Nathan: Hey, guys. Welcome to another episode of the “Foundr Podcast.” Just want to say, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to share your earbuds with me. Now, today’s guest is actually another Australian. We’re going back to back Australians at the moment with our features, and I promise you we’re not being biased. This has kinda happened this way. We don’t interview many Australian entrepreneurs, like, so many of you international guys just…there’s too many of you good international guys out there compared to us Australians, but we do have some amazing ones that I have in store over the coming weeks.

And today’s is actually another friend, too, if you listened to last week’s episode with Darrell Wade, you know, mentor and friend and my ex-boss. Make sure you check that out, I know you guys are loving that one. If you haven’t listened to that yet and you are a regular listener, I think you’ll really like that one. It’s a ton of fun. And, look, today’s episode is with another dear friend. His name is Yaro Starak. And what’s really cool is, actually, when I was in my day job, you know, on my lunch break, I once watched this video of Yaro talking about how he left his nine-to-five job. And he’s pretty old-school, pretty, you know, pretty well-known and well-established in the online entrepreneurship, certainly blogging space.

And also, you know, [00:02:00] I guess, kind of building an online business, building a blog that can replace your income, you know, a niche blog and, I guess, living the laptop lifestyle and all that kind of stuff. And I remember watching this video of Yaro just thinking, like, you know…and this is like four years ago, thinking, “Wow, that guy’s so cool. I wish, you know, I could live how he lives.” And, you know, what’s really surreal is, you know, I actually interviewed him for the magazine two and a half years ago. And he’s from Brisbane and when he was in town in Melbourne, I offered to take him out for dinner and to catch up just for taking the time to do that interview with me.

And then from there that kind of created this amazing friendship that we share now. And he lives in Canada and we’ll probably try and catch up, you know, when I go to the States later this year. So, I guess, where am I going with this? I guess, all I’m saying is it’s just so cool how far we can come if you put your head down and it’s so cool the relationships you can build with people if you just always look to serve first and ask later and just go out of your way to say thank you for whatever that person’s time is that they’re giving to you.

Anyways, great episode with Yaro coming up, guys. Really, really pumped about this one because, I guess, we both kinda let the guard down and we just talked shop about blogging, email marketing, you know, funnels, you know, you name it, making money online. It’s crazy. So, there’s a lot of gold here. Yaro definitely goes in-depth. And I’m just gonna leave that with you, just take my word for it. This is a good one that I’m quite proud of. So, look, Yaro’s an absolute boss. He’s been doing this online entrepreneurship thing for over 10 years. He knows his stuff. I’m sure there’s a ton you’ll be able to learn from him. Now, let’s jump to the show.

Look, the first question that I ask everybody that comes on is, how’d you get your job?

Yaro: I don’t have a job. I don’t know what are you talking about.

Nathan: That’s what I ask everyone, man.

Yaro: I’ve never had a job my entire life. That was the primary goal of doing anything online or anything as an entrepreneur, was to avoid nine-to-five work. And I’m very proud of the fact that, although I had casual jobs and I had part-time work, I never have had a full-time job in my life, never will, fingers crossed.

Nathan: How good is it?

Yaro: Well, I mean, I think it’s good. I don’t know what it’s like being on the other side, so it’s pretty awesome right now. But you’ve had a job so you know what it’s like.

Nathan: Look, I can definitely tell you this, is much better on this side of the world. But I’m curious, so let’s take us back. For those of the audience that are not familiar with your work, because you’ve been doing blogging since it was even cool or it’s called blogging, take us back, man. Like how did it all start? You went to Uni?

Yaro: Yeah, I did. So, you know, I got my start as a youngster like yourself, actually even younger than you when you got your start. I started 19, 18, 19, and it was great timing, you know. If you wanna talk about “The Wild West,” that was 1998, 1999. Dot-com boom has started and was going through that crazy ride of hearing about so many companies online. Obviously, it was the first time, you know, you people were talking about making money online. And I loved it. I loved the internet. I love forums and newsgroups and websites. That’s all we had back then, nothing else. No search engine like Google, no social media, no blogs, no podcasts. That was it.

So, I kind of fell in love with the internet and I actually wanted to have my own website, my own something. But I was, 18, 19, so, you know, I didn’t really know much about business. In fact, my thoughts about business at the time were, come up with a great product idea and then run television, radio ads and billboard ads and, hopefully, if the product’s good enough, you’ll make a lot of money. So I didn’t really think about anything else, didn’t think about customers or, you know, funnels or marketing or, you know, direct response or copywriting, all things I later learned.

But I did start a website and it was a hobby site about a card game called “Magic: The Gathering” which is a kind of a…it’s a geeky game, proud to say. It’s a combination of your dragons and your elves and your goblins, all your fantasy stuff, mixed in with the competitiveness of poker. And there actually is a professional tournament series played around the world and still is today. It’s been along for like 20 years now. And I’ve played competitively in high school and a little bit after high school, on university.

So my first website was about that and it turned into like an online magazine. We had guys writing tournament reports. And then I launched an e-commerce store and the trading forum. So it actually became an income source for me. Didn’t make a ton of money, but 500 to 1,000 bucks a month and, boy, did I learn a lot. Great training ground for running a business. You know, I was going down the post office every day sending off cards and, you know, hustling, as you would say, hustling a lot back then.

But, eventually, I grew out the card game and I wanted to do something a bit bigger or something, you know, full-time income, so I actually ended up starting an editing company which was modeled off some…well, kind of two things. It was a combination of a U.S. guy who was in his Harvard dorm running an essay editing service that skyrocketed. It became super big and he ended up selling for a few million because it was back in the dot-com boom, so you could sell anything or anything basically. But I liked the idea and I took it to Australia and I said, “What do we need here? Well, we have a lot of international students at University whose language is not English first. They’re struggling with their academic writing.”

So I started an editing service for that specific niche. And I basically connected University professors and Ph.D. graduates with the students to edit their papers. And that worked really well and it actually became my first ever, like, a successful full-time income business. You know, it was the first business I grew to 100,000 a year in revenue and it was a real lifestyle business. You know, it only took me a couple of hours a day to sort of maintain it. I forwarded emails back and forward between the editors and the students and it was great. But there was one thing missing from it. I kind of lacked passion eventually. Once I made good money from it, I was like, “You know what? I don’t wanna run an editing business for the rest of my life.”

And it was around this time, 2004, and I was like 24 years old, I came across blogging. So it was actually by chance. It was early days. People were talking about blogs because they were great for getting traffic from Google. Simple as that. You put up a blog. You write some posts. Google starts sending you traffic. So, I didn’t know what the difference was between a blog and a website, and I learned by putting a blog on my editing company website. So, I started editing and proofreading blog, really boring subject. So I kind of crashed and burned within three months of trying to write about editing and proofreading, no offense to the editors and proofreaders of the world. But what I did love, I think this is where we share our passion, Nathan, is I love talking about running my business.

And, of course, by then, I’ve had seven years experience. I’ve had a, you know, this card game shop. I’ve had this editing company. I’ve had an offline English school. I don’t think I ever told you about that. I had like an English school in the real world and I also had done some other things. So I just wrote about it on this new blog intended to be a hobby called “Entrepreneur’s Journey.” Little did I know it would become to what I do for a living. And 10 years later, I’m still writing that same blog. I’ve sold off the editing company a few years back, sold off the card game store. I pretty much sold up everything to go 100% into blogging because I loved it.

I love writing. I love teaching. I love sharing stories. I love podcasting. I love, you know, basically being a content creator and having an amazing business that runs behind my content, that sells and helps people and, you know, you can make a great living doing it. So that’s what I still do today.

Nathan: That’s a really good roundabout story. I didn’t even know some of these things, man. So, dude, I have a first question for you. Like you said you went to Uni, so during these other businesses like the editing business and the card shop business, you were supporting yourself all through Uni and then you just transitioned to work on that full-time?

Yaro: Pretty much. So…and I did a Business Management Degree at University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia.

Nathan: Yep.

Yaro: And I had casual jobs, like one of the best jobs I’ve ever had was working at the helpdesk at the University Library which is basically sitting in front of the computer waiting for students to come up and say, “I’ve lost my assignment on this floppy disk. Can you save it?” You know, and I did that all day long but not very…like there were periods where it was busy. But I do night shifts, like 4-hour blocks and you’re getting paid $25 an hour to sit in front of the internet. So, literally, like my business was run and built while working this casual job half the time.

So I kind of supplemented my income with casual work. That was when I had the card game site. And once I graduated, I kept the casual job for a couple of years while I grew my editing company. And it became a full-time income, but I had trouble quitting the job because it was just such an easy job to do and I…it sounds really kind of sad but it was my main social life because back then, Brisbane wasn’t a hotbed for internet marketers and online entrepreneurs. I didn’t really have many friends doing what I was doing. So, that casual job at least gave me, you know, some kind of interaction with a human being you sit at home on your computer all day which is we still do that, you know.

So, to answer your question, the proofreading, the editing company became my full-time income and I ended up quitting the casual job and 100% on that business.

Nathan: Okay, because they didn’t have like co-working spaces or anything like that back then, right?

Yaro: No co-working spaces, no meet-ups, no Skype, no social media, you know. There was no group with people. You have to kind of…you could attend networking events but they were, like, you know, working-class people going through events. And you talk to them and they’re, “Oh, yeah. I’m a marketing manager at so-and-so company.” I’m like, “We don’t have anything in common,” you know. “Where’s the lifestyle entrepreneurs?”

Nathan: Well, that’s crazy. All right, so…all right, we’re going deep now. So, dude, I’m really curious, and this is something I’ve always wondered, you know. And you might find this…I’m really excited to hear your answer to this, like, you know, people always talked about, you know, the dot-com boom. And they also talk about, you know, the financial crisis. And I’ve always wondered, you know, because me and you have similar businesses. You know, they’re online information publishing, content-creation type businesses, and they’re digital. We sell digital products.

And I’ve always wondered, let’s say something like an equivalent of the financial crisis happened again in two years from now and you hear all these myths and all this stuff, right, that it’s coming. And during that period like, you know, the dot-com, maybe not the same as the dot-com boom but the financial crisis, did your business take a hit?

Yaro: Good question. You know, I actually launched my first ever product, my first ever course in 2007, and the GFC hit, the Global Financial Crisis, hit I believe 2008. So I was literally in the thick of it, like my first kind of early days of creating products, kinda like where you were at. Like, imagine right now, because you’ve, you know, launched your first training program, your first community, right now there was a big huge global financial crisis. That’s you’re at where I was at at the time. And I remember going, “Okay, am I getting hit by any kind of negative impact by this?”

And I did notice a few people give me the explanation of, “I have to cancel because I’ve been let off my job,” or something like that. But I honestly believe, as a person who is teaching an alternative way of making money, you’ll actually benefit from that because you’re creating…like you’re helping people create businesses that basically do things that are kind of fundamental. Like, if you’re helping people…whatever it is, you know, lose weight or cure their skin, kind of thinking about half my students here, you know, help people write books or things like that, these are kinda things that people always need to do.

And, in fact, when a crisis hits, it actually can be great assuming you’re not targeting people who depend on something that gets hit hard, you know. If you’re servicing the oil industry right now, you’re probably not doing great because oil is too cheap, right? However, if you’re servicing, you know, the airline industry, because oil is so cheap, it’s great. So, you know…but I didn’t have that kind of tying into a specific industry. All I had was, “Here’s a way…” I teach people how to make money from a blog. If you have knowledge in your head, you can take that knowledge, turn it into content on a blog and through email and sell your own products and make a living.

And if someone, you know, just got laid off because of the GFC, this actually looks like a perfect timing to take a course like that. So I think I actually benefited from that kind of event.

Nathan: Okay, interesting. So would you say the quote that Warren Buffett says, “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful,” would be true in your case then?

Yaro: You know, that’s I think more related to choosing to invest and, you know, when to invest and what to invest in. And I think that makes sense. Doesn’t quite I think apply quite the same. What I love it is the sentiment of, you know, thinking about why are a group doing something and how much of it is just emotional herd mentality, and then how can you actually, a, plan for that and, b, benefit from it. That’s what like about that, thinking about, okay, you know… I remember…who was it? Someone was telling me recently that, for example, Facebook and all these guys are stockpiling cash because they think there’s gonna be a bit of a crash in the stock market, so their valuations will be lower.

So it’s not gonna be so easy to raise funds. They need to have a war chest of money. So, you know, they’re planning for the future, right?

Nathan: Wow.

Yaro: So, I think, as what we do, we can certainly do the same thing, but I think a lot of it actually comes down to repositioning our marketing, right? Like, it’ll be targeting certain attitudes that’ll be prevalent at the time. So if there’s a crisis that happens, we can say like, you know, “Don’t ever be dependent on a job again. Take one of our courses, you know, be the master of your own destiny.” So there’s always an opportunity to use the current story as a part of your marketing.

Nathan: Okay. Interesting. Okay, all right. So, were you always charging in U.S. dollars back then? Would have you got hit because of the drop in the dollar though?

Yaro: Yes. I was charging U.S. and have for almost the entire time I’ve run my business. There was a brief period where I switched to Aussie. That was that period…what was it? Three, or 4, or 5 years ago when the Aussie was 5% to 10% stronger than the U.S. And I switched it then. Didn’t last long though. I remember thinking it was maybe six months to a year, and that was just purely, you know, made sense financially to do that especially looking at my customer base. I have a fairly large Australian base of customers, not as big as the US. And now it’s the opposite. Like I’m having Australians and Canadians saying to me, “Oh, listen, I can’t afford your stuff because it’s 40% extra for the American dollar.”

Nathan: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I get. That’s what happens with us.

Yaro: So, you know, you gotta decide how to deal with that circumstance, maybe change your marketing. Like, for example, if you’re doing Facebook ads, go after America now, don’t go after Australia, because it’s hard to put the Aussies to pay.

Nathan: We actually…funny story, actually, just on that. We don’t do any of the advertising to people in Australia because we’re trying to get a grant in Australia. It’s called the EMDG grant.

Yaro: Export grants.

Nathan: Did I tell you about that?

Yaro: No, but I’m quite familiar with the gentleman who helps companies do that, so yup.

Nathan: I’ve known for us we’ve always charged U.S. and I think we always will have to because most of our customer base is there and that’s how we pay a lot of our team members. Like all of our online international team members, all transactions is on U.S. It’s kind of like the global currency in a way when you do online stuff, right?

Yaro: Yep. And you just enjoy these moments if you happen to be living in Canada, or Australia, or, you know, anywhere else and you’ve got this great transaction. But, on the flip side, as you know well, every service you’re paying for in a regular basis like your hosting and your customer support software and so on, all those SAS softwares are suddenly 40% more. So you feel it on that end.

Nathan: So, it makes sense like, you know… But that’s interesting that you changed it. You can do that. You can just do that, huh?

Yaro: Well, yeah. I mean, I remember when I did it, I didn’t have a ton of products on the market either. I think now it would be quite a significant change. But, you know, sometimes like when Aussie’s contact me and say they can’t afford it, I might sort of, “Let’s work out a way you can, you know, pay in Aussie dollars, payment plan or something,” and, you know, help them out in that regard because I get it. I’ve been there myself, buying American stuff with a weaker dollar so…

Nathan: Okay. Interesting. Dude, let’s talk about the hay day for you because you went through a stage you’ve actually never even talked about this, where you went through a stage when you were just absolutely crushing it with blogging. There weren’t many people teaching it. And tell us about like during those days and why was that the case you think? And tell us why like…and how things have changed because you’re one of these people that have been in this online entrepreneurship blogging space for a long time. So you’ve seen people come. You’ve seen people go, and you’ve seen people come into the space and then really disrupt things and build up quite a large significant audience. So I’d like to hear your take on that.

It’s, you know, it’s interesting because I was one of the first people to, a, make money from a blog, b, teach it and see right things, like giving away a free report about how to make money blogging. And I’m pretty certain I was the first person with a flagship course on how to make money blogging, too, with my “Blog Mastermind,” the first version of it. And it kind of…I was lucky but I think smart in the fact that I was straddling two worlds. I was studying blogging and watching bloggers, but I was also studying Internet marketers and watching them do amazing things with email marketing.

And I combined those two worlds and that’s the thing at the time. None of the Internet marketers were heavy in blogging, if they did blogging at all. They weren’t into that. They weren’t into social media, podcasting. They still…most of them aren’t. Still a lot them you’ll find don’t do anything. They’re not gonna be posting to Instagram. They’re not gonna be Pinteresting, you know. If anything, they might have a virtual assistant doing it because they are masters at email marketing and they just get their traffic through pretty standard platforms like buying ads and doing joint ventures.

It’s, you know, it’s Facebook advertising and it’s Google advertising and it’s big affiliate launches that really give them huge lists, you know. And because of that, they don’t need this social presence. They just…as long as they’ve got some kind of proof of concept. So I took that. I was like, you know, “I’m building this great blog where I can channel my blog audience into an email list and get the benefit of being direct response marketing.” So, I did that and then I taught that. And that was what was, I think, great. So many people who took my course said, you know, “The one thing you taught me about everything else that really matter was start an email list,” you know.

And it’s amazing because that’s 101 internet marketing today. You have to have a list. But back then, even myself, it took me a year before I had an email list to my blog. And I just didn’t do it. Bloggers weren’t doing it. They were growing their RSS feeds and that’s what.

Nathan: RSS feeds, wow.

Yaro: Back in the day. So, you know, I benefited heaps from email marketing because I could do a launch and I could sell my course, and I’d learned about all the classic, psychological triggers like scarcity and social proof and authority and consistency. And I used all those things in my training and in my launches and just in my promotions. And it did really well. I kinda got tired of it. That’s actually what happened. Like, I did my couple of half a million years of income and I was, like, “You know what? I don’t wanna do any more courses.” I kinda tired of creating training products.

So I had this, I guess, the golden years in that period anyway, was ’07, ’08, sort of ’09. I did eight months traveling around the world, ran my business from my laptop, made more money than I spent on the trip. And it was great, you know. And then I kind of got burnt out from teaching and wanted to do a start-up so I kind of switched gears a little bit. I had some family challenges with my mom going into hospital and sort of, you know… I was kinda grateful that I was running my own business because I could spend some time with my mom while she was in there. And it was great but, you know, things changed over the sort of 2010, over the next two or three years.

Podcasting exploded, then Pinterest exploded, then Instagram exploded. And suddenly, there’s, you know, gurus on every platform. People were getting massive audiences. Kids like Nathan Chan pop up and started magazines and Instagram accounts and suddenly have half a million followers. So everything got bigger. Everyone, and still is, everyone’s growing huge audiences and it’s amazing. But, you know, I’m still getting most of my traffic from my blog, all my sales from my blog and my email list so I haven’t really changed in that regard. The system still works. The difference now is you’ve got all these other channels you can tap into and there’s a lot more people you can work with.

You’re the master of networking so you know how many people have audiences now that you can work with and do joint ventures with or swap Instagram pictures with, whatever it is you do, you know.

Nathan: Okay. No, this is interesting. So, are you open to being transparent with like your traffic and your list size? Because I think the audience would find that interesting.

Yaro: Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s changed so much. Like, when I was doing…like, my early days, I added an email list to my blog, got 10 subscribers a day which was awesome. It was, you know, amazing. And that just kept going up with my blog traffic went up. And I think I sort of peaked at…I ran about 50 subscribers a day. And then I added a pop-up and, wow, it jumped to 100 subscribers a day. So, who knew pop-ups were so effective?

Nathan: Wait, wait, wait. Sorry, Sorry. How much traffic were you getting, out of curiosity?

Yaro: Oh, okay. Time for me to kind of think back over the years, you know. It’s sort of…it was I think at the point where I was getting 10 opt-ins a day. We’re looking at kind of 500 to 1,000 visitors a day. But a lot of that’s sort of random search traffic so, you know, they weren’t necessarily all interested in the subject of my email list. And then to give you the full story, I had a rollercoaster ride with traffic…not a rollercoaster ride. I had a…I won’t call it a hockey stick growth, I had a nice, steady, slow trajectory of growth over a number of years.

Like, literally from the day I started my blog, there was a bit of a spike at the beginning for the first year or two. Then it just sort of flattened out to this point where, I think, if I remember right, I sat at around 100,000 visitors a month. And that was consistent no matter what I did. I wrote more content.

Nathan: Unique or

Yaro: That was unique visitors. So I ran about 150 to 180 in page views, right? And it just stayed there and it’s amazing. Like, I swear it was all Google deciding how much traffic they wanted to give me, which I still think they do, right?

Nathan: Of course.

Yaro: I would write more articles, nothing changed. I’d write less articles, nothing changed. So it was definitely like you just got put in the spot. And not that I was complaining. That was a great amount of traffic and I could do a lot. I could run my whole business and I was running a lifestyle business so…

Nathan: You’re the boss, man.

Yaro: But then something happened. It’s sort of around 2011, it started to go backward. So it was the first time I’ve ever seen a sort of downwards trend. So, I watched that slowly and I was not in…like, that was at the point where I’d also moved on to my startup and I was still running my blog. I was still posting. I was telling stories about running my startup. I also had a few experiments with bringing on some other writers which didn’t really work well for a couple of reasons because I didn’t like having to edit other people’s work. And people started complaining. They came to my blog for my writing.

That’s actually when I realized that I’m probably just as much a writer…not probably, I am just as much a writer, if not more of a writer, than I am an entrepreneur, so there’s a distinction there. And the traffic went backwards. And then probably leveled to about. Like, the lowest of the low period was 50,000 to 60,000 unique visitors a month. And that would have been probably 2011, 2012-ish. And I could go into theories I had regarding, you know, why things changed, SEO changes, you know, removing dates from your blog, the links getting old, but I’m not gonna speculate because all of it is speculation.

But what did happen was I kind of kept writing and I one day woke up and there was that upward trend again, kicked back in.

Nathan: Wasn’t a spike?

Yaro: I wouldn’t call it a spike. It was definitely a jump. It was a jump to like a new platform. And, again, it didn’t continue to spike, it continued to slowly grow over a period of months. And within probably 6 months, it was up to where it was, with 100,000 visitors a month and then it kept going. So that was the first time after probably eight years of blogging I actually broke over 100,000 visitors a month. And then it kind of peaked probably in the last…I had this year that just passed, 2015, was my highest traffic year ever. So we did 2 million, just over 2 million unique visitors last year. And I think the previous sort of years were all around the 1 million to 1.5 million visitors.

So, you know, it’s great to see…it’s nice to think about you got 2 million people who’ve seen your writing, and that’s all my writing. Well, mostly my writing, a few guest posts here and there. So, you know, I really love that.

Nathan: Wow, so you got around 150K, 160K visitors a month?

Yaro: Yeah. It’s been around 200,000 for most of 2015, you know. Goes down Christmas time.

Nathan: Wow, that’s really impressive. So the Google god is looking after you now?

Yaro: You know, this is the crazy thing. There’s no clear reason why. I mean, I wish I could say, you know, I’m an SEO genius  and I make… I made some changes, I won’t lie to you. I made some experiments. I did remove dates from my blog, which I think helps. I did some restructuring of a few pieces of content. I removed advertising. I cut down on my ads a lot and you know, changed my design. There was all these kind of rumors talking about if you have too many ads and so on. So, you know, I played with things and I like to think I am responsible.

But my theory with Google is it’s not…if it’s a trend watcher over time, so you can change something today and go, “Well, a month later, nothing’s changed so it didn’t work.” But what they’re really looking for is your long-term trend. Are you getting more links than you used to? Are you producing higher quality content than you used to? Are you getting more social shares than you used to? More incoming links than you used to? And is this a trend, the long-term trend? And they check in on you and go, “Yeah, this guy’s doing better. Let’s bump him up,” you know, that’s why. That’s how I think it works. That would make sense to me. They don’t wanna do fly-by-night stuff. They wanna look at long-term trends.

Nathan: That makes sense because everyone says like SEO and this whole content marketing thing, it is a very, very long game, you know.

Yaro: And I think you get rewarded for work you did six months ago.

Nathan: I agree. Dude, this time last year, you know, we didn’t even have really any content marketing strategy, didn’t really do much posting on the blog a little bit, and we had like 5,000 hits a month. And now we’re close to 100,000 so we’re working on catching you, bro.

Yaro: Well, you’ve got a team now. that’s great.

Nathan: I know. But I’m curious, so how many blog posts do you have in total on the entrepreneurs-journey.com website?

Yaro: I don’t actually know.

Nathan: Like is it 3,000? When I spoke to Darren Rowse, it was something crazy like maybe 5,000 or maybe 10,000. It was insane. Like, I was just like, “Wow.”

Yaro: Maybe 10,000 plus for Darren I think because he’s put a lot of stuff over the years. I think that mine is probably close to around 2 to 3 and he’s somewhere sitting in there in the 10 years because, you know, I’ve had a very clear stance about how to run a strategy for blogging. And it’s been very much 80/20 rule, focused. Like, I discovered the 80/20 rule around the same time as I started blogging, maybe a little bit before. Actually, definitely before I started blogging. But it heavily influenced my strategy because I saw guys like Darren and a lot of other bloggers writing 5, 10 posts a day during the early days because everyone was writing magazines and was all about covering the news and putting out lots of content with blogs.

That was like, I don’t want a 12-hour day trying to cover every little ounce of news. And I tried it a little bit here and there but I realized I love writing in-depth, thought-provoking, helpful, epic content, whatever you wanna call it. I called it “pillar articles” back in the day.

Nathan: Because that’s where it’s at now.

Yaro: Right, and that’s where it still is. And the difference now is it’s more about the marketing. But, you know, I wanted to create a blog that only took an hour or two to maintain. And to get that right, you have to build a machine behind your blog, and that’s why the email list was so important. That’s why having my own products was so important. Bloggers back then, all about page views and advertising. It was Google AdSense, “Let’s get as many page views as we can.”

And, to me, that just seemed insane because you have to build this content factory. And I didn’t wanna be in-charge of a content factory. I wanted to express myself through my writing and have a business running behind it. So, you know, I was very clear about the different formula I was going to use for blogging, which is still what I teach other bloggers today. And I think it’s even better today because it’s so crowded. You need something much more focused, strategic, based on, you know, sales funnels, emails and products that you sell from your blog.

Nathan: Can we delve a little bit more on your blogging strategy? Because I’m sure there’s many people listening to this and they’re like, “Okay, so, you know, I started my business. Is blogging worth my time? Where do I start? I don’t know what to write about.” You know, can you give us an overarching strategy? I know you could talk about it all day but just give us an overarching strategy of what you teach when it comes to blogging and why it is so important, you believe, to get on this content marketing train? Like, you don’t really use the word content marketing. How come?

Yaro: Well, I mean, it is. I think what I try to stay clear of is generic phrasing, and content marketing is generic phrasing. When you say content marketing, someone might say, “Oh, you mean like posting on YouTube videos?” And like, yes, that’s true, but that’s not what I teach, right? So, I give you a phrase today that’s much more specific, so I say, “I practice and teach other people what blog posts and what emails you need to set up in order to sell your products,” right? Very specific. And, you know, that to me is a clear message. It’s also what I’m best at.

My products sell on autopilot because someone, you know, does a Google search, finds a blog post, joins an email list, goes through a sequence of blog posts that my email list sends them, and then also automatically makes offers for my courses and my eBooks and my membership site. And those sales come through regardless of whether I’m doing anything. That’s all automated. And that was important to me because, like I said, I didn’t want 12-hour days. Also, I didn’t wanna be trapped in perpetual launches, you know. I always need to do campaigns. I do them still but I love the fact that every day my stuff sells without me having to do a big launch or having to get new affiliates constantly or having to, you know, always…

Even, you know, I always have to tap into paid advertising or do a webinar. I know you love webinars and I won’t discount the fact that they’re great for selling, but I love the automated nature. So that’s why I’m looking at the evergreen aspect of webinars because that’s what I love. Do something once and have content work for you forever. So I’m always keen to find those kind of methods. And so far, what’s worked for me is, first of all, and this is really the methodology, so I call this the “blog sales funnel.” It’s a phrase I use. It’s basically just attaching a blog to your traditional sales funnel marketing, so the blog serves as your central hub.

So, if you could imagine, if you wanna sell something online, you know what your customer…why they need your product, so what their problem is. You should be clear on that, you know. If you’re not clear on that, that’s your first step. Go figure out why people want to buy your stuff, like what’s the problem you help them solve or what’s the need you’re meeting. Once you know that, you’re creating content to do two things: attract people who have that need, and serve people who have that need. And then you’re guiding them through a series of educational content that actually starts to help them solve that problem.

One of the cornerstone principles of blogging and content marketing, I believe, too, is giving a result in advance before they buy from you. Someone who actually goes through your information and actually can apply it and their life improves, they actually move forward in whatever they’re trying to do will then go, “You know what? This guy is clearly good at what he does because he helped me get a result. I wonder what’s in his paid product.” So then they go and graduate to your next level, buying your course, or joining your membership site, or whatever it is you sell, they buy.

So, the key is making sure you’ve got the right content and the right messaging to get the right person and help them, and then they become customers. So, that’s pretty much what I spend all day on right now and teach people how to do that, and also doing it myself.

Nathan: Awesome. And I’m curious around your sequences funnels, like how many emails do you tend to send for one product? You know, what’s a general consensus game plan there? Like, would you give someone a lead magnet? So, let’s say, you create a blog post on a certain topic and then you might have some form of a lead magnet to try and get their email address. Once you give them that lead magnet for email, what happens next? What is the strategy there? What do you like to teach around that and what do you think works the best?

Yaro: There’s a few ways to do this, and a lot of it depends on how mature your business is. And when I say that, I mean how mature the information resources you have. So, if you’re brand new to this, I actually think the best way to start is to give away a free email course which is just made up of blog posts. If you wanna spend some more time writing a free report or preparing a webinar, or preparing a video series, will work potentially better but I don’t think it’s, you know…if it’s a big hurdle for you to leap across, save that from, you know, month three or month six and just get something out there with a buy button on it so you can move people through some content.

So, it actually keeps newbies, people who are just getting started, to write essentially two weeks’ worth of blog posts which are linked together through emails. And they start very strategically. It’s…you’re doing what I call a life story post, to begin with. I should clarify, I focus on helping experts, people like teachers, coaches, trainers, authors, speakers, knowledge experts, people who have information in their head and they wanna package it up and give some of it away for free, sell some of it as digital products. So, I focus on that group very much with my coaching and my training.

So, you can imagine someone who has this knowledge in their head, the first thing they need to do is introduce themselves to the world by writing this life story post that essentially demonstrates the credibility and explains why they’re good at what they do because you wanna buy from someone who’s good at what they do. So, it’s your first point of credibility, is your backstory. So we introduce…like If I was gonna say, you know, “Day one in a free email course it’s, here’s my life story. This is how I got good at what I did. You should learn from what I’ve done.” And then, day two or second email, second blog post, it’s some sort of story that leads to the big “aha” lessons, what I call it “the big aha.”

So, most people who teach something, there’s a breakthrough moment they had in their own life to solve the problem or have a result and they can sort of package it up into this, I call it, “an aha moment.” You know, we all have that with our marketing, you know. It’s the day you first discovered a certain type of content or the first time you had a breakthrough on Instagram or you had a breakthrough on Facebook ads, or webinars, or something like that, and you can talk about what was the turning point. So, you teach in that day two. And then in day three, you might demonstrate the steps to actually implement the lesson learned in the “how to.” It’s very much structured teaching this. And the idea here is to give that lesson to demonstrate your credibility to actually genuinely help people to solve their problem, and that all happens during the first week.

But also during that first week in your emails and your blog post, you’re actually dropping hints about your product. In fact, you can link to your product. I do this right now. I link to my product at full price. So, to give you a concrete example, I’ve got a mindset and productivity eBook which is my favorite eBook because I love that subject and I think everyone should study that first as an entrepreneur. So, I have a series of blog posts about the subject of mindset and productivity, things like the 80/20 rule, the Theory of Constraints, you know, inevitability thinking, all these concepts that helped me, and I’ve learned over the years, that help me to do what I do. I teach them in blog posts.

And in the second week, I say, “Hey, I’ve got this…” I call it an eGuide. It’s an eBook basically, “And it’s on special this week only.” So week two, there’s actually a series of emails that talk about a case study, talk about the special price for the book, and it has built-in launch techniques. So, for example, the price is special only this week, and everyone can go through that sequence and experience that week two special only during the second week. And what’s beautiful about it is this is set up in an email auto-responder, so everyone that come to my blog, join the list, and then over two weeks, they get sent the first weeks’ worth of content, and the second week is offers related to that content. And people buy stuff because of all that’s been set up, and it’s a machine.

And once it’s been built, it keeps working for you. So, that’s in a nutshell, obviously, I could, you know…I’ve got an entire course on this but that’s the short answer of how the machine works.

Nathan: I see. And can this be applied across board to other niches? Because you talked about some people packaging up their information. I’m curious, how can this be used across board if you wanted to start a blog and use it to grow your business?

Yaro: Well, the great thing about it, it’s problem-solving and everyone who sells a product, it’s a product to solve a problem. So you might have, you know, a software-as-a-service product and it’s designed to solve a problem for people, you know. Let’s say you’ve got a helpdesk software. So what you would do is you’d actually write an educational content series, a series of blog posts/emails, that educate people on the efficiencies that are available, you know, through helpdesk software or even just something simple like how to organize your customer support or how to…give them some templates on how to deal with common questions or some standard operating procedures.

You basically give people a little bit of a solution that your software actually provides the big solution, but you’re giving them enough that they’re going, “Wow, this is actually working.” And also it’s very clear, you’re selling, “You know what? If you don’t wanna do this yourself, you should buy my stuff because it’ll do it for you.” So, you know, for example, if you’re a service provider, this is the perfect model because you can educate and then say, “You know what? If you don’t want to go and build this entire customer management system yourself, we actually have a team that does this for you,” or “You know what? You know, we’re running a gym and we’re gonna teach you through educational content, the exercises you need to do and the food you need to eat. But you know what? If you want the personal touch, come join our gym or hire a personal trainer.”

So it’s quite easy that the core principle is “educate first, sell second,” and the education makes people go, “You know what you’re talking about.” And the blog is just the gateway to reach millions of people on the internet.

Nathan: Awesome. That’s a really good explanation. One last question before we close up that piece, is what about if you have e-commerce, physical products, man?

Yaro: Well, it really depends on how many you have, you know. Amazon does not have an email sequence for every single product they sell because that would be crazy, right? I think when it comes to e-commerce, the best…and this is why I kind of love and I’m jealous of people who are in e-commerce, is that you can run with the, “Hey, sign up for my email list for discounts and specials and new product releases,” right? Your entire email list can be just different segments and product categories of specials and new releases because the amazing thing about an e-commerce business, your subject is the products you sell.

It’s not education about the products you sell necessarily. If they’re complicated products, yes, but if you’re just selling, you know, t-shirts, widgets, you know, sports gear or whatever it is, you don’t have to educate people on how to bounce a basketball. So, it’s not nearly as complex. What you need to do though is still have a means to get in touch with your potential customers. And that’s where I think the phrase “content marketing” comes into it. And I think it comes down to a lot more about your ability to actually reach people through all the mediums. That’s when you’re tapping into viral videos on YouTube or Facebook.

Yes, you’re bringing people back to your website but you’re ultimately trying to get them to buy the product straightaway or join an email list so they can get discounts in the future. You’re not really trying to guide them through an educational sequence. Education is there when you’re trying to sell a more complex product or service.

Nathan: That makes sense. And you’ve explained that really well. You’re quite good at this.

Yaro: Thanks, man.

Nathan: It was really good because you’re putting it nice and clearly. So, for example, if you had an e-commerce product, let’s say you sell a coffee scrub like Frank Body, wouldn’t it be more beneficial to just try and sell that coffee scrub as opposed to try and push people to sign up to your email list? And then, if they did buy the coffee scrub, you still get their email then you can re-mark it to like you can hit them up again and offer more products and stuff? Like what’s your thoughts on that? And I’m sure you get this question a lot.

Yaro: Actually, I don’t get this question too much because, you know, I’m not in e-commerce too much.

Nathan: That’s right.

Yaro: I know one of my students sells toys, like she wants to be in education as well but her main income source is an e-commerce toy shop. And I said to her, you know, “The key for you is your product is your marketing. So, you know, videos of your product being used, getting someone with a large, whatever, a large Pinterest account, sharing pictures of your product, or a large Instagram using your product, you just need to get your product out into the world. And, ideally, yes, bring a person straight back to buy it, that’s the first goal.” I think where the email list comes in is to capture the, “I’m not ready to buy it but I probably will be soon,” people, right? And that’s when things like, you know, exit intent emails are great.

There’s so many things you can do today with a person who, you know, comes and then abandons a shopping cart and you can have a pop-up that says, “Hey, here’s a 10% voucher on this if you wanna grab it now,” or, you know, “Hey…”

Nathan: And a timer on it as well.

Yaro: Yeah, all those sorts of scarcity things. It’s not, you know, it’s not what I do. I’m not an e-commerce specialist and there’s so many tests that people do on their e-commerce platforms, you know, like the layout of the shopping cart, the special offers. I think what’s important, regardless of what you’re selling, is having some mechanism to get people onto an email list because, in the future, you’re gonna have a new product to release. And the best person to buy that new product is someone who’s bought your other products. This is a key principle in the blog sales funnel and in sales funnels in general. The best customers are people who’ve bought from you before. And that always blows my mind.

Like, for example, my client, I remember with the toys she didn’t actually email her previous customers more offers for more toys. And I was like, “Oh, my God, that is the best customer database, the best email list you will ever have.” So, if, you know, you’re selling product right now and you don’t actually go back to those same customers with new product, then you’re missing out on most of your income.

Nathan: That’s gold, man. Well, thank you for sharing that. Look, we have to work towards wrapping up, but I have a few other questions for you. And this is an interesting one that me and you have never spoke about and I’d love to hear advice because you’ve been an entrepreneur for such a long time. You’ve seen people come. You’ve seen people go. And you’re seasoned guy, like you’ve done many different things. You’ve done startups. You’ve done heaps of different businesses as well. So that’s why I actually often ask your opinion on things. And my question to you is, when it comes to Foundr, you know, something that I’m…

Yaro: Again, coaching.

Nathan: Well. I think that we’ll find this answer interesting as well. Okay, so just give me a shot, right?

Yaro: Bear with you, okay.

Nathan: All right. So, when it comes to Foundr, I wanna build a brand, right? And your familiar with this. I don’t wanna make Foundr a Nathan Chan club and I don’t really wanna make Foundr all about me. But I the way I see Foundr in a vision is like, you know, obviously I’m the CEO and I’m leading it. I’m leading the tribe. I’m leading the movement, leading the vision. However, I don’t want an expectation that, for example, if someone were to purchase a new product that we launched like “Foundrs’ Club” which is an epic membership community with all these amazing resources that, you know, there’s an expectation that I’m gonna be there and all those kinds of things.

So, I guess, the question that I’m gonna ask you is personal branding versus branding, how do I make sure that Foundr can exist without me and it can be perceived that Foundr is a brand and, obviously, Nathan is just the CEO?

Yaro: That’s a tough question, I’ve crossed that bridge a number of times myself thinking, what if I wanna sell Entrepreneurs Journey one day, you know? It’s selling Yaro so it’s kind of a hard sell. It’s a little different for you because, you know, you’ve kind of started Foundr and tried not to be pure Nathan. It’s not Nathan’s techniques in your magazine. It’s Richard Branson’s, right? So you’ve got that kind of going for you there although your Instagram course is Nathan Chan teaching it.

Nathan: That’s right.

Yaro: So, you know, there’s an element of you and it’s Nathan Chan’s podcast voice when he’s doing these interviews.

Nathan: That’s right.

Yaro: So there’s a lot of that happening. But, you know, I like to look an example like Clay Collins and Leadpages, right? So, he was a content marketer, still is, but he became a CEO. And now his product is a software service so it’s not delivered by Clay Collins. It’s all these engineers making it. So it’s clearly a standalone company, not to mention even their marketing they do now, it’s no longer Clay doing it. It’s, you know, the team doing webinars or whatever. So, I think the fact that you’ve made the decision to not be the brand will immediately mean you’ll do the right things to make sure you’re not.

And I think the key, especially for someone like you who wants to build an education-based business around your brand, is making sure whoever is doing the educating does a good enough job, like it has to be on par of a Nathan Chan level, right? Like, because you don’t wanna go and have people go buy a product and go, “Oh, I thought Nathan was teaching this. I don’t like this other guy, you know, or this other girl,” and then it’s not gonna work. So, I think that would be step one. Your products have to deliver value without Nathan being involved.

And actually I remember very clearly a lesson from Rich Schefren. He was a mentor for me in my early days and I took a program from him, and he was saying, “You don’t actually have a company until your company can operate without you. In fact, can create value without you.” And he was actually saying, “If you’re in the expert education business, then you need to build a company that…” and this was really, for me, that “aha moment” deal breaker, was, “Can your company create and launch a product without you having any involvement in it?” And I was like, “Wow, that is, you know…that’s two steps, three steps, four steps, ahead of where I am.”

You know, I don’t even have the people doing the things I should be doing yet. You know, like the marketing manager and the copywriter, I’m still doing most of my copying and I’m still doing most of our marketing, whatever, back then, right? Then I thought, “Okay, so how would I do that? Because everyone expects Yaro’s voice to be behind a product.” So, I think one of the keys there would be, who you get to teach and who you get to create product plus, as you said, it’s all about your branding choices when how you go out there and present yourself. So, you know, you’re doing all the right things because you’re getting other people to do a lot of stuff, like you’ve got Jonathan now as the voice behind your blog, right?

You know, I get an email from Foundr saying you posted an article. Nathan didn’t write it. Jonathan did. Whether I like Jonathan or not is another question. No offense to Jonathan. So far I like his stuff, too. But, you know, it’s a question of…and this is interesting because your audience will tell you this…because I did this. I said, “Let’s bring on a team of writers onto EJ and see what it’s like and hoping for more traffic, for starters, and hoping to remove the dependence on the Yaro brand and make it more about the Entrepreneurs Journey brand.” And I have to call it a failure because my traffic didn’t go up even though my content production tripled.

So, you know, that theory went out the door. And the core base of Yaro fans got upset because they kept seeing these articles from other people even though, ironically, I was still publishing as many Yaro posts as I was before. They were just getting drowned out in the other people’s stuff. So that turned to be a negative for my stuff. So, you know, that’s what I thought. In my own case with my own business, I’ve realized that I love being the voice. I love being the face. I love being the teacher. But there’s avenues to create product that aren’t about me. So, plugins, simple tiny example but I sell a plugin for WordPress called the “Smart Slider” and it’s just a little plugin that helps you grow your social media following in your email list by sliding out a little box on your blog on your left side.

And it’s, you know, it’s done great things for my social media and my email as growth. And it’s a product that sells every week, and it’s not Yaro. It’s the “Smart Slider.” So, I think what’s important is to understand you have an audience that has a need. How you fulfill the need is number one, doesn’t have to be Nathan Chan, doesn’t have to be a personal brand. As long as you fulfill the need and you’re doing marketing, you can decide what brand is behind meeting that need.

Nathan: Great answer. And because I wanna build like an asset-based business. It’s funny, I have a lot of people said to me like, you know, “Your personal brand is gonna explode. You’re just gonna keep doing what you’re doing,” like, you know, “How you’re looking on your personal brand.” I actually really don’t care. I don’t really care if it benefits Foundr. But something that’s been on my mind at the moment quite a lot is how the brand is perceived, and I wanna be very careful. I thought asking you this question while recording would make for a very interesting answer that other people would get a lot of value from, so thank you.

Yaro: I wanna clarify that I want to be the personal brand.

Nathan: I know.

Yaro: Like I said, I consider myself a writer, and the fact that people read my words and buy my writing… I’m a paid author which is a very difficult thing to do to actually get paid for your content today. So, I love the fact that I can make a living from my writing, and I see myself writing for the rest of my life. That’s why I said now I see myself more of a writer and not as much as an entrepreneur because, unlike you, I don’t wanna sit at the top of a company with a bunch of people working under me and spending all day, you know, sort of… I love strategic thinking, too, like you do but I don’t want to be…I know what I’m good at. I know what my role needs to be, and it’s very heavily content is what I do.

So, I think that’s an important thing for everyone listening into this is what are your strengths and how do you deliver value and what role you perform in your company? And that needs to reflect how you build a company around yourself. That’s pretty important.

Nathan: Because, I think the stuff that I do with Foundr, I always see it as a start-up but sometimes it can be infused with just pretty much, you know, online marketing, online entrepreneur, online business kind of stuff, you know what I mean? So sometimes it can get confused.

Yaro: All my people, pretty much they all wanna be the face. They all wanna be the brand. So, you know, that’s why I specialize in that kind of person because the space of the value is in their head and they wanna get it out there and they wanna help. That’s what floats their boat, so to speak. So, I think you like building a company. I think I know you wanna help people too, but I think that’s what floats your boat, is building a company. So you have to also, you know, go through the process of building a company, get an office, hire full-time staff, you know, all that. I hate those things. I don’t want an office. I wanna sit in cafes all day and type.

Nathan: Laptop lifestyle.

Yaro: It’s all about the laptop lifestyle so…

Nathan: Well, look, dude, like where’s the best place people can find you?

Yaro: Well, to find me, the simple answer is just to google my name, Yaro, Y-A-R-O. I have the blessings of a weird name that easily to rank number one. I’ve ranked number one for Yaro for, well, ever since I’ve been online basically. So if you wanna find my blog, my podcast. But if you’re more specifically looking for how to start selling products and services from a blog using what I talked about earlier, what specific blog posts and what specific emails you need to create, then I recommend you go grab my “Blog Profits Blueprint” which is a free report and a series of some training videos, and that’s at blogprofitsblueprint.com.

Nathan: Awesome, awesome. So blogprofitsblueprint.com. And I’ll mention that at the start and also in the notes. So, look, thank you so much for taking the time, Yaro. You’ve shared so much gold. This has been an awesome conversation, dude. I just wanna say, it’s really cool to be able to, you know, have you come back because you did interview me and I did interview a very, very long time ago. That’s how we became friends when I first started Foundr. And it’s funny because, dude, I watched one of your videos when I was in my day job, literally like four years ago. So I started, you know, Foundr almost three years ago now.

And about four years ago, I was in my day job. I distinctly remember sitting at my desk and I was, you know, always interested in the entrepreneurship thing. And I watched this video that you did a talk. You had long hair and you had the microphone and…you know, holding the microphone and you did this talk in this dark area to this whole ton of people. And I felt it so extremely inspiring and I was thinking, “Wow, that guy’s living the dream. He’s so cool.” And, you know, seriously, and, you know…

Yaro: Even with the long hair, you thought I was cool?

Nathan: Yeah, man. That was…dude, you should never have lost the long. You could turn that into a man bun now.

Yaro: So I’d be a hipster, like, you know.

Nathan: So, anyways, like it’s just awesome just to, you know, have you come back and to have you share with everyone and for us to be able to chat like we’re chatting now. So thank you.

Yaro: Oh, I’m loving to be on your podcast, but more importantly, I’m loving to see your growth, Nathan. I had never seen someone grow as quickly as you’ve grown Foundr. It’s incredible. With the Instagram, the magazine, how much hustle and how much you get out the door and who you’ve connected with, that…like, you’ve built… I know you don’t wanna build a personal brand, but Nathan Chan is getting pretty out there pretty quickly from a standing start, so I’ve been blown away. And I love seeing it from the sidelines, too, being able to talk to you on a regular basis and watch you rise and rise. I have no idea where you’re gonna be in the next few years. It’s gonna be huge, whatever it will be.

Nathan: Oh, well, thank you, man. You know, I’m just doing what I love. But, dude, look. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Yaro: Thanks for having me.