Success Does Not Come Easy—Why You Need To Focus On One Thing At A Time

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and before we talk, today's guest who's kind of a big deal. It's really a big deal. I would be remiss and properly introduce my co host Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com and Scott Todd, look, the only way you could close 197 deals last year is if you automate and you automate and you automate. And the way that Scott automates and the way I Automate is posting Domination.com TheLandgeek Scott Todd. How are you, Mark?

I'm great. How are you?

I'm excited to talk to our guests because I'm really interested in becoming a better entrepreneur and a better thinker and maybe even a better person.

Yeah, you know what I'm interested in? I'm interested in knowing how this one person was able to build up a network of sites to get two and a half million page views.

That's a lot of page views. It is. I'm lucky if my website gets like two.

I think you get more than that. Come on.

10. I don't know. I don't know. Not two and a half million.

I'll tell you what, Mark. I felt very, very good up until like about 30 seconds ago when I saw the two and a half million because I was looking at my like Google Analytics of my site and I'm like, I thought I was doing well. You know, I was. I've hit five figures a month in excess of 10,000 page views a month. It's not two and a half million. That's what I got to get to.

Well, let's talk to our guests and see how we can get to two and a half million. You ready? I'm ready. Matt Paulson from mattpulson.com is an entrepreneur, an angel investor, and an author. His largest business, MarketBeat.com makes real time financial information available to investors at all levels. And he does this through his daily investment newsletter, which has attracted more than 5, 430,000 subscribers. He also has a podcast startup Q and A. But his financial news websites attract more than 4 million page views each month. MarketBeat was recently recognized as the fastest growing privately held company in South Dakota by Inc. In its annual Inc. 5000 rankings. Many major media outlets have featured marketbeats reporting including Barron's, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Market Watch, and Seeking Alpha. However, you know, Matt's also an angel investor. He's Got a couple other companies as well. He's got his books, he's a big deal. Matt Paulson, how the heck do you become such a prolific entrepreneur?

I work really hard and I really only do one thing at a time. So I figure out, okay, what's the one thing I'm working on now? And you know, I work on that towards hits its natural conclusion. So it's, you know, you look at my resume, my LinkedIn profile, it looks like I've got a stupid number of things going on. But you know, really I'm only working on one of those things at a time because like, if you look at when all these things started, you know, it's really like one a year. So I kind of pick out one new thing a year and add that to the list and you know, after a while I get good at it and it doesn't take much time. Like running the angel fund maybe takes two hours a month. So it's looks really impressive on paper. But it's, you know, there's not a whole lot of time that goes into it.

How did you learn to do all this stuff?

Yeah, so I mean it really started, you know, probably when I was like 10. I wrote HTML when I was a kid, made a little upset for myself and eventually I made like a website about SimCity and you know, I was getting maybe 25 page views a day when I was in like seventh grade in the 90s for my website, that's SimCity 2000G codes. And I really cut my teeth on some of the basics then. And you know, I went to college, I got an undergraduate degree, computer science. So I learned all the stuff that I hadn't learned by myself before and just get a really good technical understanding of, you know, how web programming works and then just kind of intermingle that with some good business and marketing knowledge. And it's just a very dangerous combination of skills put together.

That is dangerous. Matt, tell us a little bit about your parents. What do your parents do?

So they are, my dad's retired now. He was a police officer for 25 years. And my mom was a school librarian for many years and right now she does HR at Walmart and she's, you know, they're both in their mid-60s, so they're getting ready to retire. But they both had blue collar jobs and you know, nothing that was all that remarkable or exciting. But you know, one thing that they did that kind of set me up for success as a child was we were one of the first five families in our City to have cable Internet. So we had cable Internet in the year 2000, which was probably, you know, four or five years before everyone else had it. We had a home computer, which most people didn't have in eighth grade. I got a computer in my own bedroom which was just, you know, really set me up for, you know, I had pretty much unlimited time then and I had a device that was connected to the rest of the world. I spent a lot of time on it. I learned a lot. And those years of just exploration of the early Internet have paid off some pretty big dividends.

Scott. Todd.

Well, Matt, one of the things that.

You said that I really, really liked.

Is the fact that you're working on one thing at a time. I think that a lot of people, they think like serial entrepreneurs or know, they think of like Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square. And I can do all these things and I can be as successful and I can run these massive companies when in fact it takes a lot of work to just do one thing.

Yep.

And you know, do you see that a lot with entrepreneurs that you're talking to that they're trying to do all these things because they want to blow up and scale up right away?

Yeah. That is kind of one of the top five mistakes is working on two or three different big projects at once. You know, starting a business is just a crap ton of work. It's a lot more work than any of us realize going into it. It's a 40 hour, 50 hour week thing for a couple years and if you're not willing to put that into one business, then it's probably not going to be successful. So if you try to do kind of a half hearted job and three different businesses at once, it's just, it's not going to get very far.

Yeah, you know, you know what I kind of thought was really interesting, Scott and Matt is that Matt's parents weren't sort of like the Sherpa of his success in a way. And so often we don't see that a lot where you kind of, you know, sort of blend into your environment. Right. So it would be really logical if Matt became a firefighter. Right. Or teacher or.

I would suck at those things.

Yeah. But you know, instead his parents kind of said, hey, it looks, looks like Matt's got some unique skills and he's interested in computers. Like let's go ahead and foster that. Right. Where you know, I, you know, it's like, do you ever see that documentary up. You guys ever see that? Scott, you saw it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so it's like. It's an interesting idea. Like, you know, what you're born into. It's really tough to get out of those situations. And. But, Matt, what would you say that the greatest lesson was that your parents taught you?

It was, you know, they did a really good job of fostering my interest. You know, they. I had like, half the amount of money I needed to buy a computer. They loaned me the other half, and, you know, they didn't really have the money to do that, but somehow they found it. So they recognized that I had an interest, I had a talent with, you know, technology. And, you know, they really did the best they could do to foster that. They made sure I got into all the good computer classes in high school. They. I think there was some kind of camp that they sent me to that was. I don't remember what the details were, but, you know, for computer stuff, they, you know, they saw the interest, they saw the talent, and they didn't try to foster me into being anything that they wanted me to be. They saw, hey, you know, our child is interested in this. Let's enable him or encourage him to follow his own interest and talents. So many parents have, like, the desire to live out their childhood dreams, their own children. And my parents didn't do that. Like, you know, my dad didn't put me in Little League because, you know, he wanted to do really well in baseball. It just. They didn't do that. I really appreciate that about them.

That's huge.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that it's like, Mark, I know, like, with my own son, he's got interests that are not necessarily mine. I'm sure you're children are the same way. You know, like, they've got interested. You're like, where'd that come from? Yeah, but if you can just, like, just support them in some way, you know, not sure where it's gonna end up. But you could. You could create someone like Matt.

Yeah. I mean, that's the whole kind of Montessori teaching style. It's, you know, what are the children gravitating to and encourage them in that. And my kids are 4 and 1, so it's kind of early to do that. But if the kid wants to play Legos, it's all right, let's go play Legos. I'm not gonna force you to go play something else.

Yeah. And now that education is so abundant, there's sort of no excuse anymore of not being able to learn something that you're interested in that. That kind of is gone, like where it used to be. Hey, you'd have to have some kind of, you know, connections, or you'd have to have some type of, you know, innate talent. Maybe then, you know, someone would kind of, you know, like the Medici's. Like, they would kind of be like your, you know, your benefactor, if you will, and kind of support you. I mean, today, you want to take a class at Stanford, take a class online. Stanford's not cost you anything. It's almost like to really be successful in the upcoming years, you have to learn how to learn and love to learn and be curious about that. So, Matt, if we're going to extract your success, right, and you're going to say, okay, this is why I've been so successful, and this is sort of my killer competitive edge, Right, what would you say it's what you say it would be besides hard work?

I really think it is. I'm willing to outwork people.

Okay, then how do you do that?

To do it for decades at a time? So I have been working at least 50 hours a week for the last 12 years. I started this, you know, my business, my first business, when I was in college. So while everyone else was, you know, partying on a Saturday night and not working too hard in your classes and playing video games after that, everyone else is playing Think Halo 2 on Xbox 360 in our dorm. I was the guy sitting on a computer in my dorm room writing blog posts for my personal finance website. So it's not only was I willing to outwork people, it was. I was doing it at a point in life when other people didn't think working that hard was all that important. And I was. I could even go back into high school. Just, I wasn't working like, 100 hours a week. But, you know, I was working, you know, on my stuff, probably 30, 40 hours a week, you know, in high school, when everyone else was doing high school stuff. So it's. I think, you know, I'm 31 now. Obviously I've had a lot of success, but, I mean, this is a journey that probably started, you know, 15 years ago now.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, now that you're an angel investor, what do you look for in an entrepreneur that'll say, okay, you've written. Not only do I like your idea, but I like you enough, I'm gonna put some money towards it.

Yeah. So in our angel fund there, there's a few criteria we look for, you know, one, we look for scalable companies because, you know, the assumption is seven out of the 10 companies we invest in are gonna fail. So the three companies we have have to really make up for that, for those losses. So we want, you know, companies and people that can seven or eight figures in annual revenue. We are looking for people that are local because this is a Sioux Falls, South Dakota angel fund. It's not a California angel fund. And I assume if somebody's coming to me from California asking for money, they tried to raise money in the valley and it didn't work out. So why the heck are they calling me if there's all the money there? But for the person, yeah, we understand that business ideas, business models change that the first thing you start is not going to be what your business ends up as. So you're betting on the person, the team, as much as they are, as we are the idea. So, you know, I'd rather bet on the right person in the wrong race than the wrong person in the right race. And, you know, one really early flag that kind of, you know, sets people off. It's like, you know, we tell people to apply on Gus, which is kind of the platform we use to manage your deal flow. And people that the deal seemed to be going well are the ones that had no problem doing that, and they just did it right away and were responsible for that request. And the people that just can't seem to an online application for the life of them, even though we're going to give them $100,000, those are the people that don't seem to have their crap together when they pitch or even like when we look at their deal. So it's really responsiveness to our request is really kind of an early indication of whether or not this person has their crap together, which in turn won't determine if their business is going to be successful. I mean, if you have to ask somebody for something four times and they don't do it, I mean, that's. That's a pretty big red flag. So that's kind of the first thing that I look for. Then it's just, you know, after that, it's, do they seem like they have their stuff together? Do they understand your industry? Do they know or enough to know what they don't know? Maybe a better way to put that is, do they know enough to recognize there are things about their industry that they don't understand and are looking to figure out, or are they the people that know everything? I think they know everything already. And people that think they know everything already are typically the ones that are going to get into trouble because they don't like, think that, oh, this giant company that's in the same space I'm in, maybe they want to tackle the same idea. And people that set aside those notions of there are other people working on this too, or just people think they've got other stuff figured out and aren't willing to accept that there's something out there that they don't understand. That's also a red flag for me.

Lack of humility. Go ahead, Scott.

I mean, do you think I came from a large company? And one of the things that I continue to hear all the time is we worked in a space where there was a lot of startups, but not necessarily direct competitors, they were indirect competitors. They wouldn't do like car sharing, ride.

Sharing, kind of a.

And you know, the one thing I continue to hear is, oh, well, the big companies, you know, they don't have the, you know, the desire or they don't have the intelligence to go do this stuff when in fact we did and we had the capital to do it also. And I think that what's funny about, for me, what's funny about that is that there's books that are written about, oh, how large companies can't pivot and large companies can't get into new spaces or new technology. But you know what, I think that's very naive because I've seen firsthand that large companies can and will and will either buy you up or kill you one way or the other.

Yeah. I mean, there's so many stories of Microsoft in the 90s, like trying to buy out companies and then when they say no, then Microsoft just goes into, went into that same space and just killed them. Yeah. I mean, it's, you can't have too much hubris and say, you know, these big companies are clueless because they've got, you know, eight, nine figures of capital at their disposal and can buy all of your competitors and just crush you if they want to. They don't have to get everything right. They could throw enough money and people and resources at something or even if you have some secret sauce, it won't matter because they've got, they can just kill you with the amount of resources they have and are willing to throw at something. And I'm guessing that any big company is going to need to be less, can be less profit, be not, not profitable for a lot longer than you can be. You're going to run out of money and they'll just consider it, you know, a sunk cost. And.

Yeah. And that's the thing is like they, they can, like you can the money that a small company might, might lose and it might be a big deal to a large company. It could be, you know, a few executives pay and like it just goes under the radar as operating costs. It's like it's not even hitting the radar yet.

It's a rounding error.

Yeah, it's a rounding error.

Right. So how can Scott and I get the 4 million page views a month?

Yeah, so what I figured out that nobody else figured out until I started talking about it and made the mistake of talking about it was I figured out that there is an entirely different kind of SEO ball game for news about publicly traded companies. So there are lots of places that have news about say Wells Fargo or Apple or bank of America or whoever, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, stocktwits, Twitter, they all have vertical searches for news about publicly traded companies. And I figured out I could get into those places. And the way that you do it in each of those different vertical search places is different. But, but we started producing content at scale using a technology that we developed in house about seven years ago to create financial news stories based on structured financial data. So that probably doesn't make any sense to anybody, but if you think of how the game Mad Libs works, where you fill in words and you get something really funny at the end, we kind of do something very, that's a very basic version of what we do. But it's like say this company announced their quarterly earnings. They announced this much per share, they had this much per revenue. And you know, that goes on for about 400 words. You do that a thousand times a day over. You put it, you know, you put it into these different financial search vertical platforms. You can do really well. And we've done really well with that.

Genius.

Now was that on Planet Money? Were you guys featured on Planet Money?

We were not Automated Insights for which is a company that's doing something similar. But we started probably four years before they did. And if I were a smart entrepreneur, I would have patented the idea then and there. But 20 some year old Matt didn't think to do that. So there, that cost me probably $10 million. That would have been a very valuable patent.

But because Mark, in this one Planet Money episode, they actually show like, hey, here's the, here's the content that a writer wrote and here's the content that the artificial intelligence wrote and you really can't tell a difference.

You can't. Yeah, because their story was about the Associated Press and they're using automated insights technology to create those articles. But we're doing it four years before they were. I saw that announcement like, ah, welcome to the party.

Yeah, it's, it's incredible. Yeah, it's, it's the best time ever to be an entrepreneur. But so, Matt, if we rewound the tape, right, and you were going to give young Matt some entrepreneurial advice, what would you tell him?

Yeah, I mean, if I were starting over today, I would definitely not like what my business works because I started it, you know, eight or nine years ago. It wouldn't work well today starting from scratch because, you know, the stuff that's out there now that I'm doing at the AP is doing is so good that it's. Unless you've got, you know, eight years Runway to work on it, or you're the Associated Press, it's, it's hard to come up with quality content that, that's this good. I probably wouldn't even tell somebody like me to try because the people in mostly India, Pakistan that have tried to copy my business, they just, they can't replicate the software. They just haven't been able to do that. And like, if I didn't have it now and I didn't know exactly how it was done, I don't think I could do it again. Like, if I've been working on something else for eight years, it's just, it's that complex. So I think I would if. So, like, in my other businesses, they're kind of based on kind of outbound marketing strategies. So, like, I think, you know, SEO today is kind of a game that's just too hard to win for anybody that's not going to be the SEO guy 24 7, 365. So I'm really bullish about, you know, direct email marketing stuff. Like with Go GoPhoto contest, our only marketing strategy is emailing animal shelters and saying, hey, do you want to run our photo contest fundraiser? Most organizations like yours will make five to $10,000 doing this. And we get a pretty good response rate. I mean, we run four or five hundred contests a year with animal shelters around the country. It's a little business that makes a quarter million dollars and there's no SEO involved. There's no Facebook ads or Google Ads or any of the strategies that anyone else is doing. Just the fact that we found a database for animal shelters and took the effort to email them, you know, maybe once a month, which I can call it spam, but, like, who's gonna get Upset about one email a month.

Yeah, yeah. So. But is there any other entrepreneurial thing that you would change from from the very beginning? I mean, any mistakes that you, you would say, oh, if I just did this differently. Yeah, would have been better.

It's, I mean, 31 and I make like two and a half million dollars a year, so it's hard to say how good this. No, I'm pretty happy with how the last decade's gone and I just can't look back and say, man, I screwed that up. I got sued once in the last decade over a non compete agreement. I probably would have handled that a little bit differently. I've had a couple companies starting to sue me over some stupid stuff I probably shouldn't have done. But I mean, there's nothing that was like derailed me for six months of my life.

I love it.

You know, I think that what's kind of funny and one of the things that you said, Matt, and I don't know if you meant it this way or not, but you said like you had figured out the algorithm, if you will, that publicly traded companies had a different search engine optimization, SEO type of rating.

Right.

And then you said, but then you started telling everybody, would you go back and not and like keep that close to the chest or, or does it really not matter because of where you've made it in your business?

So at first, like, at first when I first saw people starting to compete with me, I thought, crap, I should have shut up about this. But then I actually built some indexing tools to say, okay, what percentage of these vertical markets do I own versus these other guys? And I realized that some of them, I probably had like, you know, 20% of stories in one of the vertical search engines are mine. And then on like the next guy was like 3%. So it's like, well, you know, he's probably taking something away from me, but it's probably not going to be. Probably not a huge percentage. But I think definitely, I mean, the cat's been out of the bank for five years now. I probably would have kept quiet about it, frankly, now, today, but, you know, what can you do about it? I don't have a time machine.

No, Mark. It's funny because, and the reason I asked that question is because I was talking to someone the other day and they were telling me about a, a marketing tool that they were using to sell land. And then after they told me, they're like, I shouldn't have said anything to you because you know, you're, you're probably going to start using it. And I mean, I have my own little, little place that I sell. And I mean, we all know it's this little place called Craigslist.

Right.

Like, to me, it's. It's a good place, but I kind of had to laugh because, you know, it's. It's like it's going to get out.

Right?

Like, there's no secrets. I mean, there's.

It's.

Anybody's going to figure this out at some point in time. And, you know, maybe you. You should enjoy it until the word gets out a little bit and then just embrace it and move on.

Right.

But that really comes back to, like, I guess, the, you know, the abundance mentality.

Yeah, not only that. Like, if you only have a business that is successful because nobody else knows about it, it's not a very good business. Your competitive advantage shouldn't be that it's a secret business. It should be that you're better than everybody else at what you do.

Yeah, I like that.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Matt, this has been really great, but now we're going to put you.

On the spot, all right?

And we're going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something actionable where the art of passive income listeners can go right now, improve their businesses, improve their lives.

What have you got, you guys? When you asked me at the beginning of the show if I had any questions, I probably should have asked that question. Hold on a minute. Let me pause this for a second. I'm going to go back to my startup Q and A list and see what my best idea was recently.

All right, awesome.

Mark, I'll tell you what I've been doing.

Okay, tell me.

All right, so this is a little bit of a hack, and I got this off of one of our podcast tips, but I got to tell you, it's been pretty cool is there's work that I want to get done with, like, someone based in the U.S. you know, we typically hire VAs off of upwork or other places. And the tip that was given was, hey, go, go to like, the Philippines Craigslist and find. Check the resumes.

Yeah, absolutely.

I've been doing that in my local area and I've been scanning and it's amazing to see how many stay at home moms are looking for work that they can do at home. They're us based. They. They just want flexible time that they can do the work whenever they have the time to do it. Replied to some and they're putting These in the resumes section on Craigslist resumes. And it's amazing the talent that you can get to do stuff as long as they can work on their own schedule. You know, when the kids are taking a nap or the kids are out, whatever. I've been very impressed with this in the last couple weeks.

Very cool. That's a great tip. Matt Paulson, how about your tip.

To follow up on that? I mostly only hire local people that like, live in a place where I can come find them. Like, my actual two employees both live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and they're both, you know, women. That one's a mom and one just is a housewife. And they both wanted flexible work and they're both good at what they do. And that's, that's been two very good hires for me. So I definitely recommend stay at home moms on Craigslist as a way to find people.

There you go.

So my tip, I've talked about this a couple other places, but is to there's a new technology called web push notifications. Are you guys familiar with that?

Sure, sure.

So we've gotten about 51,000 people to sign up for them on our website. And every time we send out a notification, we get about 2,000 clicks. So it is just an amazing little technology inside the desktop web browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Safari. So if you go to like marketbeat.com, you'll get asked. It's like, do you want to allow this website to send you push notifications? And there's a button that says allow our block. And if you click allow that website, regardless if you're on that website at any point in the future can send a notification to your browser. So you can say, hey, check out my new blog post. And you could be on, say, ESPN and you would get a notification from MarketBeat saying, hey, come to MarketBeat and check out this new story. So it is really, I mean, it's kind of like email in that, like, you can just, you know, hit people up whenever you want to. You don't have to wait for them to come back to your website. And it is a little bit more ephemeral. People, you know, people that subscribe, they can become unreachable and you just can't push to them again. But it's a, you know, after email, it's, it's a very hot marketing tool that most, almost nobody is using. For one, two is just, it's, it's so powerful. I mean, I've got advertisers paying me, you know, $1 52 a click on some of these things. So just the fact that I send out a notification for them, you know, I get 1500 clicks that say two bucks a piece, you know, I make three grand from sending out a push notification for an advertiser. Not just because I thought to start collecting push notification subscribers and they didn't.

Wow.

Are you using a particular company like I've looked at Push Crew?

Yeah, yeah, we use one signal.

Oh yeah, I'm looking at one signal right now for WordPress.

Yeah, so I like one signal. We just use their API to like send notifications through their system. So we primarily use them as an infrastructure provider and they're very good for that. There are tools to manage your messages and view the stats and schedule them. I mean it's all there. It's just the UI isn't as good as it can be but we don't really use it so it's not a factor. I know a lot of people use Push Crew and there are a few others like that as well do the same kind of thing. One mistake though that people make with it a lot. So like if you sign up for Push Crew it'll have like the Push Crew, they'll have their own version of the Allow deny thing and then that take you to another page that shows the actual allow deny thing built into the web browser. Don't use those intermediary things that let you do custom messaging. Once you add that second step into it, it will really hurt your opt in rates to these things. You really want to have that built in browser except an I button that works a lot better than the intermediary pop up buttons that they give you to opt in or not.

Very cool.

The only requirement, I guess I was done. But the only requirement with that is you do need to have an SSL certificate on your website. So you need to have that HTTPs enabled. But you should be doing that anyway now.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, fantastic. Well, I just activated my One signal free web push notification on my site.

Awesome.

Great tip. Great tip. My tip of the week I think is better than everybody else tip of the week because it's. Learn more@matt paulson.com Matt Paulson.com will have a link to it. This is great. This is great. Matt, do we. Is there anything we didn't ask you? We should have asked probably. What should we ask you? We didn't ask.

I don't know. I've got a lot more tips like that we could go on for Hours with stuff I've been learning the last six months.

All right, best three tips last six months. Go.

Push notifications is definitely number one. Number two would be using Google structured data testing tools. So with websites now the big trend with Google is there are really paying attention to schema.org information on your website. So it's basically a way to provide Google with structured data. And there are two of their specifications. One is the schema list and one is the schema question. If you have HTML that's formatted in the way that they want it, you know, when you Google sometimes now it tries to show you the answer right at the top of the page without you clicking on anything. Marketers call it position zero. But if you set up those schema questions on your website, you know, sometimes you can get those spots and you know we rank zero for a lot of questions and it's, you know, that's been a very nice little source of web traffic that you know, again not a lot of people are doing yet structured data testing.

Tool preview. A free Chrome extension. Do you recommend getting the, the Chrome extension?

It's not, I just use, they have a website URL for it. Okay, so if you look up like the schema.org? specification and then you put some of those question and answers on your website, Quora does this. Then you can, you can get some of those position zero spots and it's some really good traffic because you know you're going to be at the top of the page.

Ah, I love it.

I love it.

Okay, so I'm going to my site right now and I say test your structured data. Run test. Yep.

And obviously nothing because you'd probably like unless you've intentionally set it up, it will come back as blank.

Well no, I've got something here. Oh cool. I have zero error, zero warnings. But it's all, it's.

I don't understand how to read it.

I don't know.

Yeah, there's a learning curve to it definitely.

All right, well that's cool, that's cool. All right. Second, that's your get two tips. Now what? Another one. Boom. No, no pressure, Matt, go.

So if you are writing an email to say you want your audience to do something, you have an email list. Send them a literally a two sentence email. The first sentence is a question like hey, are you still interested in XYZ question mark? Like if you are, click this link. So it's that that type of email digital marketer calls these like a nine word email because there's nine words in email. But the open rates tend to be very high. People actually read them, they take action on them because it only takes like a second to read and they get through pretty much every spam filter in the world. So when I send out like a nine word email, my open rate tends to be about 30 to 40% higher than normally is. And the click through rate tends to be usually about twice as good as it normally is. Just because it's short, it's concise, it gets through every spam filter in the world. People actually take the time to read it. Then if they're interested, they'll click and take action. So you don't have to write like a four paragraph email because who wants to read a four paragraph email anyway? So keep it really short and sweet.

So do you do this for all your emails? Because I write like five emails a week.

No, it's something to pull out of the hat. Maybe once a week.

Once a week. Okay.

Yeah, I couldn't do it for everything. But it's. You got something simple you want people to do like read an article, you know, it's, you know, a really nice way to get people to take action.

Yeah. Are you interested in dominating Craigslist? Click here.

Yeah, I mean that. It doesn't have to be.

That's really good. That's really good.

More complicated than that.

Boom. I'm going to start doing that. I'm doing that today. No, Scott, I'm doing it today.

No, no, I'm doing it right now.

Mark, I already did it.

No, you didn't.

Yeah, I did.

No, you didn't. Trust me. I can see, I can see your screen fine.

I've got two more of these if you really want.

Let's go.

Let's go. Matt, we love it. We're sucking out all the genius from Matt Paulson. In fact, after this podcast, I'm gonna have you on speed dial.

All right, so two more. One is the accelerated mobile Pages project. Google amp.

Boy. Whoa. Do I go to Google amp?

Yeah, just. Yeah, Google Space amp.

Okay.

And this is a specification for like really mobile friendly news content or expanded E commerce. A bunch of other spaces now, but it is a kind of a subset of HTML that's supposed to look really fast on mobile web browsers. And if you do it, Google is right now they have what's called a search carousel where they're giving people that have this and friendly content, you know, kind of an extra position on top in mobile, get a lot of free page views. We're probably getting about 10,000 page views a day from our amp. Stuff from people on their mobile phones searching for stuff on Google that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise. So it's been a nice little traffic source. I've had my developer make really mobile friendly AMP pages that have our normal ads in them or normal email opt ins, but it just looks really good on a phone. So one, it's creating a good experience for your users. But two, Google is also sending you more people because you're doing what they want you to do, which is create these really nice fast mobile web pages.

Wow. I love it. I love it because, you know, I've got an app right now for the Land Geek. It's not that good. I think this could be better.

Yeah, I think most people that want apps don't need apps. You've got a website, you probably don't need an app.

Exactly, exactly. Okay, so awesome. So that was Wamp Mobile or no amp Want mobile. Okay. Google amp. Okay, so maybe I went to the wrong place because I went to. It's a beautiful Google AMP development.

Yeah, that's probably a service for amp.

Oh, okay. So I want to go to the.

Amp project.org AMPProject.org is the site for it.

Got it.

All right, one more. Last one. So there are, you know, we all have websites and most of us have no idea how people are actually using our websites and interacting with them. So there could be a whole bunch of people that are getting stuck on one part of your website. They don't understand where to click. And if you move the button around, if you knew where to put the button, then you could get much better results and get people to take the action that you want them to. And the way to really figure this out is to use a technology called session replace. So it literally records what users are doing on your website and how they're mousing around, what they're hovering over, what they're clicking on and just kind of replays like what they were doing as if you were standing behind them in their room as they were on your website. There are a few services that do this. Clicktail is one of them. Mouse Flow is another. Hotjar is one. I think we use hotjar on our website, but it actually records those sessions and those mouse movements and what people clicked on when they did. So that way if people are getting stuck on your website or like on the landing page especially, and they're not taking the action that you want them to, you know, maybe the button's in the wrong place. And, you know, if you watch several of these session replays and you see people make the same mistakes over and over again, and you can know that you probably have a user interface issue.

Mark.

I actually used hotjar on my Lanmoto site and it was amazing because I had a slider, you know, like, that would just change out the pictures. But I only had one picture because I wanted to have it show. And there was, you know, arrows on each side of the picture. And what hotjar showed me is that people were actually clicking on the arrows even though they're. I mean, the arrows were there, but there was no other content. There was nowhere else for them to go, but they were clicking on the arrows. So I'm like, wow, that's pretty powerful to know that people are looking for more pictures, more stuff. And I mean, it's amazing what like a hotjar can do to tell you the story of your user experience.

Matt, how many users do we need to have click around before we know? Okay, this is an issue? Not many.

No, I mean, you just. I mean, how many session replace can one person realistically watch? If somebody spends a minute on your website, you're going to spend 100 minutes watching 100 people on your website.

Right, Right, exactly.

The he heat maps. The heat maps were the most important for me because the heat maps, it looks at where the mouse is going, where the cursor is going, and it records it. And then it shows you like, this is where people are taking the mouse. And then you can put. Put that content over there.

So do you guys like Hot Jar over everything else?

I wish I had a good answer for this. I actually delegated it to my. One of my employees and she's been messing with it and I haven't.

Okay, all right, well, cool. I liked it. You know, we could take it fancy hands and say, hey, of these heat map companies, which is the best? Do some research. Okay. So Matt, any. Any more tips?

I think that's it for now. That you guys basically heard half my conference talk at MicroCon next week.

This is great. That is great. Well, thank you so much. I would remind the listeners the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like a Matt Paulson@mattpulson.com to come on this podcast is if you do us three little favors. You go, you subscribe, you rate and review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of your review@supporthelandgeek.com we're gonna send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit. Just Want to remind everybody, today's podcast is sponsored by posting domination.com Delangi because, look, and Matt will agree, you can always make more money, but you can't get more time. So start automating. Automate the Craigslist postings. Automate your Facebook postings. Automate your life. Right, Scott, are we gonna. We should write a book about this. We should. Yeah. You know, Ari Meisel took a great title, Less doing, More Living. It should be something we'll, like, rip it off, like, let's do it.

The Art of Automation.

Yeah, yeah. The Art of Living. Better. I don't know, Matt. You like that?

Yeah, I think there. I think there's a book there. Just stuff that everybody does that can be automated that. I mean, like, anybody that still pays their bills, like, writes out a check. They're. They're idiots. Because.

Anyone who's doing errands anymore, like, I do everything on Amazon and online, their shipt app. I mean, it's unbelievable.

Uber.

Uber eats.

Yeah. Yeah. We. I live in a town of 150,000 people. We don't have all that cool stuff.

But it'll come to you, man. The drone. I read today that now drones, like, they're. They got drones that will bring you cash. There's no reason to go to the ATM anymore.

That would be a fun drone to shoot out of the sky and.

Yeah, yeah, no, I saw that. Yeah, yeah, I saw that on. I forget where I saw it, but, yeah, I think.

Yeah.

So that's so cool. All right, so, Scott, Todd, are we good?

We're good, Mark.

Matt Paulson, are we good?

Yes, I think we are.

All right, well, again, I want to thank all the listeners. Scott, you ready?

I got anxiety, but let's go.

Let's try.

One, two, three Let freedom ring, ring.

Matt's like, I really regret now coming on this podcast.

Yeah, he's shaking his head. I have no idea what that was.

About, but that's our tagline.

That's how we end every show. It's terrible, but it's awful.

Then maybe you should change it.

But it's working for us. I think we got people talking.

All right, Matt, when are you coming back on? Because we love the tips, we love the geekiness.

I don't know. Ask me again six months, and I'll probably say yes.

Awesome. All right, Matt. Thanks so much, Scott. Thank you. Thank you, listeners, and we'll see you next time.

Thanks, guys.