447: How to Diversify Your Traffic and Income with Ewen Finser

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Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Euan Finser. He is back on the podcast again this week to chat about the importance of diversifying your traffic sources as well as your income. Given all of the changes in the online content creation space in the last few years, I'm thinking about AI, Google, algorithms, all that good stuff. It makes sense that you might be feeling a little risk averse or just kind of overwhelmed by all of these changes. So so what can you do about it? That's why we asked you and back onto the podcast. He knows a lot about the importance of diversifying your business and shares more of his tips and strategies for diversifying his traffic sources for his various websites as well as why you might want to consider diversifying your income from those businesses. He shares more about how you can go about diversifying your income and some of the tools and sites he uses to help him do that. It's a really great interview for any Entrepreneur know you'll get a lot out of it, so I'm just going to let Bjork take it away.

Ewan, welcome back to the podcast.

Great to be here, Bjork. Thanks for having me back.

We're going to be talking about two things that people love to talk about who listen to this podcast.

Search engine optimization and money.

Like those are two. Those are the two things we hear people coming back to quite a bit. And it's two things that you have experience with as a operator of online businesses. We're going to talk about that a little bit, a little bit of your background and also as somebody who's just strategic and thinking about finances and being a business owner and investments and things like that. So you've been on a couple podcasts for people who maybe have missed those. Can you give a little bit of background of who you are and what you've been up to over the last few years as you've been in this world of full time entrepreneurship? Yeah.

So I'll keep it short because some people might be tired of hearing it, but I started this as a lifestyle business back in 2013, 2014, when I was in my early 20s, kind of after just being exposed to corporate cubicle life and realizing it wasn't. Wasn't for me and working nights and weekends to get the business off the ground. And you know, this is pre kids and everything, but it was, it was like a side hustle. And I picked up out of 30 other websites in college, say for beer money, but I don't drink beer anymore.

So you and I both. Yeah, for tea money.

For my evening tea money.

Good night tea money.

Yes. So we did that and then got it to a point where it could replace the day job, this is probably in 2015, and was able to quit the day job and kind of go full time online. And the types of like businesses we were operating were media businesses. Little. Little. Well, they're called niche sites really back in the day, affiliate sites and fairly simple. You know, we had one of our first sites was in the home robotics and automation space, which is partly just good timing, but you know, over some consistent effort, you know, writing all the content myself and then slowly adding some freelance writers and adding some managers and things like that, we were able to scale that we were able to have in 2017. We sold that for a nice little exit. That's kind of my first taste. But we, I realized at the time, you know, probably around 2017, that there's some legs here, like if we could build More of an infrastructure around incubating, launching, managing, even acquiring media properties or websites. We might be hitting on something at the time. I just remember this is back 5, 6 years ago but e commerce penetration was maybe like 8, 9% of all total retail commerce. So just very kind of early innings for that. And so we started scaling Team Amy who's also great British, probably have her on as well.

Yeah, we should.

Our COO she brought at the time, brought her on. She was just doing consulting, you know, helping us with all, all various projects. We kind of built the team from there, location dependent, no office anywhere, people all over the world and really started scaling the writing, writing teams. And I would kind of come to market with a thesis around. I see a gap whether search landscape or just something. I see this interesting affiliate opportunity in a certain vertical and kind of put together a scope and then we have kind of like a, in effect it was like a go to market strategy at the time which is like us doing our own little version of that and then hiring experts, hiring writers to fulfill kind of against the requirement for, for articles and content. We, we did a bunch of that. So we kind of grew the core portfolio adventure. Forth Media today probably has like 40, 50 websites in that kind of the mothership. That's like the operations that see and then we have a couple portfolio companies where we either work with investors or work with strategic kind of small family offices, private equity to, to acquire and manage primarily websites. We have like some digital products, e commerce elements, some courses here and there. But it all kind of funnels from the media side of things. And then kind of fast forward to today and we do have some services. We have a content recruiting service for writers. Content, content teams in a box where if you know, if there's brands that want to do content marketing but don't have, don't really want to do all the legwork to find the experts who even know what they're looking for and manage those writers and kind of manage the production. We can kind of do the headhunting for them, present them with the team and kind of get them onboarded and then move on to the next client. And then, and then we have like more recently my evolution is like we've acquired a couple newsletters and we're building out email lists. So we're kind of still in that media. I think the media ecosphere is like where we are but definitely evolving a little bit in terms of our thinking around list building and things like that. So we have I guess the one, the one Place where I'm, I'm personally publishing that I spend a lot of time in is nichemediapublishing.com which is our little like industry trade mag for people who operate smaller media businesses. Whether it's email, newsletter, social media, video, whatever it is.

Yeah, it's. I don't subscribe to not a lot of newsletters. That's one that I do subscribe to. And one of the things I appreciate about it is like it's squarely in the category of what we are, which is like thinking strategically about things that are happening within search, how that's changing. But beyond just SEO, it's also talking about like, what are the strategies for content creators in general? So you're creating content and the content you're creating is going online. How do you think about that strategically? What is the value of a newsletter? How does that look like? What does it look like for these trends and shifts that are changing within the industry? And so for those who haven't yet signed up, I would really encourage people to check it out. Niche media publishing dot com, Is that right? Correct. Yep. And it's one of the things that's so great about talking to anybody like you who has multiple touch points across a broad market. So like an example is we'll have a conversation with the CPA who works with creators. They see, you know, a hundred different tax returns, a hundred different best practices. And for you, having 40, 50, 60 plus sites that you're managing, you also have this kind of like holistic or it's a different understanding of the landscape than like we would, where we have like three or four sites, two of which are really like SEO focused and really focusing on the food space. You kind of have this across the board. You're seeing all of these different sites. So with your portfolio and also with your kind of broader knowledge of the market, what are some of the changes or shifts that you're seeing happen specifically in the world of search? And maybe you can talk about your own portfolio.

Yeah, for sure. You know, I think the last 10 years, you know, has been a generally very favorable context for doing anything online with media. I think certainly during COVID we saw the COVID bump and then we have this confluence of things happening right now, which is the post pandemic kind of return to normal slack, I guess, from everything digital. So even E commerce companies are feeling this. Not everyone's using Zoom as much as they used to. So people are coming back to work that whole. Or getting out, getting out of the house, whatever. And so there's that trend which is kind of a little bit of a headwind for anything digital to be honest. And then there's the kind of the macroeconomic which is another kind of contributor where there was a period maybe a year or two ago or like are we in a recession? Technically in a recession, but maybe a soft landing. Either way, we're certainly not in the environment of 2% interest rates and free money for anything you want to do. And that the trail down effects of that, you know, speaking personally, it's like when, when in that environment there's a lot of companies that just are willing to spend a lot of money on things. So we had, we were doing consulting, we're like people were knocking down our door to get like services. And you know, just that environment certainly shifted the people. You know, a lot of the people we work with now they're like a little bit more conscious of that. They have limit, they have limitations on.

Kind of austerity measures around spending and budgeting. Yeah.

And then I think, and then you layer on the third thing which is probably the. Well, I. It's kind of two things in the search landscape specifically but in within search you have two trends. One is the AI kind of apocalypse which is you know, obviously people creating content using AI or just using AI to do things in an automated fashion, which is both creating opportunities and risk at the same time. And it actually, to be honest, that was what I was preparing for this last year. I was like, okay, sometime around 2023, 2024, end of the year there's going to be a switch where Google's may turn on search generative experience and search as we know it may be different.

Can you explain what that means for people who don't understand like what is turning on SGE or search generative experience mean in the Google interface like when you're googling something.

Yeah. So some you may have opted in, some people may have already been seeing it pop up in search where you get this like generated like chatbot type response at the top of Google. And so basically that's just using AI to, to, to, to answer the question, kind of pulling from what's already out there in the universe so that at a very simple level it's like putting a chatbot into search as like one of the first touch points as opposed to just the search, the search bar and the organic results.

Yep.

So I mean that's been, that, that's been tested. It turns out though that seems like Google's kind of walking that back. It's not quite ready for prime time. There's all sorts of issues with it. But really what the biggest impact has been has been Google's helpful content update in September, end of September, and like some subsequent updates from that. But that actually ended up shaking up the search landscape more than than AI has so far, at least in my estimation and experience. And so that kind of rolled out in September and you might see it in search looking like, oh, there's tons of Reddit forum posts showing up where there used to be a lot of content brands and editorial sites. Search might not be the same experience you've had in the past. Just a lot of flux, a lot of turmoil. We can kind of get into those details, but I think the overall picture right now is headwinds. Headwinds for media brands. A lot of the big companies that I look to, and I do this in my newsletter, kind of breaking down their earnings reports. Future PLC Dash, which is part of iac, you probably recognize some of the brands like Health, Healthline, some of those Red Ventures is another one. All of those big media conglomerates are going through changes and have some negative stories now about it's the growth isn't holding up. And I think they're kind of projecting, if I were to summarize it, 10% month over month decline into the future for search because they don't really know. Even in future PLC's earnings statement they said something like we're going to try to call the turn in 2024, which to me is like the least optimistic way of putting lipstick on it.

Call the turn. Meaning.

Yeah, like we're trying to, we, we want to call a turn in the market back, you know, in our favor. But yeah, we don't even know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Essentially saying things, things have taken a turn.

Yes.

In not a good way. And in 2024 we're going to try to turn them back towards a good way. Yeah.

And call it like, we're going to be. Call it like. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what that means even. It's.

Yeah. But and so for just to kind of recap so people can follow along, these companies are kind of like big versions of really big versions of the companies you or I might have where there's multiple owned brands within the larger company. One of them you referenced was Future plc, which you can just go to futureplc.com and they have like Tom's Guide where I guess Tom probably started that 15 years ago, built it up into this massive site it was acquired by a company or Marie Claire or PC Gamer, homes and gardens, cycling, news, space.com. so they have all these content sites. And what you're saying is these sites are these conglomerates. These big companies are saying publicly, we notice a decline in search. Like that's. We're experiencing that and just calling that out. And what you're saying is there are these headwinds. Headwinds meaning like if you're in a ship and kind of like you said, for the past 10 years, maybe we had this kind of like the wind at our back and it was suddenly like, oh, this is really great. Like, it feels good to create content. And now it's headwinds, meaning like, okay, it's kind of coming at us when we're trying to go forward, the wind's not going the right way. And so as for these companies, part of it is we kind of need to figure out what to do. And that's part of what you're exploring within your newsletter is like, hey, what are the other ways to do this? Maybe it's. Yeah, you know, for you. You talk about a newsletter, which is interesting. We've had a podcast with another creator, David Lebovitz, and he talks about, you know, kind of a shift from thinking of himself as like a blog centric person to a newsletter centric person on substack. And just the shift that that was in his mindset around content creating didn't have to like, be as search optimization oriented, which I think feels good for a lot of creators to not have to be like, you know, robotic in their content creation, which maybe sometimes feels like that. And so what does, what does that mean then? Like, we're kind of in this. In between where we're figuring out what's next or what. What is your take on it? Like, it's kind of the experimental chapter that you're in to find out what we do. Or do you just keep grinding on content and say, we're maybe gonna still be able to make progress, but not as much as we could previously.

Yeah, no, it's a tricky. It's a tricky one. And I try to balance. It's like F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, like hold two things, you know, to be true at the same time, two opposing ideas and still retain the ability to function. And I kind of just keep that front of mind, like it's tempting. I see a lot of creators kind of jumping from thing to thing. Like, you know, oh, it's the. It's over. Google's over. You know, don't do SEO. It's like, no, Google's still an amazing traffic source and even the sites that we've had that have been hit are still getting traffic from Google. And that's super valuable, you know, and in some ways you can even think of it in the sense of if, if all the media brands are playing with the arm behind their back, you know, there's, there's kind of more demand than ever for eyeballs.

Yeah.

Because it's, it's, it's not just the media players that are being disrupted. It's. It's the whole food chain, right. From the advertisers, the media buyers, the brands trying to look where to put ad dollars. And so this is like flux. And I think flux always change, always feels kind of negative when you, when it first hits you. And then it takes a little bit, but then, then at least for me, I start to see the opportunities then on the other side. And it's really what it becomes as an exercise in navigate navigation as opposed to like this good that, you know, that bad. Like, you know, let's shift everything over here or everything over there. It's like, no, we gotta navigate this ship, you know, in a slightly different tack. Right. To get the. Right to get the wind where we want it. We do have that ability to control it. Sometimes it's like turning the Titanic. You know, if your business is not entirely wired a certain way, it can be a lot left or even to pivot it a little bit. So I'll just say that as like a general copy. But then like some of the things that I'm interested in one, I've looked at all the other platforms, very kind of deeply Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, you know, YouTube, you name it. TikTok. And what I see with all of these platforms is diversification and a similar risk profile. You know, like TikTok could be banned tomorrow. You know, the government might be like, nope, we're done with you.

Yeah.

And it's an algorithm and it changes. Pinterest, you know, isn't. It's an interesting one because it's probably the closest corollary to Google search in that people go into the search bar and enter things and, you know, follow. You know, it's a little bit. It's kind of a hybrid between pure social media and search. And it's very interesting. And it's still an algorithm. And if you've been along as long around as long as I have with Pinterest, there's been times where they've turned off the switch. And I think all of these platforms kind of have this incentive to keep you in their walled garden, but give you enough kind of breadcrumbs to keep you creating. And so there's this tension here where, you know, building your house on rented land. It's like I've heard that a lot from people and of course you don't want to build it, but there's a place to start, right? Build your house, you want to start, you start there because you can't buy your own land.

Yeah.

And then how do you develop a stable foundation that kind of has some, some durability? The thing that I've settled on is list, the list, the email list as the kind of the DNA. And I think, you know, we have a mutual friend, Matt Paulson at MarketBeat, and if you look at his business, how incredible it is, he's really built it off of the back of an email list. I think he started with SEO as the play Google News. A lot of different, what I'd call tactics. I'm kind of looking at all these other platforms as there's a Facebook tactic, there's a Google tactic, there's a, a growth hack, you know, here and there. But the core that we want something solid that we can hang on to. And I think the email list, like we talked about, Market beat, you know, I think they were probably hit a little bit with this recent Google update as well. But you know, with X number million, you know, subscribers, literally immaterial to his business. And so that's, I think, kind of the North Star for us. It's like how do we align as having the email as being our, our insurance policy or our very long term growth, incremental growth strategy. And so I'm kind of thinking about all of our businesses like that now. If it's something that cannot be readily kind of operationalized or synchronized with an email list, it's probably not a market we want to enter right now.

Yeah.

And so that's kind of one framework I'm using.

Yeah. And point being, like you said, all of these platforms are necessary to some degree or useful maybe is a better way to say it, like interest. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, your own site, your own blog. But all of those come with some risk. The inherent risk being an algorithm can change, they can flip a switch. Suddenly Pinterest goes public and they need to prioritize ad revenue. So they want to keep people on more. Like all of these little nuanced shifts and changes, or not nuanced, significant in a Lot of ways which resulted in the thing that you had being taken away and that idea of rented land being a platform that you don't actually own, whereas your site is something that you own, but the traffic source to it for a lot of us isn't, which is search. And for some of us we felt that in a really significant way where that drops off. Your point being email is helpful because for the most part the deliverability and consistency around email is controlled by you. Now there's always the like I remember one of the things being Gmail releasing their tabs and the tabs come out and it's like suddenly stuff goes into promotional tab and how do you. So there still is some element of that but for the most part email being something that you control wholly and that being an important piece of the puzzle.

Sure.

And also with the privacy concerns coming up, you know, all those things, even with our programmatic advertising, if you have their email list, they're opted in. It's like I think a more valuable visitor. I don't know exactly how it works with you know, Raptive and Mediavine, but there's something around that and it makes sense. You know, I think that that's another kind of concern that we're looking at. And yeah, it's not a perfect solution. You point out some great, there's some great points there. But there's, you know, I think dmarc, there's a couple things coming out right now.

Yeah.

Where you have to add certain things. Trusted sender, if you're sending more than 5,000 emails, the whole list of things they're requiring now. So it's not without some risk but it is like this, you know, this, this almost like a, a permission structure if someone's opted in. And I always look at as a trust proxy too like yeah, it's a great KPI for our content quality. If someone is willing to consume our content, come from Google or Pinterest or Facebook, consume an article from us and then enter their email. You know, they probably had a good experience and so if we can kind of orient around that. It's also like there's other benefits than just getting someone's email. It's like we're on the right track if we're seeing a high opt in rate, particularly if we don't have any special offer. It's just, hey, get the latest from our newsletter or something like that.

Yeah, that's great. And I love that idea of you saying it's kind of this insurance policy where we want to think as creators, how do we diversify our sources of revenue for our business?

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I'm going to go up a layer because the second thing that I wanted to talk to you about, kind of related to some of this stuff, is how do we, as kind of like investors, almost think about the income that we're creating from our businesses so on one level we're diversifying with platforms, traffic sources, maybe sources of revenue within the business. But let's say there's a scenario where somebody is building their site and they're taking all of the income they're creating from their site, putting it back into their site to continue to grow. They're hiring people operating break even, you know, revenue is equal to expenses and they have this thing that's really valuable. But let's say one of these shifts does come Google algorithm changes and suddenly this asset that you've built that's really valuable is maybe half as valuable as.

It was, which is still really valuable.

But you've just kind of had this, you know, if you look at, if we think of it like a net worth statement for us as individuals, you've had a cut in your net worth. It goes to half. Like your, all of your investment was in a very small micro cap stock which is your own business. So one of the things that I think is important to talk about and kind of shine a light on as we're talking about diversification within our businesses is also diversification on a higher level, just within like our own finances as well. And I'm curious if you have thoughts on how to approach that. And how much do we build our own thing knowing that we can control it? Maybe there's some really great upside with it versus thinking about other areas that aren't our own business to put some of that money into when we are at the point where our sites or business is creating profit.

Yeah, no, it's very, it's. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and it's kind of funny because I feel like there's conflicting wisdom out there, like conventional wisdom on Main street where it's like, you know, put it into your Socket, into your 401k and contribute x hundred dollars a month. And you know, it's kind of like this conservative for, for most people. Like here's your conservative, you know, plan to retirement and you can retire and you'll have just enough money to live up, live a, you know, live a nice life and go golfing once a week or something. You know, there's like, and then for entrepreneurs it's like we all, all the stuff here is invest in yourself. That's the smartest investment you're ever going to make. And so it's like double down on yourself conviction, like go, just go do it. You know, take a risk. And so there's like these conflicting kind of narratives. And I think honestly for Entrepreneurs, we'll probably need a little bit more of that like conservative like what makes us great entrepreneurs sometimes is our Achilles heel in that we don't know when to stop and when to want to, when to diversify. And one thing, like one thing personally about how I thought about this. I used to never want to sell any of my websites or like my babies and like I was just so. I believed in them. And that's partly why they worked because without some of that belief I don't think they can get off the ground to be honest. There's times where like you're running on. That's all you're running on is.

Yeah. Your own belief. Yeah.

And they're going to figure it out and make it work and it's not rational at that point. But I think if we kind of zoom out like there have been some situations where I've, you know, been, you know, someone offered me a certain number I couldn't say no to or I just for whatever reason I was like let me like have a forcing function to take some money off. So I kind of have this internal rule of thumb where every, I call it every two to two and a half years I'm looking to sell a certain percentage of our earnings almost regardless of the climate because I think calling timing of things is just very difficult. So I just have my own internal rule where I'm going to take some chips off and then put them into like very non correlated things.

Yeah.

That are, that are not, you know, anything to do with websites. Maybe it's like real estate or just an index fund. Like something very simple that I don't have to think about. It's kind of working in the background and I even set it up so it's like automated like even on you know, for like monthly or monthly basis like certain X percent. And one of the books I read a while ago, it's like Profit First. I think I forget.

It's a great book. Yeah.

Yeah. And that was an also a turning point for me because like the point of why we're doing this is, is like not to just be like a venture growth story. Like we're doing it most of us for a lifestyle, you know, reason like we want to, we want a different life, we want a better life. And yeah. Just being able to, to say, you know what, I'm going to pay myself first or I'm gonna, I'm gonna think about that at least this year. How is that going to work? And so yeah I definitely spent a lot of time Thinking about it. But I think we could do more as entrepreneurs to have some sort of framework at least for how we're investing and taking chips off the table.

Yeah, that's great. Profit first. Great book. The basic idea, there's a lot of really great elements with it, but it was a while ago that I read it is like, okay, if you have a business that isn't profitable, you need to make sure that you are building in profit almost as a line item. So like you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year in revenue, but you're spending a hundred thousand dollars. Then you write in that year in the budget like $50,000 of profit and then build backwards from there. Is that kind of how you remember the bit, that basic concept? And so you did a similar thing conceptually with your businesses to say I'm going to, as a forcing function have this percentage that I'm going to take as is it. Would it be like a distribution out of the business?

Yep.

And is that exactly like an actual percentage that you've set that automatically transfers out?

So it's not, it's not always an automatic. It is a target. And I think it's especially in times like this. Right. Where things change quickly. You know, all of a sudden you're on a growth trajectory and then you're like, hold on, we got to like stabilize everything. You know, of course that that factors in. But yeah, I, I, you know, one, one thing is like technically speaking, we're structured as an S corp, which, which the reason you do that is so you can pay yourself a salary. So there's like that's part of that percentage. Right.

And that's beneficial because then you're not paying additional taxes on distributions that you might take.

Yeah. You're basically an employee of your own business. And that's like there's tax benefits to that.

And so from that you're saying you have this salary that's kind of in some ways a profit first mindset of taking that out. And then also thinking about, okay, in seasons where it makes sense, having a target percentage of saying I want to kind of de risk some of my kind of anchoring around most of my net worth as an individual being in this business by taking that out and looking for other places to invest it, whether that be an index fund. So for those who aren't familiar or index fund being like a bunch of stocks that are rolled up into 1s and P500 index fund is one of the most popular. The great thing about index funds is there's not a lot of fees with them. So kind of a strategy from an investment standpoint, but essentially taking some of that out and doing so in a way where you're. It's not like when you feel inspired or when you think of it, but thinking of it as that profit first kind of mindset to say, I'm going to have this goal of getting this amount out of the businesses and from there investing it in other places. And that's for other people where it's like, okay, it's probably up to them or financial advisor that you work with to make a decision on that, but building in. And what I like about it is like some type of process around how to go about doing that. And you said that that wouldn't always exist in seasons where maybe you do need to focus on your business a little bit more. How do you figure out when those seasons are like, obviously in the startup phase you're probably putting more money in than you're making. But when do you think the point is? When it makes sense to start thinking strategically about diversifying by investing in other kind of areas.

Yeah, I think that's a tricky one depending on the type of business I think you're running. I think initially for me, the type of business I was running was a lifestyle business where the point was like, it almost started with profit first by accident. Like, sure. It was like, how much money can I make so I don't have to work my day job? Which was kind of a similar, you know, level of analysis. And it was a solo operation. I think there's probably a lot of people in the audience who maybe they have some VAs, but like for the most part they're, you know, they're doing a lot of the content production. They're still kind of. It's their thing. Yeah. You know, and so, you know, from that standpoint, I think it's actually very, it's, it's, it's pretty easy in that mindset because all you have to think about, it's not yourself. And like some of your line items, once we made the pivot from solo business with a couple freelancers to we're now a media company with processes and systems and scale. That I think for me was the hardest point because then you kind of. There's very tempting then to be like, well, let's re. Let's invest in people, let's invest in process, let's invest in, you know, let's do more, let's do more. Now we have got to scale. Now we have this team, we got to keep them busy. We got to keep, you know, keep, keep moving, keep hiring. And that, I think, is a very tricky switch in some ways. When I was solo, I was. There were a couple years where I was more profitable than years where I had a company with, you know, 15, 20 people. It was just kind of odd to think about.

Right. But point being, like, you're scaling, you're growing, revenues may be growing, but along with that, expenses are. And it almost feels like I would be interested in your thoughts on this. Like that there's a chasm that you have to cross where you go from this, like, solopreneur kind of on your own, maybe a couple people supporting you. And then you say, I'm going to attempt to like, build, scale and grow a thing. And it's not like revenue immediately ticks up with expenses ticking up. So you kind of eat into that profit with the bet that eventually the investments that you're going to make, be making are going to pay off. The revenue grows, hopefully, then the expenses maybe stay the same, and then it gets to the point where then you maybe have that profit again. But it probably is a consideration that people need to make. Is that something that you want to do is try and cross that chasm 100.

I think it's actually one of the most important decisions we can make because depending on what your context is, one, you know, might be much more attractive than the other if you really think about it. And sometimes there's pressure too to like to, well, you know, gotta reinvest. There's also like reinvest in the business, you know, and so you kind of, okay, how do we just keep growing? And yeah, you have to really know what you want and you take it from like kind of a solo business. It's like lifestyle freedom and you don't have to answer to anyone. And you build a team. And what the funny thing that happens is then you feel responsible to the team, which is natural, it's human, it's the right thing to do once you bring people in, but you kind of have. It's. It's a, it's a whole different shift. You're not, you're not just, you know, following your own kind of selfish desires anymore. You're kind of having to think about a lot of people and it's more responsibility. Yeah, yeah, more responsibility. And I think, yeah, to your point, it's kind of like you take, in terms of profitability, you probably take a couple steps back to take, you know, 10 steps forward and it does, but it doesn't always work out. And so that, that's the tricky part. I see a lot of companies, particularly now you're going to market where they're kind of in this, in between, they're stuck in the chasm, right? They're like trying to scale. They've tried halfway to scale. They're like, but then now, now they're like in between and there's a Google Update. And so they have to like, you do a fire sale, you know, to get liquidity because, you know, so that's.

Can you explain what you mean by that?

Yeah, so. Yeah, so. So, you know, when you're in a situation where you're, you're, you're planning like, look, if, if we could predict Google, it'd be a lot easier or Google was consistent, we could build a really good model. But you know, coming into 2021, 2022, you're kind of going along with, oh, well, I expect this to be a little bit better than last year, kind of making your projections and then Google Update hits and you have, you may.

Have Alex, which is the fire. Like, it's like you have a store, it's really successful, and then a fire comes through, which is the Google.

You know, it's like, it's act of nature almost. And, and then you're kind of in this in between stage where you're like, okay, I, you know, for example, we may have, in fact, we did invest a lot of money earlier in the year into like certain things that we were betting on. And all of a sudden they, you know, traffic is reduced by 50%. And, and then we're like, oh, now.

What do we do?

We've already allocated. Do we continue following through and just like trust it's going to get better? Or, you know, do we have enough flexibility in how we, how we plan to scale where we can unwind some of these things or what that kind of looks like for some companies is letting people go or cutting hours or reducing operations expenses in other ways. Like maybe it's marketing or paid out or whatever, it was kind of pulling back and you know, is there enough left for you to pay yourself? And so I think that's the kind of the key to crossing that the chasm, so to speak, is like making sure you have enough, like your, your home front is taken care of, like, you know, ideally. I mean, the way I, the way it worked for me was I had an exit kind of before I started to really scale this whole thing. So that was helpful to kind of kind of set some sort of benchmark where, like, at least, at least I know I had like one. One successful exit. I wasn't reinvesting everything. I kind of took some off, you know, bought a house, you know, did some of those life things that I need to do and had some security in that before taking that leap. And so. Mm, I guess, I guess that's, that's how I would approach it. Yeah, but that's what I mean by that. By the, you know, getting caught in the middle is like, there's kind of. You're kind of in no man's land.

Yep. One of the things that I've been trying to do is get an understanding of like, okay, let's say we have. In the next month, we have a thousand dollars and we're kind of trying to figure out what we do with it. We could invest it into one of the businesses. Like maybe you hire somebody or you have a project. $10,000 is probably a little bit easier to play with. Like bigger, more realistic numbers. You could invest it into the businesses. You could invest it into real estate. Maybe you buy a house and it's a rental house and you have this other thing, you could invest it into the stock market. Right. So index fund. One of the things that's hard if you buy a house, you go to Zillow and you can see what the value is, and you can see month to month, how much it goes up. Okay. In this area, we owned it for a year and it went up 5%. And previously we had a house that was $200,000, and now it's, you know, $210,000. With the stock market, you have really good day to day, second to second indicators of how much something is worth. It's a little bit harder with an obscure asset like a website or a blog or a site. How do you think of the value of the thing that you're creating? And do you track that in any.

Way to help inform decisions on.

Yeah, I mean, I'm always curious about what industry multiples are and only so far as, like this kind of a band of like, valuations are low, valuations are high. And kind of what I, what I try to do is when valuations are high, be kind of selling in, selling into that.

Meaning, like, that would be a season where you'd potentially be open to selling.

Yes. And kind of just like. And now. And so this is probably another kind of, I guess, bit of financial wisdom as it relates to business or life in general, but kind of for business Expenses, having a reserve. So that when things like this happen, you know what they call it? The blood of the streets. When there's like, people are selling, people need, there's a. Some like, I see, I've seen it all the time this past month, a lot of people selling things, you know, at a discount. One and a half back x, one and a half times earnings, two times earnings just historically low for the asset class. The average is probably like 3, 3.5. That's like the norm maybe for a really good asset or business, maybe four, four and a half X. During the pandemic for, if you're running an Amazon business, there was all these big aggregators raising money, these big conglomerates that were acquiring Amazon brands from kind of mom and pop operators like, like me and you. And multiples got as high as six or seven times.

And so when you say six or seven, it's, it's like earnings. So essentially there's lots of ways you can calculate earnings, sde, ebitda, but essentially it's like profit, more or less profit. And you add your salary back in. If you're taking a salary. Yep. And so right now you're saying one and a half to two times that you might see that pop up, but normal would be like three to three and a half. So if you have a site and it makes profit of 100,000, the value of that could potentially be 300 to 350,000. If it was like something you're. It's kind of like that's a stock and you have a hundred percent usually, not always. You have 100% ownership in that stock and the value of it is that it is the multiple on earnings which shifts and changes depending on the market.

I don't, what I don't do, I guess, is I don't like, track my net worth relative to the industry. Multiples. I think, you know, the only thing that's real kind of to me is the earnings and the revenue really, because you can, you can cut expenses, but the revenue, the profit and the money in the bank. I think sometimes there's like games that get played with multiple, like with valuations. And you know, I think famously, like venture culture celebrates this. Like, they, you know, you hear, you might hear things like, oh, they, what's the word? They look at the book value or something. They did a markdown. It's like, what does it even mean? Like, it's a theoretical valuation based on what their last raise was. But it's all, it's all kind of made up Numbers. Really?

Yeah.

And then you know, because it really what you find out the business is worth when you go to sell it. Which sounds like like duh. But like that's been my experience is because I've sold sites at 4x, I've sold sites at 2 1/2x. I've sold sites at 3 1/2x and they weren't like necessarily better than each other. They were just usually it's kind of where we were in the market and.

It'S always what the seller can agree to and what the buyer can agree to. Yeah, yeah. And where you don't have a ton of that data, it's hard to know what the norm is. Whereas Zillow it's like there's thousands of houses that are sold every year and so you can kind of aggregate that and.

Yeah. And it's the value of the land which I think in the website space would be like the domain like if you have a really brandable domain like you know, I don't know, like superhero.com.

Yeah.

That would be worth something intrinsically versus you know like best tennis shoes dot com.

Yeah. Right. That's great. Last question. Kind of in that category, do you have any favorite like apps or tools or like on the money management side of things, anything that you use that you especially like?

Yeah, let me think. So for, for business banking I really like the Mercury.

Yep. We just switched accounts over to Mercury with Cool last year. Yeah.

So I love them. It's easy to use, simple. The problem is for treasury management they're not great unless you have like a huge number. Unless like a venture company with like a ton like multi million sitting in the bank. What I've, what I've kind of my stack is Mercury for the business checking and kind of like it's multiple business accounts. You can even set up custom workflows. So things are like going to different bank accounts. You can set up like 10 different bank accounts under one entity. You can add users. It's really, really easy to use. For the saving size side, I like Live Oak Bank. They're kind of a business friendly and they, they were gen, they were offering the best interest rates and they still do and good CDs and like basically allowing you to park your business money before you take it out the business somewhere safe. And and of course that's not investment advice but that's just what I'm doing, you know. And that has a good interest rates because that's another thing we didn't touch on. But you know, interest rates at 5%, you know, putting, putting money into Treasuries. So, so on the personal side, Treasuries and, and I think the treasury is direct. You can, whether you can use your business, you can, business can register, you personally can register, you can invest in U.S. treasuries that yield over a certain period of times, you know, six months, nine months, three months, you can set a term and you get kind of the, whatever the current interest rate is, you make kind of the spread on that if you kind of blend the government your money for a little bit. And so that's one thing I've used, I've been using which is helpful on the business side. On the personal side, I also like to do Treasuries right now because it's just an easy way to park money. I think there's a couple, I'm trying to think there's a couple different places to go. Any bank worth their salt probably has some sort of treasury management system. But you can also do Treasuries direct with the government and then Wealthfront. I've enjoyed my experience. Therefore they've automated bond portfolios and index funds and their checking account I think is close to 5% or a little over 5%. So it's, it's been consistently one of the higher. Well that's not checking. I think it's a savings vehicle. But it's draw it when you need to. And so yeah, those are the things. I mean it's nothing. That's revolutionary.

That's super, super helpful. Yeah, we kind of similarly. I'll just share these if it's helpful for anybody. We use a site called American Deposits for business savings, one called Max My Interest for personal savings. And I just started using for like daily budget management. I have one that brings in all of our transactions, business and personal and then one that's just personal Monarch Money, which is really great. Cool. Last question that I have. And then, and then we can jump. Do you, do you shoot for like a month percentage or a like 3 months savings for the business or do you have anything like that for your businesses that you kind of try and track?

Yeah, I like I have a target. Right. It's not always perfect. I, I, yeah, I would like to have three to six months. Like I look at almost like payroll because like a lot of the other thing and like hard opex. I kind of look at our expenses as like yep. Like investing in new content. Right. That's like more speculative and that's like you can just not do it this month. But the hard expenses of the core team that we need, that we want to keep because if we, we let them go, it would, it would cause us more harm in the long run.

Yep.

And then the hard expense like hosting and things like you need to pay for. Yeah. Having, having six months of runaway is really helpful. And honestly, particularly in times like this where all of a sudden your, your projection changes.

Yep.

You know, based on the reality on the ground and you have to make some, some hard, hard decisions and it helps to have a little bit of flexibility so the changes aren't super abrupt because the human mind, in my experience, it's difficult sometimes to. When things are on the decline, like your expectations are almost trailing.

Yeah. Right. You know, a little bit behind. Yeah.

Until you catch the floor. And you want to get to that floor either from expectations or like business. Okay. We hit the bottom. This is the trough and then like this is the reality. Confront the brutal facts. As Jim Collinso says, that's going to be so much easier to say it out loud. Say the ugly part out loud and the hard part out loud and then you can come to. Then from that point you come up with a really good plan. And so yeah, three to six months and then I mean, of course you want more like the. I always now I think of like from an investment perspective, the more the better to be honest. Because there's time like this where people are getting a lot of inbound from people like, hey, you know, no longer. I was like, I'm no longer interested in running the business. I want to do something different. It's like. Well, yeah. Because the business declined.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, 60%. It's. That's not fun for anyone.

Right. But.

But there are opportunities where those will come up when you least expect it. And so having that availability to move on something is, is really helpful.

Yeah. That's great. Ian. This is all awesome. Anytime we have you on, we could talk for hours. Yeah. People are interested in this space. I know. Especially interested in some of the things that you're talking about when it comes to content and building content businesses. Best place to follow along is the newsletter.

Yeah. Niche mediapublishing.com of course you can connect with me on Twitter. Fairly unique name Twitter and LinkedIn. Wherever is easier and yeah, just that's probably the best for now and then. Yeah. The newsletter is like the latest on my thinking and so that's. I think that's. And there's like other things in the newsletter. Like there's kind of things we do and businesses we own and services. So it's like the central like eating my own dog food. It's the DNA.

Yeah.

For me it's this, it's the relationship I have, my audience, the people that this industry. So that's a great place to start.

Awesome.

Thanks so much for coming on youn really appreciate it.

Awesome.

Thanks Bjork.

Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and I am coming at you with your February member news update. So every month at the beginning of the month we love to fill you in on what is going on with within the Food Blogger Pro membership. We like to say your membership is always changing because we are always adding new content, having new events and just new exciting things going on in the forum. So wanted to give you a little sneak peek as to what you can expect this month. We kicked off the month with a new coaching call with Matthew Duffy all about being action oriented, allocating resources and branding. Matthew has seen really significant increases in traffic just in the last few months and shares some kind of tips and strategies as to how he kicked that off in this coaching call which is almost two hours and filled with lots of good tidbits. Next up on February 8th we have a live Q and A with Casey Markey all about Advanced SEO. So this is for members who are looking to dive deeper into advanced SEO strategies and tips and just take their SEO strategy to the next level. It'll be a really great and informal, informative Q and A and we're excited to have you join us. Lastly, at the end of the month we'll be publishing a brand new course all about Google Web Stories. We'll be covering how to get started with Google Web Stories, designing and customizing your own Google Web Stories, optimizing them for SEO and just best practices for maintaining them and hoping to see success with them. So it's going to be a really great month. It's a short month, although not as short as usual because it is a leap year. So we have 29 days to make make the most of February and we hope you'll join us. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode and we will see you next week.