Transcript: Sustainable Solopreneur 7 Rules for Online Success – DS600

Brought to you by Semrush Affiliate Program

Promote the Semrush Affiliate Program, which offers high commissions (up to $300 per sale) and a long 120-day cookie window, by highlighting their new AI Visibility Toolkit that solves the current business pain point of tracking brand presence on AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode.

Also, check out:

Contact me. Ask Questions!

  • Send me an email here: feedback@doug.show
  • Leave a voicemail: (406) 813-0613

 

Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. I’m Doug Cunnington, and today I’ll give you seven tips for being successful online. Last episode, I gave you 17 things that I wish that I knew before working online. There might be some overlap here. I actually didn’t compare the two, but I think they’re separate and we’ll, we’ll be totally fine here.

I resisted the urge to write even more. My initial list was five, but I came up with two others, and I like this format. I like giving some, uh, discreet tips, a little more directed. I think the episodes could be tighter. And we’ll see how it goes. I will give a call to action here early. Uh, next week or the week after, I will have an episode about risk management.

I’ll have to come up with a better title because risk management, it doesn’t sound as sexy, so I’ll work on that. So I’ll think of a better title, but if you have questions or ideas about risk management or related, let me know. Send it in. You can even. Check the, the show notes. There’s a, a voicemail number, so if you wanna call and leave a message, I could play it on the air.

I did this a lot more in the, maybe first two years of the show, and then maybe I, I stopped mentioning it or maybe I was too mean to the people that actually left messages. I don’t think I was, I always answered their question. But anyway, the point is you can leave a message. And this is around like the project management aspect, but I think the risk management is something that people online often ignore.

I mean, if you’re trying to work on a project online, you’re probably like fairly optimistic and you are not, maybe you’re not thinking too much about the things that could go wrong, but that is one area which I didn’t list it here, but that could be one area where if you have. Contingency plans. You are, you’re setting the stage for success.

So I didn’t put it on here, but maybe that’s number. It’s uh, number zero. We’ll start numbering at zero, but let’s get into it today and we’ll just start with number one. So think long term. So. I, I didn’t do this in the beginning. I was just dabbling online and I didn’t really get it, and it manifested itself because I would make short term decisions and it would basically be like a, a little money grab, you know?

I’ll give a specific few example. I mean, this happened again and again basically once I got started online. I was, um, building my own websites, but at the same time, I decided in parallel I was gonna launch niche site, project my blog, and have a product like, pretty much immediately all this, example will come in again and again.

So I had an email list pretty much from the beginning and a few hundred people signed up right away. Another story, maybe I’ll, I’ll cover that in a future episode. So I had a few hundred people on an email list that I was able to launch my first product to and all that stuff. So that was fine. But I was getting offers from other, I guess, software companies typically, and uh, I say software companies, it was typically individuals who were like, Hey, I have this plugin that I developed and I wonder if you could offer it or.

I have, uh, a link building service and I want to sell it to your audience and you get a commission. So sometimes those worked out well. So I earned a commission. The people, the clients that actually purchased whatever it was, they got some back links. They were able to, you know, get more traffic, improve their rankings, and every, everybody won, right?

So that’s the best case scenario. More often than not, and this is the the silly thing, I would, you know, get the email from someone or I would know who, who it was. Someone would say, Hey, I’m selling this plugin. Go ahead and offer it to your audience. So I would like send out these emails and I was just kind of mimicking what.

Other people were doing. So I would have whatever the, the flashing yellow text, the highlighted text, you gotta get this tool. It is really awesome. And it’s only on sale for this Black Friday and all that kind shit. And I would potentially earn a little money, but a lot of times I would send these out, kind of annoy the audience and then.

Make like 50 bucks or something like that. Other times, like I said, it can work out fine, but I was making these short term affiliate deals that didn’t really serve me in the long run, and it was a very, very shortsighted situation and I was just thinking, Hey, I wanna. See what happens if, if I send out these emails and if I was thinking long term, it would’ve been much better.

And I did need to test to see like what worked and what I liked and what I wanted to do. And maybe the audience really likes that. Like it just depends on what you’re trying to do. So keep all of that in mind. There’s no. There’s no like, uh, hard and fast, assuming everyone’s ethical and there’s no bad players in this situation.

There’s no, um, there’s no major issue with testing things out, but just be sure you understand like what you’re doing and I’ll give you, I guess a, a technique that might help you through any of the. Like business models that you’re looking at and a few years later, after I got laid off, I actually used this.

Exactly. Think about the scenario and if it’s successful in six months, in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years, what will it look like? Think, think about hugely successful, uh, beyond what you even were trying to do. If it’s 10 x bigger than whatever you were trying to do, is that what you want?

Like, is that a scenario that works out well for you? So think about that, and you will need to, I mean, anticipate what you might like in the future. But in my case, I was looking at a. Uh, guest posting, link building agency. So I was running that right when I got laid off, and I was doing really well with that.

It was actually the biggest, most successful portion of what I was running, and I decided I didn’t like it, so I stopped doing it when I look back, and I don’t have any regrets on that decision. One, not me, but one thing a person could have done was to grow up that agency to a nice respectable level in back in those days, in 2016 or so, I probably could have grown up this organization, had it managed by some GM and I probably could have sold that operation for a very.

Very good price because in those days a guest posting and link building agency would’ve been really valuable. And actually if I sold it to the right person or other agency, they could have grown it up even bigger and it would’ve been a success for everyone involved. So the main thing here is think long term and think about, Hey, is this work I wanna do?

If. This is a wild success. Is this gonna pay off in the way that I think it is? Or am I gonna create a job that I actually don’t like very much?

Number two, an incremental stair step approach is probably what you should aim for with. YouTube social media, it’s really easy to start following along with someone who is running a huge company. Probably they’ve been working on it for, you know, 10 or 15 years, and you’re starting to follow along and you’re thinking, oh, yeah, I, I wanna do what they are doing.

But they’ve been at it for many years. It’s not an overnight success, and a lot of times. We think, hey, we could probably, we’re smarter than the average person, right? We could do better. Uh, we could do it faster. It turns out most people are average and we just think we’re a little bit better. Some of us, uh, I think I’m probably a little below average in so many areas, but I’ve overcome, I’ve overcome that as far as I could tell.

But the, the point is we need to take an incremental approach. So if you’re just getting started. You’re probably still following along with someone who’s very far ahead of you. That’s okay. You just need to make sure you take a sort of a smaller approach. So you know, you may be following someone who’s making a million per year and they’re doing, they’re doing great, and you’re like, I wanna start a software company and follow along in their footsteps and I should be able to do it.

I have the skills. Um. I’ve worked at companies where we’ve, we’ve done stuff like that. You may still need to go slower and have maybe a much cheaper product, a much simpler product than what you can ultimately end up with if you are thinking long term. But the thing is, you, you don’t want to jump ahead too far and you might be thinking, you know what?

If I can go ahead and skip the steps and skip three or four years and all of a sudden have a million dollar per year business, you might think that’s perfect, but you may run into some issues because you might not have the skills that you need to manage the problems and issues that will arise eyes with the scope of a million dollar business.

It may not exactly make sense, but. You will still have problems in the beginning with smaller, smaller, uh, you know, revenue companies. And as you grow, you’re still gonna have problems. They will just be much bigger fucking problems and you will have to solve them and figure it out, but they won’t feel as bad if you built up the skills to get to that point.

A quick a little analogy is like, imagine. Like, uh, child stars, which, you know, they, there’s so many stories. It’s like a cliche. The child stars get into, -, trouble, right? They have drug problems, other issues crop up, and they just have like sort of an unhealthy psychology. And they have a hard time and it might be they didn’t, you know, develop the skills that they needed ’cause they got too much money, too fast.

Same thing with like lottery winners, right? They get a huge pile of money, hundreds of millions of dollars. They don’t know how to manage it and somehow they end up. Just throwing it, throwing it away somehow. I, I don’t know how they do it, but they, they don’t have, uh, the skills and things go sideways and then they end up broke and bankrupt at, at the same, uh, position that they were in before.

’cause they didn’t have the skills. So you might be able to, you know, get some mentoring and, and advance a little quicker. Or maybe you do have, I mean, some people are better than other folks and you will be able to, uh, solve those problems faster and easier because you’re smarter and better, but most people are so.

People that listen to this show, though you are better. So take the stair step approach. Go slow, it’s gonna be okay. And I’ll give you uh, one just minor example. So I mentioned earlier I had an email list. From the beginning of a few hundred people, it was very scary to write, like, I’m not a, an a writer. Um, I didn’t study it.

I did some light technical writing and was pretty self-conscious of writing and I wasn’t confident in it, basically. So I would write these emails and it would be very stressful ’cause I’m like, I’m sending this out. To hundreds of people. And occasionally I would get back emails like, Hey, you, you wrote the grammar’s wrong.

People actually fucking critiqued what I was doing. And I was like, God damn, you know, that kinda sucks. Um, and I did. I was like, oh, shoot, I wrote the wrong word or whatever. I’m, I’m not great at grammar. Right? So that, that did kind of bother me. But now, uh, because I’ve sent emails over the years and sent it.

Out to, you know, thousands of people. I can’t remember the biggest, my email list was maybe 12 or 15,000 or something like that. And, you know, sending that out was stressful. But by the time I got to that point, I had sent out hundreds of emails to thousands of people over and over, slowly growing. So I didn’t feel the pressure in the same way, even though the mistake if I, you know, misspell a word or sent out.

Actually, a bigger issue would be like sending out a link that was incorrect, which I have done, and then you’re like, oh shoot, I really screwed up. It turns out most stuff is okay, but you feel like an idiot in the moment. And like I said, I slowly made mistakes as the email list was growing so it didn’t feel as bad.

And then from the skill level, when things go sideways, like you’re gonna have issues and problems, and I would have. Uh, software issues, software would break, integrations would break, and it would be like, oh, this actually costs me like tens of thousands of dollars. Like this issue cost a lot of money and I need to go in there and fix it.

And the pressure’s high and there’s a timeline and it’s not for another company. This is like for my own company. So it’s a whole different thing than when you’re working for someone else and it’s like, ah, there’s a big problem out there, but. It’s a big company and I’m part of a bigger team and whatever, it’s, it’s not a huge deal.

Like we’ll figure it out. So stair step approach, incremental growth, build up your skills over time, you need to do that. This month I partnered with the SEMrush Affiliate Program and is a company that I. Started to hear about, I think pretty much as soon as I got started online and I was learning about SEO and marketing in general, and SEMrush actually went public in 2021.

It’s traded over on the nasdaq, which was cool. I remember hearing about that and thinking, SEMrush the software that I use all the time, so I’ve been an affiliate with them for a long time. Again, since basically 2013. So when SEMrush let me know that they’re eager to bring on new affiliates, I was happy to work with them this month.

. Hopefully more. So, SEMrush is one of the best SaaS affiliate programs to promote in 2026. So if you’re an established affiliate marketer, that’s great. You could probably hit the ground running, start taking advantage of the resources that SEMrush is offering. They have a lot of, uh, marketing materials.

They have someone that could help you out, um, as a like onboarding contact. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that. Uh, I guess I’ll tell you now. It’s a dedicated account manager and they’ll start working with you with day one. If you’re a brand new affiliate, new to uh, Mar Marketing in general, you could still work with them.

Again, they’re trying to bring on like new affiliates and they want to nurture you as you’re getting started. So you could earn higher commission rates if you have a higher volume of sales, which is cool, but even if you’re less experienced, you can work with that dedicated affiliate. Account manager and they have a huge library of promotional materials, normal stuff that you might imagine like banners, uh, videos, which is really cool.

And they actually have videos that are in a vertical format as well. So those are better for folks that are on their phone or if you’re. Using social media or some sort of short form video, that’s great. And just help with, uh, content and content ideas. They have 120 day cookie and you even get paid for free referrals.

So people sign up as like a seven day free trial, and that makes it a very low barrier to entry for people that want to test out some rush. And then if they, they actually sign up. Then you get a commission. And remember the 120 day cookie that really pays off. So if you’re interested in checking it out, please follow the link in the description, or you can get to it.

It’s a SEMrush affiliate program, and thank you for, you know, partnering with me, SEMrush.

Number three, don’t burn out. One of the key things is to keep going. So I have definitely bumped into more people than not that kind of get started online and then they quit. So it’s much harder to have. Long-term sustained effort with consistency. You can take breaks and stuff like that, but you know, it’s really hard for folks to keep going.

So one of the keys, of course, with being consistent long term is to not burn out and. You may not think you’re gonna get to that point. You may think, and unfortunately, I, I probably said this and I still hear it often. I don’t adopt this anymore, but I used to think, oh, I should be able to outwork other people.

I was younger, what I was saying that, but now I don’t have that kind of energy. I’m in my mid forties, late forties now. That I’m thinking about it and I just don’t have the same kinda energy. And I’m sure, um, most, a lot of people, uh, can probably outwork me. They just have a little bit more drive. And the thing is, if you, if you have that mentality, you could probably sustain it for a bit, but you will probably burn out and it’s the.

It was the beginning of the year, and I wasn’t paying too much attention, but I saw at least one video from a creator on YouTube that I follow, and they were saying, ah, I started to burn out. And they had a channel that was growing super fast and they looked like they’re having a great time. But slowly you could kind of hear like one or two comments through videos.

And I, I could see like how they’re, they’re gonna get burned out, like, just chill and take your time. But. What happens is you lose your creativity, you lose your drive, and you’re not interested in the project that you’re working on because you have burned yourself out. Like you, you, it’s just like wearing your brain out, like you’re a little too tired.

But what it comes down to is like you don’t have the motivation and you’re like, I don’t wanna do this right now. I don’t wanna do it anymore. And then if it goes too far, then you end up just quitting now. There is something about, um, being able to take the breaks that you need and making sure that you’re on sort of a long-term sustainable situation.

A few years ago I had a podcast accelerator. I had three folks that worked with me and I really emphasized sustainability so. Sometimes they would ask me like, what, what’s your view on editing? Like, should we edit the podcast and make it a, a really high quality product? We’re doing video also that was part of the, the accelerators to publish this stuff on YouTube, and they would wonder about like the, the cuts and the editing and like, sh should I really do the best job that I can for these edits?

Generally my answer is in the beginning, maybe do some edits, like take a couple things out. But what you wanna make sure of is sustainability. You wanna be able to produce your podcast for a long time. I forget the stat, but something like 90% of podcasts only put out like three episodes. So people kind of get started and then they like stop.

They quit. And then again, the stats might be off, but it’s like most podcasts only do like, it’s under 10 episodes. Maybe it’s three or seven, I can’t remember. And then, you know, another fairly huge percentage of podcast only produce like 20 episodes and then they stop. The point is it’s really hard to be consistent over time and not burn out one.

Easy way to burn out, especially with YouTube or podcast, are similar. Where you have to do a lot of editing is trying to make it perfect and then stopping. So you end up putting out three perfect episodes versus like 50 imperfect episodes. And by the way, that’s what I did with this show. I was like, if this is gonna work, I’m not gonna fucking edit.

Um, all this. So I would literally. I would literally do one take, I’d hit record and then I would just publish it. And you push through. If you know there’s no editing coming, then you push through. It’s like a live situation that also was helpful, um, in the beginning to actually do live streams on YouTube and move forward.

It that. That time there would be a chat going on and it’s hard to keep talking, watch the chat and move forward and make sure there’s not too much dead air. It was great to build up the skill to just record by myself, and it’s not perfect of course, but again, sustainable. It is very sustainable and I’m still, I’m still doing the show.

I think we’re about. Are we, uh, 600 episodes in something like that? Is this a 600 episode? I didn’t even know it Technically, that’s just the numbering. Because I had some, I think, some bonus episodes that didn’t get a number, and then other times I would do like a 5 99 0.5 or something like that occasionally.

So anyway, I think this is number, the number 600, so that’s cool. Anyway, I’ve done a lot of these shows and part of it is like making the barrier to create the show very low. Does that mean less quality? Yeah, I guess so. I guess that’s what it means. And other times, you know, I do what I can and I do edit it a little harder, but these days I’m just trying to keep it an easy lift and it’s been working out well.

Number four, revenue drivers versus the unimportant. this is assuming you have your business running, things are going smoothly, things are moving forward. There is some revenue coming in. . I mean, there’s a lot of distractions anyway, but. In your business, there will probably be a lot of things that are actually not that important. They’ll seem kind of urgent, but they, they may not drive revenue like at all. So it’s really important to think about things in terms of like revenue, maybe upcoming pipeline, right?

If it’s an agency or some. Business where you need to have clients coming in, you may need to think about that. So it could be a very important non-urgent task where you need to do some marketing so that your pipeline continues to be full so you have consistent business, that sort of thing. But the main thing is you don’t wanna get distracted with say, emails like I did earlier today.

So. I get emails for, uh, people wanting to be on the podcast or on the YouTube channel, or maybe in this case they wanted me to be on their show. So that one wasn’t too bad, but I thought about it for a second. I’m looking at the email. It’s not really important, but I looked at it and then I was like, well, they’re asking me to be on their show, so maybe that is okay.

I did take a look. I had to Google. Who it was in the show. And then once I saw it, I was like, oh, they seem kind of lame, so I’m not, I’m not gonna do it. And I spent time on that unimportant task, like chances are, if it was a big deal, I probably would’ve immediately recognized the name. So where I’m sitting now, if I get invited on a podcast.

I should probably take a quick look. I didn’t spend too much time, but I did, um, sort of procrastinate on some other stuff because I was like, oh, kind of look through my email. But really what I needed to do was record this show right now, but it distracted me for a little while and it was purely unimportant, doesn’t drive revenue.

That said, some of you out there may be thinking about, uh, the fact that. The show, well, this time it does have a sponsor, but for, uh, most of the last several years, this show hasn’t had a sponsor. So it, it is not directly driving revenue, but this show is pretty much a hobby. So, um, this will come into to play in some other areas, but maybe in future shows.

So I don’t go on and on. But quick note, I did see a, uh, a comment over on YouTube maybe in the last couple shows, but. I think they were responding to the fact that my channel doesn’t get as many views per video anymore, and I actually said that in the episode and I think they were just like, yeah, it’s cool that you’re continuing on.

It seems like pretty sad that you’re only getting a few hundred views. And you used to get so many more, but you, you, you keep going and, and good for you, Doug. So I think they even said like, they, they weren’t trying to make fun of me or talk down to me. It was just an observation. And they were like, yeah, keep your head up.

It’s all right. And it, it is all right. I have separated myself from the metrics so much that I’m doing this for the audience that’s here, which I appreciate. Everyone that still watches and listens. And, and for myself as well. And I was talking, um, I mentioned Matt Esei often on the show and yeah, I mean, he enjoys doing his podcast and that’s why he does it.

And he makes the, the lift, the, the barrier for creating the podcast lower and he makes it work for him. And I’m doing exactly the same thing over here. So. Focus on the revenue drivers Pareto principle, and one way to, you know, kind of figure this out, if po I mean it, it’s hard to simulate this, but imagine if you only had like one hour that day because you had some sort of, you know.

Let’s say you’re going on vacation. Let’s say it’s something awesome and you’re gonna go on vacation where you have no connectivity, you’re not gonna bring your laptop, you’re not gonna do any work, and you have like one hour that day to do some work before you head to the airport on vacation. It’s like, what are you gonna do in that one hour?

Quickly, all the distractions fall away and you are left with like the thing that you have to do to keep bringing in revenue, for example. Okay. Number five, take action over doing more research. Basically, this is sort of analysis paralysis, and with the ability to do so much research, we can get stuck in oh, a kind of a bad pattern.

And YouTube is a. It’s rough. There’s so much info and there’s so many videos that you can keep watching on basically any subject that you want to continue to do more and more research. It’s kind of amazing and you know, back e even just like eight years ago or you know, pick some time in the past you maybe only had like a blog in a couple podcasts to go to.

For certain information, and it was fairly limited. But now with ai, with, um, all the different platforms where information can be shared, Facebook groups, Reddit on YouTube, TikTok like. There’s a lot of similar information, just recycled and regurgitated, and you could end up in a bit of an echo chamber and continue to do research over and over.

Or you might be a person who. You do research on things that you don’t need to know yet, and you’re like, ah, I wanna do a little bit more research before I start taking action. And I have seen people where they’re like researching for a year or two never taking action, and they actually aren’t learning as much as if they, you know, stopped after one month and started launching things and testing things out and see what works.

You learn so much more by. Trying something and seeing what happens. When I launched, um, courses over the years, I obviously knew I could research and find out what other people were doing in their launches, but the context matters so it matters. Uh, like what your audience is like and the content that you produce and what the course is and the product fit and all, all these other details.

So I could do a ton of research and think, oh, if I launch in this certain way, it’s gonna be the best way. But you don’t know until you try to sell something to your, your actual customers, your actual. Uh, audience and see like what happens. And of course, not everyone has a product that they’re trying to sell to their audience in the, you know, sort of content creator world.

It could be something else, but you have to test it and then get some data. Sure. You could test things in sort of a, a smaller scope, so maybe it’s not a full launch. Maybe you launch a product to a smaller subset of your full audience to get some data. That’s a great way to test things out. Most of the time I would just launch to my full audience because my audience wasn’t big enough to get, uh, good enough sample size or data to take action on.

I think as I mentioned, like the biggest of my email list was, it was maybe like 12 or 15,000, and I think. I would probably want to have, um, you know, three to five times more than that, at least to get a good sample size. Because

in this scenario where you’re sending out an email, maybe 30% of of the people will open the email, which is actually pretty good in the marketing industry. In other industries, it may be more people open, right? But my email list, it would be like really good to have 30% of the folks open it, and then maybe only, I don’t know, five.

6% of the people would actually click through. So when you start doing that math with a smaller sample size, with a smaller email list, you just don’t have enough data. So really, if you have like 5,000 thousand people on the email list, you can launch to a group, see how it goes, tweak things from there, and then launch to the the bigger size.

So anyway, taking action is better than continuing to do research. The caveat is you do need to have like some base set of knowledge. You need to do some research, but taking action is the best way to learn and you, you can really rely on the data if it’s something that you have tested and you got real results, um, another, you know, very specific thing is.

Like, try to try to sell your service or product or whatever it is, and actually get people to pay you money like that. That is the real vote. If you send that a survey and people are like, yeah, I want, I want this product, but they don’t pay you any money for it, then it’s, it’s kind of worthless, right? You actually need the vote of someone paying money in a transaction taking place.

Number six, learn from others’ mistakes. taking action is great. You could learn from that. And if you make a mistake yourself, then you’re much more likely to not make that mistake again ’cause it hurts and you’re like, ah, I messed up and I don’t wanna do that again. You can also learn from others’ mistakes.

Those are some of my sort of favorite episodes that I remember listening to podcast, big, podcast listener now. But back when I was, um, learning, those were very good episodes to hear like what went wrong. ’cause you could learn a lot from what went wrong versus the success stories. Success stories are great, but sometimes.

Those focus on only the success part, and you don’t hear about the mistakes, but you could learn so much by avoiding the mistakes that others have made. So I think seeking those kind of episodes out, or YouTube videos for example, like, Hey, don’t do this. That is a good approach to avoid mistakes. The other, and I think, um.

Even though I have mentioned don’t use, um, AI too much, it’s actually pretty decent for this kind of thing where you use AI as a conversation partner on something specific. So you’re like, I’m thinking of launching a SaaS product in this area. Here are some of my ideas. What should I look out for? Why might this not work out?

And you can ask specifically for mistakes that others have made. And obviously with AI having so much data, they could probably give you examples that were in podcasts that I mentioned, right? So this information is covered in books, all sorts of media, YouTube, videos, et cetera. So that information is out there.

And if you can. Figure out the areas to avoid. This is all risk management, right? Figure out what to avoid. Then it could put you in a spot where you’re not gonna make those mistakes. You’ll still make mistakes, but hopefully just not ones that you could have easily avoided by watching someone else.

Last one. Number seven, don’t copy end stage giants. So quick example on this. At some point in time when I was producing a lot on YouTube, especially long videos, so I often did long form podcasts just like this, and I was thinking, oh, I, I should maybe create a second channel where I just show clips.

Pretty common, right? We see this with actually smaller creators now, and maybe I should do that, but I won’t by the way, but. At the time, it would be like some of the biggest podcasts out there. Were creating a second channel with just clips. So I recall Joe Rogan specifically huge channel was doing, um, whatever, millions and millions of views for each video.

And he would have the Clips channel and they, they would just be seven minute segments instead of three hour podcast episodes. Yeah, and you would think, well, these huge podcasters are doing it. Everyone should be doing it. The problem is they’re, they’re huge. They’re on a different level at even at the time, I think Joe Rogan had 15 years of podcast under his belt, and I’ve only been doing stuff for a couple years and.

The scale, like just didn’t work out, that it didn’t work well with the algorithm. I can’t even remember if I actually tested this out, but at the end of the day, I was like, oh yeah, like this is not gonna work for me. And it could be for anything, right? So if you’re opening up a restaurant, for example, and you’re thinking, oh, I, I wanna copy what McDonald’s is doing.

If McDonald’s is doing it, I wanna do it. Well, I mean, you, you haven’t sold billions and billions of hamburgers, right? If you try to do the monopoly promo thing, like probably not gonna work. Maybe it will, but probably not. It’s just the scope doesn’t work. There’s a, there’s like a discrepancy between the experience and the brand recognition and like a million.

Different issues with trying to copy a huge company when you’re just getting started. the main idea here is don’t copy people that are too far ahead of you. You can use the ideas, that can work of course, but if you analyze it and maybe use, uh, AI as a conversation business partner and ask like why this might not work for someone starting out and.

Imagine it’s not you. Also, if you were, if you were thinking how you could poke holes in your own ideas, just think if someone came to you asking for advice, like what advice would you give them? And sometimes detaching and separating yourself from the idea will allow you to analyze it and poke holes in it in a more effective way.

So those are my seven. Ideas rules for being successful online, and you should check out the SEMrush affiliate program. Please have a look. They’re supporting the show and if you click over there, if it looks like a good match, please do apply. If you haven’t signed up for the email list, you could hop over to whatever link is in the description.

I think you just go to niche site project.com, click the green button and you could sign up for the email list. Over there and if you do have any questions about risk management or related, you can shoot me an email feedback at Doug show or you could leave a voicemail at the number in the show notes.

Thanks, and we’ll catch you next week.