Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. My name’s Doug Cunnington, and today I’m going to go over a few things that are working now, putting that in air quotes, ’cause I’m not engaged in all of these online business models. But the thing is, last week I published an episode and basically I was just like, man, it’s crazy out there.
Online business. Is, it’s so volatile. And I was somewhat discouraging, I would say. Although I’m surprised in the, uh, feedback that I got on the show. No one took it too hard and they didn’t call me out too much. A couple people called me out a little bit, something about rambling on, but anyhow, I was like, Hey, maybe.
I would work in the physical world and work on a couple things, like in my local community, I feel like. That’s a pretty low barrier to entry and it depends on your priorities and what you’re interested in and all that kinda stuff. But in general, if I was like, I need to earn some money, I could probably like make it happen in my local community a little bit faster than doing it online.
That said, I know there are some business models out there that are valid. The thing is, I was. Was mostly talking about like, Hey, we used to work on niche sites. What happened to niche sites and the downward spiral changes in the market? All that kind of thing. I mean, it’s been devastating for so many folks that were working full-time on niche sites and, and sometimes it was even like people that had a site that was doing pretty well.
Maybe they had a social media presence and maybe they also had like a YouTube channel and they were covering stuff their. You know, there’s a few people that I interviewed in the last couple years where I was interviewing them about like, alright, your site has. I got hit by the helpful content update, like what are you doing?
What has been working, where are you trying to shift, and all that kind of thing. So with all that said, there are a few things that that do work. So I made a little list. I prepared a bit ahead of time. There’s a couple that I have dabbled in in the past and then there’s some that I’ve heard people talk about.
Some things that I see out there that, you know, clearly might be a little bullshit, or at least people are over, they’re overselling it just a little bit. So before I get into the, the details. If you dig these episodes, please let me know. Leave a comment over on YouTube or shoot me an email feedback at Doug show if you wanna help support the show.
’cause before I used to sell a course and there were, uh, there were a lot more other products that I could refer you to, like maybe WordPress themes or other plugins or other things like that that helped pay for like the hosting that, you know. I require for the podcast and some editing and some other software that we use, like the script.
But I was gonna say, if you wanna support the show, uh, actually, if you haven’t checked out the script, that’s a great tool that you could use for editing video and audio. The cool part is, it, it works, uh, via like a transcript, which also means you have the ability to like change what you’ve said and like correct things and it’ll like.
Basically mimic your voice. Pretty amazing. The other thing, there’s some products that I’ll actually mention right now. Uh, one is gift lab and the other one is e printables. I’ve. Interviewed Cody Berman several times on the channel, but print on demand and Etsy printables are a thing that are, are working.
There’s more people there, but there’s also a large marketplace which actually makes it work pretty well. And that’s one thing I am working on, um, going through like the gift lab course and have some print on demand, uh, products out there. And I think that’s a good place for people. To give it a shot.
It’s not a hundred percent passive, but it is a situation where if you do put in work, like you can get sales fairly quickly, kinda like the old days with niche sites. And there’s a couple other things I’ll, I’ll put links in the description, so if you wanna help support the show, I’ll put a link for New Tropics.
That’s Mind Lab Pro Gift Lab, that’s a course and community and also associated with the e printables. And there’s a free e printables workshop. So anyway, let’s get to the topic today. All this kind of fits together. The other digression is timeshares. Alright, stick with me on this. So I went to a timeshare presentation last summer.
My wife, like she was at a festival or something like that, and the timeshare folks had a booth and they got her and her friend’s attention and they were, they were. They were like, well, you know, you guys could sign up, but you have to bring your spouses. And my wife said, I don’t think my husband is gonna go for it.
So she called me and basically was like, Hey, yeah, do you wanna go to a timeshare? It’s in Breckenridge, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, fuck yeah. Like sign us up, let’s do this. I did ask like, what? What do we have to do? And it was a 90 minute presentation for a discounted stay. I think it was a hundred bucks.
For like three nights. That was pretty good. Had a little breakfast. It was a D, decent little motel. And they also allowed us to bring Georgie who’s uh. Sleeping behind me, so hopefully I didn’t wake her up by saying her name. But anyway, Georgie could come because we weren’t staying on the actual grounds.
We were just staying at a hotel that was close by anyway. I was like, hell yeah, sign us up. Let’s do that. So we had a nice time, did some hiking. Got to hang out with our friends. Georgie came along. Breckenridge is wonderful in the summer because it’s at about 9,000 feet. So it’s much cooler, so it might be a hundred degrees in the Denver area.
You go way up in the mountains, high temperature’s, like 70, and it feels warm, but basically cools off at night like in the forties. So very nice. The reason why I’m bringing up the timeshare presentation is, is very interesting. The presentation was fine. If you have thick skin, it’s just. An observation of marketing and sales techniques, which is why I wanted to go.
I was like, hell yeah, sign us up. Let’s do it. I wanna see what it’s like, ’cause I’ve heard such bad stories about it, so I’m not gonna go too deep into it. But we talked for weeks about. Timeshares and like why they might be good, why they might be bad. And you do a little more research and you find basically anyone that owns a timeshare.
Not a hundred percent, but most people are like, yeah, this was probably a mistake. Other people you talk to, they’re like, this is a huge mistake. And you often find they’ve made other poor financial decisions and essentially. That was just one more thing and you could unroll and unravel some poor financial decisions.
But a timeshare is kind of hard to get rid of. So if you do research, you’ll find a bunch of people that say it’s no good. However, if you go in there, they have very good sales techniques, they, they know exactly what they’re doing. The reason why I’m bringing this up is because. Even though everything sounded really good and the people were happy, and in fact sometimes you get to chat with some of the other owners or some owners that have not only enjoyed the property, they’re there right then and they’re like continuing to purchase more, uh, weeks or you know, time in the timeshare.
They like it so much, they’re buying more. Like they have firsthand experience and they want it more, but there’s something that didn’t feel right. It just, it didn’t sound right. Number one, they’re bringing us there and they’re, they’re paying for us to stay there at a greatly discounted rate, and it just doesn’t add up.
Because if something is good, then the market usually figures it out and you don’t have to bribe. Bribe people to come and check out your facility. You don’t have to give them free stuff to listen to a 90 minute presentation. If it’s really good, people are gonna be like, I’m buying this. I like, I want to get this.
And think about products that you like. Think about products that were like recommended to you by a friend or a relative. Someone you trust and you trust the recommendation and you. You buy it and you’re like this, this is good. You’ll often find the really good stuff doesn’t have a super strong like marketing push.
People wanna buy the thing and. We couldn’t quite figure it out ’cause we’re like, oh, this math sort of works out. And they, they show you, hey, if you, if you buy this property, you put X money down and then you pay tens of thousands of dollars, you can get access to it for one week. And we ask a few follow up questions and whatever, and we were never gonna, we’re never gonna buy it.
It wasn’t a super high pressure place, at least this specific one. But at the end of the day. It was just like, this seems like a good deal in, uh, our friend Sandy and Chad that we went along with. And my wife and I, we talked for hours, like beforehand. We talked for hours right afterward, and we also just thought about it for weeks.
Like it was amazing how much time it took up. They make it sound like such a great deal. Where even if their estimates are a little bit off, then it still seems like a pretty good deal. And they, they talked about their maintenance fees, which, uh, you know, they, they didn’t call it maintenance fees. They called it like HOA type fees, or, and the thing is, it doesn’t matter.
They like rebranded it and they didn’t call it timeshares. It was like fractional real estate ownership or some bullshit. Right. I mean, the thing is like, they were trying to rebrand it and I mean, I. Am confident in negotiations and generally don’t give a fuck what. Those folks are thinking, um, or what they think of me more specifically.
So it was easy for me to just ask direct questions like, why is this not a good deal? Like, what part are you not telling me? And they, they’re good to dance around. And I think at some point I was like, all right, I kind of get what’s going on here. And the thing is like we. Like I said, we all talked about it for many hours.
Were, uh, there’s a group, I won’t say that I’m a smart person, but the other people that I was talking to, they were truly, uh, like very smart, well, education, well educated professionals from different industries and blah, blah, blah. Um, but we were like, why is this not a good deal? Like. Uh, things kinda work out, but like, I, I don’t understand like why people buy these and then they run into issues and then we started looking up reviews for the specific place that we saw the presentation at in the facility.
Fucking beautiful, right? I mean, it, it’s great. And the thing is, there’s like a handful of things that aren’t, you know, quite right and they don’t deliver on and blah, blah, blah. I’ll give you one tip about what timeshares is. Just read all the fine print. Well first, don’t fucking buy a timeshare. Never a good deal.
It’s never gonna work out. Just trust me on it. I did interview my dad ’cause we had timeshares. They had timeshares growing up and I have fond memories of doing these vacations and stuff, and he made it work out fine at the end of the day. At the very end, I’ll spoil it for you. I was like. If I was asking you, dad, like, Hey, should I get a timeshare?
He, he would tell me. At the end of the day, I asked my dad, Hey, if I had an opportunity to buy a timeshare, would you advise me to get it? And he was like, no, just straight. No. No caveats. No other details, no. Generally not a good idea, but the overall lesson here is we didn’t know exactly why it was bullshit.
We didn’t know exactly. We didn’t know exactly why it was a bullshit kind of deal, what the issues were, but we knew something was off. And the reason why I’m telling you this is like if you do hear someone promoting a specific business model and they have an incentive for you to believe whatever it is they’re telling you and you don’t know why.
Something is off, but you know, something just doesn’t quite add up. Like if timeshares are so great, why do you have to bribe people to go listen to your presentation? If they were really that good, there’d be a word of mouth situation of buying timeshares. These are really good. Go for it. So if something seems weird, then it’s okay to say no.
You can just get out of there. And there will be other opportunities. Like if, if for some reason like you, you have a hesitation to jump in on a specific business model or a deal or some transaction. It’s okay to say no. Another one will come along and everything will be fine. There’s almost never a situation where it’s like, that’s the only time you’ll have that opportunity.
And if you sense something a little weird, there’s something weird. So get out of there. You don’t need to make that transaction at the end. I’ll tell you one other thing that I experienced where I was, um, I was. Doing a transaction on Craigslist. I was selling something and if you listen to the episode about me selling my truck, then you, you may, uh, you know, you may have already heard the story, but anyway, I’ll tell it at the end.
But there was something, and I was like, this is a little bit weird. I don’t know why. It’s weird. I don’t know what, I don’t know what the issue is, but like, I’m not doing that. Like this is out. I’m out. I, I’m not listening to you. Anymore. So, but for timeshare presentations, I would say if you, if you wanna do that, just go in.
Do not have an open mind. Just be like, I’m not gonna buy this. You don’t have to tell them that. You could also just sit there silent for a long time and they will ask you, Hey, will you just have an open mind? And you could say yes, but basically. You’d be like, nah, I really don’t wanna have an open mind.
So it turns out, as long as you, uh, just take what they’re given, you should be good as much as possible, accept the gift ahead of time. Like we were staying in the hotel already for a little while before we went to the presentation. Sometimes it’s like a fucking buffet ticket or something like that.
Probably don’t do that one. But you can essentially, um. When the Time’s up cl get the thing, get the thing that you’re supposed to get, um, or don’t go to a presentation where you don’t get the shit ahead of time. Okay. Let’s get into the business models at work Somehow. I burned 15 minutes on that. Okay.
Let’s move. The one that seems most interesting to me because I’ve gotten a couple emails, is around non WordPress. Content management systems or CMSs. And there, there’s some pushback around WordPress these days. There was a big situation going on with I think WP Engine, I think it was WP Engine and Matt Mullen wig and blah, blah, blah.
The details don’t matter. Little soap opera thing going on in a very nerdy. Like Kera culture and there’s some pushback on WordPress. And I mean, the fact is these days like. There’s not a ton of people out there saying like, at least as far as I know, like, Hey, you gotta have a blog, you gotta have a website.
Like people are leaning in different directions as people are not on websites as much. People are on websites a little bit, and they’re of course on e-commerce, but from a blogging standpoint, not so much. And there’s a lot of like extra shit. With WordPress and I remember, I don’t know, it was like maybe three years ago, I was a little bit intrigued with like flat file system CMSs, and there’s a bunch of other different types of websites that you could have.
I mean, you could have a blog like on top of um, Shopify or whatever, but these flat system CMSs, flat file system, CMSs, they were intriguing because I. Have a software background and from, you know, the late nineties, I was like on these sort of archaic, uh, Unix based systems and that kind of makes sense to me, right?
Like the hierarchy of files and folders and just having everything right there. It makes a lot of sense to me. And part of it is just because, like, that’s what I literally grew up doing. So. When I was exposed to like having a flat file, CMS, I was like, that’s cool. Like it’s kind of, it’s old school. It’s simpler.
Like I logged into my WordPress over at Niche Site Project and like there’s, you know. Lots of plugins. There’s a lot of complexity that just doesn’t need to be there. And when I look at, um, you know, hosting accounts that I’ve let go in the last year where I’m just like, shut this down, shut this down.
Like, I’m not doing that anymore. There was a time where I was like, alright, should I try to sell this? Should I like try to get this over to a domain broker? At the end of the day, I was like, you know what, I’m not Like I asked one or two people and then I was like, you know what? Fuck. Just turn it off, let the domains go.
Like this is a, like sort of a dying industry or, and stuff that I’m not interested in, so I’m like, I’m out. That said. You probably could have not only a blog, but you could have, um, a YouTube channel where you show people how to set up these different CMSs and you could just review like non WordPress CMSs.
I’m curious just if people out there who were blogging in the WordPress space are now like covering other things that are not WordPress. Also a ton of websites. I think it’s like, you know, the, the largest minority probably of websites are on WordPress. Like, I think the last stat that I saw was like 40%, but I would say within a few, like, I’m trying to think of the different websites that I have rolling, but like at the end of the day I am like, ah, you know what?
If I’m not blogging much and I don’t need to do any sort of more complex tracking or anything like that, it’d be very simple to migrate the few blogs that I still have out there into a flat file system, and they would just serve as like online business card type thing slash simple blogs. You also could.
You know, blog on another platform where, you know, things could live there. Uh, I mean, I have podcasts, right? Pretty sure. I could just like have a, a blog section of the podcast and you know, it could either live on that platform or I could point it towards like my own domain where it’s doug cunnington.com/you know, whatever podcast it is, and there’s information there.
Or I could just have the blog live there. You could also. Blog on a specific platform like Medium, but the point is you have these, uh, non WordPress CMSs and that could be interesting. That could be pretty interesting. Second one I’ll mention one that I’m actually doing is the print on demand over on Etsy, and I had a red bubble site set up for a little while, and it was only ’cause like someone was like, Hey, I’m using Redbubble to do this stuff, so I was like, okay, cool.
Of course. Redbubble doesn’t have a huge. Well, as far as I know, Redbubble doesn’t have a huge, like built-in marketplace where Etsy does. People literally go there to shop. And as I talked to my friend Cody, who was doing the e printables course and making, you know, great money on the side, I think he has set up like multiple new shops to just like start a new shop and go along with the cohort of his course and he’ll set up a new one, get it rolling.
It’s pretty cool. And you could. You can go and study those. So, anyway, we’ll, I’ll link up to that. There’s a free workshop for the e principles that you could check out further. The gift lab is, it’s a spin on it, right? So it’s still on Etsy, it’s still, um, like a, a printable situation, but. The gift lab is like print on demand, where the Etsy printables were, that Cody was working on.
Those were largely digital printables. So maybe it’s like a checklist for when you go on vacation or whatever, right? It could be anything, but it’s largely print on demand. Um, sometimes it’s just a PDF and you have to print it yourself. The gif lab focuses on gifts, as you can imagine, that are print on demand.
And when I interviewed, uh, Emily. She mentioned she hooks up Etsy to print afi, and then there’s all these different, essentially these are suppliers slash manufacturers that do the print on demand for you. So I set up a shop there. I’ve only sold a couple things, but frankly I’ve only, I only have like three products I think.
And because I’ve been doing a little traveling, I haven’t spent much time creating new products. I have some ideas, but the cool part. That Emily emphasizes is to not do clothing, which I, in my case, I did clothing right away. ’cause I had people asking me about specific products, but she was aiming for things that will not have a size issue.
So those are things like a journal or a coffee mug, or maybe a mouse pad or a water bottle or whatever, right? There’s a bunch of stuff that you don’t wear. You will not have a size issue with. And I mean now like if someone’s ordering online and they’re ordering it for themselves, they probably know their size.
They can look at the um, size guidelines and kind of figure it out, right? But if they’re ordering it as a gift, it’s more likely that they’re gonna make a mistake on the size. So you do run into a couple issues with that. But Emily mentions like, do things that don’t have a size component. Where someone can make a mistake on it.
So pretty cool there. And Emily goes through all the details. I was actually able to set up like print Deify and my Etsy shop in, I think it was under two hours for sure. And I’ve never done it before. And um, you know, if you’re checking this out, like you’ve probably set up different accounts and websites and other things, so you’re fairly savvy and able to, to navigate in fact.
Perhaps I’m slow and you could do it in closer to an hour or 90 minutes, but you could pretty quickly set up a shop and I had a couple graphics that I knew I was gonna use already, so I was able to do that pretty quickly. Cool. Really cool stuff. And I have, I have so many ideas around it that. It’s like I have ideas for different stores, but I’m just like, I should just focus on one store and have a lot of products.
And that is the one thing that Emily emphasized. She has like hundreds of products and some she, she turns off ’cause like it didn’t work out like she thought it was going to. But I, I want to say like from the interview she has. 600 to 800 like active products on her two respective stores. That could be off by a factor of hundreds there.
But the point is like, I think she said she has like 200. Sorry, 2000, 2000 Pro projects products. Gotta get the words out. She has like 2000 products out there and handful of ’em are turned off, say 25%, but she has so many of them that even if she only makes like a few sales every now and then, like it adds up in aggregate.
Of course, like many product, uh, you know. What word am I looking for? Like many product like sales, distribution, um, graphs that you may look at. Most of the sales are from a handful of items, and those make up the majority and she sees that as well. That said, having so many products does help the overall situation.
Okay. The other couple will mention here. We have a few more directories. So for a few years I’ve been talking about directories or interviewing people that have directories and you know, specific industries. These are usually pretty niche and it’s not necessarily easy, but they seem to have had a bit of a resurgence, especially like with the downturn of niche sites.
Maybe it is a little bit harder for people. To like get the information they’re looking for. So directories are welcome again, like all of these, there’s the caveat where it’s just like, if this doesn’t sound right to you, like if it sounds a like a little bit questionable, go with your gut. Right? I do know people that have directories that are making it work.
Um, they have their own little challenges and I think if you run across people that are. Pushing specific courses, products, and other things like that specifically where they’re like, this is the only way maybe don’t trust everything they say. It’s just like if they’re pushing it too hard, then they, they have like the monetary incentive to be pushing you to like, you have to use this product.
That’s the only way. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. Alright, so. Directory something to look at. I think niching down is probably, um, the smartest thing to do, so it’s a very specialized directory. The other is newsletters, so people are really pushing newsletters. I think part of that is being able to contact your customers or your audience directly without any gatekeepers or as few gatekeepers as you could.
Possibly deal with, and it’s a great way to do it. I mean, you’re able to contact them, you’re able to. Direct your audience where you want, whether it’s a social media post or a website, or maybe you have your own physical product or a local service. That’s perfect. And by the way, I mean you can have like a local newsletter.
Those are the type of folks that I’ve heard of most often. But it can be in anything. And I mean, think about yourself. You’re probably on some newsletters that are very specific and often. The top of the funnel. Is some social media or other type of content production. And then you get people into your email list where either you can market other products, you could be an affiliate, you can have straight up ads, you could sell your own things, you could sell other stuff.
You could direct people to your Etsy shop. But at the end of the day, I, I almost feel like having a newsletter is a key component for anything that you’re working on. So if you do like the. The non WordPress CMS content, like have a newsletter, right? Like you should want to be able to contact those folks directly.
Maybe you’ll have a course or a workshop on how to set up a specific CMS, right? Like that would be a simple business model where you’re like, yeah, we’ll, we’ll have 10 people. We’re all gonna set it up side by side. On this whatever four hour workshop or however you wanna set it up, right? So newsletters, I think those are continuing to prove to be the best way to contact your, your audience.
And there’s a lot of different ways you could do it. I know actually, I’m not gonna mention any too many specific email service providers, but there’s a ton of them out there. A lot of them have like a free level that you could check it out and, and. Try. Um, I almost moved over to Beehive and they were a little sloppy with the transition and I actually like sent over my email list and some other stuff and people tried to work with me, but I basically like.
Paused and I was like, is this gonna work out? Like I thought because they had an ad network built in. And I was like, great. I have some friends that are doing that, but they were making changes with it. So again, I’m not saying anything weird was going on with beehive. I decided not to move over and I later heard from other people that the AD network was a little.
Volatile and sometimes the payouts were lower than they expected, or maybe they got a payout for a little while, and then the way they were being paid in the future wasn’t on like a, like purview of an ad. It was. On clicks of the ad. So because of the volatility, it was pretty unclear for me if I was gonna be able to like, earn from the ads.
So I was like, yeah, you know what, I’m gonna, I’m gonna stick with others. But, but there, like I said, I think there’s um, options and some people are happy with beehive and some people are happy with other platforms out there, so newsletters, very good. Last one I’ll mention is just anything local. So. When I talked about directories, I mentioned like niching down and being very like specific, like I interviewed, uh, Tony Marto a couple, few years ago.
You could check out those interviews out there. But he was working in the physical therapy space, like he’s in the industry. He’s a physical therapist. He has good network around that. So he’d niche down into that one specific area. If you were really into. Like micro breweries for example. Perhaps I am like, maybe that gives you a way to contact people that you wanna contact you like the breweries and you could have like a nice directory and, or maybe you’re in the industry already and you’re like, you know what?
I’m gonna have a directory of, of micro breweries in a specific way. Perhaps a poor example. But you could take that into any industry, right? If you look at the local aspect, you could focus on your county or your specific town, or if you live in a very big city, maybe like the suburb area. And I don’t think there’s necessarily like a specific size where it’s too big or too small.
It just depends on the scope of what you’re trying to do. I would say it’s good to, if you’re gonna start small initially to maybe brand your, uh, local, whatever it is, just so that you could expand it a little bit larger in the future if you are focusing very. Uh, like hyper-local. That said, if you focus hyper-local, then there’s probably like less competition and it’s harder to find like the exact specific information that you’re providing.
The cool thing with the local aspect is I think you could do that on whatever platform you want. So if you’re a social media person and you really love Instagram, you could focus on that. And if you just liked YouTube. You could do that. I interviewed Sam Newman, who I found him ’cause I was looking for like food vloggers in the Denver area.
And Sam, he had a bunch of videos about food, but also just like local topics and that sort of thing. And I saw he was actually a real estate agent, so he had some home walkthroughs and some topics that were more related to. Real estate and or neighborhoods, but that was only a small portion. So I sent Sam an email and I was like, Hey man, do you wanna come on my show?
We’ll just talk YouTube, but we’ll promote whatever you want. And great interview. I got way less traction than I expected. It’s the content on the channel. I mean, basically like I was covering niche sites and all that kind of stuff, and I think initially didn’t, that video didn’t give much traction. Great interview though.
Really good insights. We’ll link to it, but the, the cool part is Sam was focusing on like local stuff. He talks a little bit about real estate, but he has more views on his food related videos as far as I could tell. I, I didn’t look here recently, but he has like, best Steakhouse in Denver and burgers in Denver and other stuff like that.
Or he’ll just go to a, you know, a normal restaurant and, um, just say, Hey, you know, here’s my experience going to this place over here. Right? Pretty simple, straightforward. I like it. I like watching. People eat and talk about food. It’s one of my favorite things, and it’s a, it’s locally based, but it supports his business.
In fact, he says in the interview he probably would not still be doing real estate because. He would probably not be doing real estate if he didn’t have his YouTube channel. Most of his leads come in through YouTube. So it’s like people have, you know, sort of the relationship that we have with, um, content creators.
So it’s like you kind of know him. Sam’s a nice guy. He has a good, um, way about him and he does a good job on the videos. Very high quality and. When the time comes to buy a house or I need to sell my house, maybe I call Sam. You know, I, I watch his videos, I watch him talk about food, but he seems like a nice guy.
I feel like I know him, and it brings in the exact right people. That wanna deal with him. ’cause of, like, I, I don’t really like real estate folks, so if I went to someone randomly, they would be, I would be like judging them constantly. But if I was doing a transaction in the Denver area, I would be like, Hey Sam, I don’t know if like you wanna work with me, but I, I know you.
I don’t know if this is the kind of stuff that you wanna work on. So if not you, then maybe you could recommend someone. So he has created like a pipeline for his real estate business and it’s super interesting because it wasn’t easy. He, he has like hundreds of videos. He published hundreds of videos before.
Anything like really worked out and you just have to go through the reps and work. On the videos, work on the content, kind of figure things out. But he’s eventually figured it out and he gets a lot of views. He has a great channel. The whole point here, you can have a local, um. Essentially a content creator, um, as a local focus.
And you could put it on whatever platform you want. It could be TikTok, it could be Instagram, it can be what, wherever you want it to be. It could even be a blog. It could be a newsletter, whatever. I would say you should try to get people onto a newsletter at a minimum, but you could pick whatever platform you want.
You will run into the issue of platform dependency. So, you know, Sam worked on YouTube. I like YouTube, but it’s more independent than some of the others. It’s not foolproof. YouTube has its issues as well. People have their accounts closed occasionally, for what I hear is no good reason, although I haven’t heard that, uh, here recently.
But it does happen. Mistakes happen and sometimes it’s hard to get, um, the attention of a big company like YouTube to like reinstate your account and other platforms you may be more subject to algorithm changes. Uh, Pinterest, um, there’s other, other platforms where people spend time and there’s algorithms there, right?
So you. You will have to watch out for that. But if you have a specific platform that you really enjoy either creating content or consuming content from, it’s probably a good one for you to take a look at. So those are the main ideas. I’ll do a quick recap. So non WordPress CMS is a specific topic.
Probably YouTube is the best place to do that Print on demand. NC has its own marketplace, like there’s a, there’s customers there like looking to buy stuff. That’s the only one that I’m testing out on a very small scale. Directories and newsletters are very good. Highly recommend, like whatever you do, try to get a newsletter going and there’s it.
It’s so easy and cheap to set these up now. Usually you could set up like a free account on most of the email newsletter platforms as you’re getting started. If your list is small enough, then often you can get a free option. And finally, anything local on whatever platform you want is probably gonna work out pretty well.
Assuming you stick to your own locality, like you have an unfair advantage, much tougher to cover someplace that you don’t live. If you’ve never been there, don’t even try. If you happen to be like a frequent visitor of a place, I could see you making that work. Like I wouldn’t do this, but. I have family in the Atlanta area.
I grew up there. I go back occasionally to visit Atlanta. Could be a place that I have, like a local, um, a local brand, and I could make that work. Because I, I go there often enough where I could like, well, actually I don’t go there that often, but I know some things about Atlanta and if I was creating a brand and I saw like a great opportunity, I could go back more often and then make that work.
I’ll leave you with a final story. So I was selling my truck and this is around like, hey, if, if something doesn’t seem right, if something smells like bs, it’s probably bs. It might not be bs, but you’re better off like walking away then like don’t buy a fucking timeshare. Right? Like that. That is bs. Sorry to break it to, to folks out there.
So I was selling my truck and I had that truck for like 18 years. I don’t buy cars often. I don’t sell cars often. First time I sold, um. A car, like directly to a person. So I, I did my research and blah, blah, blah, and I listed it on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. It was probably like 50% of the things that people that contacted me were like scammers or bots.
So there was someone who, it seemed a little weird. They were like, Hey. I am interested, like, let’s meet up. They were actually referencing the ad. They seemed like a real person in the way that they were replying back in a normal amount of time. Sometimes. Not immediately, sometimes, like if we were going back and forth, it was fairly quick.
It, they, they told me, Hey, can you get this, uh, title check essentially? And I was like, I’m not familiar with that. Like, what is it? And they were like, yeah, just does a title check. And I went back and I did some research on the Colorado, like selling your car website, like the official.co.gov website, and it.
It mentioned some places where you can do a chi title check. It mentioned like, oh, these are free options. These are paid. The paid options actually have more information and it is thorough, but you can do essentially a free title check in for, for most states, I think. So anyway, this person was like, Hey, I wanna check out the car tomorrow.
That price sounds good. And I went and looked at the website that they were proposing that I’d take a look at. And I was like, this is a weird fucking name for the website. It doesn’t say anything about like clean title, check it. It was like something weird. I don’t remember what it was, but it was, it was something that did not make me think it had anything to do with cars or titles or anything.
And I read the copy on the website and it actually looked legit. Like you’re buying a vehicle. Here’s like what we can do and blah, blah, blah. And it tells you why it’s more valuable than a free title check. I. And I thought about it and I was like, you know what? I asked a couple of my friends who actually have sold cars and one of my friends, he actually like, I think he does a few cars per year, right?
He’s kind of a fixer upper kind of dude. And uh, he was like, yeah, if somebody wants to take the car to the mechanic or whatever, that’s cool. They pay for it. You get a report. So that kind of told me like, yeah, if people wanna check things out, there’s no issue with that. It’s okay if they wanna check it out, but they pay for it.
I’m like, I’m not gonna fucking pay. Pay for it. Right. So anyway, going back and forth with a guy a little bit and I was like, Hey, here’s the free title check, here’s the information. You could run it yourself. Um, if you want to do the paid one, which was $27. I was like, you could do it if you want. Just gimme a copy of the report.
And they were like, oh, I wouldn’t want this deal. Like, I really want the truck. I wouldn’t want the deal to fall through because of $27. And they kind of put the pressure on and I was like, you know what? You know, fuck that person number one. But I was like, you know what, this is like a high pressure thing.
So I, I was like, you know what, maybe like, we, we will figure it out. I, I was like, you have the free title check, like all this checks out. This is from the state of Colorado. You like. Here that’s free. And I was like, there’s a lot of scammers out there. I was like, I just wanna make sure you’re a real person.
I was like, let’s hop on the phone. You’re local. What’s your phone number? Let’s call. And they ignored that. And then they kept trying to put more pressure on me, and I was like, let’s just hop on the phone for a few minutes. We could hash out the details a little faster. And then they stopped responding.
The whole point is it seemed a little weird and I told my wife about it and she was like, well what’s the scam? Like, why is that an issue? And I’m like, I don’t know what the scam is, but it doesn’t matter if I know how they’re trying to trick me. I just know it was weird. And I think you should remember that when you’re watching, you know, stuff on YouTube, when you’re, when you’re hearing people on social media, especially.
It’s like people are full of shit. People are full of shit. And if you don’t know what the scam is, that’s okay. And then, I mean, there’s some stuff, right? Like when I first learned about. SEO and niche sites and online stuff. I was like, this seems like a scam. But I kept doing more research. So if you continue to hear about it, like find more sources, find more resources, find people that you trust that you can listen to, and then maybe they could alleviate your nervousness or whatever you are sensing as Bs D.
You know, don’t ignore it, but you can’t investigate further. And if you have enough. Information coming from trusted sources, then maybe there’s something to it and you could check it out with timeshares. The more research you do, the more you will find its total like just bullshit. And it’s like, man, why are people still able to even sell these timeshares?
Like, it’s obviously like so much of this is a fucking scam. The other tricky part with timeshares and this, this is the last part, alright. The tricky part with timeshares is if you do talk to someone and they’re like, I am very happy with it, my timeshare, they might be, some people are just upbeat and happy.
That’s great. They should go with that. That’s a great way to be. But there is the confirmation bias of they made a decision and it was an expensive decision in. Even if they know it was a bad financial decision and they could have gone on better vacations to other places and earn more money on like whatever they invested into, invested in air quotes into the timeshare like.
They have convinced themselves that the timeshare is a good decision and they really like going to fucking Hilton Head every year, every single year, every year you’re gonna go to the same fucking place every year. So they like going to the same place year over year. At the same time and all that kind of stuff, right?
And then don’t even get me into like the point system where you like trade in points for another thing and it’s just like, get the fuck outta here. Like why is it, why is it complex for no reason if I wanna stay at a different place. Don’t try to sell me a spot here, right? Like if I’m just gonna trade these fucking points, why don’t I just go to the straight to the place?
How is it cheaper for me to pay like $37,000 to to go somewhere else? Anyway, don’t buy timeshares people. If you have any questions, comments, or complaints, you can send them to feedback at Doug show or leave them in the comments over on YouTube if that is your spot. Thanks for checking this out, and we’ll catch you in the next episode.