NP 38: How Matt Paulson Built a Finanicial Network of Sites Getting 2.5 Million Pageviews and...

Welcome to the Niche Pursuits Podcast. Are you ready to discover some niche business ideas that actually work well? It's time for a motivational kick to jumpstart your next big idea. Here's your host, Spencer Haas.

Hey, everyone, Spencer haas here of nichepursuits.com

and welcome to the Niche Pursuits Podcast.

Today it's going to be a really interesting show because we have a special guest with us. His name is Matt Paulson and his

blog is over@mattpulsen.com he's an entrepreneur, he's an aspiring author, and he's an ASP.net web developer. Matt publishes a daily investment newsletter to over 92,000 subscribers through his Analyst Ratings network. And he operates a network of financial news websites, including American BankingNews.com and AnalystRatings.net along with a few others. He also has a few other websites that we will talk about just briefly. One of those being Lightning Releases, which is a press release writing and distribution service that he created to help out small companies, authors, and nonprofits get their message out to the world. And then finally, we'll have the chance to discuss a book that Matt has just finished writing that will be released probably before you listen to this podcast. It's called 40 Rules for Internet Business Success.

And so I'm very excited to have

Matt with us on the show. So we're going to go ahead and dive right in and let Matt tell.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Niche Pursuits podcast. My name is Spencer Hawes from nichepursuits.com and as well, I also have Perrin on with me as co host. As usual, Perrin, how you doing?

Pretty good. Hey, everybody.

Awesome. And we have a special guest today, actually, we have Matt Paulson of mattpulson.com who's going to talk to us a little bit about a couple of successful sites that he's had and some of the tactics that he has used to make those sites so successful. So, Matt, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Spencer. It's good to be here.

Absolutely. Yeah. No, thanks for reaching out. We had actually contacted each other. Boy, it seems like it's been maybe a year ago or so we exchanged.

Yeah.

And finally hooked up again. And I wanted to have you on the show because you shared with me some of the numbers from some of your sites, and I was quite impressed,

to say the least.

But before we jump into those sites and why they've done so well, I want to hear a little bit of your background. Just briefly tell us your story of how you became an entrepreneur, how you went from just being A guy in school to somebody with a successful online business.

Sure. So I guess my entrepreneurial spirit really started when I was a kid. I did things like lemonade stands and I collected aluminum cans and sold them. So it must be in my blood. I've had it from kind of day one in like middle school and high school. This would have been like 1995, 1996, kind of those years I had like a website about SimCity and I had some ads on it and I was getting 25 hits a day. And back then I was pretty happy with those numbers. And I might have made like 25 bucks a month just on some random ad network that doesn't exist anymore. I kind of had the gene from day one. High school, I kind of took a break from doing Internet stuff just because I got busy with activities and stuff. In college I went to basically computer school for computer science and then I stuck around for a master's degree after that. When I was in school I had a lot of free time. So I ended up making just some websites and actually started out as kind of a personal finance blogger. So I had a website called Just American Consumer News and I don't update it anymore. But at the time it was maybe getting hit today after a year or so and I was doing pretty well with that. It was making maybe 50 grand a year After a couple years into was kind of a fun business, but I kind of realized that I'm not going to be the next JD Roth or Trent Ham from the simple dollar of those people. I just don't have it in me. I realized that if I'm going to do this, I got to find something else to do that I can do better than anyone else. I kind of really took an inventory of my skill set. It's like, what do I know how to do? What can I do better than anyone else? I eventually landed on the investing space one, because I know some stuff about it. Two, I think I can report on it in ways that other people haven't done so well. And I have some good programming skills and some good data analysis and automation skill. So I've been able to take some data and report on it in ways that I think are interesting. And apparently other people have some well and have as well. And I've really been able to kind of build a funnel from just getting people on my websites to onto an email list and selling them stuff down the line. So I've really been doing Internet business for kind of in a serious way for seven, eight years. I've been full time with it for two years now and business is going extremely well. I couldn't be happier. I do three different businesses. We certainly talk about those more in a little bit though.

And what are those businesses, Matt?

Sure. So there are kind of three main businesses that I have and the first is kind of the investment news reporting business. I use the brand analyst ratings network. So I get have a few different kind of financial news websites. One of those is americanbankingandmarketnews.com so I drive a lot of traffic to those through a variety of different measures. And then on there I get an email address, say, hey, sign up for my daily newsletter. And after they sign up for the newsletter, they get offers for a premium version of the newsletter. So I've got, I think 94,000 people signed up for the free newsletter and then 2,000 people are paying for a monthly, like the premium version on a monthly basis. That's going pretty well. The network of financial news websites gets, I think, about two and a half million page views per month. So the ad dollars add up pretty quickly there. The other two businesses are. One is called Lightning Releases. It's a press release writing and distribution business. So we help people write press releases and then we help them, you know, get them out to places where people actually see them and read them. That business I started about 18 months ago and that's taken off pretty well. And my newest business is called GoGoPhoto contest. And that organization helps animal shelters and humane societies raise money through photo contest fundraisers. So basically they run a photo contest. People will pay to submit their pets to the contest. And at the end, whoever gets the most votes will get to be in a calendar or something like that. So we've done, I think, 80 of those contests with humane sites around the country. That business isn't that big yet because we only keep like 5 or 10% of the proceeds. So it's, you know, we've helped raise 350,000, but we haven't really, you know, we made maybe 10% of that. We're still growing on that one. But those are kind of the three different businesses that I run.

Awesome. Yeah, sounds like you're doing quite a bit and having quite a bit of success. I mean, just with the financial network. I believe you said you have about two and a half million page views per month. That gives people an idea of how large these sites are. 94,000 free subscribers, 2,000 premium subscribers. So clearly you're doing pretty well there. And we're going to dig into the numbers here in just a second. And then talk about how you grew those subscribers and how you've grown the revenue on those sites. Would you mind sharing what is your most profitable website? You mentioned several there. Is there one in particular that stands out?

Sure.

So certainly the investment reporting businesses, probably the biggest, but it's actually a network of four or five different sites that kind of work together.

Gotcha. Okay.

And those are sites, you know, I started AmericanBakingNews.com from scratch and Analyst Ratings Network, and I've acquired a few more that also drive traffic to the Analyst Ratings Network. So that's kind of my biggest kind of business unit in terms of revenue overall. But certainly it's split up between, you know, affiliate revenue and subscriptions and just, you know, adsense and display ads and that kind of stuff. And even now we're getting into like doing some dedicated emails to our list and it was pay quite well. Pretty good as well.

So the two biggest URLs or the two biggest sites is the americanbankingnews.com and is it analystratings.net?

yes.

Okay.

And then there's a couple of others associated with that network as well.

Yep.

Okay, awesome. So now the big question here. Are you willing to share what the actual monthly income is for either that network or a couple of those sites?

Sure, I guess I could do that. I'm not ashamed of the numbers or anything. So the total business makes between 90,000 and 120,000 in monthly revenue. Probably 60% of that comes from the investment. New stuff, a lot of that subscriptions and then probably half of it subscriptions, you know, 40%, you know, another 40% of that is, you know, display ads, and 10% is miscellaneous stuff like email ads and affiliate commissions. So the kind of the investment space that, you know, makes between, you know, 50 and 60amonth and everything else makes, you know, between 40 and 50amonth.

That's huge.

Yeah, the numbers are great. Yeah, I can't complain about them.

And as far as the trajectory of debt income, I mean, you said that you've been doing it full time for two years. So has it been steadily increasing or did you kind of explode in the last two years or what was the trajectory of that?

Okay, so 2009 I made 71,000. 2010 I made 139,000. 2011 I made 276,000. 2012 I made 327. 2013 I doubled it to 789. Then this year, so far, halfway into the year, I'm at 661. So I'm probably on track to do a million 2 and 13 this year.

So that's a pretty big hockey stick

for someone with websites. Yeah, it's taken a while, but it's really starting to explode and really starting to leverage all the relationships and assets that I have and just really trying to maximize those.

Man, that's awesome. There's a ton of questions that I want to ask and a lot that we could probably learn. So I know that you have a network of sites, and I'm not sure the best way to approach it. I was thinking maybe we'd just talk about one site. What I'd like to do is discuss something that is somehow replicable by people listening. We want to hear your story of how you started from no website to where you are today. So maybe tell us, well, why did you. I guess you explained a little bit why you created analyst ratings or the financial network, just because you brought some different things. But was there anything in particular that made you want to create that website or that network?

Sure. So this story kind of begins in maybe 2009 when I started AmericanBankingNews.com, which is, I think I call it American Banking and Market News now. That site had picked up really quickly. There are a lot of, like, investing and finance, specific ways to do SEO, relating around stock tickers through places like StockTwits and Twitter and Google Finance and a few other places. And I really kind of figured that out pretty early, and I was able to maximize kind of ticker SEO as a source of traffic. So that really turned into 2010. After I'd been doing it maybe a year and a half, we were getting maybe a million page views per month. So it was really a way to just produce content at scale and then have that content flow into places that talk specifically about specific companies that have stock tickers. And that turned into a lot of traffic pretty quickly, and we were just really able to maximize that. And the traffic was great. And I knew that it was good ad revenue, but I knew that if I want this to be a sustainable business that sticks around for the next 10 years or so, I'm going to need actual customers that are buying products and services for my company on a regular basis. So I didn't want to just stay at the ad revenue. So I kind of started the email newsletter. At first there was just the free newsletter, but then I had gotten a whole bunch of people that said, hey, Matt, I really love the newsletter, but I really wish it would have this or I really wish it was sent earlier in the morning or I wish it didn't have ads or I wish I could get email alerts. So I was like, hey, maybe there's an opportunity here. So I created the premium version of the newsletter just based on what people are telling me. And the first six months I only had maybe 100 subscribers to that. I just didn't know what I was doing. So 2012 and 2013, I really kind of started to figure out the conversion process and really optimizing kind of the opt in process. And I really looked at kind of, you know, every step of that funnel from when somebody first lands on to one of my websites, from a place like Stocktwits to when they sign up for the newsletter, to the autoresponder series that promotes the premium newsletter, to the landing page, to the signup page, you know, to even after they become a customer. How can you split, test and optimize kind of every step of that process? And you know, we've doubled the opt in rate on kind of our opt in mechanism ever since we started. And our conversion rates have gone up just based on really hitting kind of a product market fit and just really testing the messaging and really understanding why people sign up. And that's certainly been really, by working on that funnel and optimizing every step of the way, we've really been able to grow that quite a bit.

And if you were going to give two key things that really helped you start getting those conversions and opt ins, what would those kind of takeaways be? Because that's something Spencer and I have been struggling with ourselves.

Sure. I mean, so I think with opt ins the key is to have one, I definitely recommend using the pop up. Two, collecting as little information as possible. Three, really testing the copy and trying different things out and just testing button text and color and layout. And I really only collect the email address. I don't collect any other piece of information. I found that that's really all I need and that's just the best way to get people to sign up for your list. So I'll do a pop up and I show that like I think twice a week and then they don't see it for a week and then I always have another opt in below the post and then another one in the sidebar. So I really just try to catch as many people as I can and that seemed to do quite well. If you go to americanbakingnews.com and click on one of the articles, you'll kind of see what I do for an opt in mechanism and that's worked pretty well for us. Our pop up actually looks pretty plain, but that's what we found. Works better than having a lot of fancy colors and I don't know, stuff that you might see from a plugin like pop of domination.

Yeah, yep, it is. It's pretty basic. Just get the information you need. Yeah, I mean it's pretty much black and white gray. But yeah, I mean if that's all you need, which usually it is, all you need is an email and you optimize for that. That makes sense. So obviously, I mean that's, that's a huge part of growing the business is optimizing that funnel and driving those into or towards an offer that they can actually purchase. Things like that, having your own product. But I'm just thinking of people that are listening here that have nothing, they have no traffic. You kind of said, well, you found some tactics that you're able to use with stock ticker symbols, things like that. That's driving a lot of SEO traffic. Are those things that are still working today and is most of your traffic still from free search engine traffic or free sources of traffic?

Yeah, those things, they all still work today. The interesting thing about Stocktwits and Twitter and Google Finance and Bing Finance and some of those places and Market Watch and I even got into Yahoo Finance a little bit through social stuff. There's not a mat cuts out there out to get you to. That's changing the game all the time. It's been a pretty consistent source of traffic for the last four or five, four years now at Google News and Google Finance they have different algorithms than the main search engine. The same is true for Google Images and some of the other more specialized search engines. I think people tend to ignore those more than they should. I think there's opportunity there. Like if you're heavy into photography, Google images, if you do it right, you can get quite a bit of traffic from that. If you have a news site, Google News is a good opportunity. And people ignore Bing and they send quite a bit of traffic to me. And there's also YouTube and even the itunes store. We have an app that we use to get email signups for as well. I think when people are doing SEO, the main focus is always getting a ranking for a specific keyword and kind of the main Google search. And maybe that's. Certainly that works and it's a changing game. But there's also all these other playgrounds that you can investigate too. And I've had substantially more success in targeting some of those more specialized things than I have just with the main Google search.

Yeah. So just to give us an idea, roughly what percentage of your traffic would you say comes from natural search engine traffic, the traditional sort of Google traffic versus all these other sources?

It's not a big percentage. It's probably less than 20. I don't really focus on it at all. There's so many people kind of in that, in that swimming pool that are vying for the same position. That's not really something I want to do. So I basically do everything but that. So you know, I've got an AdWords campaign and we do co registration advertising and you know, we do obviously the new search engines, kind of the ticker specific finance search engines. So it's really everything but that. I don't even really try to bother with those because the amount of money you have to spend and effort you have to put in just to get a ranking and keep it. I think there are better ways to get traffic.

Yeah, very interesting. And certainly there's a lot more information that you could share that we just won't have time for. But I do want to dig just a little bit deeper on you mentioned like StockTwits and Twitter, how you're driving some traffic that way using ticker symbols. Can you give us an idea how those work and how you're driving the traffic specifically?

Yep. So with StockTwits and Twitter they both basically work the same way. Twitter, you know, they have hashtags but they also have what you call cash tags that are for stocks specifically. So instead of, you know, basically a dollar sign, then the ticker symbol, so Apple would be dollar sign aapl. And if you, it's basically, you know, a tag in your tweet, like a hashtag. And then when anybody searches for that cash tag, my stuff comes up. So I use, you know, we have a big database of kind of stock ratings that come out every day. There's 3, 400 that come out, you know, on a daily basis. So I create kind of an RSS feed of all those ratings changes and I have kind of like a Mad Libs thing where it basically turns it into a tweet. And then so it'll be like this brokerage upgraded this stock from a hold rating to a buy rating. They set this price target. So those tweets are pretty easy to write, you know, on an automated fashion. Very easy if this then that to post it to our Twitter account. So our Twitter Account for that business is just ratings network. So you can check that out and you can see kind of the content that we're publishing on Twitter and on StockTwits.

And so to clarify, all of this is automated. You're not manually doing any of this?

No. For the Twitter and stocktwit stuff, we have data sources that we compile and do a SQL database and then that gets turned into an RSS feed and then if this, then that post it to Twitter for us.

Yep. No, that is awesome. That's very cool. That maybe can give some ideas to people out there listening. It certainly will be different depending on the market that they're in. Not everybody can use ticker symbols, but maybe there's some other ideas, some other takeaways that people can do there as well. It sounds like you're doing a lot. You're certainly publishing a lot of content. Do you have a large team behind your business now? How many people are involved?

Seven or eight, I believe. So I've got, I think three people that are writing full time. I've got a customer service person, you know, an accounting person, and then a couple people that help out with kind of software and web stuff that when I need them.

Yeah, that's one of the questions I was going to ask also is that, I mean, one of the first things you notice when you visit any of your sites is the extreme quality compared to a lot of other stuff out there. I mean, they look like CNN and the New York Times and any other number of quality news sites. So how did you go about finding your writers and you know, were they mission critical to your business and when did they come in?

Sure. So I found, I found one of my writers in the pro blogger job boards, which is kind of a great place to hire quality people. Then the other two I hired when I bought like they had been writing for our website and then I bought that website and I kept them on. So that's kind of where I got them. Two of them write full time for me and one of them writes part time for me. So it's. They produce a lot of content and they do really good work. And certainly to kind of maintain a position in Bing News and Google News and Yahoo News and places like that, you really have to have that quality. You can't just, you know, get in by producing crap like a lot of people do. So I've, you know, really tried to find some good people that can write consistently and don't need a ton of oversight and just have given them free Rein to, you know, write about financial stuff. And that's gone pretty well.

Yeah. Just because you mentioned it. I'm curious about acquiring a site to drive traffic to another site. Can you talk about that process?

Yeah. So basically I've been watching out on Flippa for sites that are kind of news focused and talk about investing. So I think I bought three right now. So that site was up for sale and I had bought it because I was already getting some decent traffic. So I bought that site from the guy that owned it and I really wanted that just so I could get some more email opt inside. It's worked out pretty well. It's a profitable website. We're getting email opt ins from it. It's gone pretty well.

Basically you bought the site and then just added your own newsletter offer on the existing site? Correct. Getting opt ins directly? Yeah.

Yep. And we're maintaining it and putting new content on it and it's going pretty well.

And what was the cost of that site, if you don't mind me asking? I'm just curious about, you know, when you have sites making as much as yours, what you're willing to spend on an acquisition just to get more email opt ins?

Sure. It kind of depends on the site. I don't think I can disclose what this specific site was just because the sales agreement. Sure. I mean I would. I think the most I've ever paid for a site is in the low five figures and it wasn't this site.

Yeah.

Okay.

And it's, it's all, you know, a multiple of revenue and traffic. It's, you know, what is the site getting now? You know, what's a good, you know, a good 20 month multiple and that's basically what you pay.

Yeah.

Now you're obviously getting traffic from a ton of different sources. I don't know if you mentioned what, what is your number one source of traffic, would you say?

Sure. There really isn't a number one.

Okay.

It's a lot of things and there are a lot of them are about the same and I think that's good. Social has been increasingly big. You know, the finance search engines are, have always been big. I try to be as diversified as I can just in traffic acquisition, customer acquisition. I don't want to be too dependent on any one thing.

Right. Yeah, no, that's smart. That makes a lot of sense. Would you say that like news search engines, Google News and Yahoo News are a pretty big chunk of that as well?

Certainly. I mean they're a big opportunity. But there is also the requirement of quality and just really doing a lot of work to kind of maintain those positions. And they have standards and you certainly have to meet those. Otherwise you don't get a stay in. Mm.

And just maybe the final question, I guess I'm not sure here on content for your sites, how often are you producing content on these sites? Are most of them daily or multi times a day?

Sure. They're all, I mean we publish content to basically all of them every day. Some of them get three, four or five posts a day and it adds up pretty quickly. Like on American banking and marketing news, we actually have some content that we license and that gets published frequently to our blog. That's a company called, used to be called Grab Networks, it's called Blinks now. But they provide us all the video content. That's been kind of a neat relationship to have.

Interesting.

So I mean these are large sites, well maintained. Just to give people an idea. I mean these have new articles every day or multi times a day. So it's certainly a large business that requires your management. That's why you have these full time writers. It's not something that can happen overnight. But would you still say for people listening out there, somebody that doesn't have a site at all or is just looking to start a site? I mean, is it feasible to get where you are? I mean using either some of the same tactics? Do you still see a lot of opportunity?

I mean I do. I mean I started and the problem is it takes time and it takes a lot of work.

Yeah.

And most people that you know, want to do Internet business want the easy button. They want to, you know, start something and be making money on day one. This was a seven year ramp up to get where I am today. I've been working, you know, 40, 50 hours a week, every week since then to continue to get where I am today. So it's, there's, it can be done certainly. And I think a lot of the tactics and strategies that I use and whether that be, you know, how I acquire traffic or email marketing or you know, doing a newsletter or anything like that, I think all of those are still valid strategies today. It's just, you know, are you willing to put in your work to make that happen and you know, a lot of people aren't.

Yeah, very true. Are there any other marketing methods that you're using to drive traffic or just raise awareness about your sites right now that we haven't discussed that you'd like to?

Yeah. Email marketing has been big for our Google photo contest business.

Okay.

So I think email marketing works really well when you can find a list of people or compile a list of targeted people pretty easily. So we know that we can do photo contests for basically animal shelters and humane societies of certain sizes. So we. Our goal has to then find as many of those as we can, and then we put them on an autoresponder series to let them know about our product and provide them fundraising tips and some of those things. So we've done 80 contests, and 60 of those have come as a result of the email marketing efforts that we've done. So we don't try to spam people. We send maybe 1, 2 emails a month just to kind of bring some awareness and say, hey, we're out here if you're interested. So I think there is. I think that's a. It's an underutilized opportunity to market to people. When you don't have a big audience

that exists already, that's a really good idea. And so are you getting those emails just by researching animal shelters or humane societies and then taking their emails and putting them on a list?

Yeah. So the neat thing about that particular industry is there are all these, you know, find the shelter directories, they list out shelters, and it's, you know, pretty easy to add them to a list, you know, by going through those directories.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And I mean, was there a process of finding a decision maker, or did you just take whatever email was there and put. And use that one?

Sure. So typically, they're relatively small organizations, so if there's an email address, either they are the decision maker or their boss is the decision maker. So it's not hard to find a person that get to the person that does the fundraising. And my business partners are pretty connected in the animal shelter, humane society world as it is, so we're not some unknown quantity that's trying to approach them out of the blue or kind of a name that we have a lot of references and testimonials. So when people come to our website for the first time, it's not as big of a step up in establishing trust.

Yeah, right.

Awesome. I want to backtrack just a little bit and talk about your other sites, your financial network that you have. And I know that you said SEO is not a huge part of your business. Probably less than 20% of your traffic comes from search engines. But do you have any best practices that you'd like to share, or is most of it just very natural traffic that comes because you're producing so much content.

Sure. I mean, for SEO, my best practice is not really worrying about SEO trying to do everything but SEO to acquire customers. I don't want to be in the ball game where the rules are changing every inning of the game. So I have anything that seems like it could possibly be a good profitable source of traffic test and I'll try it, you know, if the first time, if it's almost profitable, I'll optimize it. So it is profitable. So recently like we've started doing like Twitter advertising and getting people to follow our ratings network account and they have like a Twitter card where you can click one button and get people on your email list. So we've been testing that, we've been testing just a little bit of everything and just, you know, when something works, we kind of add it to our arsenal of traffic acquisition strategies. So certainly SEO is important, but the traditional Google search SEO is not where I want to put much of my energy.

Yeah, that makes complete sense. But have you ever done any type of, or are you doing any type of link building or anything else to increase your visibility in Google or. It really is pretty hands off.

It's pretty hands off. We don't do any link building for any of my main sites with just being kind of news organizations, we attract links pretty naturally and I don't see a ton of benefit and to try to build links to our websites because I'd rather just have that happen naturally. And certainly if you're building a smaller niche site, that's a different ball game and you need to approach that accordingly. But for what we do, SEO has not been a big focus and I don't know that it's ever going to be. Sure.

And then the final related question to this, as far as content and SEO, are you targeting any type of keywords at all, specifically with your articles that you write, or again, is it just more news reporting and natural writing?

Sure. So we like to write about kind of bigger companies because certainly more people will be looking for those in places that do the ticker kind of SEO. So certainly if we write about Apple, it's going to get more traffic than kind of a no name company that nobody's ever heard of. So we kind of know based on data that we collect which companies we get the most traction from and we kind of report on those more than others.

Gotcha. But it's, it's very different than which keyword you might most easily rank in Google for. It's more based on the data that you know from Twitter and stocktwits and other places you know you can get traffic from.

Yeah, it's more based on what type of, what companies are people most interested in. And then we write about those.

Yeah, very interesting. No, that's very cool. An awesome business. It's huge. Doing very well. So congrats on that.

Thank you.

And I think you shared some good tips. Perrin, did you have any follow up questions? I mean there's a ton that we could go into. I wish we had a lot more time to pick your brain but anything else you have, Perrin?

I kind of do. I just have one. So this is something that I've seen some bigger websites do and something that you are obviously doing and I'm really curious about the strategy behind it. But you have a network of sites that are all working together and I was wondering how they do that and what's the benefit of having a network of sites all kind of working towards the same goal.

Sure. So really all my new sites are kind of a funnel back down to Analyst Trading's network. So it's, you know, it's not a matter of one site does something that, you know, another dozen, it's, you know, just I picked them up over the last few years and they all have get certain traffic and all do cover, you know, certain things, you know, better than others. And it's, you know, really, you know, the advertising revenue is certainly good. And then it's really just, you know, all of my news sites are funneled back to my subscription newsletter business to get people kind of on the free email list. Because I know that like whenever somebody signs up for my list, they're going to be worth, you know, six or seven dollars to me over the course of two years. So if I can get anybody on that list for less than $6, certainly I want to for their targeted traffic. I certainly want to pay for that. Having a network of news sites that drive traffic to the newsletter is kind of how that works.

So how does, I mean, how can you get away with sending one newsletter to email signups from a bunch of different sites? Is it just because the content is related?

Yeah. So like on a pop up it'll say subscribe to American Banking News and Analyst Ratings Networks daily email newsletter. So, you know, kind of in a copy. I try to make it sound like they're part of the same company, which they obviously are. Yeah, it's really never been an issue that, you know, I'm using two separate brands for kind of the reporting and then the subscription business. I think there's another company called Benzinga that does something similar. They have got a big financial news website, and then they've got a business called MarketFi that is all kind of their paid products, and people kind of know they're related. So it's not really that big of an issue.

Yeah.

Cool.

Yeah, I think that makes sense. Now, I know, Matt, that you're also in the process of releasing your very first book, and I wanted to give you a chance to just tell us a little bit about that book.

Sure. So I was going to an entrepreneurial event, you know, I think six months ago now, actually maybe a little bit less than that, but somebody had said they had written a book, and then like the next week at the same event, someone else said they had written a book. And I was like, you know, these people don't know anything that I don't. I could write a book. So I decided I was going to write a book.

Absolutely.

So the title of the book is 40 Rules for Internet Business Success. So it's basically kind of all of the lessons that I've learned during the last seven or eight years building my Internet businesses so that people that are reading the book can grow their businesses faster and just avoid some of the mistakes that I've made. So I'm selling it on Amazon. It'll be out July 21, 2014. So if you are listening to this podcast, after that date, you can go to 40rulesbook.com and then you'll get redirected to Amazon to find the book or read it on Kindle or you'll be able to get a print copy as well.

And can you share with us maybe your favorite or one of your favorite rules for Internet business success from your book?

Sure. So I think for audience like yours and Pat Flynns and people that listen to, like, Entrepreneur on Fire, the lesson that I think applies the most is to not be a franchisee of somebody else's business model. So, I mean, how many podcasts are there out right now that are business interview podcasts that are being. Trying to be exactly like Entrepreneur on Fire?

Yep.

You just can't do that. You have to be original and really kind of forge your own path, because your strengths are going to be different than Pat Flynn's strengths. They're going to be different than Johnny Dumas strengths. And the reality is you just don't have the relationships that they do.

So you can't.

You can't expect to copy them and get the same success that they are. You really have to use your strengths and Your abilities and your relationships to kind of forge your own path.

Yeah, I agree with that advice 110%. I say the same thing all the time in a slightly different manner, but same point. You have to be your own person. You have to go out, develop your own strategies. You can't copy people to success. You really do have to bring something original to the table.

So you know that with your. You're like a knife site that somebody copied, right?

Yes, somebody, definitely. Not only just somebody, but several somebody.

Several somebody's. And I'm guessing that none of them, you know, made it to the traffic level that you made it to.

Yeah, no, we actually talked about that in a couple previous podcasts about. It was, it was one of the nine mistakes in our nine mistakes of SEO and building niche sites. It's, you know, you can, you can't just paint by number. It's. That's, that's not how business works, you know.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think that goes back just having your defensible business that's, you know, not as easily copyrightable.

Yeah.

And, you know, whether or not you have, you know, whether that you have some software, some relationships, or some traffic acquisition strategies that people can't copy easily, you know, I've tried to build businesses that, you know, somebody listening to this podcast couldn't just go out and copy in, you know, a month or two. And that's worked out pretty well for me, which, you know, enables me to, you know, talk more freely about kind of what I'm doing.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, it's definitely worked out very well for you as you've shared the numbers with us from your business. So we appreciate that. I tell you what, it's got me fired up. I want to go out and create something that's getting two and a half million page views. That would be awesome to check out those numbers each month.

For sure.

So, yeah, I'm fired up. Hopefully people listening are excited to just really realizing what is possible with an online business. I've had success in my own way with my niche sites and certainly Long Tail Pro is doing very well in other areas of my business. Matt has shared his story with how he's doing well in a different way. Lots of different avenues that you could go. Hopefully people just take some action and make things happen for themselves for people that are interested in following along with what you're doing. Matt, do you have a blog or other place that you'd like to send people to follow along?

Yep. I blog about entrepreneurship on my website. It's mattpulson.com Paulson is P A U L S O N and I'm sure you will link to that in the show notes as well. And my Twitter ID is Matthew DP DS and dog P as in pony. So feel free to follow me there as well. And I often, you know, write stuff about entrepreneurship there too.

Awesome. Very good. So I will indeed link to those in the show notes along with some of the other things that you mentioned here on the podcast. So yeah, I just want to thank you so much for your time for coming on and sharing the numbers and all the details your business. Like I said, very inspiring. Hopefully as well for people listening out there, any last parting words that you'd like to share?

Buy my book when it comes out on July 21st.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm sure it's got 40 points. You shared one that was really good. I'm sure the other 39 are just as good. So absolutely. Once again, thank you so much and best of luck to you you and also best of luck to everyone else listening in out there. Thank you very much.