to podcasts, I thought they were a waste of time, and things that could be summarized in much shorter bullet points.

However, I always read all of Nick’s PDF podcast summaries, because they were so interesting with great side hustle case studies and tips. I never listened to the audio, but I would read all of his summaries and I love getting his emails. One day, he asked readers to reply to an email if they had an interesting story, because he was working on a secret project. I was intrigued and replied with my her co website investing story. He replied back and said it wasn’t a fit for the project, but that he’d love to talk more. And feature me on the side hustle podcast if it was a fit. At the time I wasn’t looking to go on any podcasts, but I felt pulled to say yes, for some reason.

Tips For Starting a Podcast

And to this day, I feel incredibly lucky or blessed to have gone on his podcast before I went on any other podcasts, simply because next process is so simple and amazing. And I’ve modeled many of my tools and own podcasting process after his. He has a pre-podcast interview where he hops on a call with each guest to learn more for 30 minutes or so, a few weeks before the actual podcast call. I don’t do this with my podcast guests. But I think it’s a smart move because it allows him to dig deeper into the person’s business model and their thought processes so he can craft the best possible questions before hopping on the actual podcast recording call. Then, and this is an incredible part that has really inspired my podcasting to this day. He has each previous guest mail the next guest a professional quality ATR 2100 audio recording microphone when he mentioned this to me on the pre call. I remember thinking “Do I really need this?” I think I even said something along the lines of “I do I need that I’m not sure that that is really something that will make a difference.”

And I was super skeptical thinking he was being too perfectionist he However, having that microphone on my first podcast allowed the audio quality to be insanely crisp and perfect. This is so much more important than you might think initially. And a side note he mentioned on the podcast intro how I have a quiet voice. But he must have adjusted the audio and I have to adjust my own audio actually I do have a quiet voice. But you can’t tell when listening because the audio on first podcast. It sounds impeccable. And right after that podcast and hearing it live, I was stunned at the difference a quality microphone made.

I went out to Amazon, I bought my own ATR 2100 microphone, and I have used it on every podcast I’ve been featured on every podcast I record for her co having the professional quality microphone elevates the audio quality and the whole podcast experience for listeners. There have been some great podcasts I’ve listened to, that I’ve had to turn off. Because even though the content is so good, the audio is so scratchy and hard to listen to. Even though the content is great. It’s safe to say I no longer think that Nick’s request to male microphones to each guest is unreasonable or perfectionist like instead, I recognize it as a way to make the podcast audio, incredibly high quality, elevating the production value in the experience for all listeners, making people want to come back and listen to more because they know you’ll have great content, but also great audio that won’t hurt their ears or be hard to listen to. So far, I’ve had guests on that have all done podcasts before or even have their own podcast. So they’ve had high quality audio, and microphones in their own collection already. But I am considering a male out microphone option for future guests. If they start to fall into the computer only microphone category.

Something I’ve taken away from Nick also is that he asked the best question I’ve ever heard on a podcast. And he comes at each topic with the mind of an entrepreneur who is interested in knowing the details of the business and starting the business himself. Which is unique from a lot of podcasters who sometimes will ask questions for the benefit of their audience instead of from the perspective of if I was doing this, what would I want to know. So this allows the episodes to be very educational, where you can learn actual tips to start the side hustles yourself and dive deeply into the subject matter, as opposed to surface skimming or stat spouting. His podcast is my favorite side hustle, entrepreneur podcast. And it’s the podcast that inspired me to start listening to more podcasts.

After I listened to my episode, I started listening to more of his episodes. And I started listening to a few of the other entrepreneurs I follow podcasts in. I especially do this during downtime if I’m doing a repetitive task, if I’m walking somewhere and don’t want to be in silence if I’m at the airport, just any time when I have downtime I put in the podcast. And it’s actually really nice to listen to. Sometimes you don’t need to read a summary bullet point and you get to hear conversation and you get to hear stories and experiences. And it’s a different way to learn that I had completely dismissed before being on Nick’s podcast and then listening to more of his podcast. So if you are listening to this Thank you, Nick, because you definitely changed my life in the sense of podcasting and listening to podcasts. So since then, I’ve developed a handful of favorite podcasts that I listened to semi regularly.

And I’ve grown to really enjoy the Nick side hustle nation episode featuring me, the Financial Independence Episode, that I’ll put in the show notes so you can all check it out if you want to. Ended up being his second most downloaded for the year with over 60k downloads and it drove hundreds day of and thousands over time site visitors to her.co. And hundreds of people emailed me after it released. And for the next year after the release every single week. I’d get handfuls of emails from his listeners. I still get emails from his listeners. And it also gave me credibility. And it was a huge jumpstart for the her SEO brand. I was able to use that podcast episode on my resume and feature it in my applications to start speaking at a few events as an example of my experience and expertise. In addition to a few blog posts I’d written

Podcasts can be a great way to showcase your expertise and show that you do have credibility on a certain subject. They can be a really great tool, either on your resume on your link Or even if you’re just submitting to be on a different podcast, if you’re submitting to write a blog post, if you’re submitting to speaking event, they’re a really great tool, even just being featured on a podcast can have a huge impact on your credibility. And if you’re looking to become an expert in an area, I would say, gain the experience and then try to get on a few podcasts because other people will see you as more of an expert if you’re featured on a podcast talking about that. So it can be a great tool to build your credibility in certain areas, even if you’re not starting a podcast yourself. Simply being featured can be enough to give you the credibility, you need to reach your goals in a specific area. The quality of next questions and the high production value of the podcast, as well as his huge audience. And listeners look very loyal listeners made going on that podcast incredibly valuable to me over the next year. Even though it’s not something I’d been looking for, I hadn’t been looking to go on a podcast. And because of my view, pre site, hustle nation on podcasts, which was very anti podcast, I never would have actually searched one out. Regardless of all the benefits it has. I never really thought about the benefits. And I just really disliked podcasts, which is so funny because now I obviously have a podcast.

So my views have changed quite a bit. But the huge benefits from going on Nick’s podcasts would never have happened if I’d gone on any other podcast as my first podcast. Because I’ve been on a few other podcasts. And Nick’s has such a large and loyal audience compared to the eyes I’ve been on, combined with his really good questions, and his perfect audio and great production value, all kind of wrapped together to make it a really valuable experience for launching the her co brand. And for providing a really credible, great piece of content that I was able to have in my resume toolkit. His podcast was able to launch her SEO brand into a bigger space for those reasons. And if I’d started on any other podcast, I don’t think that would have happened. And I probably would have maintained my view that podcasts are a waste of time, and not good tools. So it’s interesting how your experience with specific podcasts and types of podcasts can kind of shape your future experience. And I’m really grateful that my first experience was on the side hustle nation podcast, which is so well produced, and has such a loyal audience, that my experience was really good. And it catapulted me into the podcast world in a really positive way. It took me a while to build up the courage to start my podcast and I wasn’t even thinking about starting one.

How to Start a Podcast

Right after my episode with Nick it more than a year after I it never even crossed my mind until recently. Because there were so many variables involved and so many things I had never done that I’d have to learn how to do. And it’s just it is a big undertaking. And you really want to be sure it’s something you want to do before you start it. What helped me actually start was just starting it trusting and taking it step by step. So before I had everything figured out, I started emailing a handful of my dream guests. Before I knew all the technical details or even how I was going to record, I emailed a few of my dream guests and my first email was actually a yes. from Michael asik, who we hear from in episode one. I invited him by replying to one of his daily email newsletters about t shirt sales. And he replied asking for more info. And then he said yes and wanted to be on the podcast.

Once I had that confirmation and the first recording booked in my schedule, it was so much easier to figure out the next steps, which was for me to write a rough outline of the questions I wanted to ask and then figure out how I was going to record the episode and then taking it step by step from there, which I will go through below. I decided to use Nick from side hustle nation’s microphone brand to record the one that I had already purchased that ATR 2100 microphone which I do highly recommend if you’re looking for a microphone.

Best Podcast Recording Software

And then I also used the same recording software that Nick had used when he interviewed me for side hustle nation which is called Zencaster, Z and c a s tr at Zen caster.com. It has a free plan, and also has a paid plan but it’s been free throughout the corona pandemic so far, no matter how many episodes you record, I love Zencaster, because it really does have the best audio recording out there. The quality is better than the Zoom recordings I’ve done. And it also has to track audio recording. So you can easily edit out coughs or heavy breathing from one person while the other is talking. This means it gives you two different tracks one for each person. So you can just cut out parts from the other person while the other person is talking. And zoom for example, gives you one audio track. So if someone coughs while the other person’s talking, it’s pretty much in audio and you can’t really take it out.

However, Zencaster is also right now it’s audio only, but they have a video beta and it’s launching soon. So there will be opportunities to record using Zen caster and using the video in the near future. I will also leave a link to all the tools I used in the show notes for this episode, so you guys can check them out. If you are interested in starting a podcast, next philosophy with podcasting and something he told me on the right before we started recording the episode is that his goal is to make you look like a genius to make his guests look like they are geniuses. And that is something I have taken away from his podcasting philosophy and aspire to in my own podcast.

Because for a few reasons, because it’s the best way to build lasting relationships with guests and make them happy they were on the show. It’s also the best way to make guests want to share the podcast. And it’s the best way to make listeners want to keep listening to your podcast. Because if the guests sound like they’re smart and know what they’re talking about, which they obviously do, they’ll want to listen to the episode so they can learn from the guest. No one wants to listen to someone if they don’t know what they’re talking about, or they don’t have any experience in the area. So if any of the guests sound bad, it’s not their fault. It’s obviously my questions. And my goal is to make everyone look as good as possible. Which is also a reason that the editing is so dangerous for me because I try to cut out filler words and other things and to make to make the gas to look good, but also to make the experience more seamless for listeners. So you don’t have to be listening to really long pauses or arms. So I have to go through every podcast and edit out small things, which is something that I don’t think every podcast host does. But I’m trying to make the best experience for both guests and listeners, which is part of the reason why the editing process takes such a long time for me after recording each episode with the guests. Next, I took each step one at a time. And I had to figure out how I was going to edit the audio and the video that I had recorded. It ended up being simple. I uploaded them into iMovie, which is free and comes on all Macs, I have a Mac and I already used iMovie to edit a handful of YouTube videos I’ve made over the years and published. So I already knew how to use it. And it’s very intuitive and user friendly. And that’s how I edited the audio and the video. When I was recording the intros and the outros. I used GarageBand on my local computer as opposed to Zen caster and would upload that into iMovie as well to kind of edit. Then I had to figure out how to make the intro music.

I ended up using blubrry.com blubry.com and listening to a few tracks before deciding on an upbeat, happy one that felt like a great fit. It cost $44.95 one time fee and I can use it on all my podcasts. It’s a one time buyout license fee, you have to be super careful because there is no fair use on copyrighted music on podcast. You can’t use a song for 10 seconds and then say Oh, it’s okay. You have to either use completely copyright free Creative Commons type music or pay for a one time buyout license. You can also buy license where you have to pay monthly or pay per use. So you have to be very careful about making sure that you purchase the right license or the right licensed music and you also have to make sure if you’re using the free music, that it is actually copyright free, because you can get into quite a bit of trouble if you do that incorrectly. That was actually the most expensive purchase I made for the podcast was getting the music, I wanted it to be good. And I wanted it to be something that I could use legally.

So I did spend the $44.95 on the podcast music, it’s also urging me to record more episodes so I can get more out of that investment. Next, after recording and editing everything, and taking the pictures, making the intro videos getting all of that set up, I had to decide on a podcast host for podcast hosting. In the episode with Logan, he mentioned both Libsyn and the free anchor FM hosts, I decided to look into each but I was originally thinking I would use the free anchor FM because I thought, well, it’s free, I should just use that one because I don’t even know if I’m going to be continuing this podcast. And if it’s free, why not just use that and then I don’t have to pay for it.

However, I’m glad I did more research first to figure out that anchor FM comes with quite a bit of baggage. After a quick Google search, I found out if you use the free anchor FM, it’s free because you’re technically the product, which is something people say often about free tech products. You’re the product if it’s free, like Gmail, Google stuff, they run ads on you, Facebook, it’s free, they run ads, and you are the product. I don’t mind people running ads on social things I do like Facebook and Gmail and that type of thing. But with a podcast, I’m not really looking to be the product. This means Anchor runs ads on your content. They also publish the content under their own ID, meaning it’s not technically your own. And they also hide stats from specific podcast platforms, statistics and knowing exactly how many people are listening to my podcast are very important to me. Even as I’m starting out, actually, especially as I’m starting out, and having someone else run ads on my podcast is not something I want, it’s not good for the brand. And if I do this long term, I would want to have the option to run ads not have someone else run the ads. And I also want to fully own my podcast and have full statistical transparency and control and the ability to potentially monetize it down the road. If I keep going that far, so anchor FM. After learning more about it, it did not seem like the host I was looking for, even though it was free. So I started to look into the paid podcast hosts, including Logan’s recommendation of Libsyn.

I did a Google search, I found out that Libsyn is one of the most cost competitive host options it starts at $5 a month for the basic plan, and $7 a month if you want to see statistics, while other hosts for 15 a month or more for their most basic plan. before committing, I decided to do a quick check to find what my current top four podcasts that I listened to regularly use as their host. To check what someone is using as their host. You can look at their podcast on site player and see if they use their hosts branded player. You can also view the source code on their website page, which you can do by right clicking on the page, selecting view page source code and then searching the HTML code that comes up for the unique words and symbols that are near their podcast player header if their podcast player is not branded, and then that will allow you to find the branding of their podcast player. So pretty much if they don’t use a branded podcast player.

If you look at the pages HTML code, you can find the brand of their podcast player, if that makes sense.

Shout out to my people who are slightly more technical. They’re shout out to my current favorite for podcasts to listen to when I have downtime currently, which is Nick’s side hustle nation podcast, the boss babe podcast, Tim Ferriss podcast, and the Invest Like a Boss podcast.

Every single one of these podcasts that I listened to regularly, we’re using the podcast host Libsyn, except for Tim Ferriss, who happens to be using a very expensive high end player and host one that was so expensive. If they didn’t even display their prices online, instead, they displayed a Contact us to learn more form, which is code for our prices are very high. So you can contact us to learn how high they are. And I did not contact them to learn more, as this podcast is making zero dollars a month, not $50k per episode like Tim, even if I was making $50k per episode like Tim, have a feeling I would still use a very low cost hosts such as Libsyn, which I then googled to make sure that libsyn was a good host. And at that point, I was 100% sold on using it as my own host. I also searched for a coupon and was able to get the first two months of Libsyn free. So this month and next month, free Libsyn hosting. The only expense I had to pay for this month was the 4495 Intro Music cost. And if I decide to keep going with the podcast, I’ll have to start paying five to $7 a month, starting in two months.

However, I pay much more than that, for my current website hosting and audio files are quite large. So it’s not hard for me to justify seven a month for podcast hosting, if it ends up being an activity I end up enjoying. And if it does allow me to get great content for the her SEO website and YouTube which are two of my goals for her SEO right now.

Starting a podcast was definitely overwhelming for me at first. But once I modeled my podcast creation after my original, amazing podcasting experience and favorite podcaster Nick Loper’s podcasting process at side hustle nation, it became much easier for the gaps, I didn’t have insight into how he did things. I simply broke down the steps and did each one at a time. So it became manageable. I will also put in the show notes, Nick, at side hustle nation also has a great podcast starting checklist where he goes through the things that he uses in his podcast and all those tools. So I’m going to put those in the show notes, so you guys can take a look at that. So we have Logan at sweet fish media’s podcast launch checklist. We have Nick Loper his podcast launch checklist. And we have the tools that I use in my podcast launch experience. In this episode, hopefully those three things you can kind of look at and take away your favorites from each if you’re looking to start a podcast

To cobble together your own tools and what you think will work the best for you. And if it does get overwhelming, remember to just take it one step at a time, focus on what you need to do in that moment. And then once you complete that move on to the next step. That’s how I was able to break it down into a manageable process that wasn’t overwhelming. And that allowed me to take action and actually launch this podcast. I hope this was helpful. And you can let me know if you currently have a podcast or if you’re starting one by emailing me Stacy at her dot CEO. And if this was helpful for you and learning more about what really goes on when someone is producing and putting out a podcast, the behind the scenes and what tools can be used when starting a podcast? Let me know your thoughts and looking forward to hearing from you guys. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Hearst SEO podcast. I hope you took something away that you can implement in your own life or business. If you want to make me smile today, you can leave a five star review on the podcast player you’re listening to. Thanks again for listening and feel free to shoot me an email with any questions or comments at stacy@her.ceo that’s stacy@her.ceo. Thanks again.

Recommended Tools:

Audio Recording: Zencastr.com (free & paid plans, all free during COVID currently)
Video Recording: Zoom.com (free & paid plans, I only use free options)
Microphone: ATR-2100 Microphone
Transcription: Otter.ai (free & paid plans, caution if you try the free you’ll 100% get the $10/month plan because it’s so good)
Hosting: Anchor.fm (free but not really recommended), Libsyn (not free but recommended for serious podcasters), and using your current website host + free PowerPress WordPress plugin (what I’m using currently and is 100% the best option for me currently).
Blubrry.com: Podcast music (not free but allows you to get “copyright-free” music you can use once purchased)

Nick Loper’s Podcast Checklist
Sweet Fish Media Podcast Checklist

My first podcast episode on Side Hustle Nation w/ Nick Loper: https://www.sidehustlenation.com/stacy

Affiliate Disclaimer: I have a few affiliate links in here & if you use them they may slightly help me, even if the Otter one just give me free Otter months, I love it enough to enjoy as many free months as I can get.

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