Matt Wolfe breaks down his three-part media strategy: YouTube for attention, a website for search traffic and email signups, and a newsletter for retention. His Future Tools site gets close to a million visitors monthly, and he's been refining this approach for over a decade.
Questions this video answers
13 years (content marketing, copywriting, etc.).
"Close to a million visitors a month" (as stated in the transcript).
Nine years for the show overall; Matt participated for about seven and a half years.
Chapters
I might have been one of the first, if not the first channel to really say, all right, I'm going to put my channel fully focused on AI. But it wasn't like a methodical thing. It was just like. That was what really interested me. And I started making videos about it. The video started doing well, and I went, okay, well, these videos are doing well. Let's keep making videos about it.
It's cool, because Stepping stones. I mean, I don't know who said it, but it's like you can connect the dots, you know, going in reverse, and it makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
It's never a straight line or whatever. It's that whole zigzag thing. And I mean, we haven't mentioned. But you have. You know, you have a podcast as well, the Next Wave, and that's with HubSpot, which is. Which is rad. Yeah. And that gets a lot of attention. You have the YouTube channel. We already mentioned the community. You have what future tools.
Yeah.
Is. Is the website. You also have an email newsletter. And it's like you start. Well, I was mentioning it to you, and I don't know, I don't think we chatted about it before this, but I see it as, like, three key components. Is like, you have the media side, which is your YouTube channel mainly, and then you have your website, which is the hub. You can have sponsorships, other monetization. You can, obviously on YouTube as well. And then. And then the email newsletter is all tied together again, sponsorships, but they're all very scalable. Couple of those are sellable. Maybe the media side, too, but like, the other ones. Yeah, but like, that whole trifecta, I feel like, is a model that a lot of people and something that we talked about a long time mentioned, Evergreen Profits, like our old company. It's kind of the same idea, but you said it wasn't really super methodical, but you did it. And, like, you did it anyway. It's probably in there somewhere, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of times I don't think we give ourselves enough credit for, you know, how. How it all came to be. Right. Like I say, it's not super methodical, but Also I did 13 years of marketing, content marketing, copywriting, all of that kind of stuff. So it's like in my brain, the pieces all kind of fit together and made sense of, like, what I should do. But it wasn't like, okay, I sat down with a pen and paper and said, all right, I'm going to make this three pronged approach of YouTube website newsletter. It was just like the marketing brain in me who's been doing this for so long knew that, okay, we've got the media outlet, which can drive attention. We've got the newsletter, which can drive retention, right? Keep bringing people back to whatever I'm doing over and over again. And then we've got the website, which can sort of capitalize on SEO and other traffic methods to bring people in as well. But also the website is what grows the newsletter the most. Most people think, oh, the newsletter probably grows from YouTube. I get almost no subscribers to my newsletter, even though it's my main call to action in my YouTube videos. Most of my newsletter growth comes from the Future Tools website. The Future Tools website gets close to a million visitors a month straight up from Google SEO, right? So it's like I have a way of capitalizing on the SEO with, with the website. It grows the newsletter, which helps with retention, so I can bring people to back to YouTube videos and back to the website. And it's just this like, symbiotic process that to me just all kind of made sense. Like, if you have a website, you should have a newsletter. We've, like, we've preached that for over a decade now. If you have a website, grow a damn newsletter that helps you bring people back to the website, right? Content marketing is, in my opinion, the best form of marketing because it's free. You put the content out there, it could live on forever and continue to drive traffic forever. We've preached that forever, right? So it's like all of the stuff I'm doing is literally the stuff that you and I preached on the Hustle and Flowchart for, you know, however long. We did the Hustle and Flowchart show together.
Nine years. Well, with you about seven and a half or so.
So it's all, it's all just doing like practicing what we've been preaching, right? You build media, create content, grow a list. And that's really.
