Chris Parker - What To Do With 9 Million Visitors Per Month

I have the opposite problem that every other affiliate marketer has. I have so much traffic I don't know what to do with at all. I mean, I'm in jest about that. So the site, I think the peak during the pandemic and everyone working from home. So everyone's trying to figure out their IP address. I think the peak during the pandemic was about 9 million visits in a month. Been probably 7 to 8 for the last couple of years per month. So that's somewhere between 500 and 700,000 page views a day maybe.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

What is happening? We are here.

We are here. Let's do this really fast.

You talk too fast. I smashed your pace.

I'm gonna have Jacob roll that back. No, I won't, actually. Don't roll that back, Jacob.

In the intro even further today, we're talking with the Mr. Chris Parker. Do you know who that is? Oh, I bet you know who his website is. Who his website. His website is. Is now a figure a person. No, it is. Whatismyip address.com. have you heard of that? I bet you have.

I've heard of it and I used it a bajillion times.

Yeah, so has like 9 million other people this month.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Are you sure you've used.

Yeah, I've probably been. I'm probably one of those people.

This one of. So what? WhatIsMyIPaddress.com has been around for 21 years now, and this guy been running it ever since. And it is very interesting. He breaks down all the. All the craziness that. That led to this point, but also just the sheer number of people and things, how he monetizes it, all this other cool stuff that goes on on that page. It's more than just an IP address.

Yeah. And I mean, that's just the tip of the iceberg, too. He explains to us how banner advertising works, because we've never really talked about that or gone down that rabbit hole before. He explained how to avoid getting scammed. We talked about a ton of common scams that happen and how to avoid them, because he has a podcast called Easy Prey where he interviews people who are victims of scams, and he interviews experts and in some cases even interviews the scammers themselves.

So it is interesting. I got hooked on it. I definitely think. Yeah, it's called Easy Prey. And he talked about, like, Media pages, the power of press and just these simple pages that can basically get you some press without you trying too hard.

Yeah, we covered a lot of ground in this one. Lot of good stuff.

Get ready for it. You want to get the action guides, of course, for this episode you're going to get those, all the instructions. It's nice and simple. If you go to flowchartgroup.com and make sure to plug in your email address because that's how you will get the action guide to this episode. But make sure you do that within two weeks. Yes. And you will love it. Flowchart group.com Anything else, Mr. Matteo?

I think we should just go talk to Chris.

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Thank you for having me on. I'm excited to be here.

And you're a podcasting guru now. You're. Oh, gee, guesting like crazy. You have this podcast. It seems like it would be one that everyone wants to listen to. Easyprey.

I would hope lots of people listen to it.

It's intense.

I definitely get quite a few listeners.

Good.

Tell us real quick. Well, tell the audience real quick what Easypray is, what the sort of idea behind the podcast is.

So the backstory is, after having run whatismyipaddress.com for, I think it's 21 years now, but let's call it around 20 years, I had lots of people coming to me saying, hey, I think I've fallen for a scam. I think my mom's, you know, the guy that she's dating online, I don't think he's real. And hearing people, like, losing their. Their life savings over these things, it's just gut wrenching.

There was.

There was a woman who she, you know, lost all her life savings. She took out a second mortgage on the house.

Wow.

And that was the point that she realized that she was being scammed. She's like, what can I do? And it's like, well, at this point, probably nothing.

It's, you know, it's too late.

And so the idea of the podcast was all those sorts of situations, not just online scams. But there's a lot of things in life that take advantage of us. The more we know about those things in advance of them happening to us, the more we're protected against them and the less likely we are to fall for them.

Yeah. So we. That. So your podcast basically deep dives on all these different topics. And I mean, even, like, interesting things like deepfakes. I was checking out some of that, like how I'm like, I've always wondered how, like, how those are made and all that. I'm like, man, that is seems like a little ways off to be mainstream with deepfakes. So that's hopefully the case. I don't know.

My guest was a little more optimistic about when that would happen than I am. I'm more concerned that it's going to happen sooner than later.

Okay, well, you Got to go check out the episode to hear all the details. But yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit, you know, and maybe how business owners. Maybe we should be kind of aware, maybe some of the key things. But of course, whatsmyipaddress.com is likely a website that we've all been across.

Probably everybody listening to this has heard of it or been on it at one point. So if you knew it or not.

So, I mean, your story there is very interesting, but now you're 21 years in. I mean, this thing has become a whole thing. I mean, it's taken over. That's your business, right?

Yep.

So tell us. I mean, there's a lot to this story, of course, but, you know, that was all created basically as a problem that you were trying to solve for a company you worked at and then developed.

Yep. Yeah. Like I said, it was. I was. The birth of the Internet.

Oh, gosh.

We had this wonderful T1 Internet connection. For those of you who aren't technical people, think of your cell phone from 20 years ago. And the T1 was slower.

Wow, that's wild.

And we had a vendor that we were trying to connect it up with them so that we could push and pull purchase orders from them. And they wanted, well, we need to open a hole in our firewall for you. What's your company's IP address? And we looked at each other, went, I don't know. How do we figure that out? We log into the router. It's not there. And I don't know. So we ended up having to going online trying to figure it out. We ended up having to call our provider to figure it out. I thought, you know, I've got this little old Windows box at home and my little DSL connection. I could make a website that'll do that. And I registered the most. Thing that made the most sense to me is whatismyip address.com.

I love it.

Network solutions for like, oh, gosh, it was like 200 bucks a year.

Yeah. The good old days of domain names. Wow. So that was it. And then it just kind of. So it was a side project for a while, I'm assuming, right?

Yeah, for probably about 10 years. It was purely a. I would barely even call it a hobby. It was just. It was up and running and the hard drive was filling up with logs, and I was starting to create facts and kind of things like that. And then this great thing called Google adsense came out. And I'm like, oh, I can make some money. Off this, this can, this can buy me some sushi here and there.

I love it.

Did you have to do any marketing around it to get people to it or is just the fact that you had this sort of exact match domain name and it was something people are searching for, you know, what did marketing play into it at all?

So, so I've done both. I think the most of it was, you know, being in the right place at the right time. You know, anyone who can go years in the past and buy a domain name, do it for sure.

Bitcoin.com, which is probably a good one.

All sorts of really good ones out there. How about google.com?

I like that one. Yeah, that's true.

Rolls off the tongue.

Yeah, much better than backup or whatever.

It used to be called.

And so I think a certain amount of it was being at the right place in the right time where an exact match domain was had of. Had more cachet to it than it does maybe these days. And then having, you know, 10, 15 years of it actually aging and being there and people linking to it and it not being. I think people are a little, a little leery about linking to, you know, hey, he's clearly monetizing that site. I don't know if I really want to link to it. So it had a Good, you know, 10 years of, of no monetization or very little monetization. And I think that garnered a lot of links to it. It built a lot of authority from that. I've done.

Display advertising for the site, I've done PPC and I make less than $0.01 per visitor to the site.

So it all adds up.

Those costs are a little bit hard to justify there.

I can make it up in volume.

Well, I'm curious about what kept you said it was barely even a hobby for 10 years. So what kept the wheels running? Like was, was there a motivation? Like did you know, eventually I'll monetize this thing or it'll become a thing.

It was, it was never a thought to monetize it. I was like, it was just something that was like, hey, this is convenient, it's useful. This serves. Okay, I wasn't thinking like this serves society but you know, this fills a need. It answers the question. You visit the site, it shows you your IP address in 8 point Arial font and you know, nothing else. But I had other stuff like I was trying. I was an Amazon affiliate way back in the day before they, anyone can be an Amazon affiliate now. But back in the day before they got rid of all their California affiliates. I was an affiliate and had a little affiliate business. So I had other stuff that I was trying to make money. But how can you make money off of telling someone their IP address?

Right? Yeah. Why even try then all of a sudden? Well, it's interesting because going on the website, it's really cool to see now what you've done in the 21 years. I mean you have a nice handy timeline on there that our mutual buddy Greg Merrilies helped you develop. We just learned. So that's cool. Shout out to Greg on the show. But it was really cool to see how you are monetizing now. And like you mentioned it, some of the more obvious ones I guess are like the banner ads, the adsense. But then you have affiliate links. It seems like you have different tools, which I'm assuming are all affiliate links for the most part.

Almost all the tools are in house built tools.

Oh, in house, okay.

They're not really, I mean they're not super monetizable. I mean I tie in with Troy Hunt has have I been pwned? Enter your email address and tells you six ways from Sunday how many times it's been compromised. So I have equivalent of that tool on my site using his back end and it's, you know, runs affiliate ads for password managers.

Got it. Okay. Clever.

Is it profitable?

You know, maybe in 10 years.

Maybe in 10 years.

Give it some time.

But I've tried to run the site in a way of like I'm looking for the long game here. If I'm not looking at, you know, can I recoup my cost of something in the next three weeks? If it recoups the cost over a year, then that's probably a pretty good deal. And if I run the site another 10 years, then there's 90% return on investment or whatever. Nine times return on investment for sure.

You don't have to answer this if you don't want to. But I'm curious how the numbers break down. How much traffic it's getting and then how much of that traffic actually turns into sales or customers or affiliate clicks. How does that sort of break down for what is my IP address?

I have the opposite problem that every other affiliate marketer has. I have so much traffic I don't know what to do with it all. I mean I'm in jest about that. So the site, I think the peak during the pandemic, everyone working from home, so everyone's trying to figure out their IP address. I think the peak during the pandemic was about 9 million visits in a month.

Wow.

It's been probably 7 to 8 for the last couple of years per month. So that's somewhere between 500 and 700,000 page views a day maybe.

And then, and then the revenue that you make off of it, it's, it's mostly AdSense and like affiliate links. Right. So like what's this sort of proportion? You don't have to give exact numbers and how much money you're making, but like what's the proportion of like affiliate income to like AdSense revenue?

Yeah, and again it's, it's, it's been that difficult thing to monetize. You know, it's, it's one thing if you have it like I tell here's the story. If you have a camera, if you have a site and you're talking about camera lenses, it's really easy to have affiliate links for camera lenses and it's really easy to get Adsense to display ads for companies that are selling camera lenses. Well, someone's looking at their IP address, what are you going to sell them?

When Google switched to the interest based ads, that helped a ton in terms of revenue on the display ads. So the number was 60, 40, 60% display, 40% affiliate.

Gotcha. And is that mostly because like with the display ads you actually get some sort of revenue on a CPM basis, even if they don't click as well. Where affiliate stuff you kind of need the secondary click.

Yeah, I definitely need the person to buy. And again, it's, you know, it's not a US audience. It's not strictly a US audience. It's maybe 30% US traffic and let's say 20% India. If someone knows how to monetize India traffic when you're in the U.S. let me know.

That's good to know.

Or you know, there's just a lot of international traffic and so those kind of things have been historically hard to monetize, like with the display stuff. I mean, at one point I was running double click double Google Ad Manager. Double click for DFP is what it was called and was running header bidding and I was trying to manage. Do you guys know about header bidding?

No. Actually I was going to say we've never really talked about display ads at all on this podcast. Like anything you got. Yeah.

Well, let's talk about display ads for a few minutes. So traditionally when someone visits a website, if it's Google Adsense, Google has some knowledge about the user visiting the website and will serve up the ad that they think is best from their pool of advertisers, whether it's people using Google AdWords or display networks that kind of mix and match everything. A few years ago, there was this really neat technology called header bidding. When someone visits your site, the query goes out to the server and goes out to a marketplace of advertisers. Not just Adsense, but a whole marketplace of advertisers that says, who wants to bid for this click or to bid for this ad impression? And so someone might say, oh, I really. I'm running an auto dealership in Yucaipa. This is a Yukaipa IP address. Let's, you know, I'm going to bid a buck CPM for that ad placement.

Right.

And so it was a way for people running websites to be able to have a wider reach of ad networks and things like that. But it meant I was working with about 20 different companies and, you know, every, you know, it's like affiliate business. Everyone's like, oh, how can I get more of your business? How can I get more ads? I want to talk to you. And I found I was spending probably a third of my month, you know, on phone calls with these people. It's like, oh my gosh, this is killing me. And the industry has somewhat shifted to people or aggregators now. So rather than me managing those 20 relationships, I manage relationship with one company, they turn around and manage 20, 30, 40 relationships. They figure, is this new network really going to bring anything new to the play or not? And I don't have to figure it out.

That's nice.

Yeah.

And just one point person to handle that. Because, I mean, on the display ads, I know we've run, you know, one of the first ways we made money online was Google AdSense that was just doing blogs and stuff. And that gave us like, oh, okay. There's ways to, you know, monetize content just as it is without doing affiliate stuff. I know there's places. What like mediavine, I think, is another, you know, like, so are there other. What are some other things that we should know about? You know, like maybe a smaller. Yeah, not so much traffic, but are there maybe some benchmarks that you would recommend? Like, hey, at this point, this would probably be a really good thing to have these banners on your site?

Yeah, I mean, I think for Most people, Google AdSense is a great way to go until you're probably getting 100,000 page views a day. A lot of these networks, I think the amount of work that you have to put into it in order to get beyond what you're going to get with Adsense, I mean Adsense, you don't have anyone. Well, it's good and bad. You've got no one to call if there's a problem, but no one's calling and bugging you say, hey, move this, tweak that. I want more. You know, talk to me, talk to me, talk to me. And once you get over a couple million a month, you can go to the companies like I think publift, freestar, these kind of network, these guys that work as an aggregator.

Gotcha. So that's the next step is the aggregator after that point? Yeah, yeah, the traffic.

And again there's, there's lots of people that have built those in house solutions. But now you need ad ops and payroll and all sorts of stuff.

That's when it's a real business.

I got you.

Okay, so what is ongoing maintenance look like for what is my IP at this point? Do you have a team of people running it for you or are you kind of doing it all yourself? What does it look like these days?

So the first probably 15 years was all 100% me. I didn't build a web server, but it was all hand coded HTML, hand coded php. It's good and bad. Once you start bringing on a team of content writers and you're the person who actually has to code it and put it on the server, it becomes a bottleneck. And I don't like that. But those are kind of the things that you need to figure out before your site gets successful as opposed to after it gets successful. Because now it's like, okay, it's already complicated to maintain and now I have to add on the layer of figuring out how to get other people to maintain it. And so it took probably two years from the decision to we're going to move part of this site to a CMS to actually be able to implement it because it all of a sudden became really, really complicated.

Right.

With 9 million page views, platforms can get extremely expensive very quickly. And so it was like, well, how do we split? Half of this traffic goes to my servers, the other half of the traffic goes to somebody else's servers to do the content.

It took a lot of poking at and figuring it out to figure out a way that it's going to work for everybody, for me, for the guys writing for me and all that stuff. So the team, I now actually I did my first hire this year.

Wow.

I have an office manager, so to speak. So she runs project management and she's been helping a ton with my podcast and getting. She's gotten all the podcast off of my hands with the exception of recording.

Nice. That's stressful.

I record it, she gets the guests, I record and it just magically happens. And like, to me, that's like, oh my gosh, I should have hired someone years ago.

That's the dream. No, it really is. I mean, that's. And you mentioned you didn't want a pod fade on your podcast, so. Yeah, I would say that's a big piece of it. Because if you're stuck as the bottleneck, I mean, it's so easy to just drop the ball on something and like, oh, there goes an episode. That one didn't get released.

Yeah, I do have to admit I. We did have a point where I had to skip a week because I just didn't have a guest. I didn't have an episode recorded that I could, that I could air the following week. I had like five episodes.

That's how it works. That one week.

I just, I had to skip that one week, unfortunately.

On the. What's my IP address? Yeah, because we'll probably get to the podcast and like the, you know, in a second here. But I'm thinking of the. We mentioned the media page and you have the press page and the media page has like the timeline of basically the beginning of what's my IP address.com, and then all these different add ons. Yeah, super cool way to lay things out. But I guess speak about those pages. I know you mentioned the press page, how that's done a lot of heavy lifting for you as well.

You know, I've looked at a lot of people's sites over the years and particularly as I've started to try to find people as guests, you know, I go to their website and you know, click their press page or go to their company page and it's, you know, it's three press releases from like five years ago when they were using whatever, one of those, the PR news, PR web. And they had a press release every week for like three years. And then it drifts off to nothing in the last five years. But to me it's. I was working with Stefan, Spencer and Greg to build a press page and it actually I was like. In the beginning, I was like, what I need a press page for? This doesn't make any sense. Why would I want to do this? It's like, trust me, just build it. And so I already had quite a few good links out there. So it was easy to say, oh, I've got This link from cnn, I've got this link from.

Daily Mail and kind of pulled together all these great looking links with notable logos, built that little logo section on it. But once I did that, I started getting requests from people in the media. I started getting writers saying, hey, can I quote you? Can you get a. Quote me on this story about ransomware? Oh, okay. And so it's like, what is it, you know, PR begats pr. If you don't have any pr, you're not going to get any pr. You have to put something out there. And that was part of, like me starting to show up on podcasts as well, is showing that you're willing to be interviewed, you're willing to connect with the public. And because you show your willingness to do that, people are going to engage with you on that. And so I now have a number of writers that have like freelance writers who they reached out to me for one particular article and they're now coming back to me for a second or third article for a different client because they know I'm willing to respond to them.

Yeah, so like you said, you just got the ball moving and now you can kind of go with that. So walk us. What are some of the key points? And obviously everyone can go to the website. What's my IPaddress.com Check out the press. But is there any, any specific thing on there that you feel like is crucial or is it just, hey, check out the format and kind of make it your.

Well, I think the thing that's crucial is to actually tell people. It's kind of like if you don't tell people what to do, they're not going to know what to do is tell people I am available for interviews, contact me, reach out to me. Otherwise it's kind of like, well, it's just a bunch of press releases. You're trying to tell people what your company is doing. You're just trying to, you know, it's like spamming, it's just email blasting. But if you tell people, contact me. And then you back it up with the proof that, look, here's all a bunch of people down here. Let me get my arrow right there.

See all these people, they contacted me and I helped them out. I'm going to help you out also. And so I think that helps a ton. And I'm sure that the combination of doing that with the podcast appearances I was on, I was able to get a television appearance out of it. That a producer for a TV show, for a nationally syndicated kind of newsreel show contacted me at like 6 o' clock in the morning, got this email saying, hey, can you, can you be available for a media appearance? I'm like, oh, yeah, sure. What do you want to talk about? Like, oh, romance scam. Okay. Oh, and by the way, we need to have the call with you between 8 and 8:30 this morning.

Let me roll out of bed here.

Exactly what is. Okay, I got to walk this dog. I gotta take a shower, I gotta look presentable.

Yeah, yeah, that's, I mean that's the beauty of being at home. And you have a nice setup here. So.

Yeah, yeah, that was, that was fortunate that I have a decent background, a decent setup already. But I know that if I didn't have the press page built, there's no way that that producer would have visited my site. If they hadn't seen that I had content on the site about romance scams, they wouldn't have invited me to talk about romance scams if they didn't see that I promoted my appearances places, they're less likely to do it. And so it's kind of all those stars align and maybe it's slow at first, but it builds up over time.

Yeah.

Now is there like a significant amount of people that are actually clicking deeper into the site when they're going to look at their IP address?

It has always been difficult to do that. And that was part of working with Greg is to find good, clever ways to get people going a little further into the site. And that, that arrangement with Greg has worked out again. It's still, you know, 90, 95% of the people don't because they got what they. I'm here for my IP address. I got it, I'm out.

Yeah.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but nowadays doesn't. If you search my IP address on Google, doesn't Google just show it like right in the search results now?

Yes. And amazingly, when Google started rolling out answers to questions, I was on Webmaster World and someone had posted about it and they specifically didn't. The person didn't mention my site. They're like, I fear for all these, you know, what is my IP address sites, they're gonna lose all their traffic, like they're gonna lose 90% of their traffic overnight. So when Google rolled that out, I lost about 10% of my traffic.

That's it.

Wow.

Well, and there's some reasoning to it. So I lost about 10% of my traffic and my page views per visit went up.

Okay.

So Google took away, took off a chunk of and My revenue per visit went up and my overall revenue went up.

Makes sense now.

Yeah, because Google took away that segment that we're never going to click on anything and we're never going to click on an ad and never going to do anything. They took it away. And so now my, you know, the metrics of the quality of the traffic on my site all lifted up, which is really amazing. So I think it's because I show the map on there that I show more information. I, you know, latitude, longitude, what their ISP is, all that kind of stuff. Google doesn't show that. If Google starts showing that, showing that up, that will probably be a problem for me.

Yeah, I mean you probably get a lot of the people that have it like bookmarked that use it frequently and the, a lot of the people that, you know, they just read an article and one of the steps in the tutorial they just read is go find your IP address over here. So you're getting a little bit more qualified people. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Yeah. And probably, I think if you trust the analytics, probably about 30% of it is bookmark traffic.

That makes sense too. Yeah.

And it's because, you know, and particularly with more and more people concerned about privacy and security, more people are using VPNs so they're coming to consumer confirm. Is my VPN working? Does it say does. Does. Does the Internet think I'm in Southern California when I'm really on vacation in, in Europe? You know, with, with the rise of VPNs that, that has. It's kind of that I'm coming to your site to confirm that my VPN is doing what it's supposed to be doing.

Yeah, that's actually. Yeah, that might be good because a lot of folks are now aware More so of VPNs and the, the reasons why you should be using one. And it's like, hey, well it's going to kick over more traffic, ideally to you. So it's gonna help the.

Which is why the primarily driven by VPNs is now 40% of the revenue. It wasn't that I've never promoted VPNs before, you know, three months ago. They just haven't had the popularity before five years ago. They just weren't really. That's something that corporate people do, but.

As I scammers do. Yeah, I took your easy prey self assessment, which I don't know if we could figure out a link, but this thing is something that. The very first question is, do you use a vp. When you use public WI fi, like hotels, airports, coffee shops, I'm like, not normally for me. No. And I know this. I'm like, it's an open network, though. I should. I think more people are realizing that now.

More people are realizing it. And in some sense, I think as like HTTPs everywhere, almost all webmaster. I mean, SSL certificates are basically free now. I think because more people are having their websites secure, the need for a VPN on public WI fi is a little bit less. But you're always having that man in the middle there. And just a question of, do you trust the coffee shop owner more than you do the VPN provider? Who do you trust more, the coffee shop owner or the company running the privacy and security service?

That's a good point. Yeah. Who's your preferred vpn? I'm just curious now.

I think if you're talking like overall. Overall, if someone's not diving into specific use cases. I like NordVPN. They've done. They have a good, well rounded product.

They've had some. They've had some minor. They've had some issues in the past, so they've worked hard to fix those issues. They've gathered around a really good advisory team for their product. And so they're. They're backing off a little bit more of the outlandish claims that you see from most VPN companies and really starting to stick more to this is what the product really does, as opposed to fud.

Yeah. Well, they also seem like they've been the best at marketing too. It's just you see them on YouTube videos and sponsoring podcasts and stuff like that.

I've seen television commercials for them. I've heard radio commercials for them. They've kind of taken a really broad approach. They're not Norton. They're not, you know, they're not a company that's, you know, they're not a company that everyone's heard of, but they have a reputation of providing a good service.

Yeah.

I wonder what the guy from Norton's doing these days. What's his name again? He's a wild man. I know. Oh, you're thinking of McAfee. Oh, McAfee. Yeah.

Well, I actually was able to score an interview with McAfee.

Before he got arrested.

Oh, is he arrested? I didn't even know that much.

Yeah, he got arrested for. I think it was either tax evasion or cryptocurrency manipulation, something like that. But he'd been on the run for a number of years around the world. That's what we were talking about on the podcast episode of if. If you really want to truly be private, there are some significant costs to it.

Is that on Easy Prey?

That was on Easy Prey.

Oh, okay. I didn't know that one. I missed that one. Well, it was an old one. Yeah. That's okay. Old is just last year for you.

Yeah, that's true.

Well, let's talk more about some of the past guests of Easy Prey. I think that's a good transition there. What. What are some of the, like, the standout stories you've had on there? Because I know you've had some people that have been scammed telling some stories. What are some of the ones that stand out to you?

So I had. There was. Had a woman on who she ultimately lost almost a million. I think it was either just under or just over a million dollars to an online romance scam. And it was, you know, shortly after her husband had died. And, you know, it was. This guy was just in the right place at the right time, befriended her and kind of met this need of. Well, he's. He's distant, so I don't have to really fully invest in this relationship. And he knew he had enough familiarity with the types of businesses that she had done that he was able to present himself as a business person and knew all the right buzzwords and all the phrases. And. And so his stories of why he needed money were all purely to her, were very reasonable at the time. There was this little thing in the back of her mind saying, I'm not sure about this, but she valued the friendship that was built, and that's ultimately what cost her nearly a million dollars.

I could see that. I mean, yeah. As a business kind of cloak. And you're saying all the buzzwords and all that and vulnerable time.

Yeah. And like, a lot of these are. I think the more casual ones are, oh, you know, my, oh, gee, my niece is in the hospital. I need a million dollars for the surgery. And pretty much everyone is like, okay, I know that one.

Yeah. The part was like, yeah, those are obvious.

Yeah, yeah.

To me.

Well, to us, it's obvious. Some people who haven't heard about these things, it's not obvious, unfortunately. But for her it was, well, he was running an import export business, and, you know, things do get stuck in customs and you do have to work with local people and setting up cargo containers. And so all the expenses were very reasonable to her that she was helping him with his business on.

Wow. Oh, man. How about, like, I'm curious if there Are any, any interesting business related, like to say an entrepreneur? I mean, that is one of them actually. That's very business related. I'm thinking of things like also, I don't know, you hear ransomware all the time. You mentioned it earlier as well. Obviously taking down big infrastructure. But from your experience, is that something we should be thinking of as smaller businesses?

To me, I think in terms of smaller businesses.

My concern is not necessarily the ransomware, but people need to have automated off site backup. That resolves the ransomware issue for the most part. But for most small businesses, some guy sitting in a rented office space, if his hard drive toasts, oh, he just, he's lost all of his contacts. Like to me that's the more likely thing to happen. And by backing up that computer, making sure it's off site in case someone steal, you know, breaks into the office or the building burns down, you've got a solution. And it also happens to provide a solution for ransomware which is much, much less likely, but just as devastating. Like we got to go after the more likely things first.

Yeah.

Do you have a preferred off site backup company that you like?

I used to, used to direct people to Carbonite. I've been less and less satisfied with their product over the years.

For.

I know was it. Idrive has been very popular recently.

They've got a good product Backblaze for the Mac, has a good reputation. I've gone with the.

I have a NAS in the closet. I have a physical drive that I copy to and I take down to the bank deposit box and swap it out with another drive. Okay. Maybe not as frequently during the pandemic, but the right. In combination with online backup as well. I'm ultra paranoid about it. One of the disadvantages of online backup is if you lose your hard drive. Well, if you're going to. Either you have to pay to have them send you a hard drive and that could be expensive, or you have to download it all and that could take. How fast is your Internet connection?

Are you capped on your bandwidth? Yeah, I was using, well, still am using a service called CrashPlan, which seems to be pretty good. But that's how I found out I had bandwidth limits was by trying to back up everything to CrashPlan. I was like, you've hit your data cap. I was like, I have a data cap?

Yes.

This isn't my phone.

But I think for like most business people, it's like.

I think we're missing the fundamentals. You're not just sure. Yeah. Be worried about Ransomware. But you should be backing up your computer because that hard drive will fail sometime.

Yeah.

And that's the more likely event to happen.

Well, let's definitely talk about that.

Yeah. I was going to say, what are some of the other fundamentals, what are some of the obvious things that you're seeing? A lot of businesses do that. It's just a simple fix.

Okay, so there are simple things like it's business.

Maybe ignore the simple fix part. What are some of the obvious things?

Having processes in place I've received a good example was Barbara Cochran from Shark Tank. She has a real estate empire and someone created an email address that looked exactly like hers, copied her signature, sent an email to her assistant and said, I need you to transfer.

I think it was $800,000 or a million dollars to this new, this new venture that we're working on and I need you to do it right away. Well, because of how high profile, because of like, that's normal for what she does for work. The accountant didn't think anything of it and wired off the money.

Wow.

And you know, a million dollars overnight was gone because of an email. Now she was lucky that she's big enough and high enough profile that she was able to call the bank and stop the transfer and get the money back. But most people really aren't that lucky. And I've seen it a lot with small businesses that people will pretend to be the CEO, email the accountant. Hey, I'm, I'm on the phone. I can't talk to you right now, but I need you to send, you know, five grand to this new vendor and I need you to do it right now. There's always that, that urgency is in there and I'm the boss, so you need to listen to me. But we need to have processes in place to really say, okay, anytime there's a new vendor, there's this process that we have to, that we've established that we have to do before I ever send money, before I ever change an account number, write a check, that this process, whether it's a piece of paper that has to be signed or I want to talk to you personally on the phone and not a text message, that there's some almost like that two factor authentication for those things because those are super, super common.

So yeah, just, just an email, I mean that's by a domain, open a Gmail account, you know, and like, boom, you're off and on your way and.

It has to come through. But even like, but if your computer's been compromised, Then someone's going to know that you use that Gmail account.

True.

So it's really. You want that sec. It's really that second factor authentication. I mean, again, it could be you set a limit, like if you're a $10 million a year business. If you lose 10 grand to a scam, that sucks, but it's not business ending loss. If you're making $100,000 a year and someone wires out 50 grand, you're done. You know, that limit should be much smaller that your accountant comes back to you and says, are you. What is this for? What's the password? What's the code word? What's the. Let me call you. You told me never to do this while you were on a phone call. You know.

People need to not be afraid to push back a little bit when they see something out of the norm happen. I was talking with a guy who ran a Resolute Landscaping business, and someone had contacted one of his clients, it was a name brand restaurant chain, probably the local franchisee, and said, hey, I just need to change. I need to change the bank account number. And so the franchisee just went and changed the bank account number. And all of a sudden the landscaper is like, why am I not getting paid anymore? Because the franchise account person changed the bank account with no, with no proof.

We got to assume, like, when things like that happen, I hate to tell people, like, you have to assume that people are trying to scam you. But in some sense, you. You really have to think, is this a scam? Or if this is a scam, what would it look like? How do I know this is really who I'm dealing with?

Yeah.

Yeah. I think most people sort of have this vision in their head. I know I did for a long time of like, this computer hacker that's writing all these crazy scripts and codes, trying to, like, get into your computer to get, you know, steal files off of it. But the reality is it's all just humans that are, you know, humans could be compromised.

Yeah. And even with the ransomware stuff, it's almost always. It's a, It's a human link, it's the weakest link. But if the human is the weakest link, it's the person clicked on the wrong email. They went to a website they should have gone to. It's very seldom that the hacker broke into the network and released the ransomware. Yeah, it's not. No, that's hard. Just wait for someone to click on an email that says, hey, look at my cute little furry Dog, it's like boom.

In. Yeah, how about, I wanna see that. How about like, like bot traffic? Because I know you can automate a lot of this stuff. Are there things that we should be paying attention to for, for that kind of, that side of things like passwords and whatnot?

Yeah, I mean, I think platforms like Cloudflare do a good job of protecting, protecting websites from kind of known repetitive types of attacks. Yeah. I mean, if you've got a form on your website, I guarantee you something crazy has come through that form. Even if you have, you know, even if you have protection, you just have to assume that anything that's coming through a form is going to be an attempt to, at some point to get money from you.

Jeez, it's the world we live in now.

Let me get, let me get on your contact form right now.

Well, yeah, I mean, I just pretty much anytime I see something from a big company at all, Facebook, Google, Amazon, anything like that, it's like I pretty much always double check. I always look in my inbox and I always double check to see the email from line to make sure it's legit. Like just two or three days ago, I got an email from somebody that claimed they were with Google, but they were using a Hotmail address. I'm like, something doesn't compute here.

Sloppy.

Yeah, I probably get one from someone claiming to be from Amazon about an errant charge to my credit card and it's coming from a Gmail account. Yeah, I don't think Amazon's using Gmail.

No, not that obvious.

But again, it's like, you know, you have to have this certain amount of distrust of anything that you kind of look for the warning signs if someone's trying to spike your emotion. There's an Earth, you know, they're coming from a position of authority. I work for the government, law enforcement. I'm with a very trusted company like Amazon or Google. Or maybe you don't like Google. I, you know, I'm from Apple there like them better.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, they're coming from some, some sort of authority. It could be your electric company and if you don't do this thing right now, then this other bad emotional thing is going to happen. And once, once you see those kind of things, those three things stack up. That right there is the, okay, I need to walk away. I need to talk to somebody else. I need to not click on anything because once you see all three of those together. Yes, I understand. It looks an awful lot like marketing.

Yeah. And that's the problem with the market. Yeah, you're right though. Red flags.

But those are, those, those are the three red flags. Emotion, urgency and authority. Like, even before you ever talk to someone, if you see all those kind of in a cluster, take a breath, think about it. But that's true of advertising. You shouldn't be making impulsive buys on stuff anyway. If it's something you really want to buy, buy it.

Sure.

But don't do it because of fud.

Are there any other areas that maybe we didn't talk about yet that you think people are just a little bit too lax on?

Yeah, I think people need to be. Oh gosh.

All these financial apps on your phone. Like, oh, you know, I worry about, you know, everybody having instant access to their whole life on one device. And I know people that don't password protect their devices and it's like, are you crazy? Like, you need to set your device to. After so many wrong passwords, it gets wiped like, and get rid of that. If you have banking institutions, you know, always have some form of second factor authentication. I know there's, there's a, in the privacy security space, if you say, oh, SMS is a valid second factor authentication, everyone will scream at you saying, oh my gosh, it's not secure. It's okay. So technically, yes, it is not a great form of two factor authentication, but it's a whole heck of a lot better than no second factor authentication. So like, if there's any thing in your life that's important, there should be a second factor to keep people from it. From it.

Yeah.

If you own a high value domain name, your domain name registrar, you better have two factor authentication enabled there because you have to assume that your password will be compromised at some point. Your password alone is not enough to protect your, your bank account. It's not enough to protect your 401k. It's not enough to protect your life savings. You need, you need a second factor on that. I was reading an article today that was saying you really should have a second phone. Really, that you just use for two factor authentication.

I could see that. Yeah. Just kind of, I mean, if you're intense about it, I guess maybe to a different level, huh?

I mean, I admit that there are, that I have a second phone number that I use specifically for two factor authentications. And that's the only thing that that telephone number is used for. And it's, you know, different from my regular phone. Just because I was worried about, you know. Well, lots of people know my cell phone number. You can they call it sim swapping. They can. You can. Someone can claim to be me and port my cell phone number off to some other carrier. And now they've got control of my SMS messages.

Oh, that's how it would work. Okay.

Someone can socially engineer your cell phone provider and say, hey, I lost my phone. Can you send me. Here's my new SIM card. Can you port the number over to this new SIM card? Oh, okay.

Yeah. Something I've experienced as well. I mean, this was about four years ago where someone, I think one of my email just got on a list where it just got. It was bombarded with different, you know, password request, you know, change requests and all that stuff. It was like Spotify was blowing up a bunch of times. I'm like, okay, that's. Hold on, that's a red flag. And then all of a sudden everything was just going and it was like wildfire. I was like, what is going on? I must be on a database somewhere, you know, and ended up. The worst thing that happened is a lot of my crypto got stolen. It was like maybe 3k or so, but still I was just like, jesus Christ. Like, what just happened?

Right?

You know, And I still have no clue. Obviously it's gone. But that sent me down the whole privacy or security rabbit hole. New emails. Totally. Like rethinking how passwords in general, how I approach that.

Yeah. So do you use a password manager now?

I do now. Yes, yes. LastPass password manager.

Anywhere we can use Google Authenticator, we're using that. Is that a pretty secure 2 factor is Google Authenticator.

Google Authenticator is pretty good. There is a caveat that you have to watch out for. If you lose your phone.

It can be really hard to get back into those accounts.

And migrating Google, they've made it easier to migrate authenticator to a new phone. But it used to be that you had to go to every website, deactivate authenticator, which required you to deactivate it with the old phone and then activate it on the new phone. You couldn't just like port your entire library over. So Authenticators, Google Authenticator is good, but if you lose your phone.

Yeah, well, I've already experienced that where I just got a new phone and when I got the new phone, I couldn't log into a bunch of apps and I had to figure out how to resync them all. And most of it was a ton of back and forth with customer support and finally getting it figured out. But yeah, it was kind of a pain in the butt for a Couple of weeks there.

Can you imagine if something emergency was happening?

Yeah, that would have been.

And you needed to get into one of those accounts.

Yeah, that's a good point. That is one of the frustrations. So as far as two factor goes, you've got text messaging, you've got Google Authenticator. Are there other ways?

There's Authy, which is like Google Authenticator and then you can get hardware tokens. So like a yubikey.

PayPal used to do, they would send you a little key fob. Yeah, I don't have one to show you a little key fob that just had little numbers on it that would change every 30 seconds. And in some countries that's like, that's the norm for bank accounts. And I have friends overseas, when they pull out their keychains, there's like eight key fobs on it. Like, oh, well, this is for. Right. You know, this is for my office, this is for my E. Email. This is for.

So that. That's it. Yeah, Same idea.

So it's the same idea, but again, it's the sort of thing, if you physically lose it, you've got a problem. So each of these things have their pros and cons, but I think the. I had. I forget who I was talking to. A couple of my guests have basically talked about the. The. The second factor authentication you should use is the most stringent that you feel comfortable using all the time.

So if it's my grandma, I'm going to be lucky to be able to get her to do sms. So if I can get her to do sms, that's a win. Let's leave it there. But you know, my brother who is, you know, super computer savvy and well, he should be using a hardware token or Authy or Google Authenticate or something like that. So it's really about what you're actually going to use and what kind of interference you can, you can tolerate in your life.

Yeah, it's like, what's your patterns and what are your habits, you know?

Yeah. I mean, if you have to, oh, gosh, I don't carry my phone with me or how do I use this stupid app?

It's kind of like, you know, if your methodology of backing up your computer is plugging a drive in and doing it every Friday night before you leave the office, there's some Friday night, at some point you're just going to go, this is just too inconvenient. Which is why you want automated.

Sure.

So it's whatever you can tolerate.

Hopefully you're not one that loses things. You know, you'd be in a bad place pretty soon. Yeah. What with easy prey. So I think you were telling me, you know, last year before you started your podcast, like, what was the whole. What was the big thing? Like, obviously, you're very into this, but, like, was there a thing, like a. An event or something happened that got you to, like, really want to deep dive into this podcast and chat about all these topics?

I think I've tried to make this shift, and my business has done well. I have a comfortable living, and I really wanted to get to a point where I need to think about more about giving back. Sure, you can put more money in my bank account, and that's nice, but how does more money in my bank account make the world a better place?

And so that part of the podcast was, yeah, there's some. There's some nice PR benefits of that, and it's part of a larger PR play. Sure.

But I get. But like, I. There's people following victims to all sorts of scams, all sorts of stuff being taken advantage of left and right. And, you know, one person not losing their life savings is totally worth the effort of, like, oh, gee, I have to talk to these really neat people and hear these great stories in exchange for this person to. To lose their life savings. Do this. I mean, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of work. You guys know, there's. There's surprisingly more work to. To maintain a podcast than just having conversations with people.

Oh, yes. Yeah.

But that, but that was. There was no specific, like, well, I got this one email about this one person who had this one. Now, there wasn't really one thing. I think it was just that, that. That avalanche of lots of small things over many years of like.

I've got a soapbox. I've got 9 million people a month coming to my website. If I can put a message out there that will save in front of a huge audience that will help people not become a victim to stuff, then I think that's a good use of my time and effort. And part of that was that discussion of, I've got all this traffic. Part of it was, how do I monetize it? But what can I use this traffic for?

Sure.

There was. I don't know if you've heard of. Oh, gosh, there's a. There was a program for doing surveys called Ask.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, Ryan Levesque. And part of his thing is like, well, if you can only get 20 people to take your survey, here's what you do. But if you can get like a thousand people, you can do this. And so I had run across his program at Traffic and Conversion Summit and went through the program and got the book and stuff and we did a survey on the site and over the course of a weekend, just a very simple pop up that was, hey, would you mind answering a few questions for me? It'd really help. I got like 8,000 responses over the course of a weekend.

That's awesome.

Did you let them know?

Yeah, actually, I don't know that I did. I meant to do that.

There's another business model right there. You can run like focus group, like surveys on your site.

Yes.

Data play. Yeah.

And that was like, I was thinking like, oh, we're gonna have to run this survey for a month to get like a thousand responses. Like, ooh, I got statistically accurate information. This is cool.

Now you gotta let Ryan know. That would be a cool case study for him.

Yes. Let me make a note of that.

Yeah, we'll send him this episode too.

Yeah, I'll ping them for you if you want. That's just like, that's one of those unique case studies. It's like, no one's probably gonna replicate that, but it's just like this happened.

But, you know, that's kind of one of the fun things about running the website is that.

There is just such a monster amount of traffic that I can test stuff very, very quickly. I don't have to run a test for six months to find out whether phrase A or phrase B had better conversion metrics or click through or how did this affect page views? I run something for a day and I have a good idea what it's going to.

I was going to say, yeah, you just leave the office for a night or something. You're like, you're good. Next morning, you got everything I need. Cool problem.

I have to admit, we've done lots of tests like that where it's like, we'll just let it run overnight. That should give us enough data.

That's so cool that you have that ability.

Do you have a game plan for the site? Is it kind of all systems go as it is now, or do you have some future plans?

So I've just recently, like I was saying, just recently migrated over to a platform where a team of contractors and potentially future employees can now actually get in and put content in without me having to be there for it. So we have a pretty massive backlog of content to get up there. And just even the things of like, okay, We've got existing content. We can build videos off of that content, we can build infographics off of those, that content. We could build checklists. I mean, I think we have more content than we know what to do with. So there's all of that. And then I've, you know, one of the things that I've always tried to do is watch my competition and you know, as they copy me, I copy them. Everybody copies everybody. But to look across my realm of, you know, everybody's doing something a little bit different of like saying, okay, I need to. Oh, that's a really neat tool. I could spin it and add this into it also. So I've got a half a dozen tools that we're going to try to rule out here that in the next year and hopefully those are the sort of things that will make the site more sticky, get more page views, increase those page views per visits, all that kind of stuff.

That's cool, man. Yeah, I want to dig more into the tools. That's one part that I have not done as probably most people. So, yeah, check out the tools. Awesome. No, this is great. Anything else, Matt?

No, I mean, we covered a lot of ground here and I think, I mean, I learned a ton.

A lot. Is there a way so easy prey being the podcast, Everyone should definitely check that and just cycle through and I'm sure we'll link an episode or so in the show notes. Is there a way that folks could get the self assessment PDF?

Yes. I mean if you go to the website and right on the front on the homepage it says get it now. They can go ahead and get that.

Bam. All right, cool. Wasn't on there. Perfect. Yeah. Easypraid.com Cool looking site too. Good job, Greg.

Thank you.

Oh, gee. And it was good.

It was Greg.

And some of you are doing.

But I like Greg and his team. Do good work.

Yes, they do. Studio one. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Chris. This is cool. And obviously easypray.com anywhere else people should go check out.

They can go to what is my IP address.com. all the social media stuff. Follow me, don't follow me.

Cool.

Well, we'll link anything.

Obviously I'd love you to follow me. Go to my website through one of the affiliate links, buy a vpn, you know, all that good stuff.

Do all that. We'll link up below in the show notes where you can do all those things. All right, Chris.

But more importantly that, you know, people just need to stay safe online. Have that, you know, think twice before you do anything, unfortunately.

Yeah. And Easy Pray is a good place to kind of start going down that rabbit hole.

So thanks for spreading the good word on that. Keep it up, please.

Thank you.

All right, my man.

Have a good one. That was a very fun episode that. That covered a lot of stuff that we don't normally touch on here.

Yeah. But I mean, was the point. We'll get used to that because we're going to be doing a lot more episodes where I think we cover things that we haven't covered before.

For sure. Well, I mean, there's a lot on this one. I freaking a man. Chris is cool. I like the. It's just such a weird. Such an interesting, I guess, predicament to be in when you have so much traffic.

Yeah.

I mean, you're just joking about all the split tests and how fast you could just like.

Yeah.

Test that next night. Got my results, Got more than enough data.

You probably don't hear that very often on a podcast that talks about marketing is like, I got more traffic than I could possibly figure out what to do with.

So cool. It's so cool.

But don't necessarily have the best monetization strategy. Well, I mean, his strategy is great, but that was the thing that he had to figure out. Not that he doesn't have that figured out, but, you know, that was the problem is he has a crap ton of traffic. But like, how do you monetize this traffic? That bounces pretty quickly.

For sure. I mean, it's interesting that Google has not crashed his website in the form of no traffic. I guess the opposite of a lot of traffic.

I mean, I find that really fascinating that he was actually more profitable with less traffic after Google made these changes. But when you think about it, it does kind of make sense.

It makes perfect. He is intent. They're intent on learning more than just the number.

Yeah.

So there's more data that he gives them. There's all these tools. It's probably maybe it's like even a trusted name in a way because it's been there for so long. It's 21 years old.

What's Google known for? Collecting data. Right. So some people are probably like, I'm going to go here because I don't know what Google's collecting on here when I search this here.

I love the fact that he's basically leveraging the attention and the fact that he's kind of built this and has a great monetization system to then really give a lot of good to the world in the sense of like the Easy Prey podcast and kind of like focus on these projects to, to give back. And it sounds like he's doing a lot of that with the tools as well on the website, the main website there. So I think it's just really fascinating to kind of be in that seat and have the attention and the ability to actually direct that attention to stuff that's for good and that he's actually. I was like, keep doing it Chris, keep going. It's entertaining too.

It's awesome. And we got schooled on banner ads. Cause we've never really discussed, I mean we've messed with banner ads on our, our blog, but it was, there's nothing methodical about it. It was like, I'm going to throw up this image and hopefully people click on it.

Who better than whatsmyipdress.com with 9 million, you know, 8 to 9 million or so per month people looking at a.

Site, he's probably a good case study to pay attention to.

Yeah, man. So good stuff all around. And I really like the whole the media and the press site pages on both of it. So you can see that on whatsmypedress.com and also easypray.com and it's legit. Yeah. I mean afterwards Chris was talking about. Actually he mentioned one of the points about PR and press and stuff is he uses HARO or Haro that is H A R O help a reporter out. He asked us to mention that so we can give you that resource. But he uses that to get interviews and all that stuff. It's been around for a while, but it's like all that stuff in conjunction seems to really be pushing everything forward for him as well in that sense.

Yeah.

So it's just, it's nice to, you know, that's where he's probably growing his podcast, getting awareness on that kind of stuff, getting interviews about different scams covered. So it's like, yeah, we could all kind of be strategic with the press and the fact they just put a friggin page on your website. You never know, you might just get some coming to you.

I mean, it's kind of like the Dream 100 strategy. You make it once and you throw it in your email signature and you reap the benefits for a while. Same with the media page. You put up a bunch of links and show that, hey, I'm available to be interviewed, I'm available to answer these kinds of questions. Just to have it out there and you know, stuff will probably come from it. Yeah, man, I dig that. Now do you Feel the need to go and secure some more shit in your life.

Oh yeah, not as much as I thought, but definitely, you know, more two factoring. I would say probably dialing in a little bit more on the password management front.

Yeah.

Just thinking it more methodically around like the financial stuff as compared like just, just making sure it's all decked out. Like we were talking about this earlier, you know, our buddy Dan, using different browsers almost sometimes for in different procedures for financial websites and like I don't know a lot of it but like there's like the touch on the new Macs that like kind of. It's all like your finger basically your fingerprint, but that's like synced up. I don't know what's the safest but like yeah, this whole security rabbit hole, it's like basically have a two factor on the important shit. Yeah. And like don't mess around. I have lost a lot of crypto and that sucked. And I definitely was. It actually by. It wasn't a two factor issue is just being dumb with crypto. Not on a hard storage wallet. Thing of a jigger. Yeah. But all the point being is like, yeah, when your stuff's compromised, things can go south fast. Like an email address. That was the case for me.

But yeah, I need to. I've been doing a lot better with my passwords just like letting my password manager generate passwords for me. Right. But like for the longest time, most luckily it's mostly old accounts of.

I know your common password.

Well, my old common password.

But the old common.

Yeah, I don't use that one anymore. But you know, like for a long time, for years and years and years and years I was using the same password like everywhere. And I recently went and like overhauled like okay, this is kind of an important login that I would never want anybody to see. Let's change this up. And started replacing a crap ton of passwords. But like it's kind of crazy because there's like, you know, we're of the generation where we've had Internet most of our life and so like how many years have we been creating online logins that you forget where you plug some of these passwords into and who knows.

The databases of where those are all stored already or you know, our email addresses. So. Because I think that was the case for me. It was like had to have been on a database somewhere. Yeah. And then it was just like freaking. Everyone was trying to open, open the gate, you know, and they did. But yeah, it's It's. I think the thing that scares me about all the two factor thing is what Chris was saying though, is like, if you lose a phone or something like that, it's like I dealt with it.

It was a pain in the butt. I actually had to create a new Coinbase account. I don't know. I had one of. One of the accounts that I had. I literally just had to create another one because I couldn't get the two factor authentication to work. And I had nobody. Like, their contact wasn't responding. If you ever tried to contact Coinbase support, they just don't respond. Like, huh. Just don't ever get a reply. My experience at least. But maybe it's changed. This was definitely years ago, but.

Oh, well, now I know. What, are they public now?

They are, I believe.

Yeah, I think they did go public, which is kind of odd in a way. But yeah, I mean, it's like.

It's like, you know when they say the gold rushed by the buy the shovels? Right. Like, I feel like investing in Coinbase is sort of like buying the shovels, so it could be one. Not financial advice. I don't do that.

I don't do those things here.

I make stupid financial decisions. So don't listen to me.

Yeah, the love of God, don't listen to that on that. Jesus. All righty, what else we got, Matt? We got some reviews. We can read a couple. Let's do some reviews here. This. This is a random. I'm kind of just like. I'm not just pulling the newest. I'm just like randomly like that one.

We'll start to pull the newest once you guys start leaving some. But we've started random here for the last few episodes we've recorded, so it is the way it is. But if you do leave us a review, we'll probably read it on the show.

Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, this one is from Jen Evan G. And it says actionable and informative. Five stars.

Five stars.

Put it here. We did it again.

What was the name? I didn't catch it.

Jen Evan G. Thank you, Gen Evan G. Jen Evan G. I like Matt and Joe's fun demeanor on the show first.

Just pointing that out.

Go ahead, keep going. Maybe it was Evan versus Jen Evan seems like a combo user here. I'm just guessing. I like how Joe and Matt's fun demeanor on the show in conjunction with the serious value they give. And it's really great for entrepreneurs at any level of business. Loved the reminder of the marketing predictions for episode 2019. I went back in time, I guess.

Whoops.

Episode to segment. And speak to your audience where they are and really enjoyed hearing how they do it.

Which is interesting because, like, we talked about that back in 2019, and that's something that we even got Heavier on in 2020 and 2021.

You got it, man. You got it. And one of the things. What? Remember Chris was saying this off air in the green room. He was like, man, you guys get a lot of reviews on your podcast. And he's like, he really likes how they are specific to the episodes. A lot of them are. And they're not just like, oh, the audio sounded great. I like the guests with no personality or specifics or anything.

Yeah.

So that's cool.

Yeah. If you had a great takeaway or actionable item and you're like, that was really cool, let us know in a review.

Oh, man.

Hey, before you read the next review, everybody should go to flowchartgroup.com and grab the action guide for this episode. You'll be able to join our Facebook group, and you'll be able to get the action guides for the most recent four episodes. So go to flowchartgroup.com and follow the instructions on the page, and we'll hook you up.

You talk so fast.

Flowchart.

Are you in a rush? I don't like that.

Sounds like a laser. Now, to people who are double speed.

No, no, no. All right. Flowchartgroup.com.

Shout out to Easy Webinar. Let's shout out our boys and girls over there. They are partners in crime when it comes to podcast sponsorships. Shout out to Easy Webinar. So you heard us talk about the wonderful world of webinars.

The wonderful world of Webinars. Www. It's kind of hard to say.

Yeah, it is.

Well, they have the wonderful, wild wacky world of webinars.

Yeah, keep thinking of more W's. All right. Well, that's true.

Winner.

Now say them all together.

I already forgot what I said.

Well, your problem, not mine. So the EZ Webinar folks from the Wonderful world, Wolf World, Wacky Whimsical Webinars. There we go. They're hooking you up. Even though on this page it says evergreen profits, exclusive offer. That's just the company name that we have here. You don't need to know that stuff. But go to easywebinar.com hustle again. Hustle.

Easywebinar.com you want to go there?

Trust me, you got to go there. It's exclusive to you, the listener of our show. It's. It's a pretty fatty discount. So if you are doing anything in webinars, likely if you're not using Easy webinar, you got to optimize some stuff. You're probably working too hard, let's be honest. Doing too much stuff. Let them do the stuff for you. If you're thinking about webinars, head over to that page and check it out. You can see all the cool things and stuff that they do for you. Maybe you can get a little bit more detail on EasyWebinar.com, but make sure to get the plan. If you're gonna sign up, go to EasyWebinar.com hustle.

Yes, do that. Let's do some more gratitude. I wanna. Let's do one more here.

Then we gotta get some food because I'm hungry.

Here we go. Awesome podcast.

Yeah, I just had to do that. Awesome podcast. Six stars. I don't know how they pulled that off. Brooke Craven.

Thank you, Brooke, for the six stars, all six of them.

Joe and Matt, host of the Hustle and fl. It was actually Matt and Joe. Damn it. The host of the Fossil and Flowchart podcast highlights all aspects of business, marketing and more in this can't miss podcast. Yay. I like it. The hosts and experts, expert guests, offer insightful advice and information that is helpful to anyone that listens. I don't know why we haven't read these more like, I mean, we read them as it comes. It's cool to go back to little cards. Moments in time.

Little moments in time, yeah.

So thank you.

When was that one from?

That was a year ago.

A year ago.

But, I mean, these are just. We're getting some more. We kind of. We weren't asking for a while. We were really good. And what Chris was saying. Chris Parker was saying that we. I think we have some prompts on our show notes, pages that might. I don't even know. But, you know, Jacob and Sue would tell us, and Chris, I guess that those seem to be working to get specific reviews. So, yeah, thank you for leaving a review. As I look at the camera, I don't know why. Because you can't see us. No, this part's not on camera, but thank you. And if you have a podcast, go shout out that you want to hear from some people.

Yeah, I'll do the noa kega thing. What's your favorite fish? That was literally one that he said.

Actually, well, make a matte one, not a Noah one.

What's your favorite wall color?

Wall color. Beige I like blue. Bye. Love you.

Thanks everybody for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it.

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