Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today I’m going to talk about my new podcast ranking revolution, but really I’m going to talk about the launch. And how I messed up, I didn’t do what I intended on doing. There are some good things happening with the podcast, but there also are some bad things that, you know, I should be able to correct and fix up and.
I’ve been working for myself for long enough that I know the launch is not going to make or break the show, although it’s a little disappointing how it all turned out. So I’ll explain it. I have a million excuses. So don’t worry, feel free to use these excuses yourself. But I just wanted to give an example of again, someone who has about a decade of experience working for myself.
Generally do a pretty good job, generally have things put together and can really execute what I plan. But in this case, my discipline was off, external factors popped in, which they always do, by the way. There’s always external factors. So I’m going to go through the bad stuff. That’s, that’s the interesting stuff, right?
I’ll talk about a couple of the good things too. Everything’s fine. I’m having a good time recording the shows. I’m having a good time figuring out the different process, which I’ll, I’ll get into a little bit here. So one thing to note is if you are interested in starting a podcast, I have been running a bootcamp.
So I ran a bootcamp in the worst time that you could try to do this, which is the very beginning of the year I launched and tried to sell the bootcamp between. Christmas and New Year’s when people are not thinking about buying things. They just spent money on Christmas. Most likely if they are ambitious, if they already have a plan for the new year, well, it’s already kind of planned out.
They’re not thinking I want to do a bunch of work in the next six weeks and I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to start it next week. That is not what usually happens. So I ran the bootcamp. I’m probably going to be running another one in the late spring, early summer timeframe. There was a lot of interest for the bootcamp, but a lot of people didn’t have the time in January and February.
So I had three people enroll. It went great. People were able to launch their shows. I think we have three out of three people launched their shows. One’s like on the cusp at the time that I’m recording this, but by the time it goes live, Amberly Grant should have her podcast out. And I’ll link up to the people’s podcast so you can go check it out, of course.
So if you’re interested in starting a podcast, say, in the second half of 2024, follow the link in the description. You could sign up for the wait list. I’m not a hundred percent sure if I’m going to do the bootcamp. It is pretty time intensive, but cohorts working together. There’s a mastermind component.
It’s very conducive for you to actually do the work and for you to actually launch the show. That said, in the meantime, right, I was like, I’m not sure when I’m going to do the next one. Someone else approached me and said, Hey, I want to launch a show in the next couple weeks. Can you help me on a one on one basis?
And I was like, um, I don’t know if I, you know, one on one’s a little different. It’s not scalable, but basically she, she launched her show too. So Natalie Kaladi. Launched her show. She’s a CPA. She had a course business where she was targeting other tax professionals. She’s a CPA focusing on real estate.
So she’s focusing on that market. And we launched a show in like four days, something like that. So really effective to work with someone who like me, who can simplify the process. So you don’t have to go and figure out how to do this. So if you’re interested, check out the link in the description. All right, before I get into the other details, I’m looking at myself in the, the camera here.
Cause I, I record video and then I separate it into audio and video. The thing is I’ve been looking I feel like I look horrible on camera. I really don’t care too much. I know as long as people can hear me. I mean, you’re not showing up cause I look good on camera. All right. I know that it’s for my mind, but the thing is I’ve been looking worse and worse.
And I’m like, what the fuck is going on? And, uh, it’s cause I’m wearing sunscreen. So I have a, an extra pale look that doesn’t look that healthy. And it’s also very shiny. So I’m, I’m being a good boy, putting on sunscreen, try to protect my skin, prevent those wrinkles, all that kind of stuff. But it looks horrible on camera, particularly with this lens and these lights, it looks awful.
So if you’re listening on podcast, only just audio. That’s great. Uh, you’re actually getting a much better experience. So I’ll have to figure it out either. I need to like clean up and wash my face or just, you know, not look at myself on, on camera again. I could see it looks decidedly worse than normal and I don’t even care that much.
But if you see an extra sheen and shine and you think, Doug, you actually look much less healthy than you did just a couple of weeks ago. It’s because I’m putting on more sunscreen. So. Don’t worry too much, but I appreciate the concern, the artificial fake concern that I just made up. Okay. Let’s talk about the good stuff first.
So the show’s fun. Ranking revolution is fun. I ended up talking to people that I want to talk to, right? There’s no other team members here. I’m producing the whole show myself. I’m editing. I’m doing all this stuff myself right now, which I’ll get into that in a second here, but basically if I want to talk to someone, I’ll reach out.
Luckily I have a track record. So people will often not always return my emails or when I, when I Try to ping them on X or something like that. So pretty fun. We also get to cover the topics that I want to cover. So ranking revolution is positioned so that the audience will be professionals. So SEO professionals, marketing professionals, it could be small business owners that are interested in sort of the deeper details of SEO.
Mostly focused on SEO, but there’s always an overlap between SEO and marketing. And at the end of the day, people want to sell more stuff, get more money, basically. So whatever, whatever the mechanism is, it’s usually related to marketing or SEO for this particular show, specifically targeting professionals, because from an ad perspective, software companies will want to advertise.
Agencies that are higher level one to advertise maybe like the Hoth who has been interviewed on the show. I talked to Rachel Hernandez, the marketing, I’m not sure if she’s a CMO. She was recently promoted. So she’s a very high level senior director or a CMO. The title I may have mixed up, but, but basically.
A company like the Hoth does white labeling. So they’re doing like higher volumes. They’re doing more typically more expensive stuff. But anyway, the, the point is targeting professionals, because that’s a little bit of a higher level where this show, the Doug show it’s a blend, right? I do cover advanced topics, but it’s also like people that are wanting to get started with their first side hustle where they’re earlier in their journey.
So I wanted to have a bit of a distinction so we can go like very deep in the weeds and it’s a fuzzy line. So that maybe that’s part of the, you know, struggle. It’s a little bit of a fuzzy line, but I’m intentionally targeting it that way. So it’s fun. A second thing is the process. So I mentioned earlier that I record video and then I pull the audio away.
One important thing. With ranking revolution is I wanted to be able to dynamically insert ads and run campaigns on the audio version. And I’ll explain exactly why the audio version was important versus the video version. But basically I’m using a company called transistor, which has dynamic ads that you can insert on the audio side.
And it’ll also let you have. campaigns within the show notes. So for example, if I’m promoting something, I can insert an ad that is time relevant, I could schedule it. I could run it across whatever shows that I want based on the campaign, but I can put in a link at the beginning or the end of the show notes saying, Hey, in.
June of 2024, this is launching. Here’s the link. Of course, when you go beyond the date, it is no longer relevant. So I don’t want that campaign running. So with Transistor, you’re able to run those campaigns, remove them when they’re not relevant anymore, and then insert them when they are relevant. Perfect example, Amberly Grant, again, one of the folks that worked with me in the bootcamp and a friend of mine, she lives in town and we’ve known each other for a few years here and we’ve collaborated on a couple things together in the past, but.
Amberly has a cruise focused on financial independence and personal finance, and it’s a a cruise that you could sign up for, and it’s going to happen, which she’s done one in 2024, but it’s going to happen, you know, several times, and basically she’ll need to run a campaign for when that’s relevant.
So for her. Just like me, it makes sense to have these dynamic ads. So you can be very focused with your ads in a timely manner. Further, I’m planning on selling ranking revolution. So if you might be in the market for buying a. Turnkey podcast, where I give you the, all the processes and a catalog, a YouTube channel, an email list, all the business, right?
If you’re interested, let me know. Shoot me an email. I want to get it established first, but the point of this show was to launch it. Get it going. I enjoy it. But I already have two other podcasts. So my goal was to sell it. So in this case, Transistor is a perfect solution because if I sell the show, then the new owner would want to be able to advertise their product, for example.
So let’s say SEMrush purchases it. Submarsh, give me a call. All right. So if some rush takes a look at it and they’re like, okay, we want to run a specific promotion because we have a new feature and we want to talk about that. They could run it on the relevant shows, whichever ones they select, they could run it on the full back catalog, whatever they want to do, but it makes sense to sell the show and then have the new owner advertise whenever they want.
Alternatively, if an individual. Once to buy the show because they’re into SEO and they just want to be, you know, interviewing people and they want to run their own ads. Well, then they can sell ad space on the full back catalog, knowing the downloads and all that stuff. So super valuable. And just to be explicit, If someone bought the show and it was an individual, I would give them all the information.
I would show them the process, again, turnkey situation, all the templates that I’m using, the methods that I’m using for editing and all this stuff, right? I can give them that and then they can go and approach. Software companies. Maybe there’s a new keyword research tool that could say, Hey, do you want to advertise on this show?
It gets this many downloads, blah, blah, blah. We can run campaigns for you. And it makes it very easy for someone to like insert a new ad campaign. Super powerful. Previously, there was a company called megaphone. They’re still around, but they, they were the company that did dynamic ad insertion. I believe they were the only ones doing it for quite a while.
As a result, the prices are very high. And. It’s cheaper, right? It’s cheaper. Now the technology is better and there’s other solutions out there like transistor for which I am an affiliate. So you could check that out if you’re interested. So back to the process here, I record video and then I have good audio from it and I separate the two pieces.
Now for this show, the Doug show, typically it follows along like one workflow and then we separate the audio and video at the very end of the process. Because of the dynamic ad insertion, I’m not doing that for Ranking Revolution. So the audio version. It’s pulled away very early in the process. And the reason why is because we can do dynamic ad insertion over here on the audio side on the video side.
It’s published on YouTube. Once you publish on YouTube, you can’t change it. Basically, I can’t go in and insert new ads or videos. That’s one of the issues with YouTube overall. Once you publish the video, you can do some minor editing in the like YouTube studio editor, but it’s very minor. So on the YouTube side, once the video is published, that’s pretty much the way it is.
So again, that was part of the process that I was going to have to figure out. One cool thing is I use Descript for my video editing. Now I’ve talked about it a lot. Descript will create a transcript based on an audio or video file. And then you can edit the video based on the transcript. So instead of editing video or audio, you’re mostly editing text, which you can still edit the waveform.
You see the waveform, you see the video, but it’s much easier to command F and search for a specific word or passage. And then you can go. Skip it exactly to where you want to go versus having to go through the audio or video file. So very powerful. The other thing that’s cool is you can go directly from the script to transistor so I can export it directly to transistor versus exporting the file, which takes up processing power on my machine here and then.
Having to upload the file to transistor. Descript will also publish directly to YouTube and many other places, right? I mean, it’ll publish to a lot of different spots, like whatever tool you might be using, whatever hosting platform you might be using, but overall that works pretty well. The only thing is, as I mentioned, I ended up having a separate video.
Process in a separate audio process where before it was pretty much the same process. And then I would pull the audio and the video files at the very end. So it took a little bit to figure out, but it’s not too bad. And now that I have it dialed in, it’s great. One other cool thing that I’ve done is these interviews that I’m doing.
They are typically two main topics and I’m separating the interviews into these two episodes So in the past I generally aim for about an hour long for my episodes for Doug’s show And for other shows that I’ve done right so about an hour not always but usually around an hour And for Ranky Revolution, I wanted to do shorter shows, about 30 minutes, maybe a little shorter, and it’s been working out great.
Part of the idea was just to have more shows and more downloads. So instead of covering two separate topics and in the past, honestly, I would do three or four topics with a guest and just have like different segments, but they’re all kind of distinct. Sure. It’s one conversation. Sure. You might have a call back, but generally.
They were four main different topics that could stand alone if I was intentional about it when I was preparing for the interview. And then of course, recording. So that said, that’s gone well. And I’ve gotten good reception from most people saying, Hey, this is great. These are shorter episodes. You cover a topic and blah, blah, blah.
There’s a tiny bit more work because the way I’m doing it is I’m recording a little extra intro and outro for each one of those episodes. Usually it’s only like 30 seconds. Like I’m not spending a huge amount of time. And I’ll just say, Hey, check out part two. If you want to hear about the next topic that we cover or on the second one, Hey, if you like this one and you want to hear the other part of the interview, like be sure you check out part one and I’m doing my best to like clearly label those.
But the result is shorter episodes. This is also a good benefit over on the YouTube side because typically not always, but typically shorter videos will do better on YouTube. So pretty cool. Last thing I’ll mention about the good stuff is I’m doing shorter solo episodes. Typically those are like around five minutes or so, and they’re just a couple or three pages of an essay, basically.
So I’m like reading an essay and I have started listening to Morgan Housel, who has a, like a money in psychology podcast. He has a couple of books out there to same topic area. Basically he’s reading these blog posts that he wrote. So he’s reading blog posts that he wrote like a decade ago, but it’s a completely different audience.
So no one knows or cares that he’s just reading one of his blog posts. Sometimes like word for word, he’s rarely putting more stuff into it. Occasionally, if there’s a new piece of information or something he just experienced in the last couple of weeks, he’ll read it. He’ll mention that in relation to the blog post, but typically his episodes are like eight to 15 minutes long, something like that.
A couple of them are longer, but basically I found myself downloading a bunch of episodes in a short amount of time because they were so fast. And straight to the point. So I’m trying to do those where I literally, I write it out ahead of time. So I don’t ramble on or repeat myself. It’s been really good as far as producing the content.
I have a list of like 10 other ideas. So this is a good point to transition into the things that I’ve screwed up on. I wasn’t going to do the negative points in any particular order, but as I was standing here, Thinking about, you know, exactly what I was going to say. The biggest issue. Is not an external factor.
And the reality is I have just not been disciplined enough or motivated enough to do the fucking work. The fact is I’m looking at three interviews that are already recorded. They were all with. Other professionals who can podcast well, they have good setups. So I literally have three episodes or three interviews, which is six episodes that I can publish and work on.
So the reality is it is my pure laziness and. Lack of discipline that I have not published an episode since I launched. And basically I published like 23 episodes on the first day. And then I was going to publish like once a week after that, but through some external factors, it was very easy for me to not do it.
So those are all the excuses that I’ll tell you about, but when it comes down to it, I will be honest with you. I just haven’t been motivated to come down here. And get the work done. So I will start doing it and I will adjust. I’ve changed the scope and I’ve changed the mental hurdles that I will have to jump over here to actually do it.
So. One solution, right? So I have I’ve done the work ahead of time. I need to schedule some more interviews, but I have three already So that’s like six episodes. The other thing I was planning on so this is the change in scope I was planning on publishing the you know, part one and part two of these interviews on the same day So like every I think I’m gonna publish it on like Wednesday or Thursday On a regular basis and I was like, all right, I’m going to publish both of those episodes.
So if someone wants to, they can listen to both parts right away. I might go to that. However, because I’m having trouble doing the fucking work here, I need to make it easier for myself. So I was thinking, Hey, if I just do one of these episodes, right? I have Jared bombing is the next interview coming up.
If I just do the intro and outro, get the episode ready, Get the thumbnail the little bit of work that it takes me to do an episode Just do one get it ready for next week. Get it out there next week. I can do it again, right? I have a bank of these so I can I can do it and it doesn’t take too long in fact when I launched the show I spent two days editing and getting the thumbnails and The show notes and all the pieces together.
It was only two days of work to do like 23 episodes, about 10 hours. So actually I kind of monitored how much I was working. So it’s really not that bad. It’s just, I haven’t been motivated to do it again. I got other excuses I’ll tell you about, but you get the point. So I’m going to make it a little bit easier and I will just publish like part one on a specific week and then part two, the next week.
The other thing I know is there’s so much content that people are putting out. Like there’s other podcasts that people listen to outside of marketing. And then there’s more marketing and SEO podcasts coming out too. So there’s a shitload of content. It’s hard for people to keep up. So if I just pile it on, it’s not necessarily going to be like the greatest thing.
Maybe people can’t keep up and they’re like, great. I got a 30 minute episode. I’ll listen to it this week. Great. Okay. So that’s what I’m going to do. I might switch to two episodes per interview that are published on the same day, but for right now I’m going to make it easier. So that I could actually publish on a regular basis, which is important as you’re trying to get started.
The thing is, because it’s a new show, it’s not like people have already had a habit of like downloading an episode each week when it comes out or whatever. So it’s not that big of a deal. So first bad point is my lack of discipline, my lack of motivation. Number two. I’m going to hit some external factors.
I was planning on launching the show with a big splash. I wanted to have about 25 episodes or so, which I got pretty darn close. Most of them interviews and ask everyone to like help spread the word about the show. And I knew that some people wouldn’t share it. Which is okay. I wasn’t too demanding especially like depending on who it is, but some people said oh, that’s great Actually, I have this newsletter and I’m always struggling to figure out what to send out So some people said yes, I would absolutely share it around and I need the content So thank you for doing the interview and all that stuff.
So that That sort of flopped. A couple people have shared it, but it hasn’t really moved the needle too much. I need to do maybe a little bit of a better job either following up or communicating, but as someone who has been on a lot of shows, when people ask me to share it, it depends on what else I have going on, and it depends on The topic area of the interview and so on.
It also becomes an issue if you do a lot of appearances. So I actually am on a lot of different shows often. So if I shared every single one, people would kind of get. Board of hearing it. Plus I have other shows. So depending on who it is, if they have like two episodes per week that they’re doing and then a YouTube channel, and they’re also sending out a newsletter, there’s a good chance there’s so much content they’re producing that even if they did share it, their audience is sort of saturated with their material.
If they don’t share it, I understand why they don’t. So that’s why I don’t push too hard. And I’ve, you know, I’ve talked to people, actually, this comes from people who are not podcasters often. They say, Oh, why don’t you tell your guests to share it? No fucking shit. Yeah, of course I’m going to tell the guests to share it, but most of the time they have other stuff to do in them doing work for me doesn’t quite make sense.
So I understand why. However, one of my main goals was to try to find people who had email lists and make sure that I interviewed them because if they don’t have a podcast and they have an email list, the podcast could be a little bit novel for them to share. And I think that still holds true, but I screwed up on this part and.
Another thing that got in the way is I had some interviews with actually like bigger name folks, but through external forces, I wasn’t able to interview them for the launch. And there were probably three or four, some of the biggest names in SEO that you see on X or they’re running conferences or whatever, like.
For some, all different reasons. They weren’t able to do an interview in the, you know, March timeframe when I sort of needed this stuff, when I needed to do the interview to have it ready for the launch. So I was hoping that was going to work out. The thing is it’ll end up being fine. Cause I will do the interviews with them.
It’ll just be delayed. What I was hoping to do is like the big launch, which is kind of hard to do, but I was like, I have. the network and I have the tools and I have the process down so I actually can launch with a lot more shows than someone who is starting a show a podcasting career from scratch because I have all of the the know how to produce a show that sounds good from an audio perspective that has video and all the pieces right so It just didn’t, it didn’t quite work out.
The other part is the March core and spam updates. So while I was planning on launching the show at the end of February, maybe at the beginning of March, I was surprised like many people that there was such a big update in March that rolled out. And as I observed specifically YouTube channels that were kind of, they were blowing up.
Because they had small channels, but they were covering the news story of the updates rolling out from Google. They were getting a ton of views. I saw they were growing as far as a subscriber count. And I was like, man, you know, luckily I’m not going to do, I’m not going to try and chase, chase the wave here on like sort of news.
And non evergreen content, right? So that is, that is non evergreen content. And that is what I wanted to make sure that if I publish an interview or I had a topic that it was just evergreen. So if someone finds the show in like a year, they’re going to go back through and look at the last 50, a hundred episodes or so, and the title will hold true in 12 months or 18 months.
It won’t be titled March, 2024 update. Like people are not probably going to be interested to go listen to that episode. There’s a couple odd balls out there. I know you might look back and think, Oh, historically, I want to see what was going on. But it’s not an evergreen topic. So I didn’t want to do like a news bait kind of situation.
The Google update rolled out and I was like, ah, crap there. There’s more interest. Even if I don’t cover the specific update and I talk on a higher level in a more general sense. There’s interest right now in Algorithm updates. So I should definitely lean into the SEO portion. So from that perspective, I was like, crap, I need to launch the show faster.
Hence me doing, you know, two days of work on the show specifically to get everything ready to launch it. I believe I launched it on April 1st, so it was a little bit late, but the update was still rolling out. I mean, I think at the time I’m recording, this is actually still rolling out as well. I kind of, kind of had to rush it out the door.
That said, you know, if you refer back to point one, where I. admitted that I was lazy, that I wasn’t motivated to do the work. I could have gotten it done sooner, but I just, I didn’t. Other external factor was I got sick. So I caught a cold that lasted for a few weeks. And, I didn’t quite lose my voice, but it was real shaky.
It didn’t sound that good. And I had a little brush, a pink eye. It sucked because I was, I was sick for a couple of days and then got better. And then it came back again a few days later. And even when I didn’t have pink eye and I didn’t have a voice and vocal issues, I was coughing. In fact, I’ve had to pause this episode recording like 10 times already.
Which is infuriating because I had to cough for a second. So it’s getting better But it’s like it’s getting better like 3 percent per every four days. There’s a horrible metric. It’s getting better It’s getting better like 1 percent per day. So it’s very slow, but I am getting better And I’ve heard from people in my area here in the front range of the Colorado area here and they’ve had, you know, a cough that took like a month to get rid of.
And I think it’s the same deal. It’s just, it’s, you know, they’re not sick. It’s just like very slowly getting better. And it’s infuriating since I have to talk and it’s impacted me in various ways. Just not getting enough sleep as well. So I’m back on track, but. It’s been annoying. So that was another, that was another issue.
Those really cover the main things. And I could have gotten past a handful of these with just enough motivation. But at the same time, you know, when I was sick and I was like, kind of getting better. I was thinking, all right, I’m going to do a little more work today. But every time I did a little more work, I, it would, I would feel worse afterwards.
So I would feel good in the early part of the day and then maybe I would do too much. So I, I had to force myself to not do too much. So get a rest. Listen to your body, whatever. So it’s been a pain in the butt. One other thing is we went out of town. So I was planning on like doing a vacation. We went to see the eclipse.
We went to three national parks. So we drove out here from Longmont, Colorado. We stopped in Lincoln, Nebraska. Then we went to pretty close to Gary, Indiana to see. Indiana Sand Dune National Park. Then we went to Burton, Ohio to watch the eclipse, which I have a couple amazing photos. I’ll actually share that.
So if you want to buy a print, you could check that out. And it’s over on red bubble, which seems to be a good site, a good provider out there, but you could actually get a print of the photo I took. I need to edit a few more, but it turned out. Pretty amazing. It’s the total eclipse and the weather worked out for us.
Then we headed down to Kentucky to Mammoth Cave National Park. Huge caves, pretty nice National Park overall. And then we headed on back to Colorado. We stopped in Where do we stop? Kansas somewhere. We stopped in Kansas somewhere, Overland Park, we stopped in Overland Park. Actually, I worked there for a couple months back when I had a consulting job.
And it was, it was a fun, it was a fun gig. I was by myself, basically, so I’d fly out, hang out. There was actually very little work to do. Extremely little work to do. So I would pop in, go to the office, just get a conference room, go to the office. There was no, I don’t even know why they flew me out there, to be honest with you, but there was a budget for it.
So I flew out and I would like do my work. You know, from nine to three, have a couple of meetings. And then that was pretty much it. It like I would literally do like six hours plus a lunch. And then the hotel that I was at was right next door to a gym. And if you stayed at the hotel, you had access to the gym.
So I would get done at three, head back to the hotel, change, work out for a couple hours and then pop over wherever for dinner. And it was great. Like I said, I did it for like six weeks or a couple of months. It was pretty fun. It was pretty fun because it was so leisurely and there was no one else there.
My boss was like back in Atlanta or something. So I don’t even, I have no clue why they flew me out there. But anyway, we stopped in Overland park, got back from the trip. I didn’t do any work on the, over the trip. I thought I would record a couple episodes, some of these solo episodes, write some essays and do any of that stuff.
So that was good. Third other thing to mention or fifth, I don’t even know what it is. So when a vacation was sick, didn’t do work on vacation at all, but kind of crazy, but my wife retired. So we’ll link up to that. I have another show, another podcast called mile high fi personnel finance and financial independence.
So my wife literally retired. Her last day was at the end of March. And that was another big, big thing as well, which is crazy, you know, looking at. You know, we’re talking about the Google update and I published a video recently about some of the success stories that Google actually featured on ads dot, uh, or ad slash something, something.
It was their, their ad portion of the company and they have success stories of people with websites and many of those sites were hit by helpful content update. The March updates or some other update where they were getting a huge amount of traffic and then it dropped to virtually nothing. A couple of sites actually got more traffic.
But definitely rare. So the weird part is there’s so many people that have, you know, the sites that were hit and, you know, a lot of folks are struggling, they’re scrambling, we’re trying to figure out other business models and stuff. And one thing that I’ve done, actually, let me know if you’re interested in hearing a little bit more about this, but we.
My wife and I, you know, we’ve been following sort of the fire community for a few years, not big devotees, but I ended up with a lot of friends that are either other podcasters or bloggers or they’ve been in the financial independence retire early community for a while. But basically, When my wife and I started investing in sort of tried to figure out our finances and we fired our financial advisors and stuff, we generally took money off the table, so I rarely reinvested back into websites.
So I just did like the minimum. I reinvested some content, whatever, but generally. No one really talks about this too much, but generally the returns from content, websites, authority sites, niche sites. The returns, they’re so high and people see what they could earn from it. But that comes with risk. Like it’s built into the price, right?
So if you could buy something that has really high returns, you could whatever make 30, 50 percent returns based on like increased earnings or. You can see sort of a capital increase overall of the valuation, whether it’s work that you do or just like natural growth. But if you have that very high return, the price is built in, like it’s built into the price.
So there’s a corresponding amount of risk and we knew that. And I’ve, I’ve seen it right since I started working online. So basically. I was taking most of the money off the table and investing it elsewhere and not investment advice at all. But if you’re interested in hearing more about that, let me know.
Cause I feel like, you know, on the side hustle and entrepreneurship side, there’s too much focus on only growth. And like you hear people. Successful entrepreneurs say, Oh, I reinvest everything. I reinvest a hundred percent back in the business. And a lot of times those are, those are businesses that are not like ours.
They are. It’s different. And you only hear the success stories of that, right? There’s a survivorship bias. So we don’t hear from the people that reinvested everything back into their website and then they, their website crashed, right? We don’t hear those stories because those, they kind of suck to hear.
Right. So anyway, the point is we pulled money off the table. And even though there’s a lot of turmoil, a lot of people are trying to figure out how to continue earning money online or how to pivot or whatever my wife retired in the meantime. So we’re very fortunate. We, we had a lot of, you know, luck come our way.
We also worked very hard and we intentionally did certain things that perhaps, right, didn’t pay as good of a return, but it’s a lot less risk. So when you’re thinking about things, as far as like long term planning, kind of the worst thing that can happen if you’re working for yourself, and that’s your goal is that you mismanage your cashflow in some way, and then you.
Can not continue paying your bills. You can’t continue your lifestyle without getting a job. So if your goal is to work for yourself and have freedom and independence and all that kind of stuff, you have to make sure that you’re managing your money properly so that you. You don’t go broke and you have the freedom to do what you want.
So if you want to hear a full episode on that, I can outline what we did. Again, this is not financial advice. The next episode won’t be financial advice. You should consult a professional. We’ll link up. To the interview that my podcast co host Carl Jensen and I did with my wife. We interviewed her just three days after her last day of work.
So we cover all that stuff. Anyway, please check out Ranking Revolution podcast and And I will be running a promo soon where I am going to ask for reviews out there. If you want to get ahead of the game, I will, uh, you know, really appreciate it. And I’ll honor, you know, any reviews that you leave on like Apple podcasts for ranking revolution or Spotify or wherever you can leave a review and a rating and all that stuff.
I haven’t. I haven’t pushed it too much, but I will do sort of a full court press situation where I try to get more reviews out there. All right. So thanks a lot. I’m going to link up to a handful of things, podcasts with my wife or at mile high five, I’ll link up to the red bubble site so that you could buy a print.
I have a couple of t shirts out there, other prints too. I’ve actually. Selected a handful of like good photos that I’ve taken over the years Often in national parks, but the eclipse one. It’s pretty good and I can’t remember the other stuff, but i’m sure we’ll link up to it. So thanks a lot We’ll catch you on the next episode and i’ll turn ranking revolution around and it’ll be it’ll be great I just I got a little behind and then my motivation is you know, how it is.
It’s lacking