Transcript – Being Lazy and Finding Advertisers – DS535

Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today I’m going to ramble on a little bit. I have a couple of notes, a couple of post it notes. It’s going to be stream of consciousness style. I think many of the earlier episodes of the podcast style, tell some stories. Maybe I have a point.

Maybe I don’t. Sometimes I’ll talk myself into a circle. Sometimes I won’t remember where that circle began and we won’t even come back to it. I feel that coming along with this, uh, on sentence right now, but I think we’re going to be able to pull it back and actually have some points here. So I want to cover a couple of topics, which I’ll mention one.

I wrote, uh, been writing more emails to the email list and one of the. Topics that I mentioned, but didn’t talk about was some recent laziness and recent is generous. Laziness is also generous, but I’ll expand on that a little bit right now. I’ll talk a little bit about not over optimizing. It’s a tendency that many of us have, especially if you’re sort of good at optimizing, if you like systems and you’re like templates, and maybe you have an engineering or a technical background and you want to optimize things, you can take it too far.

And then it makes you go crazy. Also talk about FinCon, which I’m about to go to FinCon in a couple of days at the time that I’m recording this, by the time this goes live, I will have. Already gone to FinCon and I’ll be back home by the time this comes out, but I’m thinking about some of the things that I’ll be doing at FinCon.

It’ll be down in Atlanta. I’m from Atlanta. It’s actually down the street from, well, I used to live in that sort of Midtown area, but I also went to school at Georgia Tech. So I think it’s like a couple of miles away. And I’ll also talk about my recent experience. Trying to find some products to be an affiliate for and, or get sponsors, which some of these things tie in together.

So those are the four main areas. Like I said, we’ll try to stay on topic. A couple of quick notes. Uh, number one, linkify, they’ve been doing a campaign for me. I interviewed Chris. Pantele a couple of times recently in a, in a, and it must’ve been a month or two ago, a couple of months. It all runs together.

Recent episode, Chris was on the show. We talked about how Haro was rebranding to Connectively. I believe that’s the name. Anyway, Chris is running a campaign for me. He already has a link for a niche site project. I can, you know, go Share what it is and everything, but it’s over at Ahrefs. So kick ass. I think it’s like a DR 90 link, really excellent link, right?

Exactly. The sort of, um, topic area content related. It’s a perfect link. So anyway, check it out. You can, I believe it’s a 10 percent discount. If you use the coupon code, Doug, anyway, linkify is awesome. They’re running a campaign. I’ll share more once the rest of the campaign is complete and then I can share them all.

But so far so good in the past. They got me a link at Yahoo finance, nasdaq. com, some other one. I can’t remember all of them were fantastic. Okay. Recent laziness. Really, I mean, recent is a relative non specific term, but I can tell you over the last, I would say five years, I’ve been slowly doing less and less.

And let me tell you, it’s addictive. Some people are I don’t know. They, they can’t let go, but me, I could let go. And once I started lopping things off and I was like, I’m not going to do that anymore. I don’t enjoy it that much. Well, it was fantastic. So I just, I started doing more and more of it.

Thinking, well, if I don’t really like this don’t do it anymore. And some of those things actually, one of the great ones was just chilling the fuck out and relaxing on emails. Turns out I get a lot of emails. A lot of it is noise. I, I. Signed up for email lists as well. And I stick on for a little while and then I drop off.

But a lot of it is like incoming noise that I feel like maybe I should reply back to, maybe it’s an okay opportunity. I don’t want to blow it. If, um, a specific company is like, Hey, should we work together? And I, you know, I don’t get back to him in time, but there, there’s so many that eventually I realized, well, nothing bad is going to happen.

This is going to be. And I’ll let the email sit. Now there’s some, if I get it from a certain person, if it’s someone that I know personally, I’ll usually reply back pretty quickly, but often I could tell if it’s a, not necessarily urgent, but if it’s something that I need to get back to them in a quick amount of time, I’ll go ahead and do it.

Sometimes I don’t, and even the ones where maybe I should have gotten back to them a little bit sooner, I don’t. And. Nothing really bad happened. So like I said before, as I’ve done less work and been a little bit lazier, nothing really bad happened. In fact, I was happier about it. And it turns out sometimes people get so many emails that by not replying back, I get fewer emails back to me.

Cause it’s rare when you send one email and they’re like, that’s the end of it. Usually they’re, If you send one email, you’re going to get like three more back. Now you may send, you know, back and forth. It’s one for one, but at the end of the day, not replying back to emails has been game changing.

Especially the volume of emails that we all get per day. You probably get at least dozens per day. So recent laziness has been ongoing in a, in a experiment. And I mean, I’m fairly productive when I actually do sit down to do some work. And I. I actually did a video a couple, a couple of weeks ago on time blocking.

I had like a reasonable sized list of things that I wanted to get done and I put it into a time blocking situation and I vlogged it through the day and I kept the scope of the video somewhat small so it didn’t get overwhelmed because I’ve honestly like video stuff all day long over a couple of days and then I’ll move it to the.

And then I’m like, fuck, I, I’m not going to edit this. Like it’s, it’s too much work. Like I said, I’m, I’m lazy folks. So, so anyway, I, I, and I didn’t have like a story in mind. And so anyway, this time blocking one is like, I’m just talking about time blocking. I check in a couple of times through the day and I.

Let you know what I did and how it turned out basically. So we’ll link up to that so you can check it out next. Again, topic that I mentioned in the email list. If you’re not signed up for the email list, you could head over to nichesideproject. com and hopefully sign up. I was getting some messages that maybe like the email form was not showing up and maybe it’s just on mobile.

I heard one of my friends, Pete say, Oh yeah, we’re having trouble with mobile. And I think both he and I are using kit and anyway, it kind of got messed up. I’m not sure what’s going on. Hopefully you can sign up for the email list. I send out a couple few emails per week, experimenting with that. So one of the things I mentioned was not to over optimize and I have an engineering background, so.

Many of us who are engineers or have like an engineering mindset, we don’t want to be inefficient. We don’t want to waste, you know, CPU cycles. Right? So we try to optimize stuff all the time. And I got to a point, I mean, you hear the, my first whole segment here was about laziness. So. You could sense where I’m going with this.

Don’t over optimize. You don’t have to optimize every little thing. And depending on what it is, it could be very good for you to optimize and get it dialed in other things. Maybe you don’t want to optimize. Maybe you want to take your time, maybe taking your time will actually give you better ideas and help you be more creative.

And that’s something that I have figured out. So instead, and actually, I don’t know if I have any like super specific concrete examples where I can give you results or anything like that. So just go with me on this, where it’s just more relaxing if you’re not over optimized. And the. Maybe the best example that I can give you is trying to like sort of optimize your overall day to get the most done.

If you do that, there’s a strong chance. Many of us have a tendency to overload our schedule, assuming. Things will go in air quotes, right? Most of the time. So we will kind of load up our schedule and if we’re just operating solo, no big deal, we can move things around. Something takes longer. We’re just adjusting with our own schedule.

If you have multiple things scheduled with multiple people and you have a start time and an end time. If one of those things goes along, if something goes not to plan, which is extremely likely, then you’re going to have a cascading impact of rescheduling and changing your schedule for some people. They like the chaotic nature of that.

Well, not me. I don’t, I don’t like that at all. I don’t like being late. I don’t like to have to like rearrange things. And it’s really cool to just have like one main thing you’re working on that day, or maybe two where maybe you’re working on something at nine in the morning until some, a couple of few hours later.

And then maybe you don’t start the other thing until like three. So there’s a huge amount of space. So if something. It’s fucked up, then no big deal. You can just keep working on your thing or slide things around. But the point is it’s not over optimized. If you try to, if you try to optimize it and squeeze every little thing in that you could do, then it’s going to be a little stressful.

Here’s another sort of extreme example, same idea of filling your schedule. If you’re on vacation and you’re like let’s say you’re in, my friend was in Germany here recently. So let’s say you’re in Germany and you’re like, Oh, I want to go to Oktoberfest, who wants Oktoberfest. I want to go to the Oktoberfest.

I want to go to this other brewery. I want to check out these restaurants. I want to make sure I get a sauerkraut. And. Whatever, right? You pack your schedule and you want to see this castle and this other thing, and you want to go on a tour. Well, you’re going to be pretty busy the whole time. And if you’re going on vacation, you don’t necessarily want to be like, all right, we got to get this done.

And then we got to go to the next thing and go to the next thing. And I’m sure many of us are guilty of doing exactly that literally on vacation, where you’re going from like one activity to the next, because you really want to pack it in. It turns out. You can’t do everything at the place that you’re, you’re traveling to.

And you might want to, you might want to try to squeeze everything in. And I’ve done it before. I’ve tried to do this and get as much done as possible, really experience everything that place has to offer. But it turns out after experimenting. I have a much better time. I’m less stressed out. If I have like, let’s say I’m at a place for five days, maybe I have two or three days where I have like one thing scheduled.

Maybe, you know, one of those things is like all day events, right? Like you’re going on some sort of tour and you’re on a bus for a little while and you do a whole bunch of stuff. But, but the main idea is like, I’m only. Filling my schedule with like 40 to 60 percent of the time that I’m there. And then the rest of it, it’s open.

I literally can just like rest and not do anything if I want to. However, you probably won’t do nothing. You can discover things along the way and maybe do things that are a little bit smaller, but the fact is like things are going to run a little bit late. Maybe rain slows you down or some other issue and just the scheduling can be stressful.

So for me, not over optimizing. In a couple of days, I’m going to FinCon. It’s a financial creators conference. So there will be bloggers, which I think was the origin. It was like the financial bloggers conference originally. Blogs were a thing back a few years ago. So there are creators of all types. So social media, YouTubers, podcasts, bloggers, and then there’s a bunch of financial companies there as well.

Many conferences, almost all of them have like an expo hall where you have the companies that have money and products and they want to work with the creators. So there’s a, a nice. Symbiotic relationship where we as creators want to partner with these other companies and find out what they have to offer.

Over, over the years, things have changed. So initially when I started my podcast, this exact podcast, I was selling my own products. I recently sunset those. So I stopped promoting them over a year ago, sunset them recently. And. That was the main monetization. It was great. I’m selling my own products. The margins are, are high.

I don’t have to work with or cater to anyone else. It’s fantastic. You do whatever you want. Selling your own digital products is the way to go. And along the way. Somehow I had a big enough audience where people wanted to, companies wanted to advertise on the show. So I started having some ad spots and I would sell my own products.

Hugely profitable. I could still do whatever I want. I wasn’t looking to have advertisers and the fact that they wanted to get in front of my audience was fantastic. So. I made sure that I still had creative control over everything. No one can tell me what to do. And it was moving forward with that. Then a couple of years ago, the money wasn’t flowing as freely.

So the advertiser, some of them went under actually some of them just changed the sponsorship program that they had in place, but the money dried up. Then my products dried up. Well, Here we are. And if you listened to the episode, I believe last week with Olga Zarr from SEO sly, her and I talked very candidly.

It was just like, we had a conversation and happened to record it and what I’ve arrived at after a couple few months of trying things and talking to people. That conversation with, with Olga and really just reflecting on the kind of work that I want to do. I like doing the podcast. I like doing this podcast.

I have another one called mile high fi where it’s in personal finance and financial independence. And it’s really fun. I like the podcast format. I like my little studio down here. I could just hit record. I turn on the lights, hit record and good to go. Right. I have a couple of spots that I could do it.

Like today I’m sitting at. The, uh, sort of the podcast studio area. So I’m not right in front of my desk. I’m sitting down at a table and it looks a little different. It’s kind of fun. I enjoy this aspect of it. So I dig podcasting and I decided to sunset the courses. So that monetization strategy is out.

So I could come up with another course. And I actually tried to promote a podcasting, like podcasting. Bootcamp workshop style situation. So not exactly a course. It was going to be produced live part mastermind. And I ran it one time as a pilot. It went really well. I tried to sell it again and launch it again.

It went horrible. So. I was like, you know what? I don’t want to push this uphill. This, this email list that I have, the audience that I have, they’re, they’re not connecting with it. You know, there’s a small percentage, but it’s so small. And my email list and the audience is so small that it’s just not enough for me to try to keep launching it.

So I was like, you know what? I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna force this. I tried a couple of times and it was okay, but not as good as I thought. So. What I arrived at is I like producing the content and even though it’s not the most efficient high margin way to monetize, I’m interested in sponsorships and having now, we’ll be clear sponsorships.

I don’t really want to do like affiliate. Referrals and that sort of thing that could be a piece of the puzzle, but generally I just want to advertise and do like more just kind of ad reads and have sponsors for the content that I’m producing. The thing that comes into play is. FinCon has all of these companies there.

So a lot of them are financially oriented, but there are several, which are like course platforms. So I think Kajabi is going to be there. Thinkific is going to be there. There’s also Kit, which used to be ConvertKit. There are. Actually like investing platforms and financial product platforms as well.

So those, I mean, because I have two podcasts, one more in the marketing space and make money online, and the other one is financially oriented. I have like a fairly good platform. And this show, the Doug show is modest audience. Trying to remember say like each episode gets about a thousand views and or listens, right?

So roughly that sometimes more sometimes less and there’s an email list associated with it. My other show is Mile High Five and it’s getting maybe like five to six thousand views. Views or listens per episode, roughly. And my co host just left the show. I’m going to continue on and have guest hosts pop in.

So it’s unclear if the show will grow because I’ll have different guest hosts popping in, or if it’ll decline because people really liked my friend, Carl. So Carl will actually record with me occasionally. In fact, I think we’re going to record something like next, next week. So he quit the show. And then like a couple, few weeks later.

He was like, Hey, we could record, record coming up. And I was like, great. You know, there, there were no hard feelings when we parted, parted ways. He just didn’t have time to do the show. So anyway, I’m going to go to FinCon and this will be the first time. So this is my fourth, fourth year. This’ll be the first time that I’m actually.

Looking to get sponsors. So I’ll have a little bit different of an approach because I used to walk through apparently with my nose held high. When the, the expo folks tried to talk to me, I was like, I don’t need sponsors. I I’m working, I’m working this out on my own. I have my own products, forget you guys, but now I’ll be going through and I’m like, Oh, what do I need?

Do you guys have a budget for sponsorships? Like, you know, I have two, two brands, like, let’s talk, maybe we could figure it out. And usually I get, like, when people find out you have a podcast, usually authors are fucking throwing their cards at you. They’re like, I want to be on your show. And they have to be basically a friend to get on the show.

Cause Lord, you don’t know how many fucking emails we get. Like if you have a podcast. You know what I’m talking about, but basically podcasts are a great, great way to promote a book. So if you have a podcast, you probably get like two emails a day from an author who’s trying to launch their book and they want to get on your show and they never listened to your show.

They just want your audience. Luckily. I know enough people that I could just never interview an author that I don’t want to talk to. So the interesting thing is like, because of my network, I will get the rare introduction to like someone that is I believe a higher caliber than I am. So I ended up interviewing someone who’s like pretty bad ass, which is fun.

So anyway, I’m going to go to FinCon. I’m going to probably try to chat with some, some of the companies that are there, they’re looking to get in front of the audience and I’ll have to, um, you know, figure out what works. It’ll be cool. If I can get some sponsors for like YouTube live streams, it’ll be cool.

If I can have. a great relationship where they’re not going to be micromanaging the the ads or anything like that. We’d love to get an ad read and just keep it simple. The issue is, you know, by me booking stuff directly myself, instead of working with an agency or an agent, there’s a lot, there’s potentially a lot of overhead.

Especially let’s say I get three or four sponsors for each one of the shows, then all of a sudden you end up with, you know, a lot of back and forth emails, like as you’re getting things set up. So we’ll see how it goes. We’ll see how it goes. The other thing with monetization, especially on the MileHiFi side, I was looking at some of the The companies that are over on impact.

So for people that don’t know, I think it used to be called impact radius, and then they rebranded to impact. It’s essentially an affiliate marketplace. So if you’re a pretty publisher, I guess that’s what you call it. If you’re a publisher like me, then you could find a companies that want to advertise.

And if you’re a company, then you could find. The, the creators out there. So anyway, so marketplace and I’ve been signed up there for a while. I’m actually working with a couple of companies. I think I was signed up with like some rush couple hosting companies and I had an account there. So I was looking and I’m like, I see these, I see these companies that are available, especially in the financial space.

And I was like, I want to apply to these affiliate programs. Like I have a decent size audience. It’s not like I just got started. I have an email list. Getting like, you know, many thousands of views. And I was like, what the fuck is wrong? Like, why can’t I apply to anything? Like I can’t apply to anything.

So apparently I didn’t have my account set up properly. And I didn’t know there was like no workflow. There was nothing that was telling me. Hey, you need to put in this information, like your website, it didn’t ask for like the brand or create, there was nothing. So basically I just had like straight invitations to like some rush or the hosting company.

And that’s the only reason I was able to apply to those programs. I had a direct invite from the affiliate manager. So as I was going, looking around, I was like, what the fuck is a problem here? And I opened a ticket and then they were like, Oh, you have to fill out this area. Which again, it’s just a horrible workflow.

I had no idea, like obvious. My account’s been open for, you know, a couple or a few years. There was no notification, no, anything to tell me to fill out these areas. Maybe they added it later. Maybe I missed it. Obviously there was a, there’s whatever thousands of people signed up, but anyway, I eventually figured it out and I was like, Oh, I could apply to all these programs.

Someone had to look and see if I actually You know, had a brand, make sure it was legit. They verify the website. They can, you know, tap in and see your like YouTube subscribers and other analytics and stuff like that. So it’s fairly sophisticated. However, I just had no idea. So when it’s something like this, the unfortunate thing is, um, it was probably my fault.

So, um, it was probably my fault because I’m assuming. Yeah. I missed something, but I’m not a complete idiot. Right. And I’ve. I’ve created accounts on other affiliate platforms and stuff. You know, it’s a tough thing. And I, you know, what I hate is when you you’re working with a company and they’re switching their affiliate management system, like all the time.

And, you know, it’s hard, hard to figure out which one to use. It seems like impact is one of the biggest, like, I think. Huge companies work through impact. So I think they may, might be like one of the big players that have the majority of all the big programs. So eventually I got, thank God I got signed up and what I’m trying to do now.

So, you know, I think the last few episodes have been a peak behind the curtain here, where I’m trying to get sponsors instead of selling my own products. It’s a bit of a shift and it’s a different monetization strategy. Again, it’s not as efficient. I’m not going to earn as much. I’m certain of that. But. I like to create this content.

I like the people that I talk to. I like, especially on the Doug show called it the Doug show in the beginning, uh, later, later officially changed the name for a keyword reasons. So it’s like affiliate marketing and side hustles on the Doug show, but it’s the Doug show, right? Because I could talk about whatever I want and I could shift, you know, you know, alienate the audience in some ways.

But at least in this case, I am talking about online business. So. This is the stuff that I’m working on and what I’m looking for. They actually have filters for ad placements versus like affiliate programs and other monetization. Uh, I guess that strategies, but monetization setups or agreements with the companies.

So once I get approved, I could potentially say, Hey, mint mobile, like, do you want to run straight up ads instead of doing the affiliate program, or do you have any. Is there any option for that? And the thing is like from an ROI perspective, a company does want to work on a referral or a commission basis.

That way they’re not paying me unless there’s actually a conversion made. However, bigger companies that maybe have external. investment or they have a lot of funding or it’s a big public company where they literally just want to market and have name recognition. So for me, that’s what I’m looking for because it doesn’t rely on a conversion to be made.

And depending on the situation, it may be like more Uh, profitable for the company to do that or whatever. But the thing is, there’s different types of goals in marketing. Sometimes it’s like direct sales. Sometimes it’s actually to spread the brand. And that’s the kind of stuff I’m looking for. So I think that’s it for today.

I, I crumpled up my post it notes. So that means it’s all done. Thanks for checking out this episode. If you have any questions or comments on, uh, the topics that I covered today, do let me know, and also let me know, please send me an email feedback at Doug dot show. I don’t get too many emails, so I, I.

Reply back to pretty much a hundred percent of the people that send the email. So if you have it, have time later, uh, probably when you’re on the toilet, and unfortunately, but if you have time later, shoot me an email, let me know if you like these sort of behind the scenes topics where I’m like trying to figure out what I’m working on and letting you know, I’m in the middle of this.

I’m trying to change the monetization. I want to produce the content and here’s the struggles that I’m going through. So if you like this kind of content. It doesn’t have to be a long email. It could just say, I like this kind of content or important too. I don’t like this content. You could say, figure your shit out, Doug.

We want to know, uh, other strategies. We don’t want to hear you trying to figure stuff out. So that’s it for today. I’m going to head out to the gym and then maybe have a beer later. If you’re not signed up for the email list, do sign up, shoot me an email. It’s too many calls to action. All right. That’s it for today.

Have a good one and we’ll catch you on the next episode.