Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington, and this is part two of the episode series with Ricky. Kessler, we talk about how to survive Google’s preference for big brand websites, which the trend has been moving in that direction, but we get into some of the details of how you might approach starting a brand, whether you want to start a blog or work on YouTube or social media, Ricky kind of outlines what you need to pay attention to.
And. If you missed the first part, he and I actually talked about the Google leak in the last episode. So you could check that out if you happen to have missed it and be sure to check out the links in the description. We reference a couple of things. I know Ricky mentioned a video by Pat Flynn. We’ll link up to that.
I talk about a. Basically a free downloadable resource that I created so that you can figure out what digital product might be a good fit for you and your personality and the stuff you want to work on. So follow the link in the description and you can download that free. Guide and by the way, we reveal like a little secret or I reveal a little secret at the end.
So you want to stick around for when I reference this specific guide and it’s kind of a cool way to reverse engineer funnel design. So it’s right here and I’m telling you that you can kind of reverse engineer it if you want to take a look and I think that’s it. So let’s hear from Ricky. And we’ll catch on the other side of this episode.
Intro Music
Doug: are you ready to switch over to surviving Google’s preference for bigger brands, which again, goes hand in hand? And I think we’ve seen this shift a little bit with, you know, maybe it’s that, that API call for, is this a small blog and small personal blog?
And now we’re seeing. Whatever like Forbes telling us about what blender to get. And I thought they were a finance related magazine originally. Right now they know a ton about vacuum cleaners. So, so yeah, what’s your, what’s your takeaway here? Like what did, what did you think when this shift happened?
Ricky: Yeah, to me it, first of all, it seems kind of. I don’t know. It’s counter intuitive, counterproductive. I think. I mean, I don’t even think it’s what users want. It’s, it’s maybe the, the reasoning behind it. I kind of get right. Especially because like you said, for years several years now, the last 10 years, you know, the blogging world has attracted a lot of people who are like, well, cool.
I want to make some money, which I, which I think attracts, A lot of good people who want to write content, who just love the topic, but they’re like, Oh, cool. This could become like my job. That’s even cooler. Right. But it also attracted a lot of people who are like, well, I just want to make some money. And so, I mean, we’ve, we saw it so much.
And, and I tried to, I think we all tried to somewhat speak out against this, but like, you know, how many people would write a review article? And basically they just went to Amazon and they read a bunch of reviews of a product. And we’re like, Well, here’s the good stuff. People thought about it. Here’s the bad stuff.
And then here’s, I’m going to make a little table showing some of the features and specs of the product. So basically it was like you took their Amazon listing and you just compiled it into a blog post. You know, that’s not the worst thing in the world. That’s a form of content curation, but it’s like, it’s not that valuable.
And it’s worse. I think when you imply that you actually have personal experience with the product. But you’re really just reading what other people wrote. We know that doesn’t work anymore. Amazon’s just using AI to summarize all of the, uh, and I actually really like that feature, by the way. I go to a product on Amazon and I see it and it’s like, Hey, a lot of people had a problem with this but a lot of people really liked this about it.
Like, cool. That’s a cool summary. I love that. But you know, we, we attracted, uh, I don’t know, I’m trying to think where I’m going with this, but where am I going with this? Where did we start? What was the question? Sorry.
Doug: It was, it was extremely open. I think I said, what, what did you think? But I’ll, I’ll check in about moving
Ricky: to Forbes and stuff.
Doug: Yeah,
Ricky: no. So I just, I get it. Like, cause we got so many people who have never touched a product and then you got like the wire cutter. Who would literally get all these products and literally test them. But then what happened to the wire cutter? They got bought by a, was it New York times? And suddenly like this high quality product review stuff went to these bigger magazine or newspaper kind of.
kind of places. I think it started with the Wirecutter and then and then Forbes kind of picked up on it, but then they’re not necessarily using their high quality journalists to write these reviews, right? You’re getting a lot of this parasite SEO where individual bloggers are like, well, I can get my, I can get my content on Forbes and that’ll speak to my authority anyway.
So I can see why it happened, but to me it doesn’t make a lot of sense because I’d rather trust. the sourdough enthusiast with recommendations about sourdough than some writer for Forbes. So there’s my, there’s my circuitous answer.
Doug: And I think, you know, we, it comes back to, um, you know, money is always, and you know, you try to think like, is, does Google have, you know, stronger relationships with the big brands?
And a lot of these, Big companies are they’re owned by like some other holding company. So like if you, and I haven’t researched this, but like, that’s just how things happen, like think, uh, companies are consolidated. And then the next thing, you know, it’s like, you know, those guys are good friends that own the company, own the companies and they’re like, okay, yeah, we could probably make this little change and it doesn’t really matter.
You’ll earn more money. I’ll earn more money. And then there’s a bunch of bloggers who, I mean, it’s not much money to the bigger companies, but like for us, it’s our full time income. So it does make a huge difference. Well, let’s talk about surviving this. So obviously we have to deal with the reality of the SEO shift just in general.
Google specifically in the traffic that we used to be able to get from Google So even if that returns there has been chatter where google has I believe contacted Like retro dodo and a couple of the other It’s like home fresh. I forget the name of that blog, but there were some Big prominent like niche blogs that were very high authority.
They were testing the products. I’m thinking of several other companies like outdoor gear lab and some others like that, that were probably impacted as well. And they’d been around for very long time, decade plus some of these. And the reality is even if Google did change things and say, Hey, we’re going to, we’re going to acknowledge, uh, smaller blogs, I have no confidence that that would last For very long.
And I think people that have been around long enough will also be skeptical. So the point being, how can we approach this from a brand building standpoint, what sort of the, what is the blueprint that one might follow for? Like say project 24, if somebody was going in and there’s, you know, the community, there’s all these different paths that you could take, like, what’s, what’s the path that you would take if you were like getting started from scratch?
Ricky: Yeah. The main thing is, one, if we ever want to hope of Like, let’s assume Google keeps the majority of the market share and we just want to show up on Google. If we ever want to have any hope of that, like we have to be viewed even off of the internet as as authoritative for that niche. And, and it could be that you’re.
An authority in a very small niche. Like you don’t have to be that, you don’t have to be huge. You don’t have to be, when I talk, I’m talking about brand building and I got a lot of people talk, you know, commenting things like, yeah, but you know, like Nike spends millions on their branding. And I’m like, Oh no, no, I’m not talking about being Nike.
You don’t have to be a brand that everybody knows. You just need to be a brand that your niche audience would know. So a lot of the brand building activities we would do, I think. Give us our best shot with search engines. They build the EAT, but I think we don’t depend on them. I think that’s the, a huge mistake.
And so, the path I would take because it’s the one that I found to work the best is I start with video content. I, YouTube is a fantastic platform. Short form content is fine for like spreading the word name recognition kind of stuff, but it doesn’t convert very well unless you get like a huge following, like a, like a viral following to where it’s like, you know, if I recommend a certain product, all the teenagers will go out and buy it kind of person, you know, the influencer short of that, like, You can do a YouTube short, but nobody’s going to click on an affiliate link from a YouTube short in most cases or TikTok or whatever.
But I think they’re fine for like trying to just get your face scene, your brand scene and getting people to recognize it and, and spreading the word. Right. So I would recommend mostly longer form content video content. So, and, and that works on YouTube. You can do long form content on Instagram and TikTok too, and Facebook.
So if you’re making it for one platform, repurpose it for the others. But long form video content has amazing, amazing conversion because it’s an opportunity for people to actually connect and you build a lot of rapport, even way more so than if somebody reads your blog post. And so, That’s, that’s where I, that’s where I start.
It’s the fastest I think place to build rapport. If somebody is just like, yeah, but I’m not in a position to do video content, if you’re going to do written content, I still think written blog content is a fantastic tool. I think having your own website is. is really important for having authority and to have a place that you own.
You’re not on somebody else’s platform. I think it’s important. It’s also a great place to sell your products that, that you’re hopefully going to create to capture emails you know, to, to build your community. And, and if you’re going to create written content, then great. Like now we have stuff. We have written content that we can point people to from other platforms.
So, you know, if you’re going to go the written content route, I’m going to create, I’m going to focus less on, again, less on the SEO side, less on trying to find super low competition keywords. I’m going to focus more on what, what resources do people need if they’re trying to learn what I’m trying to teach or if they, yeah, if they’re trying to get into whatever it is that I’m, that I’m trying to share with them, what resources do they need?
And those resource posts are fantastic for pointing people to from YouTube videos for pointing people to from Pinterest and other social media. So if I’m going to do social media, I’m not going to have a strategy of just like taking my RSS feed from my blog and auto posting it to Facebook.
Nobody clicks on those. Instead I’m going to participate on that platform and social media in a more organic way. I’m going to post it, you know, it’s like, um, you go to Twitter and Gary V isn’t like. Posting blog posts on Twitter. He’s just like, here are my thoughts. Like, here’s something that here’s a.
motivational thing, or here’s a interesting thing, just stuff. And that’s, that’s what Twitter is, right? So we got to use each platform kind of in the way that it’s intended to, but you can pull information from these blog posts you’ve written or from videos you’ve made and, and Twitterify it, right? Or Xify it, I guess.
And then but use that to just build following, build brand. And I, and that’s where I’m going now. So. My recommended path for most people is just start with video. It’s, it’s not something you’ve ever done before. It’s intimidating and it’s kind of hard. But even with a small audience, I mean, we met each other back in the day when both of our channels had fewer than 10, 000 subscribers.
We launched project 24 to a channel with 12, 000 subscribers and I quit my job. A week later, you know, like, yeah, that’s the power of, of, of video. Video, if you can engage with an audience,
Doug: a hundred percent, there’s a couple of places I want to go with this and I think it’ll take us to the end most likely.
So like you said, video is difficult. You and I have been doing this stuff for about a decade and we’re both from the engineering and project management background. So we did not have, I would say at least for me, I know I didn’t have strong Communication or presenting skills, but over time you can learn nearly anything.
There’s a trend for, I’m going to trigger some people and say for lazy people that are trying to do faceless YouTube channels, where do you stand on that? Is that just a shortcut for lazy people? Leave comments below. If that offends you, what do you think about faceless channels?
Ricky: Yeah, I think there’s a place for certain types of channels.
where it works. The example I’ve given before is there are channels that will do like, and they’re typically very well researched in many cases, but like fan channels, there’s, there’s one that’ll do, and I can never remember the name of the channel when I bring it up. So I feel bad, but usually someone in the comments knows and they’ll, and they’ll be like, Oh, Ricky watches this channel.
But there’s a channel that will do like, what would have happened if one of their videos was, what would have happened if Obi Wan Kenobi had gone to fight the M, uh, you know, Palpatine, and if Yoda had gone to Anakin. And they like, based on all the lore and what they know of their personalities and even their like little, literally their lightsaber fighting styles and everything, they like play it out and they use little clips from the movies and stuff and, and kind of tie it all together into a narrative.
And, and even like do dialogue and stuff, but their personal face never shows up. Like those videos can do really well. Now, the problem with that though, is like. Great. You can get maybe even millions of views, but what do you do with those? Like, who are they connected to? They’re not connected to anybody, maybe your brand, but like, so, so I think in you kind of maybe that entertainment space, sometimes in the kind of newsy expose sort of space, like you’ll use a lot of footage from the people that you’re talking about, you know, and a lot of B roll footage and you can do, you that kind of expose content or, or just reporting, talking about other people.
But it, and it can get, it can grow a channel big, but then what do you do with that? Whereas like when you build a brand and you have people people connect with people and then like come out and say, I recommend this product or this tool, right? You’re trying to build a YouTube channel. This is a tool that works really well.
You’re trying to build a blog. This is the tool I use. If they’ve built that trust, like you better believe a certain percentage of people are going to go use, choose to use that tool and I’m going to get a commission for it. And if I say, Hey, I have a product for you. This is me trying to help you achieve what I’m teaching you.
Um, you know, they, they, they, They go buy it because they believe you. And I think that is the downside of the faceless channels is like some of the people doing faceless channels, I would say are probably putting a lot of work into it, but they’re, I think they’re going to really struggle to build.
enough connection to actually get the real benefit of video.
Doug: I agree. And there’s a couple, I guess, niches where I, I will occasionally watch one’s like sort of the geography slash demographic type videos where they talk about whatever towns to live in or why the geography impacts the history of a certain place.
Those are pretty interesting. And at the end of the day, those are kind of like It’s a short college lecture and it’s pretty interesting because I would watch that kind of stuff. The other is for me specifically, it’s sort of like the behind the music sort of like rock stories of like our youth, right?
So like 90s rock. And it’s like, here’s the story of like Scott Weiland and STP and. blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, yeah, you could use B roll. You could use different footage and highly entertaining. Like I care about that stuff. But to your point, it’s like, what product do you sell along with that? And the fact is like, we’re talking personal brand stuff.
Like you and I could probably pitch to do a talk at most conferences and say, Hey, we can talk about YouTube or podcasting or content creation or something like that. That’ll fit in at. Any conference, right? Real estate, lawyers like high level professionals would like dentistry, like they want to hear the stuff that we know.
And if you just have a faceless channel, you can’t do that. I’m not saying you and I want to go speak at those places, but like all we would have to do, we could do the same talk at all those different places, by the way. So if you just think like one or two levels up, then. Like now we’re talking cause like someone might may hire us to consult on YouTube production, even just the studio or something like that.
Right. Like it takes a little bit of work and know how we could save them dozens of hours and just say like, get this stuff. Don’t do these things. And then there’ll be set and then they can focus on the content. Second part here is you talked about video first. I like that a lot. If someone is a talker, you and I can just talk.
Without much preparation. What if you take that and you use your AI tools and you create the written content from our conversation or even from a monologue. So what do you think the possibility of like that ranking well, we’re producing like good content to accompany the video first approach?
Ricky: Yeah, I think.
There’s a lot of opportunity for that. And I think it has a lot of potential. You know, it not that long ago, people would ask me this question. They’d say, what do you think about me making a YouTube video or doing a podcast and then just taking a transcript and publishing it? And I’m like, well, unless you’re publishing it with the podcast as the transcript, like it’s, it’s not valuable.
That’s not what anybody wants. But now because of AI, you can take that, you can summarize it. And you can get, have the AI help you sort of restructure it into a flow of things. And even create additional resources, like you just said that, that supplements, you know, a YouTube video. You know, if you have an idea of what that could be, it’s like, sure, feed it this transcript.
And it’s like, here’s all this stuff for my video. All the, the actual thought is there. The ideas, the concepts are there. And then it’s a fantastic language tool to be able to do the writing and then to potentially create really cool resources. I absolutely, I. Don’t have any issue with that. And I think it has a lot of, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for it to do well.
Again, assuming that we can push traffic to it, which if you’re doing video, you should be able to, and it can probably rank on at least other search engines, Google.
Doug: And I’ll give a quick, just specific use case so we can record even this interview and I could, I used descript do you use descript for your video production in such?
Ricky: I haven’t, but I’ll try it. I’ll check it out. I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t tried that one yet.
Doug: The cool part, especially for, you know, longer podcasts that we may do or like a recording like this. So it’ll do the transcript and then you’ll be able to edit it based on the transcript and or Like search for long silences and take it out.
You can take out fiddler words and that sort of thing, but it has AI built in. So we could say, Hey, give us the show notes, including timestamps, big time saver, but you can also ask for a blog post. It’s not the best style, but you can take that as a starting point, maybe clean it up a little bit, throw it into Claude and write it in a different style or chat GPT or whatever flavor of AI you want to use.
And then you end up with You know, a decent blog post. So that’s good, but you could also say, Hey, create a lead magnet, a content upgrade that actually goes beyond what I talked about. So you actually have a one or two pager PDF that can be produced, and then you have your lead magnet, so you could say in the episode, Hey, download show notes, plus like the free checklist for blah, blah, blah, or whatever your lead magnet is, and then.
You want to make sure it fits into your funnel so that you get the right sort of people to get that. Which brings me to the next question is monetization. So you mentioned very briefly products like you, you have your channel, maybe you have a blog to get people on the email list, some other stuff like that.
You can use stuff like convert kit to have a landing page. You don’t have to have a full website, but you the email list. And then you sell something. What products do you recommend or what’s on the list of products that people might want to create depending on their skill set?
Ricky: Yeah, we’ve been a huge fan of creating digital products, really any kind of whatever fits, you know, if it’s a, sometimes it’s a software product, a tool a spreadsheet calculator kind of thing.
Um, I mean, it’s amazing. The spreadsheets that people sell where it just is like a lot of calculations done. It’s like you input a few things and boom, it’s, um, know a lot of people that do that for real estate. It’s like, Here’s how I determine whether this property is worth buying or not. And so you input these numbers and this will tell you how much money you can make.
And if it’s above a certain threshold, I buy that kind of stuff. You know, memberships oftentimes like a community style are often good depending on the niche, depending on the topic. Because a lot of times people they’re looking, they’re, they want to learn, but they also. need to collaborate with other people and learn from each other.
And communities often go really well with instruction. So like you can sell an ebook, but the perceived value of an ebook is typically really low, even if the information in it’s really good. But if instead you have instruction often in the form of like a, a video course. It’s perceived as higher value.
And then if you have community so that people at least have somewhere they can go with their followup questions and to help each other out and for support and motivation, they often do really well. I watched a video, a YouTube video from Pat Flynn. It’s been going around cause it is a good one. He put it out a little bit earlier this year about, you know, stop selling info products, do this instead.
I think it was something like along those lines. But one of the things he talked about is like. If people feel like they’re just getting information from you, information is everywhere. So what they need is they need something that saves them time. So sell them implementation, right? But then he went through the different ways of implementation that you can sell.
And one of them is just like, if you give them like with, with us, with our course training, we’ve always tried to give people instead of just a bunch of information, it’s like a step by step do this, then do this, then do this. Well, how much time did you just save by learning how all of this information fits together in a structure in a flow?
And then, um, community is a learn together to implement, you know, like community is one way of selling implementation, like whatever it is, like, Information products are fantastic if what you can sell to someone is that you’re going to save them time or money or you’re going to help them achieve a result that they’re, that they’re not getting to on their own.
And, and that’s going to work for a lot of different niches you can do. I mean, you can make money a lot of different ways. If you have a business of any kind, like these principles of content are just going to help. there’s a, I went to a cool conference last year called vid summit. It’s for YouTubers, um, for mostly for YouTube.
And there’s a guy who. I mean, his company sells office furniture on the internet. That’s what they do. And he started blogging years ago. His dad had owned the company before and he’s like, I’m going to start this blog. And he starts blogging about office chairs. And and then after a little while he got into YouTube.
And their channel is not huge, but they, they grew their sales like crazy one going into COVID because everybody needed an office chair for the house now. But then like office chair sales really started to decline after a little while. And across the board, like this is what he was saying last year is like, everyone’s sales are down this year.
Except ours, we’re still growing. And it’s because he has a YouTube channel where they like review office chairs and stuff, you know, like it’s amazing what you can do. And so he’s selling a physical product. So if you have something already, if you have a business or a concept already, you can sell whatever.
But if you’re coming into it from a, I want to make a blog or I want to make a YouTube channel about a topic I love, then one of the easiest things, if you don’t want to have to worry about all the infrastructure of sales Is. information, but information in the form of saving people time or money or helping them achieve a result that they would be very unlikely to achieve on their own.
Doug: Perfect. And I actually created a lead magnet that helps people choose what digital product might be a good fit for them. And, uh, luckily it fits in perfectly for you know, this is behind the scenes funnel design stuff. It actually fits in perfect for people that might want to join project 24 in the future.
So. You know, we’re, we’re opening the kimono a little bit and sharing some of this stuff here, but people could check that out for sure. I will try to find that Pat Flynn video. It sounds like I need to watch it myself. Pat’s great. So as we, um, we wrap up here, we covered so. Much. And I want to thank you for your time today, Ricky, but what’s coming up for income school, do you have any, um, can you share some video ideas that are coming up in the next few months or something like that?
Great channel and we’ll link up so people can watch it if they’re not already following, but yeah. What’s coming up for y’all.
Ricky: Sure. Yeah. Um, right now I’m making quite a bit of content. around bumping my mic, making a lot of content around things I’m actually doing. So I’ve got this website that I started a year and a half ago privately at first, but I talked about it a little bit, but then I didn’t tell people what it was.
I finally revealed what it is and just said, you know what, with everything that’s going on, you know, I need to be able to make time for this. And so the easiest way for me to make time for it is to make videos about it because then I, because if I’m doing other projects in my videos and then having to work on my own stuff outside of that I was running out of time.
So I thought, you know what, why don’t I just build this like with people? So, recently I just I just made a video. Well, I think I just published one about Pinterest and how I’m doing Pinterest for that blog. One about how I’m working on getting content from, other writers in the industry who are knowledgeable on the topic.
They’re not necessarily writers, I should say. They’re just people who know the topic, but how I’m getting them to create content for me. And with me, I’m going to be talking about using AI for keyword research some PR stuff and building EEAT and getting, well, building links, but in, uh, I think in a way that, that is good and just showing like a little bit more.
A little bit more in the weeds, like where, where the rubber meets the road. Here’s how to actually do it. Not just super high level. And then I’ve got one that I’m, I’ve been thinking about for a while that I think is really important for content creators to keep in mind. And that’s just mental health.
And in fact, we got a post in our community today where someone was asking about that. They’re just like totally burned out with all these things they’re doing. And a friend asked me about this last week to just like, how do you deal with the stress? Of running a business. Cause you get people who get into content creation and they’re like, yeah, I’ll just make some content.
And after a little while, they start to realize like, Oh, I’m also a business owner. Like, this is getting, it gets more complex with time as you grow. And so suddenly they’re facing certain stresses that they maybe weren’t anticipating. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that one and what all to put in there.
I’m not a, I’m not a therapist, but But I want to share from my experience that as well. So those are some things in the pipeline right now, but mostly just trying to work on my other projects and showcase what that actually looks like for someone who’s doing not just a blog, but the social media, the YouTube and everything.
Doug: Awesome topics. Yeah. I’m looking forward to hearing those and watching those videos. And I know, yeah, the mental health thing, especially from a creator. Is, uh, there’s a lot behind the scenes, I think maybe in our little circle of friends and stuff. I think many of us are a little more candid about like, Hey, we’re taking, taking a little break.
Cause going crazy, that sort of thing. But there’s a lot of folks where it’s just like, Especially on the social media side. I think YouTube were somewhat insulated, but if you’re on TikTok, and it’s like, you got to keep feeding the beast it can be devastating when you need to take a break and really stressful.
So, so we certainly feel for people. Okay. Well, Ricky. Again, always a pleasure to catch up. We’ll link up so people could find all this stuff and, um, anything else parting words anywhere else people should follow you or anything.
Ricky: No, honestly, like. YouTube’s the place we are on, you know, there’s the income school YouTube channel.
And then I’ll give a shout out to channel makers is our other YouTube channel where mostly it’s Nathan and Julia. They’re on my team. They’re here teaching YouTube and video content and how to be successful there. So you don’t, you can learn it all. I encourage you to learn it all and, and, but yeah, don’t burn yourself out.
Just enjoy the, enjoy the ride.
Doug: All right. We’ll talk soon. Thanks man.
Ricky: Thanks Doug.
Doug: Thanks a lot to Ricky. Be sure to check out his a couple channels over on the income school side. We’ll link up in the show notes and descriptions so that you can find it. And I think if you have any questions, any follow up questions for Ricky, let me know. It’s always fun to have him on. We’re in the same time zone, too.
So that makes it a lot easier to schedule meetings and stuff like that. But if you have any other ideas, let Uh, to have follow up interviews with Ricky or any collaboration ideas, let us know in the, I guess, in the comments of YouTube, or you could shoot me an email, feedbackatdoug. show. That comes directly to my inbox.
So thanks a lot. We’ll catch you on the next episode.