Mark Webster - The Most Effective Content Marketing Strategies

And so we ended up deciding to start Authority Hacker really as a way to document our processes and what we were doing on this website. So how we launched it, how we would do our keyword research, how we would build links at the time and all sorts of stuff like that, it was kind of an exercise in. By having. Forcing ourselves to document it, we thought through the process much more clearly. So we were able to optimize our own processes better. Second, we could also use it as training for the people who we wanted to bring in to execute these processes. And third, maybe we could start a blog or you know, some kind of online marketing site. I mean we had at that point about 5 years experience doing this kind of stuff. And that's, that's kind of what grew into Authority Hacker.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Floatshark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey. Oh, hello there.

Oh, I didn't see you there.

Haha. Yes. I've only been sitting in this room all day with you.

I don't know why but like your haha sounded like it had a British accent.

I was feeling exquisite. But maybe it was because it says Scotland on the top of my notes right here for Mark Webster because he's in Scotland. Yes. And I don't think that's where the laugh came from, but it's just ironic.

Yeah. Well, Mark Webster, yes. He is one of the co founders of authority hacker.com, which is a really cool site. It's actually a site that I've referenced quite a few times around things like SEO and yeah, I believe they've got a bunch of like tool reviews and stuff. Like I think they've got a pretty in depth review of like Ahrefs.

They got a. Which is a great company, it's awesome company. They're technically not sponsoring this episode, but we love them. Yeah, they'll be back though. And yeah, they, they, I feel like they kind of take a similar stance to us in their own way where they're only going to stand by products, any affiliate promotions and things like that. They're things that we use or things that we've at least gone through and we've seen. Yeah, this is bitching. You need it. And that's like them too because they're like, yeah, we don't make the money off that, but. So there's no skin in the game or us telling you about it. Yeah.

I think while we were having this conversation, you and I were just kind of, we kept looking at each other and by the way, we're starting to do video versions, so you could find a video of Joe and I looking at each other. But we started looking at each other, like, sort of chuckling. But because of how sort of parallel their story was to ours, they both been. Gail and Mark, they've both been running Authority. Well, they haven't been running Authority Hacker, but they've both been partnered together for, like, 10ish years. They're both in their mid-30s. They both have content marketing as their sort of, like, core of what they do.

They're both the coolest guys ever that have podcasts.

They both make their money off affiliate marketing.

Yeah. And they just look great. They're just cool people.

Are you talking about us now or them?

All of us. All of us, like, the collective of the four of us. We're just like, the parallels. This is what we're talking about. Yeah.

You know, we haven't even met Gail yet. We didn't.

It's okay. I'm just assuming, just based off of the parallels, we can keep rolling with this.

Yeah. Yeah.

He's a cool dude.

So what are we talking about on this episode? On this episode? Let me tell you.

You were just asking me, but then you said, let me tell you. So I'm confused.

So let me tell you.

Okay, go for it. Very confused.

All right, so on this episode, we actually really dive into their process of getting content created for their blog. They're very, very prolific with the amount of content. They. They do a lot of SEO. So we talked about their content strategy, their SEO strategy, and then we even talked about their partnership. And all these weird sort of overlaps with, like, how we're all twins.

We are twinsies. And I love the fact that they have these things called authority sites, which is a key component of Authority Hacker. This is, like, they have a training around it, but really you'll get into. We kind of break down, like, what their authority sites are. That's. Yeah, that's where the content writers come into play and talking about, like, what are these authority sites? And he actually said that one of them sold recently. I think it was, like, mid six figures or something like that. And these are, like, niche sites out there that they develop, and they have a network of them, and they have a whole, like, training. It's really cool. And the really cool thing is that they share how to do all that stuff.

Yeah.

Which, like, their big vision is essentially for their readers. Like, if you're in a day job, one of these sites can replace your income. Like, that's really what they're trying to show here. And, you know, you can obviously stack them and make it bigger and then scale it. And we don't go into all that here on the podcast, but that's what really attached me to these guys. I'm like, these guys are fucking cool because they have a cool mission. They have a very scalable model, and they're just chill dudes, and they're sharing it, like, freely. I think it's perfect combo. Yeah, that'd be it.

We can relate.

Yeah. And we took notes, of course. So. Hustleandflowchart.com comp. That's.com comp. C O M P. I thought you.

Had to remind them about the dot com.

Comma. I know. I don't know why I said that. It just felt right. It's like, I don't know. I'm getting tired, man.

Yeah, you are. It's hustlingflowchart.com. get them notes.

Baby was up very late last night and been podcasting all day. But we're going to get through this. Get the notes. You got two weeks. I know. I'm just, whatever, explaining myself for no reason.

Let's go talk to Mark Webster.

Mark. Hey, Mark. We're live. How you doing, my man?

I'm fantastic. How are you guys?

Great. Yeah. You're out there in Scotland, where hopefully this weird Covid stuff's not as. Not as weird out there. I don't know.

Yeah, I'm actually kind of curious. I haven't really heard about it from Scotland much.

I've been in my house for about four months now. They're just sort of starting to let people outside now, so it's been pretty strict here.

That's good. Yeah, it's, like, gone this, like, weird wave thing in the U.S. i'm sure the news is shining that, like, oh, well, we won't go down that route.

I just perceive the rest of the world looking at the US Just, like, shaking their heads.

The thing is, though, I work at home anyway, so really not much has changed in my life. You know, I just. Just don't really go out anymore. But then again, I never really used to go that much anyway.

So that's what Matt and I were talking about. That, like. Matt's like, this is like my sweet spot. I've been waiting for this where it was like, I think I'm adapting because I'm not naturally. That personality. I kind of like to see people and.

Yeah, no, I'm like, I definitely lean a little more Introverted, and now I have an excuse to say no to going out, so I'm just using.

Exactly. Same here.

Well, dude, I think, well, you and your partner Gail are doing some amazing things and you've been doing stuff, what, together for what, 10 plus years now, I think.

Yeah, 2010. We met and we started an agency together then.

Nice. Yeah, so it's like Matt and I, we go way back to right around the same years, actually. Maybe year before or so, but either way, long. That's rare, man. How do you guys originally meet and kind of get this thing going?

Oh, man, it was so random. We met in a bar in Singapore and we both happened to be going to Kuala Lumpur next on our trip, and we ended up meeting up again and just becoming friends. And we got drunk one night and decided it'd be a good idea to start a business together. So I knew a bit about websites, he knew a bit about SEO, so we started an agency. And then four months later we were quitting our other stuff and going full steam and that. And we ran that for a good four or five years before moving on to building our own sites. But, I mean, you're right, it's very rare that two people stay together as business partners for any length of time, more than a couple of years, especially through multiple businesses as well. We actually did a podcast about it recently, talking about that. I think it's just you have to kind of bring something that the other person doesn't have and just fully kind of trust that both your futures and outcomes are, are going to be the same and that sometimes one person is going to give more, sometimes the other person is going to give more and just kind of be okay if it's not exactly 50. 50 the whole time.

Yeah, no, that's. That's really smart. I mean, it's impressive that you've lasted 10 years with your partner. Joe and I, we. We sort of quit our day job, so to speak. Speak in 09. So we've been about 11 years now, so we're kind of like on that same boat. But it's. It's always fascinating because when we go on other people's podcasts, everybody's like, I've had business partners. I can't make it work past, like two years. Like, how do you guys do it? So, I mean, maybe. Maybe that's something that we can, we can touc a little more. But before we do, let's. Let's go into your backstory a little bit. Like, what were you doing before you had your Meeting in Singapore with Gail and did all that. What did you do before this and how did you transition into this stuff?

I was on the traditional high school, college, university graduate job at a big finance company. Track that the system kind of pushes you through. And I just remember I was working in this insurance company. I just remember 15 minutes after my first day there, I was like, is this it? Is this what work is it? Felt like I've been sold a lie. I guess I just had a sort of natural entrepreneur inclinations. Didn't really like taking direction from other people, to be honest. So started plotting my way out of that. Eventually I just quit and went traveling for a while. All this time I was just learning a lot of stuff, reading as many books as I can, Affiliate Marketing for Dummies and SEO for Dummies, all these kind of like really basic stuff. I was on all the forums back in the day as well, just reading what other people who probably didn't really know what they were doing said was working and leaving it all and tried building a few websites, tried some ad arbitrage, all the old school stuff, black hat links back in the day. And I just sort of eventually stumbled my way onto to making this one website kind of semi successful and just learning enough of what I needed to know to have the skills to repeat this. And that was around about the time I met Gail. And then we decided to start an agency and do it for other people.

Were your parents entrepreneurs or anything? Or you just had this drive to kind of.

Not in the slightest. They're like anti entrepreneurs, to be honest.

My dad's like a salaryman through and through. He came from not the wealthiest of backgrounds and he was like the first in his family to go to college, all that stuff. And he had a pretty good job for most of his life in an oil company. And so that was the direction. Oh, get a job, be safe, take that route. But I don't know, I just like, even from when I was 12 years old, I had my paper round and I just absolutely hated working for other people. I always wanted to do my own thing and always had these ideas and it just took me a while before I kind of found my stride and was able to kind of step out there and do it myself.

Yeah, well, and you said the agency thing, we've, we've all been in agencies and we'll probably circle back how this plays a part and it's not an agency, but like this whole balance of business. But I'm curious of what that agency looked like and how it evolved into authority hacker now as you have it.

Yeah. So we started, my business partner Gail and I started this, this website selling SEO services essentially. And we would fulfill those. It was like 600 bucks a month SEO package. We sold the package and we kind of did everything. Sort of people didn't really know what they're buying us through Google. And some people were happy, some people weren't. Back in the day of 2010, it was really easy to rank websites using gray hat link building.

You just stuff the footer. Right. With transparent link or whatever.

I remember when Fiverr came along, that was a game changer for SEO.

Yeah, that too.

Because you could just go buy backlinks. But I mean that obvious died quick. Yeah.

So I mean like back in the day we did it all and we actually ended up moving to Budapest in Hungary at the time. Just honestly chose it randomly on the map and went visiting. We ended up settling down there. It was a really, really good place. And we opened an office and started hiring people locally as we thought. Open an office, that's how to grow a business. Hire lots of people, that's how to grow a business. Turns out you should only really do that stuff after you get loads of clients. But we didn't really think about too.

Much burn rate and all that fun stuff.

Yeah, that's it exactly. Yeah. So honestly, I mean we had, we had many, many months when we had like zero savings in the business bank account and we were making like a $50 net profit that month or something and just hanging on, just being able to pay rent the next month. So it was a bit touching, touch and go for a while, but we end up growing fairly quickly. We ended up developing a number of productized services. So we would sell guest posts, for example. We had various link building packages which other agencies would buy from us. So we were kind of fulfilling them. I like that remotely there.

Yeah. Because that's probably like a sustainable client then, right? Or at least more so than a onesie twosie kind of client.

Exactly, exactly. But there's this 2013 guest posting. Guest posting. What it was back then, which wasn't really guest posting, it was just sponsored links and link farms that started to die off a bit. And we ended up focusing more on our clients at the time.

We ended up becoming more boutique. We downsized a little bit, we moved to a smaller office and we're getting some pretty good results for many clients. And it was kind of like a nice happy balance. But we never really optimized our sales funnels our sales processes. We were more good at the service end of things. So, like, delivering work but acquiring new clients, Especially us being in Budapest and not most of our clients were sort of in the US or the uk. So it's kind of hard to meet people face to face and whatnot. So we realized that we just weren't enjoying it. We didn't enjoy working with clients. And there was one particular case that really stood out. It was like a wedding DJ company in the uk. We did a really, really good job for them. So we got them so many leads that they were booked up solidly for six months. So they fired us. And I was like.

We'Ve got to stop building other people's businesses for them and start bringing our own.

We're feeling your pain right now as you talk about the agency, because we have very similar stories.

Well, yeah, I mean, literally, almost exactly. It's like, you do really good work. And I think for us, it was a little bit of SEO stuff. We had a content marketing agency, and, yeah, we showed all this growth of leads, tracked everything, and then they're just like, yeah, we have a new marketing person. You guys are gone. They have their own ideas. I'm like, oh, cool. Okay. Yeah.

Well, they came in and tried to reverse engineer what we were doing for them, and then they fell off the rankings. So screw.

Go figure.

Did they come back and ask you to fix it?

Well, by that time, we had already went. And that was sort of the last straw for us in our agency was when that happened, we had done such a good job for them for so long. We'd traveled for them, we did all sorts of stuff for them. And like, when that happened, we're like, you know what? We can make so much more money doing the exact same thing, but doing it for ourselves.

Yeah.

And there'll be no red tape, no client reporting. You don't have to work on their shitty websites. You can just do stuff properly.

Yeah. And you could actually scale to the worth that you're bringing, too. You're not capped by some retainer per client.

Yeah, no. We actually had one client that we went and bid to them, like an agency service of doing content marketing, like weekly blog post, forum and sort of helping them, you know, move up in this. We weren't really SEO guys. We more focused on content. We knew, like, some basics of SEO, but we basically bid him three grand a month to go do it for him, and he declined it, thought it was too expensive. Well, this person happened to have an affiliate program, so we Went and signed up as an affiliate, made a blog ourselves and started creating content about that product. And we, we grew it to where they were paying us 30,000amonth in affiliate commissions instead of the 3K that we initially bid them.

So guess we made it.

That's amaz. That's amazing. I love that story. And plus, at the same time you guys were building an asset like the website, which had a lot of value as well. You don't have that when you're working for other people.

Working for clients don't make sales to this day. So it's like it works.

But I was going to say, how did you transfer to Authority Hack? Or how did you decide we're going to start making these sort of mega detailed blog posts about all this stuff that we've been learning.

Yeah. So about maybe a year and a half before we end up selling that agency, we knew it was kind of coming and we started planning, start planning what we're going to do next. It just made sense to start getting into building our own websites. Affiliate marketing. Affiliate websites were very popular at the time. There was a few people talking about authority site authority mode. We didn't coin the term, but I think Authority Hacker. It was actually a mix of life hackers, which I was a big fan of. And well, authority websites, that's where the name came from. But actually just maybe 612 months before we started Authority Hacker, we started another website in the health space where we didn't know anything about health, but we got a writer to come in and work with us to create content. We did all the website, the SEO, the marketing, the monetization. And then we learned quite a lot in the first year from that. It grew really, really well because we're really determined to have something to move on to next after we the agency. And so we ended up deciding to start Authority Hacker really as a way to document our processes and what we were doing on this website. So how we launched it, how we would do our keyword research, how we would build links at the time and all sorts of stuff like that. It was kind of an exercise in. By forcing ourselves to document it, we thought through the process much more clearly, so we were able to optimize our own processes better. Second, we could also use it as training for the people who we wanted to bring in to execute these processes. Third, maybe we could start a blog or some kind of online marketing site. We had at that point about 5 years experience doing this kind of stuff. And that's kind of what grew into Authority Hacker.

That's what I like about your guys vision is that you've always wanted to give back. So it started sounds like as internal documentation more or less, but at the same time you're sharing it with the world and then that's what's kind of nice with this agency. I guess one of the benefit is that you're getting paid to learn, so that's a cool thing. But then even more so and you have a little bit more control documenting that, forcing you to refine your processes even better.

Yeah, for sure. I mean as much as I hate on the agency days, I mean I think you hit the nail on the head there. You really do learn so much because we worked on maybe 500 different clients over four years and saw so many different types of websites, big and small in every industry. And like the knowledge you get from, from that is, is pretty immense.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's cool. So I guess describe what authority hacker is now because I know there's a lot of different points to it. You know, it's not like an obvious, it's not just a blog. You know, there's like a whole business model that's happening behind the scenes. But give us a scoop there.

Yeah, I like, I really need to work on my elevator pitch here.

But we have an hour on this podcast you got.

So the 2 second version is we teach website owners how to grow their business. The two minute version is that we teach online marketing. There's a big skew towards SEO content marketing. We do everything white hat in terms of link building. We're not trying to go against Google. We've been burned with that before back in our agency days.

And we also try and teach people to create really good content, not just what's the minimum I can do to make some money and get people to click on my link. It's like how can you build something which is going to be long term and survive not this next Google update, But the next 10 or the next 10 years of updates and that's usually by just creating amazing content. So we build a lot of processes for how to identify those opportunities, how to create really good content. I used to always get annoyed by white hat SEO marketers back in the day who would give very abstract advice like just build great content. I'm a very systems guy, so someone says that to me. I'm like what does that actually mean? So how do you define great? What are the steps? How can I document this process? And so we've attempted. It's not always easy. It's not always possible. We've attempted, where possible to do that in all sorts of areas. Content being one, link building being another. We have also branched out into podcasting, as you guys have. So we are. We're at 230 something episodes now. So we have a weekly, weekly show with. With Gal, by the way. I think it's so much easier when there's two people.

Yeah.

Running. Running a podcast. Like, I feel sorry for these. These people running solo podcasts. I have to get a guest on every single week.

It's tough, you know, manage that and see that. So it's a solo show that's called Authority Hacker. Right? Like the podcast.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's a duet show, not a solo show.

Right, Right. Well, yeah, but I was gonna say, yeah, I guess a duet show. But you don't have guests on. Right. So it's always just very rarely.

Maybe like five or six times a year we'll have. Have some have someone on, but it's mostly just a few of us chatting about what's going on.

It's kind of. Yeah, I felt like we had a lot more of those back in the day, but then we just had this desire to get more different guests on and stuff. But yeah, we're always getting pulled back to like, we need to get back on the mic, just the two of us.

You know, we have a sneaky secret too. We've gotten really, really good at RA guest name for SEO. So now like every. Every guest that we have on, we try to get on page one of Google for their name. So now if you search most of our guest name, like the Evergreen Profits Hustle and Flowchart, like podcast is. Is right in the mix with those people's names. So that was sort of like an intentional. Hey, when we interview guests, we sort of boost our SEO.

Quite a bit of a challenge to ourselves. But now we're seeing like, oh, actually this is really benefiting us too, and our guests. So it's kind of cool. Cool.

That's awesome. I never thought of that as an avenue, actually. I always thought about having guests on is you can kind of get exposure to their audience and they promote, which has worked well for us in some cases. But yeah, I'll need to start reverse engineering what you guys are doing.

Yeah, just ask us, we'll let you know.

Typically when we have SEO guys on, it's a little bit harder, but a lot of our guests, they. We don't put any focus on SEO, so just a little smidge of focus on SEO. And we can jump straight to page one.

So with Authority Hacker. So you had the podcast, you had the site, you have some training as well, right? Courses and all that stuff to help folks out.

Yeah. So maybe two and a half years after we started the site, we started a course, Authority Hacker Pro, which was just like a collection of all our advanced tactics and ideas in like step by step video format. And then what we found was that there's quite a lot of beginners newbies joining that course who it's really not suited for. Like, you already need to have a site with traffic to make that work. So we ended up building a beginner's course as well, which even though the content is easy for us because it's beginners, it's basic stuff, it's actually the hardest thing to create because it's more about getting people to actually do stuff and teaching complex things to them quickly in a way that they're not going to just give up after they get stuck in the keyword research and find out it's actually pretty hard to build a website.

Yeah.

I think for us, we found one of the reasons we phased out courses as part of our business model was we were talking about such technical topics. We were talking about Facebook ads, Google Ads.

Various podcasting stuff, affiliate marketing. And a lot of the tools and things that we teach people to use, they evolve so quickly. So it's like if you have videos around Facebook ads, two weeks later, Facebook's going to change something and render your old videos irrelevant. Do you deal with that? And if so, how do you deal with that?

Oh, welcome to my life.

That is one of our biggest challenges.

In fact.

These tools often, they're maybe smaller companies as well, so they don't have change logs about announcing what's changed or they don't really announce it particularly well. It's just someone in our community is like, oh, this doesn't look like this. How do I find this? And we have to go and reshoot it. And then if you're shooting a bunch of videos in sequential order that relate back to the other one, you have to go and do it all again and set up all the examples.

A lot of people, they look at courses as business, think, yeah, it's great. You don't need inventory. You can sell to anyone online. These funnels thing, really cool. I know a lot about this. I can make a course and that's right, you probably can. But building a few videos and calling a course is maybe like 10 or 15% of the work. All of the rest comes in, like what you mentioned there, updating it, managing your customers, your community, the sales funnel, the sales cycle, getting new people in the door, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, it's pretty challenging.

Yeah, in a minute. Maybe we'll do this shortly. Because there's like a whole balance. I know, it's like. Like there's the work that you're teaching and then there's this other side of your business, which are your portfolio sites that we were chatting about before this hit and recording. That's what I'm super curious about. So describe, like, what you're doing outside of the public facing. You have this whole other model happening behind the scenes.

Yeah, yeah. So we actually have a number of other websites, not just authority hackers. So we're not the marketers who teach marketing and do nothing else. You kind of lose your edge quite quickly if you do that. So out of necessity, I mean, I think we'd probably make more money if we just went all in on authority hacker training. But out of necessity, more than anything else, we actively spend a considerable amount of time working on other websites as well. So we build them from scratch in all cases. So far, though, we're looking at buying some, maybe in future. Just to skip forward a little bit in some of the timelines, but we have affiliate marketing websites. Some are monetized by ads, and where possible, we draw this experience into authority hacker. So we did a pretty detailed case study about how we built and grew one site and then sold it 18 months later for a pretty decent amount of money. Then we also document a lot of these in our courses, and we have examples or case study sites within each course so that we show people how we actually build the site and we build an actual site together and things like that. But ultimately.

I'm constantly being pulled by two ends from these businesses. So on the one hand, you've got the need to stay sharp, the need to actually do what we say we can do in other industries, other niches, and kind of be good at SEO, be good at online marketing. And then.

That could be a business in itself. Get rid of an authority hacker. Just do that. In fact, we even considered doing that at one point, just focusing 100% on that. Then you've got authority hacker, which requires us to stop and teach thousands of people this stuff which we're learning. And so in order to do that, you have to actually not just know the stuff, but be good at teaching the stuff. And those are two very, very, very different skill sets, which I Don't think enough people appreciate unless you've. I mean, you guys having built a course, you probably understand that just dumping all your knowledge in a few videos is not a great course. You need to really think through and look at how people are using it, look at what the data is saying, survey your audience, talk to people and just, I mean, it's taken us five years to like learn to really do this stuff properly.

And that's kind of where we're at today. But really, every single quarterly meeting we have, we're like, where are we? Are we, are we like 75% authority hacker? 50%, 25%. You know, we were just getting pulled back and forth the whole time. That is our business. Because we really have to do both of these things to make it work long term. Otherwise we just get rusty. And marketing, especially SEO, it changes so fast. So we just lose our edge and yeah, it's not going to work for long term.

Now, do you guys have much of a team behind running Authority Hacker in some of these other sites, or is it just the two of you trying to do it all yourselves?

No, we have a team and we have a team that goes across all the sites.

Having had 30 people working in our agency at one point, we have a strong desire to keep that team as small as possible. So we're really, really careful these days about who we hire. We only want to hire the absolute best people. So we reject a lot of people. We'd rather have a role go unfilled than bring in someone kind of moderate or average. But yeah, we have a team in place where we've kind of excelled more at that is bringing in people to.

Augment Gail and myself. So rather than replace us as content creators, which I don't think is going to be possible in Authority Hacker, I don't think we can bring someone in and they can just take over the podcast or start making courses. It just wouldn't be the same. A lot of people follow Authority Hacker for Gail and myself and the way we teach our unique weirdness or whatever. So we've kind of taken the bottom up approach to replacing ourselves rather than just trying to step out the business entirely.

On our podcast, actually, I was interviewing a guy, Mike Morrison, he runs a site called the Membership Guys. A big, big fan of what they're doing and they're a membership site about membership sites. And I asked him this question when he was on about what, what's the exit plan here? Can you exit this? And his response was death. He's like, I Love this so much. I'm just going to do this forever until I can't do it anymore.

Cool.

It kind of got me thinking. I feel like I'm kind of on this track as well, to an extent.

As long as you're happy with it. Yeah. The mission's driving. Strong people are stoked on it.

I feel like that's how we approach.

This podcast is like this podcast.

The podcast itself. I don't think we ever plan on stopping some of the other little pieces underneath in the business. All of it's for sale.

Yeah. Hey, for the right price. I learned that from your dad a long time ago. So I'm curious, Mark, about. With an authority site, if someone were to be in, let's say, our shoes, where we have other stuff running, we see the power and team we have, maybe some investment money. Who are the core roles that you think would be required for an authority site?

So it depends how hands on you want to be, but assuming you not vary, then you need some operations person who's just going to be on it. You can sit there and provide the vision for what needs to happen and check in every week or daily standups or whatever, but you need someone who can actually.

Really care about what's happening and make sure all these processes are executed. That's one. A writer, if you're making any kind of authority site, is most likely going to include lots of blog content. So you need a good writer. There's lots of writers out there. There's not very many good writers out there are reasonably priced. So hiring writers is a whole other kettle of fish that needs to be solved. And then around that, those two people as well, they can get the site to a decent kind of level. But when we're creating sites, the strategy, planning, keyword research, site planning, we still do all of that, 100% of that ourselves, just to set the plan. So we'll come up with maybe 200 to 500 blog posts. I mean, a lot of sites never get this far, but blog post ideas, and then we will give that to operations people who will execute on those. I work closely on hiring the writers, and it's really important to find the right type of person who kind of. It's hard to explain, but someone who gets it. And it's not just writing like fluffy blog content because they were given a keyword and an article limit. And so like teaching people how to create good content and having all the processes to do that is a real challenge as well. But those would be the main goals. Sorry, Main roles. And we have a link building team that go across all our sites. So the processes which we develop up on one site for link building, for outreach, for marketing, we tend to rinse and repeat, not all of them, but a lot of them across multiple sites. So there's kind of like economies of scale efficiency there as well.

Now with the content writers that you have, are they first of all, are they in house or are they kind of like freelance where you hire them as you need them?

Our entire team is remote. So we have a number of what I would call like in house staff. Even though they're not in house, they're like full time members of the team. All of our content writers, though, are freelance. So we use them as and when we need them. For a couple of sites, that actually means they're more or less full time and have been for fairly, well, quite a while. But sometimes we're like, okay, we're creating more content, it's not actually going anywhere. Let's just just car losses and kind of stop this for a while. So we like having the flexibility to do that. We've tried with in house riders before. And while you can sometimes get the quality up a little bit faster because you're working with them closely, they're more invested in the business. What we've universally found is that productivity dips quite quickly when you have someone who's, who's getting paid a fixed salary to kind of work rather than getting paid per word, which is what we pay all of our content creators for.

Yeah, I think we brought in a writer in house one time ever. And I think we experienced the same thing where she was really, really good in the beginning, and then after a couple of months, it kind of felt a little more rushed and a little more.

It's human nature. Yeah. But at the same time, you got to structure and account for that. I know this is a deep thing, but is there a quick tip to hiring a good writer, like a location to find them?

Oh, yeah.

I have a few good tips for that actually. So the Pro Blogger jobs board is my favorite place for hiring. That's where we go to. Yes, it's 70 bucks, but if you pay 140 bucks, you can get a featured listing, which I think now is two weeks on the top. And so we'll regularly get a couple hundred people apply for one of our jobs when we do that. One thing though that I've done more recently is I've actually started specifying rates in the past. What we used to do is we Used to say we have an application form, name, email, etc. And then some portfolio samples. Why do you want to work here? And then what's your rate? Most writers don't really know how much they should charge because they're not working with lots of other writers. And you get a lot of decent writers who want to charge you like $2 a word or something ridiculous like that. So what we started doing is we just fixed fixed rate. So like 6 cents a word or whatever it is, it varies niche to niche. And we ended up getting like a lot more high quality writers who maybe like didn't want to spend all the time applying for jobs but knew we had a lot of consistent work to offer who were applying for those positions. So that's helped a lot. Our structured application process has also been really good for that. So. So I read a book called who by a guy called Jeff Smart. Best book on hiring I've ever read.

It's all about this structured process. In the past, whenever I was doing recruitment stuff, I would always just Google what questions should I ask in an interview. I had no idea what I was doing.

Been there, done that.

I just have a 40 minute Skype call with someone, interview them for a bit and then say, did I like that person? I don't know. Maybe yes. And it was such a bad gauge of whether that person was actually suitable for the role or to work with us with our company. After reading this book, we completely restructured the process. We have an application form, everyone fills it in. It's kind of the same. Sometimes it'll be two steps depending on how complex the role is. But the goal there is just to filter out anyone who's really unsuitable and select people who look like they might have a chance. Then from there we do a screening call with a 15 minute screening call. I usually do them with everyone who makes it through there. So it can be sometimes a dozen or so people at that stage. And this all comes from this book, who by Jeff Smart. And the way they structure the questions in the screening calls is really, really smart. So the first question that's asked is what are your career goals? And it kind of throws some people off, but people who have a players, people who want to achieve something, they all have goals and they can all answer that question really, really well. There's some basic stuff. What are you good at professionally? What are you bad at? But the one I like the best is who were your last five clients or bosses if it's for a full time role? And how would they rate you out of five and why, by the way, we do check references, so be honest. And that just uncovers so much like interesting information about people's past and it really raises a lot of red flags for certain people.

Do you lean towards people that answer like a 4 because you're like, oh, there's some honesty there. And then you obviously dig in.

So traditionally if you answer 5 out 5 or 10 out of 10 for something like that, then maybe the person's too confident that you say, but if someone has done one job really, really well and like, you know, actually the rest of them, I was maybe a three or four, but this one I really noticed out of the park. And that was a five, then yeah, get them potentially a good person after that. So anyone who makes it through that stage for writers, we'll do a paid writing assessment. And what we do is we give everyone the exact same assessment to do, we pay them. So there's no kind of issue. Sometimes if you're hiring on upwork or something, you can't do free trials. So we just found it works better if we pay people at this stage. But they're kind of invested already because I've spoken to them on a video chat, face to face, so to speak. So normally people are quite out for doing it at this stage. And then we'll assess not only their writing, but we'll give them an existing article to give feedback on to see how well they can read something and judge what's good, what's bad here. Because I think understanding the nuance and content is quite an important skill trait to have for a good writer. And then sometimes we'll ask them to research something as well and present their findings. It'll be something which they don't know about, just to see how well they take on information. Then from there we go and do like a two hour video interview, just like really go through all their work history, talk about their examples, give them a few hypothetical questions and if they start, if we realize they're going to be good at this stage, we're kind of pre selling them on working with us and talking about our vision and where we want to take the site and how we're different from all these other marketers that just give you 50 keywords and a word count and never talk to you and things like that. So that's our process.

That's smart. One of the things I love about the pro blogger job board, that's where we've always hired writers from as well, is one of the Things we used to do, and you've probably experienced this too, is you'll put an email on the application and say, email me your application or whatever. And then you'll just get your inbox flooded with 200 people emailing you. So we started doing the same thing where we'd send them to a Google form, a Google form where it would basically populate a Google sheet for us with all the information they filled out. And the cool thing is you'll get like, you know, 150 applications or whatever. You might pick a couple writers and then let's say a few months down the line, you're looking for more writers. You don't have to go post on ProBlogger again. You can just go back to the database you created from, you know, people filling out that form.

Yeah, we do the exact same thing. We use Google forms for that. And what we also do is we link it using Zapier Help Scout, which is a tool we use for our customer support. We have a separate installation of this just for recruitment. And then we use the canned response feature in Help Scout to decline people or ask for more information, or set up the screening calls using Calendly and stuff like that. It's a central place, so I don't actually have to manage all of the back and forth organizing stuff. We can have our support team help us out with that as well.

Very cool. Just take it away from your bucket of. Yeah, because I just remember, yeah, it was like a blessing to see so many writers, but at the same time, we're like, oh, my God, we have to sift through all these. Like, holy crap. Yeah.

Well, luckily it dumps them all into a Google sheet. So you could, like, sort them by criteria, sort them by price, sort of. You know, you could sort it out and sort of narrow in on people. So the last question I have about content, Joe may have more, but the last question I have about content is once somebody writes an article for you, what's your process after they turn it in? Do you. Do you go and tweak it so it's more in your voice? Do you do anything else or do you kind of trust your writers at that point to just publish the content?

Well, we 100% do not trust our writers to publish the content early on. We normally have operations, people who do all the editing. Publishing, I say editing, it's not traditional copy editing, spelling and grammar. It's like we use a tool called Surfer SEO a lot these days to. It's really good at finding alternative keywords which it does like correlation analysis with sites which are already ranking to see which secondary LSI keywords, whatever you want to call it, is in there. And then we'll add a few of those to the content and then maybe if there's a featured snippet, we'll think about optimizing the code for that. If there's a list that needs to go in there and some of the images which we find, it's really bad when writers source their own images. Either there's copyright issues or they're just kind of bad. So we have operations people that do that. And then if it needs to be promoted in some way by email or on social media, or broken down into some Instagram stories or whatever, there's other people that get roped into doing that. So we have a pretty slick process in Asana. It's like a project management task management system, which we use. So when the writer ticks off that they've done it upload or attaches the Google Doc to the Asana task, then it automatically kicks off a number of tasks for other people to create that content as well. And that's the only way we've been able to manage so much content with so few people. Because back in the day before we were somewhat organized like this, it was just a nightmare. You'd have someone's Excel document with someone else's Google sheet and someone else just keeping track of things in notepad stuff just went all over the place and we're forgetting to pay people and all sorts of stuff like that.

Well, that's what's the beauty of what it sounds like. What you're doing is you're front loading the systems, the processes. It's all very duplicatable. I mean, it's not like you're doing. I mean, you have 200 keywords, you're giving them in the very beginning, you know, and then so there's not going to be a mystery of what's going to actually show up on the site eventually. So I think it's brilliant because anybody who even just manages one blog will start dropping the ball on all this stuff, let alone a whole bunch of them. Like, you guys are, are.

Yeah. Oh, and the image thing is huge too. Like, make sure you're double checking the images. I remember one time we had a writer write something for us, used an image they found online and then we got a bill from Getty Images for $800 and we're like, mother, damn it.

That writer was very excited before as well.

Yeah, I feel like if you're doing.

Enough content, you're going to run into it eventually.

We try and use a site called Unsplash that's pretty good for. For royalty free images. We picked up on Appsumo. A deal for deposit photos image comes up every so often, so we use that. But actually what's working really well for us lately is Canva. So it's like.

Online, simpler, easier to use version of Photoshop that has a bunch of stock imagery and stock parts to it. You can create not just stock images, but featured images with your title and other cool elements really, really easily. So that's been something we've been playing around with quite a lot lately as well.

For images. Yeah. Well, I'm curious still on the content vein and all this stuff because you mentioned SEO a bunch of times. I know in our research you guys are big into just organic traffic. You have other traffic sources too. And we're doing a ton in SEO and we're actually currently just nerding out and optimizing madmin.

We use Ahrefs for, for pretty much everything. We're starting to use Topic. Use topic. I don't know if you ever.

Usetopic.Com yeah, check it out. It's more of like a contextual app that helps you refine your existing content so you could jump the ranks and all that stuff.

Well, what it basically does is you can plug in like a link to a blog post and it will analyze all the posts on the front page that are similar and then it'll tell you like other keywords to add into the mix and say like, hey, this one that's ranking first also talks about this, this and this. Consider talking about this, this and this and your content if you want to rank for these keywords. And it goes a little bit above and beyond what Ahrefs does in terms of like actually analyzing what's inside the content and telling you how to optimize the content. It's like Yoast SEO on steroids.

I guess that's actually exactly what surfer SEO does is sounds like those two tools kind of have a bit of an overlap there. But yeah, it's worked. That approach has worked very well for us because Google knows what it wants. It's showing you what it wants by what's already ranking there. So the more elements of that you can bring into your content, the better. I want to caveat that by saying don't just rip off and copy what's on page one, because I really do feel like with the prevalence of these kind of tools that there's, there's perhaps a pull towards everything being the same and just like a different version, rewriting what's ranking number one. So I always have to catch myself not going too far down that route and still trying to come up with something somewhat unique.

Yeah. Well, from a podcaster perspective, if you're going to interview a guest, let's say you're interviewing, I don't know, just for sake of ease, let's say you're gonna interview Richard Branson.

Right?

Well, you can Google Richard Branson, figure out all the most common questions people have about Richard Branson and then when you interview him, make sure you ask those questions. Put the transcripts on your blog post and there's a good chance you're gonna go like, for Richard Branson, you're gonna climb the ranks because you're asking all the questions that are so commonly asked when people Google Richard Branson.

You gotta give a shout out to Jurgen.

I love it.

Polymash, Jurgen and Polymash.

Yeah, that's Polymash Jurgen.

Yeah, yeah. So gotta give that shout out. But yeah, it's freaking brilliant. And Ahrefs, I know, does have like a questions tab. I was telling you that last night.

But yeah, we use the questions. We use Ahrefs as our. It's the best keyword tool by country mile. And we use the questions tab in Keyword Explorer to find a lot of questions for actually doing link building opportunities. So a lot of the info based content ideas there, they tend to have a lot of links already. So if you sort them in reverse order by keyword difficulty, kd, which is Ahrefs metric, which just basically tells you on a 0 to 100 scale the number of links pointing to sites ranking for that keyword. Then you can do like skyscraper based link building towards those content based around those keywords. And that's been huge for us over the last four or five years.

That's cool. Yeah, that's another hack that we like start messing with.

Did you have something else on there? I actually wanted to talk about link building.

Well, yeah, SEO. I wanted to just. I was curious about the process on these authority sites. I know you have surfer SEO, you have the keywords kind of thought out. Like when you actually publish content, what does your process look like at that point?

With SEO, you mean in terms of link building?

Yeah, link building or just really optimizing for traffic in general. Like do you, do you have Yoast in there as well?

And so basically what you're asking is like when a blog post goes live, like what are the steps you follow to make sure it's optimized?

Right. So actually as we're writing the blog post, we will do some of these steps. So Surfer SEO has a sort of plugin essentially which works with Google Docs and as you're writing it, you can get it so an editor can come in so long before we publish it. There's a few of these steps where we're already sort of taking once it's actually live and out there, most of the work from then, most of the on page work is already done. We used to use Yoast last year, a couple years ago, three years ago, they had a bunch of issues. I actually forget what it was, but we've started using a tool called Rank Math. Rank Maths, Rank Math, I forget Singular. But it's basically the same as Yoast, but it has all of the features which Yoast used to have for free, which you now have to pay for in Yoast. So if you're on a budget, it's a significant good one to go for.

Sweet.

So we do all our kind of technical meta description stuff like that on there. Then it's primarily a link building game for us.

Yeah, let's talk about that then.

So on a site which is already kind of on its way up and has a number of articles, some traffic and stuff, we will do some internal link building. So that could either be just like looking at our inventory of content and seeing where would it make sense to link to. This is why having a full time person in operations on your team that's dedicated to helping out doing this kind of stuff comes in handy because they know all the sites you're trying to put, the pages you're trying to push that are maybe top of page two, bottom of page one, that a few internal links can maybe push it up a bit. We have a process. I can't remember exactly what it is, but it's something like if you Google your own site, like site authority, hacker and then a topic it will come up with, Google will present topics or pages which that topic is related to just on your site. And then that can serve as a way of identifying internal linking opportunities.

But that's quite straightforward. The biggest chunk of work is on doing proper link building like backlinks. And so we have a number of different processes which we'll do. Some of them are kind of site wide, so we'll do like guest posting. We're doing a lot of helper reporter out Haro it's been really good for newish sites just to get a lot of really high authority links. Plus it's free to sign up to and join that newsletter as well. So get a lot of links like that in the early days, but specifically to content where we're posting often we'll let it sit for a little while and just see is it going to rank naturally and that will depend on competition or if we know it's just going to be. It's going to be an uphill battle and it's like a long term thing. We'll start link building immediately, trying to get deep links to that specific page. So whatever we're doing in guest posting at the time, we will. Or skyscraper link building, we've done a lot of as well. Or you know, things like this. I'm coming on your podcast not really to build a link. It's more publicity and stuff. But you know, there may be link building opportunities for things like that. Just any marketing activity that you're doing, any, anything you're contributing to your community, like look for a link. Yeah, so we did one recently with we use asana a lot, as I was mentioning, for our processes. So we actually reached out to them and said, hey, we use asana. Here's all the crazy advanced stuff we do with it. We've actually built some training for it in our course and stuff. We showed them it and they're like, cool, we'd love to do a case study of you guys. So they interviewed us and we're getting some publicity that way. There's some links coming back from there. So you have to like, I know, you just have to always be hungry for links and everything you do you need to think of as like, what is a link building offer opportunity. Where's the next one? How can I get my next link building fix? And then just as you're naturally doing promotional stuff for real marketing for your business, you will come across numerous opportunities for that.

Well, for podcasting specifically, I mean you kind of did it earlier. Probably not intentionally, but mentioning I think it was one of the podcasts or articles you wrote, the case study thing, we'll for sure link that. So sue, who's listening? Who takes our notes? I don't know. Do you know the number of the episode or.

Probably I don't, but next time I come into podcast, I'm gonna have it ready. Just so someone asked me that, well.

After this podcast, just email us the link to that case study and we'll link that. One of the things that we do when we go on podcast is obviously, we mentioned the name of our show and the link to our site, but we always like to mention, like, one sort of cornerstone, pillar, piece of content on the podcast as well. Because now we're getting, like, a link straight to our homepage, but we're also getting a deep link from being on that podcast as well. So we always like to do that on podcasts is kind of mention a few different sources that people can go to, so that now there's multiple links, both, like, to the surface level page, but also deeper links.

Well, I'll help you out again, Sue.

That's really, really smart, actually. I like that.

You should link up, Sue. Who's listening? Yeah. 182 is the episode I was, like, nerding out. I think it was your business model on authority sites or, like, the structure of it or something.

Oh, I loved how that started off, too. That was an episode where you're like, this is kind of an intro, so people don't know who you are yet, so who the fuck are you? And that's how the episode started.

Like, I like these guys.

These guys match our style a bit.

We're.

Gail and I were a little bit awkward with all this kind of intro. We don't have any sponsors. We don't really have anything to go on. It's just like, here's the podcast. All right, can we start talking? So Gail got into this routine of asking me how it's going. So I was like, but first I'll introduce you to my business partner, Mark. How's it going, Mark? And I was like, oh, yeah, fine. Great. It was always really, really awk. But in the last episode of our show, we started doing these. We publish on YouTube as well, so we started doing these chapters on YouTube. So we have, like, from five minutes to seven minutes, we're talking about X. From seven minutes to nine minutes, we're talking about Y. So he's now got the 00:30 to 00:45. How's it going?

You're famous in a chapter. Yeah. People could skip to it. Like, let's see how awkward Mark is than this one. How about this one? I like that chapter feature, actually. That's probably a cool strategy there for just content in general.

What's the timestamp thing? Right, that's what you're referring to.

Yeah. So it's really rudimentary how YouTube works. So you just leave a comment with the timestamp and the index or the name of what you want to describe. That chapter and it will automatically put it in. I think you just have to put it in a comment or in the description.

Yeah.

So you can't really kind of set it in the back end or anything at the moment. But we did it this week for the first time and our average watch time on YouTube went from like 9 minutes to like 16 minutes or something like that, which was huge. So it makes a big difference because people can just. It sounds like you guys usually do longer podcasts kind of. Kind of like us. So people can just skip to the parts they want and can actually get the content they want to get out of it while they're having their breakfast or whatever else they do.

It's funny because I love it when other podcasters do that, but we actually haven't implemented that in our podcast.

Well, you know what? This is how we do that. Hey, Jacob, you're listening too. So this is how we do this. Mark, he's our editor and helps us with YouTube. So we should do this chapter thing.

We train our team members through podcast episodes.

We should do this chapter thing that Mark's talking about. Check out his channel.

Yeah, if you're using Pat Flynn's player. So we use Fusebox, which used to be the smart podcast player. They actually have that timestamp feature so you can embed the player on your blog post and do the same timestamping thing too. We don't use it, but it's there.

We actually used to use smart podcast player as well, but I can't remember why we stopped using it. I think when we started doing more YouTube based stuff, we pushed that first. We still have SoundCloud and everything going out to Spotify and wherever else. But we really trying to push YouTube first and foremost now because it just seems such a great, great opportunity for not only engagement, but for discovery in podcasts as well.

There was something that's just reminded me, I think it was something Gail said in that podcast, which I was just like, dear God, I need a nerd out on all these shows that you guys have. And the note pages are just better than anything I've ever seen too. For a podcast with diagrams and stuff. No shit. It's amazing. But there was, I think Gail was talking about if you want to grow Instagram, your Instagram channel, embed that content on your post. Like, same with YouTube, it sounds like embed that. If you're trying to grow an audience there, why don't you double dip when it's on your own website? Obviously you can capture your Pixel Em. You can do all that stuff within your control. So is that part of the strategy?

A hundred percent. Because when we're emailing our audience or doing monthly roundups to members about here. Here's some interesting podcasts we did this month. In the past it would be just a SoundCloud embed or the smart podcast player, whatever, and then the show notes and sometimes a transcript. Back when we used to do full transcripts, transcripts rather. But now we just do the same thing. We just stick the YouTube video embedded higher up on it. And that alone drives people to that platform as well. So yeah, it works very well.

It's like so simple. But when you said I was like, duh.

It's like if you're trying to grow.

Something, just put it where the eyeballs already are.

Yeah, it's true. Pretty obvious. There's so much stuff that we have like blind spots to. And then we'll have a podcast with somebody to just.

Just like duh.

It's also like little things. So we tried doing daily shows for a couple weeks just to see what that would be like. As a bit of an experiment, it was kind of fun. It allowed us to cover shorter topics, snack size content that we wouldn't have necessarily done an hour long episode from. But what happened was that it really split our audience. Half of them loved it and half of them hated it. So as part of that, what we did was say if you guys, if you like this or if you don't like this, you have any opinions, go to YouTube. YouTube, because there's comments there and comment on this video. Tell us what you like. And comments obviously Drive engagement on YouTube. It's one of the metrics that drive engagement. So it really kind of like spiked our interest in our podcast for those two weeks when we were doing that before we reverted back.

That's really, really smart. We should start doing that on our podcast. Tell them because these do get repurposed into YouTube videos as well.

So just start throwing the comments over there around the episode.

Throw the comments over there and we'll keep an eye on that. There's one last question I wanted to ask, but it's sort of a slight change of subject and then we can go ahead and start wrapping up. But so obviously we've got two sort of partnerships here that are unique in the fact that they make it past 10 years or two years.

So for me and Joe, I think that the key to the success of our partnership is really, really clearly knowing who we are in the business. Right. Like I know who I am in the business. I'm the technical systems guy, right? I do advertising, SEO, build systems, spreadsheets. Like I'm very techy. Joe's more like outreach, connecting with people, networking, speaking, going on a lot of podcasts, things like that. So like we have clearly defined like these are my things in the business. So I'm kind of curious as sort of the sort of final wrap up, what sort of things do you believe has led to you guys having a successful partner?

Certainly that. So our line's a little bit more diagonal than that. But so Gail I would describe as like the techie mad scientists. Like loads of ideas and experiments and stuff, all drawings all over the wall. And then I think we're both quite introverted, but I'm more the systems processes guy that comes along and takes all this craziness and organizes it and makes it into more of a business. So that certainly he has a lot of skills that I don't have. I have a lot of skills that he doesn't have. So that synergy has really kind of underpinned it. One other thing which we did right at the start is that we were both like, okay, this is it, we're both going all in, into this. No outside projects. And in a considerable number of cases where partnerships fall apart, part I've coached people and talked to people about these situations. It's often because they're being pulled in multiple ways. So it's like, well, I could put all this extra energy into the business, but my other business, which does something not too dissimilar, I get 100% of the equity or the revenue or the profits from that.

Game theory starts coming in and it's like, what are you really trying to do and what's your incentives? And all this kind of stuff, it just gets a bit messy. We have it very, very clear. It's like this is 100% of everything is going in here. If I come up with an idea, it goes in here. If Gail comes up with something or we don't do consulting anymore. But maybe four years ago, someone paid Gail to do a bunch of consulting and flew him out somewhere. He put that money in the business. So we sort of split it in a way. So it's just kind of like that long term, okay, we're both in this together. We both want the same thing. We're both going to make it kind of equal. Has been a big driver. Plus we're, we're both quite logical people.

I don't want to be one of those people. Well, I have no ego, but we definitely both have egos. But.

It'S quite common that we will have a debate about something and then whoever has the correct logical idea, the other person will be like, okay, yeah, actually you're right. That makes sense.

I like that. Yeah. You get down to like, obviously there's always emotions and wants and needs and personalities and your motive, motives over his or vice versa. But at the end of the day, it's like what's right for the business audience. Whatever your goal is, logic is typically the thing that'll get there. Emotions are probably gonna get fired up and that's probably just gonna lead to like better ideas and probably a better outcome. Yeah.

And I can definitely attest to the like, you know, your focus. Both have to be in the same place. I've had previous business partners in the past. I know Joe has as well. Well, where, you know, in one of my businesses specifically, that was my full time thing, but it was my partner's side gig essentially. And that's just a recipe for resentment. Right. Like over time, if I'm putting 100% into something and he's putting 50% into something, but we're splitting the revenue 50, 50, resentment is going to come from it. So I think that's sort of something that we both learned from past partnerships of like, we're either all in on this or we're out.

It's also as you get. I mean, we've been doing this for 10 years. I'm in my mid-30s now. When we started this, we're in our mid-20s and our priorities in life were vastly, vastly different to what they are now. So it's just accepting that what you want to do in life and long term plans, they're 100% going to change as you get older. And it's just like being honest with each other about, hey, I don't really want to do this, or hey, I'm thinking about doing this, or we need to, to prepare for this, or I'm getting married, we need to make some more money. You know, I want to buy a house, this, this kind of stuff. And it seems like the other person kind of like being okay with contributing towards some of the other person's goals, even if they're not feeling them at that exact moment or whatever.

So you're essentially married. I mean, at the end of the day, it's very similar to a marriage.

Dude, we can relate. I mean, we're in the mid-30s, so like we've had, yeah. Houses Kids moving, other stuff. Just random things happen. And we're always there to. As long as you got the support and you share for us, it's a lot of, like, the shared vision of where we're headed and then knowing who we are, how we work and all that stuff, then it's gonna work out. As long as we're keeping true to ourselves and that vision that we agreed upon.

Yeah, I mean, we've had. We've had times in our business where, like, maybe I'd take some extra money because I have an expense that, like, Joe doesn't have, or Joe would take extra money from the business for a month because he needed it for whatever reason. We just always know, like, it's gonna even out eventually, you know? So I think if you have that kind of approach to it and you're kind of cool and open about that sort of thing, then it should play out well. But as soon as, like, go ahead.

That's really key as well, especially for things like expenses. So, like, I'm a PC guy through and through, so I'm all about, you know, building a moderately priced desktop, whereas Gail's like a Mac guy, and he gets the. He always gets the latest iPhone or imac or whatever. And it's just like, you don't even think about those kind of things because. Especially with an expense like that, because it's something contributing towards the business. And if it's. You need money for whatever, something in your personal life, it's freeing up your time so that you can work on the business. Therefore, it's contributing towards the future growth. So you kind of really have to think big about these kind of micro issues. As tempting as it is in the early days to kind of like. Like, what's he doing?

Yeah, I think it's something.

At the end of the day, I.

Almost feel like it's something that almost all partners have to figure out through trial and error. It's sort of hard to convey that through this conversation. I think people, like, everybody thinks, oh, we're different. But then, like, not really. We've definitely had our ups and downs.

Well, I think this is super fascinating of a conversation. Maybe we'll do it again later on because there's just so much cool stuff. Or Gail, maybe we'll have him on. Hear his perspective in here.

You guys. You guys will have to come on ours as well at some point. I think I really enjoy this. I can tell you guys are super kind of passionate about what you guys do and stuff as well. It really comes across in your interview as well.

Thank you. Well, hope you had a good time. Let's, I guess. Lastly, you already mentioned who as a solid book for hiring. Is there another book or maybe some resource, even a podcast that you refer to often? You recommend others.

I'm a big fan of managing finances properly, so Ramit Sethi's book, I Will Teach youh to Be Rich for Personal Finance or Mike McCallowitz, profit first. Really, really good book for particularly back in our agency days, we were really struggling to. I don't really know where all the money went. We kept spending it as soon as it came in on growth and stuff. But reading this book really helped us to flip that model on its head and. And as soon as we did, we were allocating all our money correctly and planning things and suddenly we just had a lot more money because our entrepreneurial drive to make things work superseded our ability to spend money.

I like it.

I highly recommend that book.

Solid. Yeah, they're both great. Perfect, man. Well. Authorityhacker.com yeah. Find the podcast there courses all these cool things that we're going to link up in the show notes that are linking directly there too. So check out the show notes. Dude. Mark, it's been great. Thank you for coming on the show.

Yeah, absolute pleasure, guys. Really, really enjoyed this one. Thanks a lot for having me on.

Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for listening to that episode. This is Joe Fear. I'm sure you probably already knew that and Matt is not here right now, but I'm pretty sure he enjoyed the episode just as much as you and I did because, you know, he went into the production of kind of making that thing right along with me. So thank you very much. I want to give a couple quick shout out to our buddies over at Easy Webinar. These guys have been supporting us for a while, a long time, and Casey Zieman is just a super good guy all around. He's actually been on the show before. He's the founder of Easy Webinars. So if you look up Casey Zman on any podcast platform you're listening to, go check him out. Go check out his backstory, what he's all about. You can learn a lot about webinars as well. And right now, Easy Webinar, these guys are are actually hooking you up with a great trial. It's a completely free trial to test out their software, Soup to nuts. Check it all out and see if it's a good fit for you. If you go to easywebinar.com hustle. That's H U S T L E if you didn't know how to spell hustle, there you go. So if you go to easywebinar.com hustle, you can go grab a free trial. And Easy Webinar literally lives up to its name. It's super simple. I mean, super easy. And it does all the stuff that you're looking for in any kind of thing with webinars. I mean, they literally cover every single type of webinar you possibly can do. So from live to automated to scheduled at specific times, and all these crazy features in between, can't even list them all out. I'll be here way too long. They give you a ton of advanced analytics. What's working, what's not. During your webinar. Based off all these actions, you'll see, see who attended, how long they stayed, if they clicked the offer or if they didn't. Basically, you're gonna make more money and you're gonna work less with this thing and you're gonna create better relationships with the folks that are listening. Cause it's a good experience. You wanna give that good experience along with some great content, of course, and a killer offer if that's what you got for them. So go try it out yourself. Go check out easywebinar.com hustle. That's easywebinar.com hustole. Alrighty. So that is the end of this episode. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, enjoying it. Hopefully you did. I'm pretty sure you did, if you lasted this long. And go check out Easy Webinar when you get the chance and we will talk to you next time. Bye 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 notes. Thanks for listening.

Get it Wiki Wiki. We love you.