How To Capitalize On "The Creator Economy"

Well, when it comes to, like, the whole media and building up a brand and all of that kind of stuff, you know, I want. I want to talk about the other angles of it as well. Like, I don't want to just talk about, here's how we're building a brand. Here's how we're building a media company, which we will talk about. We're going to share the journey. That's what a lot of these Tuesday therapy sessions are going to be, is us sharing the journey as we go and teaching what we're figuring it out as we go. But there are also a lot of people that are like, I'm not interested in building a personal brand or a media brand or a brand in general.

Makes sense.

Right. So I want to talk about opportunities for those people as well. So you can see why we're excited on both sides of the coin.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float. Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf.

Jo Fear.

Hey, now we're recording.

Caught you on that. We were about to record the most epic episode without the recording button on. Yeah, that's not good.

Well, we would have actually still had it recorded. I hit record on the video, not the audio.

True that. True that. We are professional podcast bastards, y', all.

Sometimes. Sometimes.

Well, this episode, I think, is gonna be a good extension of what we've been chatting about the last few weeks. Yeah. On our duet episodes, that is. Obviously, we've had the guest episodes that.

Are duet slash, therapy session, slash Joe and Matt. Slash Matt and Joe episodes.

Yes. Is that going to be in the branding of this. The show?

The title where it says, like, the name below the title of the episode, it's going to say therapy session slash duet episode, Slash Matt and Joe. Slash Joe and Matt.

All right, Jacob, good luck. Fitting that all in the thumbnail, huh? Props to you for making that happen. All right, carrying on.

I think we decided to call them therapy sessions again. Right.

Are we just deciding? I don't even know.

I feel like we landed back on therapy sessions because we stopped naming them therapy sessions. And then we had people tell us they really liked that we were branding them as therapy sessions, so we went back to calling them therapy sessions.

Well, leaning on the brand and what we've chatted about, you know, the last few weeks or so, it's been all about branding. So let's brand it as such Therapy sessions. It's back.

So the Tuesday episodes are branded as therapy sessions.

All right.

Even if they're not always therapeutic.

Although I'd say they are in some way.

Yeah.

I feel like every episode we do has a therapy element to it. That's true. Where someone is being deconstructed or maybe a perspective change, you know, something we haven't thought about.

Yeah. Often tears.

Yeah. Well, those are the best ones.

Mental breakdowns.

So my goal is to get you to cry on this episode. I'm just kidding. I won't. That'll be for you, the listener or viewer. So get prepared. Strap in.

Next episode, he's gonna come and he's gonna sit and, like, peel onions under the table. I'll be like, you got him.

I like that idea.

Yeah, don't do that.

I don't like it.

I don't like the idea.

You don't like the idea of crying on camera, Matt?

Not. Or just. Because they just gotta get painful.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe cry.

Make it for something substantial, at least.

All right, well, I don't think we'll have tears this episode, but I feel like maybe tears of joy, because I feel like there's some really good opportunities that, you know, we've been chatting about for a while, specifically in the creator economy. And, you know, how we've been seeing our company as a media company rather than more of a, you know, as just a podcast with. With an email list in products and stuff and affiliate marketing, but rather. No, we want to harness the affiliate or the media company idea in leveraging sponsorships and brand deals as the main form of monetization. But still, the digital marketing element of everything we've always done is still there.

Yeah.

As like more of a byproduct.

Yeah. But, you know, there's also probably a lot of people that listen to this show that are like, you know, I'm not on the path of creating a media brand myself. I'm not trying to be an influencer. I'm not trying to build a personal brand. And so we wanted to create this episode just to kind of speak to that audience a little bit. Right. Speak to. How do you. If you know that the creator economy is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and we're going to talk about some numbers and some stats. If, you know this is going to be a bigger and bigger industry. Right. Why not figure out how to sell the shovels to the people in that industry? Right. So that you can capitalize on it without yourself being a creator or an influencer. So that's what we're going to talk about today. That's right. Before we do, we have our flowchartgroup.com.

We do have that in the action guides that are. Or the flow notes. Flow notes.

Flow notes.

Is that the branded thing that we're going to lead with?

Yeah, I want it to be branded as flow notes. I just haven't been able to get flownotes.com?

Okay, well, don't go there. Go to flowchartgroup.com and yeah, within two weeks of this episode going live, you can get those notes. The flow notes we took on this episode, all the action items and cool things that you want to basically take away from this episode, they're done for you. So go to flowchartgroup.com within two weeks of this going live, plug in your email address. Also join our Facebook group. It's all in the same thing. So flowchartgroup.com is how you get the notes and join our community.

Yeah. And yeah, it's like a great Cliffs note. So if you want to stay in the loop, keep your finger on the pulse of all the stuff we're talking about. But maybe you don't have time for every episode.

Go there.

Flowchartgroup.com is your answer.

And we have a wonderful sponsor as well for this episode.

We do.

And they would be going red route now. Yo, Matt. All right. How you doing?

I'm all right.

All right, cool. Yeah, yeah. So, like you care. Well, I know you're right. I'm just moving on to the next thing, so. Just kidding. All right. We recently did a full on audit of our site.

We did.

And we saw SEO audit, specifically. Yes, SEO audit. And we had. We had some issues. We had some issues. So walk me through this.

What?

We used ahrefs.

We did use ahrefs. And when I ran our site through ahrefs, I found all sorts of little calamities.

Calamities. Yes. So ahrefs, it was nice enough to give us the advice on how to fix these things, I believe.

Right?

Yes.

AHREFS tells you, hey, look, this should be HTTPs, but you've got it as HTTP. Maybe go fix that. Hey, this link is porting to a 404 broken page. Maybe go fix that one.

No bueno.

Hey, this URL here is redirecting like four times before it gets to the final destination. Maybe that's something you can fix. Right? And you go and fix all those things and the next thing you know, your site actually ranks a little bit better and goes a little bit faster.

So the point is, we should probably be paying attention. Everyone you listening should be listening. Listening. Monitoring your SEO health. Right?

Yes.

You're The SEO overlord over here, at least of the two of us.

Yeah. You should be monitoring your SEO health. If SEO is important to you in your business.

Yes, definitely. You should. We get most of our new traffic through SEO, and it's fabulous because it's free. Free traffic. But we position our content in a way where it's attractive to Google and you, the listener. If you came through SEO, maybe. So Ahrefs is hooking you up, though, because they still have their normal Ahrefs, which we highly recommend. We've still used to this day for years and years and years on end. Every other SEO expert that we've had on the show also uses it. Well, now they have a free version that is actually a thing that's gonna monitor your website for its health. Hundred SEO issues and more backlinks, like, you'll know who's linking to you and all that Stu. There's opportunities for you to do stuff there. And then, of course, all the keywords that are ranking for you. You can get this for free.

Yeah, it's free. Like we talked about. We've been talking about Ahrefs forever. They now have a new thing called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. You can find out about it over@ahrefs.comawt that's a H R E F S.comawt Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. It is a free version of Ahrefs. So go check this thing out. Best conversion rate you're gonna get. Monitor your SEO health, backlinks and keywords for free. Check out ahrefs.com awt.

All right.

That was a great, great sponsorship. My favorite so far by one of us.

Yeah, it was my favorite one.

It was great. Yeah, it was a great read. All right, so this episode, we're talking about essentially, the creator economy, the opportunities that we see. We have some cool stats of where. I mean, there's. We're seeing it compared to, like, the gig economy in terms of how much money is getting invested in their sponsorship deals. Just opportunity for growth.

Yeah.

And how you, as a. As an entrepreneur or, you know, as a marketer specialist, whoever you are, whatever you're good at, this is a good opportunity for you to be aware of where the money is flowing, essentially, and where the attention is flowing and how you can more or less position yourself in a way to work with or, you know, kind of ride that wave with the creators. Yeah, I think it'd be a really smart thing to do. And we'll talk about some ways to approach it where it isn't you building the media company? Because I think it would be cool for us to actually talk about our experience so far in building a media company or at least like starting to re engineer our company to go that direction. It's a lot of work.

Oh, yeah.

You know, there's a lot of stuff that's involved, but a lot of moving.

Parts that you don't think about until you're actually in the weeds moving on all those parts.

Exactly. Especially when you have a smaller team and there's a lot of stuff you want to do and kind of position yourself. How about, how about this? We start with some cool stats because I know you're pulling them up on screen right now and we have a dock full of them. So let's fire out some stats of where this gig or not gig, but creator economy is headed with stats that are super relevant to this. And then let's talk about our experience so far.

Yeah, so this, we, we may be able to overlay this on the screen if you're watching the YouTube version over at HustleandFlowchart TV. But we're looking at a graph right now that shows the growth of influencer marketing spend. So where the money is, you know, each year, how has the spending looked? Right, so in 2019, it was, what is that? $2.42 billion spent on influencers. That was a 26.4% growth over the previous year. In 2020, there was 2.76 billion spent with influencers. That was a 14.4% growth over the previous Year. And then 2021, this is sort of estimated through the end of the year. It's estimated to be at 3.69 billion. That's almost. That's almost a billion more than the previous year.

Yeah, yeah.

That's a 33.6% growth rate in influencer marketing spend. So you're just seeing this like growth year over year of more and more brands money and putting it towards influencers. And when we say influencers, it is sort of this all encompassing across YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, like people are influencers on different platforms. So this doesn't specifically speak to YouTube, but it just shows you that the influencers, the personal brands, the people that are putting money into these, like, media companies that are shaping up out of this whole economy that we're seeing, it's just growing year over year. The projection for 2022, 4.14 billion. And the projection for 2023, 4.62 billion. Where those numbers came from. I'm not actually sure how they come up with those projections.

That's from eMarketer. Yeah. Which I know. Yeah, there's. Well, we'll link some of these articles that we're mentioning here.

I'm sure that's like an average growth rate year over year and they're just kind of continuing that average over the following two years. But that's billions. Hundreds of billion. Not hundreds of billions, but billions of dollars.

Well, a couple other stats that we. Because there's a. There's lot of people keeping stats of this and I mean, obviously this stuff changes so fast, so I think it's smart to just keep it. These are just ideas to like, kind of give you a bunch of ideas of just the lay of the land. It's almost like here's your pulse of this thing. Even though, like, if you look up some stats probably going to look a little bit different. I think everything's going to show you. The general idea though is that it's growing tremendously and there's a lot of attention being had by the money, but also the consumers.

Yeah. And I think this gives a pretty clear picture of like, this is why we're shifting a lot of focus into the meat brand. This is where we see a lot of things going right now. You know.

Our past episodes we talked about like branding over direct response marketing. I still believe there's like a big opportunity and a good space for direct response marketing. In fact, what we're going to talk about today, I think is going to be some of that overlap between branding and a media company and a lot of the direct response marketing strategies. We're going to talk about how to create some of those overlaps.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know. Well, actually, before a couple other stats. Yeah, I think that's a good thing is in this episode, I think we've talked about a lot of building a media company or a brand or having your own podcast and doing that whole thing, having a YouTube channel. And you know, it's all the stuff that we're honestly doing now. It's a lot of work. But yeah, use a. Maybe as an entrepreneur, marketer, specialist or whatever you are. There's so many other things that you can do with this economy, this creator economy that is growing right now. So re angling. I mean, a couple other stats here is 800 million in venture capital funds have been invested in the creator economy startup since October 2020. What are some other stats here that look good? It looks like 46% of creators have been building an audience for 4 plus years. Earn over 20k annually mentioned on their monetized channels. I mean that's not.

What's the source for this stuff?

This one, this one. I don't know if I linked into our Slack as we're reading, but I can. It's on my other computer.

Yeah, we can always. We could put the source on the screen probably.

Yeah, well we'll send a link and definitely link it up in the show notes too because there's some good stuff in terms of, you know, there's a lot of sponsorship dollars getting pumped that way. I know you have another thing over here.

Yeah, ignore that first link. Basically everything I was looking at was pulled out of that E marketer. So I was reading one article that was basically analyzing the marketer article. So.

Okay. Yeah, so let's see here. There's another one of the survey creators that consider themselves full time creators. 78% or more of them are making 23,000 annually. You know, these are all just kind of showing like there's more of a. There's more of a push of people actually able to go full time with this and make it more of a thing. Obviously it might not be a substantial amount of cash, but it does show that there's more people actually pushing themselves into this creator role. And what we're seeing, I mean there's like mega influencers who are the Mr. Beast of the world or dude, perfect, that channel. But then there's a lot of folks that just have a smaller following that need some help when it comes to marketing or even on the business front. There's some opportunities that we've listened to, interviews. We've also seen, you know, people partnering up with some other influencers out there on more the business side of stuff. So that's, that's kind of like the idea of what we wanted to chat about is specializing rather than, you know, maybe even doing the creating yourself. So let's talk about our own, I guess our experience so far of making this pivot because there's definitely, there's, there's work to be done as a media company or as a, as a creator that that takes your eye off the ball of maybe some other stuff that is more direct response.

Y. Yeah, well, as we're trying to build a media company. Yes. We're trying to, you know, grow YouTube. We're actually trying to grow two YouTube channels. We're trying to grow currently one podcast, but are in talks with two other podcasts to work with them under the media company to Grow. That'll be further down the line. We've got an email list with an email newsletter that goes out once a week plus, you know, some additional emails throughout the week sometimes. And right now that is sort of encompassing of the media brand you've got. And then we've got kind of our, what we'd consider like our second tier, which is probably, you know, Instagram and Facebook groups and some of that kind of stuff that's still media that we can get in front of people with. But the real core ones that we're trying to build constantly are podcast downloads, YouTube views and email growth. Right. And so it doesn't sound like that's a lot, Right. But each one of those things has multiple buckets underneath. Right. So when you're looking at, let's just hone in on just YouTube.

Right.

With YouTube, we need to create thumbnails that grab attention. We need to create titles that grab attention. We need to edit them with, you know, things like B roll and sometimes underlying music and putting text on the screen. We need to. With our. What are some of the other stuff? Keyword optimization, the SEO stuff that goes into figuring out what things to try to rank for.

How about just distribution on all the platforms and a release schedule. You know, there's all that stuff that involves, you know, just keeping a whole map and plan to all this stuff too.

Yeah, yeah. And like that stuff is like literally just YouTube.

Right.

And then you jump over to like the email, right. And now and with the email you've got the list growth side of things. So you've got like, you've got to create lead magnets to get people to opt into the email list. You've got to create email follow up sequences for when they opt into the email list. You've got to create your broadcast emails that go out every time you mail. If you're mailing to some sort of promotion, you need tracking links. You know, all of these little things go into just running the email side, not to mention coming up with the content. Because our newsletters are curated content from around the web. So you gotta find all the content and put it all together and add our own little notes around all of the content. All of that stuff has to happen with just the newsletter. Now let's jump over to the podcast. Right? Podcast. We've gotta record the content like we're doing now. Now when we record the content, it gets converted into audio. So somebody's gotta edit the audio. It gets converted into video. Somebody has to edit the video. It gets converted into action guides. Somebody's got to listen to the episodes and make the action guides. It gets converted into a print newsletter. Somebody has to organize them all into a print newsletter and keep track of all the customers.

That was my brain going, brrr.

So when we're looking at this media company and we're just looking at our three core focuses, which are YouTube, the podcast and the email list, it's exponential the amount of tasks that come with running the media company and just having three core media platforms.

Yeah, I know you don't like a lot of spinning plates, Matt.

No, I don't.

So is this something that.

I mean, it's something that we're building and, and I think what we're going to do as we.

So basically what you and I are doing right now is kind of creating the foundation of everything for us. So there's a lot of it's all everything and more of what you just said, which is kind of happening prior to us like honing in on this. But now we're, you know, there's the implication of sponsorships, you know, like, like we want to lean heavier into sponsorships and doing brand deals. We're doing a lot new, some new growth hacks stuff to grow our audience and investing a lot of funds into that. And you know, there's a whole model there which we're testing out, which we're not going to totally go deep dive in on now, but those are all these new things that we're doing. So yeah, when it's two of us heading this up and we do have a team, but at the same time it's like there's a lot of new functions happening, There's a lot of new spinning plates that we're just testing right now that's not like totally locked in. We have the vision and we see all the different indicators are saying like, this is the smart move.

Right.

Pivots are taking a lot and I.

Was listing all that stuff and that's not even scratching the surface. Right. Like, when it comes to the podcast, you still have all of the outreach and follow ups. So much, so much stuff. Right. But I was not bringing that up to complain about how much work it is. I was bringing that up to present the opportunity that exists there.

Totally.

Right. Like, there is the fact that each one of these things has so many little subtasks is a huge opportunity for digital marketers who want to go and specialize in one of those. Just like, you know, just look at YouTube and then look at like just one of the Tasks that you've got to do for YouTube. And there's a business there that you can go and replicate for people over and over and over again, right? So like, you look at like just the thumbnail concept, right? We need thumbnails that are optimized that get the attention, that get the click that, you know, seem to work. And then you need somebody kind of watching the back end stats on YouTube to go, okay, that, that image worked well. That one didn't. This color seems to work well. This one doesn't. When we add text, it works well. When we don't add text, it doesn't work as you know, you need somebody keeping an eye on that to constantly optimize. Just YouTube thumbnails, right? So if somebody wanted to go out there and create a business and say, I am the YouTube thumbnail guy.

Right?

And like you just specialize in YouTube thumbnails, you can go and swoop up all sorts of influencers and be like, look, I specialize in YouTube thumbnails. I'll be the guy that creates these designs and then once a week I'll log into the dashboard and see which ones are working, which ones aren't, and then constantly optimize and consistently give you better and better performing thumbnails over time. That business would crush it.

Yeah, that's it. I mean, you can, you can work with a bunch of creators or work with one really big one or whatever it is. And that's a role that's so damn needed. It's kind of like silly how it's such a needed thing because you're like, oh yeah, just whip open canva or snap or whatever. And it's like, oh yeah, you could. But there is a total science to this stuff, you know, and we're definitely not the experts there, but that's an opportunity that we've heard from a ton of interviews we've listened to from. From other influencers or creator types or their agents. Yeah, you know, you know, like the Mr. Beast guy reducer that we'll talk about in a minute here. Like, I think he even said that too. He's like, so much opportunity for these roles that never existed before.

Yeah, yeah. And that's how people can get involved in the creator economy, but still use a lot of the direct response principles that they've probably learned over the years. Right. You know, go and be the specialist in YouTube thumbnails. Be the specialist in YouTube specific video editing. Be the specialist and yeah, YouTube titling or the specialist in YouTube SEO or.

Understanding how engagement looks like, like, because yeah, YouTube in itself, it's kind of like people who, because I know, you know, like conversion optimization, let's say, you know, and looking at Google Analytics or some of these other platforms. Well, yeah, you have YouTube analytics, which are crazy in depth. And, and then you have things like Tubebuddy or some of these other apps, Vidiq. I mean these are all things that you can, they're add ons to YouTube or your, your browser that you can start to dig into analytics and see what are the trends, you know, who's popping off in my, my category that I can look at their tags or what they're doing in terms of how they're engaging their audience or getting more traffic on the platform. It's like SEO basically. Like all these specialty skills that we kind of do already in digital marketing can be put over into a lot of these platforms, especially YouTube. Yeah. Because it's so similar, but that's where the attention is.

Yeah, I mean one of the things we do full transparency is we'll go and look at YouTube channels that are similar to the one to like the types of things we talk about and we will go and sort by most downloaded videos and see what their most downloaded videos are talking about as sort of fodder for what videos we should make in the future, what people we should bring on as interviewers in the future. Like you could probably build a career as like a YouTube content idea generator for people. I mean, the point being that like you find that specialty, that niche thing that you can get real focused on and offer that to creators and you don't even need to go after the biggest creators in the world. Right. Like you were saying, you can go after the sort of like, you know.

Up and coming, but ones that might have a little bit of momentum behind them already.

Yeah, so you've got like YouTube creators, like you know, the MrBeast and the PewDiePies of the world, which are tens of millions of subscribers, right? Yeah, they probably have their team around them already, but then you have the YouTubers that are like 20,000, 30,000 subscribers who are probably still trying to do all of it themselves.

Exactly. And they probably don't have the business savviness behind them because they're probably, if they did, they'd probably be hiring a bunch of people to help them out. But yeah, I would say looking at some of these folks who are just getting, starting to get that traction because that's what we've seen and what we've studied, we haven't Reached it yet ourself. It's like, once you get to some of these numbers, let's call it, yeah, 20,000 subscribers. You know, YouTube gives a lot more attention to folks like that, especially if watch time's high. There's all these engagement elements. You know, YouTube's gonna favor those influencers, those people, those creators.

Yeah.

Might as well, you know, start to look at people in your industry, maybe folks that you can. I mean, there's a lot of ways to get connected with folks. We're not gonna talk about that. Like, we have our Dream 100 strategy, all these other ways that you can reach out to folks in your network or on YouTube. But, like, those are the folks. If you make a good case and. And. Or if you can get referred to someone like that, present yourself as a specialist. I think that's the big thing is. Is the whole generalist versus specialists is something we wanted to talk about as well.

Yeah.

There was an article that Roland Frazier shared with us that. And I don't have the title or anything in front of us, and I think it's a paid article, so it's not something we can share anyway.

Wasn't supposed to share it.

Don't call him out like that.

But he was allowed to share.

Yes. Yeah. He essentially, that article said that, you know, there's. There's this big creator economy happening, and a lot of us who do have a podcast or YouTube page or even consistent blogging, we're creators. I mean, like, I would say most listeners or people watching us are creators in some sense. And what this article was basically saying is that there's a lot of components like you just listed out. You listed out a bunch of stuff that are functions of a media company. So technically, I bet a lot of us are running media companies, or at least because, like, we're using. We're doing the functions of a media company, and it's a lot of work. So what the article is basically saying is that creators and influencers out there really need help. They need support. And it's mainly from specialists, not general agencies that are just going to take everything and run with it. You know, it's like, I know in the agency world right now, at least at the time of this recording, we know a lot of agency owners and there's some pretty big agencies and ones that have been around a while, but are kind of more generalists and they're hurting.

Mm.

And it's like a lot of the folks are just kind of cutting out the middleman or going back to Basics or what works. Whereas like the specialty agencies though are the ones that are very defined or have some like a really good moat around them. They're crushing it.

Well, and also there's the element of the fact that a lot of those worlds that those agencies are working in have actually struggled as a result of the pandemic. Where the creator world has thrived as a result of the pandemic.

Well, actually the money you showed in 2021, it shows like the biggest leap is this year in 2021.

Yeah, yeah. And they directly attribute it to the fact that there was a pandemic. More people are at home watching content online. More people were engaging in social media online, no doubt. Right. So like a lot of agency owners that are like, I'm a Facebook ads agency, I help run Facebook ads. Well, when companies started losing revenue, they had to figure out where to cut costs. And a lot of these agencies were where they went and cut costs. Now these creators on the other hand, they found flourished in that same time frame. Like that. During that same time frame you see a lot of these creators like double in download numbers and just have this astronomical growth. So that's so like there's still money there. It's just these agencies, the money is sort of, I mean, I'm not saying drying up, but it's like there's definitely still money in agencies. It's just a lot of businesses were hit hard during the pandemic and when they went to cut costs, cutting out middlemen was one of the areas they cut costs.

It's like a positioning thing more than anything. You know, it's position yourself properly and, and strategically and I think that's, that's what you can do. Anyone can do that here right now with the, the creator influencer economy. I don't know which label to use. They're kind of like interchangeable, I guess. Yeah.

But we're even interchanging creators and media brands now because most of the creators are trying to be media brands.

And see, that's the key. It's like, I think once the momentum starts and I don't know when that pivot happens for a lot of creators in their minds. But like, I mean the media company, that's a lot more of a business minded thing I feel like, whereas a lot of creators probably aren't approaching it as that initially more is like, hey, I'm going to make some income off of this, you know, like, oh, I have something to share, I'm going to show tutorials or do whatever I'm going to do on my my as an influencer. But yeah, over time, maybe they're doing the right things. They're getting enough awareness and attention where they're like, oh, wait, hold on, I'm starting to earn money now. Oh, I can bring in protein powder to pay me for my. I mean, yeah, it's just like a dumb example that we always throw out. But I mean, I feel like the things will start popping off, like, oh, okay, I'm doing brand deals. I'm approaching. I'm getting paid by YouTube. Well, maybe there's a way to kick it up a notch. I think that's where the big opportunity.

Yeah, well, people will start to realize that audience, you know, the perspective we've taken. And I think more and more people are realizing this as well. Whether it's the right perspective or not. Time will tell. But we've taken the perspective of audiences. Our currency.

Right.

That is the currency for us.

It's been the case for a long time for us. Yeah.

And I think more and more people are realizing, like, ooh, if I actually get a thousand more subscribers on YouTube, then my income goes up by this much. If I get 10,000 more subscribers, my income goes up by this much. If I get this longer watch time, my income goes up. If I get this big name media influencer on my show, my income goes up. And so they're seeing all of these little tweaks that they can do to grow their audience, which in turn grows their income. And these little tweaks can be done by other people?

Definitely. Well, there's one stat actually just reminded me, and it's this one I highlighted. This is from earlier I wanted to point out. It said there's. There's not a definite correlation between follower count and income. It says between 50 and 100,000 and. And 500,000 to $1,000,000 reported income levels from creating content. There is half a million dollars in income difference, but the difference is only 1.8 thousand more followers.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, we talked about a little bit offline and that is a sort of a mechanism, I believe, of how the YouTube algorithm works. Right. So the YouTube algorithm is basically showing you more videos that are similar to the videos that you've watched in the past. And that is a higher priority than showing you videos that you actually subscribed to.

And that might be the case on other platforms too, not just YouTube. Yeah, but yeah, YouTube. I mean, I'm sure a lot of them are very similar. They're all modeling each other.

Yeah, you'll notice that if you ever go on YouTube and let's say you go like. One of my favorite channels is a channel called Wisecrack. Right. And it's a channel about philosophy, but it uses analogies from like cartoons and TV shows and stuff like that. And I love that channel. But let's say I never subscribed to Wisecrack on YouTube, but I watched five videos by Wisecrack over the course of a week. YouTube's gonna go, okay, he obviously likes this channel. Let's show him a lot more of this channel. Even though I never click subscribe. Right. On the other hand, I can go and click subscribe on Gary V's channel. Look at his videos, go, nah, none of them interest me right now. I'm not gonna pay attention to these videos. But I'm subscribed, so I'll see more of his stuff in the future. I'm unlikely to actually see a lot of Gary Vee stuff really quickly. Right. Because they're basing what I see more of on my viewing habits, not my. What I click subscribe on. I'm sure subscriptions have something in the algorithm. They're weighted somehow, but they're not nearly weighted as heavily as your past watch history.

Well, and we are, we know this because we're still on our truck to get a thousand subscribers on YouTube, but it's the watch time as well. Like, it's not only get to a thousand subscribers, it's also 4,000. 4,000 watch hours. And so that just shows you right there that YouTube is weighing a lot of consumption of content as like a big metric. Because obviously anyone can probably. I mean, even though we haven't done it yet, but you can get to a thousand.

I mean, we've done it, just not on this YouTube channel, correct?

Yes. So there's a newer channel. I. I mean, I don't know how old it is, but it's newer. I mean, our other profiles, I think I'm open, whatever. It doesn't matter. But the point is it's consumption, it seems like. So let's talk about some of the ideas of actually, like how to work with a influencer or creator. Like some of the needs that they would have that necessarily aren't known by them or even, you know, it's like things that we now can start positioning ourselves as partners with creators. Yeah. Either as like a hired partner or maybe as a partner partner. Yeah.

There's definitely work out, depending on the skill you provide. Right. Like a YouTube thumbnail generator is going to be Hard to get any sort of percentage of sales off of. Right? But somebody that creates your email newsletter for you, they can potentially come in and take a percentage of all sales generated by the newsletter. So maybe the newsletters have a sponsor to them as well, and the person who writes the newsletter takes a percentage of the sponsorship revenue from the newsletter only. But then you go and find a creator that has 20,000 to 50,000 followers, and they can blow up that newsletter overnight by telling their following to go and subscribe to the newsletter to get updates about videos, but also, you know, special drops on our latest merch.

Get our latest NFT drop. Like, I mean, that'll probably be a future episode, but stuff's going that direction too, right?

So another. I love that one. Sponsorship brokering. Yeah, you can kind of like be the middle person to that because if you have connections to sponsors or you're just really good at outreach and you see some creator that's like, hey, they got the attention, they got the. You know, maybe you hit some creator up and they share some stats, you know, you figure out what the popular trends are. And all that stuff are like, cool, that's all I need. If you're really good at sponsorships or working out partner deals, yeah, you could be that broker person and, you know, get. Get it cut that way as well.

One path we almost went down, but, you know, sort of decided it was just another plate we'd have to keep spinning. So it was just a bandwidth thing. The reason we didn't. But, you know, as you, the listener knows, we have a newsletter, a print newsletter that we actually ship to the houses of subscribers. And you can physically read it. Right. For a little while, we were toying with the idea of offering that as a service to other podcasters. Like, we will listen to your podcast, we'll take notes on it, we'll put it into a print newsletter. We'll manage the customers, and we'll print the newsletter and ship it for you every month.

We split the fees or whatever.

All they do is they keep creating content the way they've been doing it. Our team listens, takes the notes, turns it into a newsletter and handles fulfillment. Right. Like that was a business model we were talking about doing. It's just the media brand, the YouTube, the podcast, the pod hacker, evergreen profits. There's a lot of stuff in the mix, right? So you could have that run with it. If you know how to make print newsletters, go offer it to creators. That's another potential.

Create a publication. It doesn't even have to be. Yeah. It could be a different form of physical, you know, mail or whatever. On the back of influencers, there's thanks.com, i think is like a. It's a thank you card, like, handwritten service thing. I mean, you can come up with some cool, you know, post kind of mail stuff on the back of a creator and, you know, maybe you do some campaign where you're getting their email or, you know, their. Their physical addresses. You can kind of create like a little mini funnel almost for a creator.

Or you can go and, like, just playing off the newsletter idea, too. You can go and find three podcasters that are all kind of in a similar niche.

Right.

But maybe they only post, like, once a week each, and go to all three of them and say, hey, let's create a collaborative newsletter where we pull the notes from your episodes, your episodes and your episodes, combine them all. Now you have three podcasts, all promoting to this newsletter, and you get to sell sponsorships. You give the, you know, the creators 75%, and you just take 25% for managing the newsletter.

Right. I like these wild ideas on how to leverage the creator economy.

Yeah, exactly.

All right, here's some other ones. I mean, I'm sure people listening. You listening. Have created a funnel. Yeah, a sales funnel. Well, guess what? I bet a creator doesn't really know how to create a sales funnel. I mean, case in point, my wife did pair up with a creator in the wedding space and essentially has created a really killer email sequence and also a sales funnel on the back of it that's recurring income and has been growing ever since. And that was actually a cold outreach. You know what that started? Actually, the way that she connected is that she invited her partner. My wife invited her partner onto her. She was doing a live summit or, you know, a virtual summit, so kind of like a podcast invited onto her stage and then from there had a conversation and kind of went deeper that way after she saw some opportunities. What have we always talked about? Oh, if you create your own stage or if you have some kind of way to start conversations or get referred to people, then, you know, it kind of leads to new things in the future, potentially. Yeah, that's how it led there.

Well, speaking of events, events are another thing that you can go and offer creators. Like, you know, when you get, like, big channels like Mr. Beast or Dude Perfect or Casey Neistat or Marques Brownlee, like some of the, like, mega YouTube channels.

Right.

People are dying to meet those creators.

Oh, yeah, right.

So, like, if you can Help them put on events too and be the events guy. For YouTube creators, that's another opportunity and they could be like local events. Like, hey, Mr. Beast is coming to San Diego and he's going to be over at this coffee shop for three hours on Wednesday night. We have 100 seats available, $100 a ticket, right? You manage that for Mr. Beast, manage all the logistics of it. Give him a cut and you keep your cut. There you go.

Live events. I mean that's, I mean think about the logistics behind just running an event. Like that's actually in full transparency. We're trying to run a couple of these types of things right now for ourselves. Yeah, it's a lot of work. It is, it's a lot of work.

We might even be cutting back on some of them.

We 100% are. It's not. We might, we are.

Hey, I was leaving it open, open ended. No, we're definitely cutting back on some of the events.

Yeah, there's, there's reasons for all of this.

But, but you can do the same concept with like the events as what I just said with the newsletter. You can go after, let's say four different creators that all have this subscriber base of like 20, 50,000 that are kind of like not the mega influencers, but got some good reach.

Right.

And you get, you get four or five of these people all to do like a meet and greet at a coffee shop or something like that and charge admission. But now you have four sort of mid level influencers all driving attention to this one event. Right. So now you all kind of capitalize on each other's audiences as well.

So you know, think about that. You can probably bring sponsors in and get a cut of that if you're the events company. And like there's probably ways to work a really cool win win deal here where, you know, with all this stuff, I feel like this is prime opportunity to figure out some kind of creative way to work with someone. Because if you're going to pitch someone off the bat, you know, a creator type, you know, you got to find a win win in there. It's not going to be like, okay, you're going to pay me $5,000 a month to do, you know, or whatever.

Yeah.

Unless they have some sponsor that's going to back it up and probably pay.

For some, you can make it such no brainers with the way we're talking about it is like, hey all your only job is on some of your videos or on social media or wherever your platform is. Tell people about this. Just get people to it. I'll handle the rest. Right. And now we're taking a percentage of like sales at the door or percentage of the sponsor that's sponsoring the local event or whatever. We're taking a percentage that comes from the event. And the only skin off of the creator's back is, hey, tell people about the event.

Right. How about on the like the growth hack side?

Yeah, I mean media buying, Media buying.

In general, like a lot of creators, I doubt folks are really savvy with Facebook ads or Google Ads or even YouTube ads, Instagram ads.

This is an area we hire out for right now. I do some of the media buying myself. But we've got a good buddy, Luis Diaz, who's been on the show in the past. He's helping us actually do some of the media buying to grow the show. Tom brees is a YouTube ads expert who's been on the show in the past. We're going to probably work with him. We have a call with him in a couple of weeks to, to help him have him help us grow the YouTube channel through YouTube ads, you know, and that's where some of the like direct response marketing that we were talking about can come into play with the creators. But you want to let the creators be creators.

Right.

Like the idea here is letting the creators live in their sweet spot of just making better and better videos, coming up with ideas for videos, creating the videos, editing the videos, doing everything that's like in their wheelhouse to put out amazing content. Everything that doesn't fall within that sort of creative wheelhouse is potential for you to offer as a service.

So I mean we kind of hit on a lot of ideas. I think that's. Oh, another one is just offer development. So think about digital products. I mean membership sites, you know, deep dive into. Because I mean, well, this is actually burger companies. Burger companies. I mean my wife, so back to her example, she actually helped kind of form a better model around the membership site that exists. Actually created it as a membership. First it was a one off thing and now it's a recurring thing.

Yeah.

So it's like you can, you know, do a lot of this stuff where you might specialize in offer development, the funnel process, conversion, all that stuff. I mean that's, that's probably the most prime for the picking for like a rev share opportunity.

Yeah.

You know, it's like a clear like, hey, I'm gonna. You're at this level, here's what you got. Maybe with or without an offer. Well, how about once we reach this level, let's call it recurring revenue or some dollar amount per month, let's say then Cool, well then now I'm gonna be a percentage partner at whatever level. Yeah, like you can make it like no skin off their back just to be like, okay, well I trust myself. I'm gonna work this little funnel behind an influencer.

Creators are really, really good at like one thing. It's creating and getting audience attention. Right. Direct response marketers are really good at turning attention into dollars. So that's, that's where you can like marry up the skill sets. If you're a direct response marketer, you can go to these creators and say, you know, you've got attention, but you're not the best at turning that attention into money. I'm good at turning attention into money. So how about we work together? You do your thing to create the attention and then I'll do my thing to turn that attention into money. Right. That's really at the end of the day what you're doing. And that can be in the form of running a membership site for them. It could be in the form of helping them sell a product like an ebook or a one off course, it could be running their E commerce. Mrbeast makes so much money off of his E comm store and selling Mr. Beast like one off drops that are all like limited edition stuff, right?

You can develop apps.

Apps.

There's a lot of no code app development stuff out there now. Or maybe you are a code, you know, you know how to hire app developers.

Yeah, Something you got like the example of Beast Burger. Right. Like that's a really outside the box thing of like a creator going and launching a fricking US nationwide burger brand trying to go global. But right now it's a nationwide burger brand. Right?

Like check that out. The model. If you don't know the Beast burger model, I mean, just go look it up.

Yeah, it's like the cloud kitchen model. If you haven't gone down the cloud kitchen rabbit hole, check it out. That might be a future episode we'll talk about. Because the cloud kitchen stuff is really cool. Not necessarily something we'll dig into, but something that's really cool to analyze, a.

Cool mod to distribute, whatever. I mean, it's on the back of a creator. And so I mean lastly, we have this talent or manager agent type role. And this is where we mentioned the guy that is basically the agent for Mr. Beast and dude, perfect. Yeah, read Ducher Reed Ducher. And he's the one that was, he's the one, I think that lit both of our brains up at first with the opportunities of all the different roles that you can kind of marry up with a creator influencer type. And, and he was just saying, he's like, man, this is a whole different market that most people aren't even aware of. And he was also the one that dubbed the creators, especially in YouTube, as more of the production companies or the media companies rather than the next celebrity. Yeah, yeah, he was, they might be that too.

Yeah, he was the one who was saying like, you know, Mr. Beast isn't trying to be the next Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. Mr. Beast is trying to be the next NBC, the next Fox, the next HBO. Like he's trying to build a media company. He's not trying to be a celebrity.

So think about like in niches, like each, each one is going to have their own media company. You know, like there's going to be a standout or there's going to be some, some B level ones as well that are, I mean there's, there's a lot of opportunity is what I'm saying is because like with the business behind it or the marketing minds to really leverage the attention that they're already getting. And it's your job to basically seek out who are these, you know, who are the ones that are on the upward trajectory. There's a lot of, you know, you can, you can look at the trends of these channels and stuff. There's a lot of public data out there. So I don't know, I, I'm pretty pumped on the direction here. It's still very early in terms of like, how to navigate it. But I think this was helpful to kind of show folks what we've been looking at and studying and what excites us. And I was like, okay, that's why this, this episode was like, this kind of seems like a no brainer.

Yeah, well, when it comes to like the, the whole media and building up a brand, that kind of stuff, you know, I want, I want to talk about the other angles of it as well. Like, I don't want to just talk about here's how we're building a brand, here's how we're building a media company which we will talk about. We're going to share the journey. That's what a lot of these Tuesday therapy sessions are going to be, is us sharing the journey as we go and teaching what we're figuring out as we go. But there are also a lot of people, they're Like, I'm not interested in building a personal brand or a media brand or a brand in general.

Right.

So I want to talk about opportunities for those people as well. So you can see why we're excited on both sides of the coin, you know?

Yeah. There's wins all around here, so pay attention to the creator economy, influencer economy. I don't know which one it is, but just start. Keep this on your radar and maybe start poking around some of these. You know, we'll link up the different articles we talked about. Check out some of these interviews. You know, the RE Doucher agent, he's been on, what, Noah Kagan's podcast, and he's on YouTube. There's a lot of interviews.

Yeah, there was another one I was listening to Eric Sue. I originally heard him on Eric Sue's podcast.

That's right. Eric's been on the show here. So his podcast is great. Leveling up, I think it's called. So, yeah, check out some of this stuff, because this is where our brains are. And I think if you just understand a little bit more, maybe this was like that catalyst to be like, oh, interesting. Okay, so I could position myself to some of these folks.

Yeah, you might have a service already that is a perfect addition to these folks.

Well, that's. I mean, you even mentioned it earlier, before we recorded, is like, think of the different services that just exist for a lot of other industries. It's like, there's attorneys, there's accountants, there's PR agents, people in pr. There's all these, like, kind of services that we all know and like, traditional services. Well, maybe some of the services haven't quite made itself, made their way. Or maybe you have one of the services and you haven't thought of. How about the creators?

Yeah, services don't necessarily see creators as, you know, businesses yet. Like, I think there's still a little bit of a. Or just not aware of this, a mental gap for people of actually seeing these creators as, like, these are the big media brands of the future, so let's start working with them now. Right. I think there are a lot of traditional companies that aren't putting a lot of legitimacy on those types of companies yet. Yeah, but like, dude, they're gonna be massive.

The stats are showing. The money's going that way. It's already there. So, yeah, it's just gonna happen more and more.

For sure.

Cool stuff.

Just a reminder, if you want the notes, the Cliff Notes on everything we talked about, it'll probably have a lot of these stats and things that we were referencing throughout this episode in it. It's, you know, a nice Cliff Notes version, our action guide. Make sure you go to flowchartgroup.com you can get it for free there. And you also get the benefit of joining our amazing Facebook group.

It is amazing.

So flowchartgroup.com make sure you head over there. You'll get both the action guide and access to the Facebook group and a whole bunch of really, really cool community elements and get to know some cool.

Peeps you dang well, so head over there then. We have an epic sponsor as well, Easy Webinar. They've been sponsoring our show for quite some time, and they're all about the webinars, of course, and they make them easy. So if you're thinking about doing webinars or if you're doing webinars right now, take a look at that tool, because I guarantee you'll get some ideas on how to optimize what you're doing. You're probably gonna save some money, probably save some headaches.

Hell, you can go and be a webinar creator for creators. So creators that need webinars to promote offers, go offer it as a service. Grab Easy Webinar. Run the webinars through Easy Webinar.

Bada bing, bada boom.

I just built a business for you.

Easy webinar.com hustle. Go secure your fatty discount at easy webinar.com hustle. That's a great idea. I like that. There you go. So if you are interested, I'm thinking on the media brand side, you got the pod hacker always chilling out there waiting for you. Yeah, that's us deep diving on how to actually build the podcast and media brand. And we'll add more of the media side since that's a more of a recent development. Pod Hacker is where you want to go. Pothacker.com.

Yeah, so pod Hacker is really where all the, like, tactical stuff is, right? So if you really want to see over the shoulders of us running ads to grow a podcast or, you know, actually the editing process that we go through or reaching out to sponsors, like, all of this kind of stuff, we're actually showing on video how we do it. And then after we show you how we do it, we just give you the template so you could just copy and paste what we did and follow the exact process.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Yeah, so that's over@podhacker.com. not to mention we do awesome monthly expert sessions where we bring in a new guest every Single month and say, hey, you're not a podcast expert. You're a Google expert. But knowing what you know, how would you grow a podcast? And we do that every single month with a really, really killer expert. Sometimes they are podcast experts too, though.

Yeah. We're bringing them in because they're just hacking their way to something. Something unique there. That's different. So pothacker.com. you like it? And if you like this, go share it around with your friends, family, dog, and subscribe like you know you have.

Somebody out there who's like, I'm looking for a business that I want to get into. And I don't know what business to get into, but I love YouTube. Is there something there? Send them this episode.

Hey, they'll like it. They'll love you forever. And we will as well.

Yeah. And then they'll hear this call to action of us telling you to send it to them and be like, haha, singer. They got me. Anyway.

Got you. And created a nice bit business along the way. Yes. Or at least an idea. All right, well, go forth and prosper with this concept and let us know how it goes.

You lingered on that f for a while. You're like, go forth. What do you think I was gonna say something else?

Don't say that.

Yeah.

Hey, that was for you.

Okay. Thank you.

I love you. Yeah, that always makes him awkward.

It does. All right, all right, love you. Bye. 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, 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 note.

Thanks for listening.

Go get it.