What You Need To Know To Make Successful Online Courses, Podcasts, and More

Do you have solo economic dependency?

That is, if you aren't working, you aren't making money. The art of Passive income podcast is the solution. Discover passive income models so you can enjoy life on your own terms.

Let freedom ring.

Hey, it's Mark Pedolski, the Land Geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and I am pumped for our guest today because he is a marketing genius. But before we talk to our guests, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host, the professor, the brain, the flight school Land Geek sherpa, Scott Todd from Scott todd.net landmodo.com if you're not automating your Craigslist and your Facebook postings, posting domination.com thelandgeek Learn anything about anything. Investor ninjas.com Scott Todd. How are you, Mark? I'm great.

How are you?

I'm great. I'm great. Are you psyched for our guests?

I am. I'm excited.

I'm excited because our guest today is Robert Plank. And if you're not familiar with Robert, he is the host of the Marketer of the Day, which is a podcast. And he's also the author of wwhy. What? How to what if he's also a computer programmer, a membership site designer, a podcaster, Internet marketing strategist. It is his mission in life to ensure your book, podcast, and online course are the best they can be. Using systems, checklists and templates, you can write a book within an hour and become a published author within 12 hours. What? You can set up a membership site in a single day, create a blog or podcast in five minutes or less, and so much more. Robert Plank. Those are some big promises. Welcome to the podcast. How are you?

I am fantastic. Big promises. So I guess we now have to deliver. We're on the hook. So glad to see you.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, let's just get into the whole book thing. Really. It took me a year to write my book, Derrich. How can I become a published author within 12 hours?

By not overthinking it. By only doing the essentials. By taking. Taking shortcuts in a good way, not in a bad way. By speaking out your book and saying it in the way that you would have explained it to a friend. Getting it transcribed, cleaning up, getting someone else to make the COVID putting it online, publishing it on Kindle, and then knowing that later on, if you want to make it better, strip things down, add more chapters, run spellcheck again, you can always improve on it. But what's most important is to have some, something tangible that you can hold in your hands. So that way you are motivated to continue. Because it's so easy to let all the baggage, the head trash hold you up, of being half done with something, of thinking, well, once I have this, everything will be perfect. It's really important to take some action, to focus, to get rid of all distractions and get something done. Get to some kind of milestone. That way you can keep going.

Interesting. Very interesting. Robert, let's just rewind the tape a little bit and tell us a little bit about your background and how you even started all this.

My background is, as you said, as a computer programmer. And just like how I'm sure you and Scott both were at some point you had a career, you had a 9 to 5, you had a job, you had a boss. And, and sometimes we outgrow those things, right? Sometimes we get just so tired of going through the day to day, living life one day after the next. And then it seems like when you get stuck in a routine, time speeds up and you say, well, wait a second, why are the years flying by? It's time to get some variety, to take some more risks, to try some more things. So I pretty much excelled at computer programming in high school. I went through the computer programming book in a week, the whole textbook that was supposed to take one all year long, just programming everything that there was. It was one of these things where I was naturally good at it. And it also turns out that computer programming makes money too, right? It's like in my town, there's a guy that creates these real huge like model figurine things. And he's good at it and he enjoys it, but it takes him a whole year just to earn just to sell one of these $1,000 items. So it's really important that we find these things that we're good at, that we enjoy, that people want and that makes money. And it turns out computer programming and software, cool qualifies all those things. But then the problem was I didn't want to be a manager. I didn't want to be a business person, didn't want to be an mba. But then getting stuck as just a code monkey, a grunt, someone just writing the code, there was a cap on that income. And also, I mean I got my college degree, I spent a few years in corporate America, but it was just boring, right? It was just a lot of getting my projects done early and, and then sandbagging my time and then goofing off in the meantime. And it was always fun to be curious and see the problems that were out there and create plugins and apps and things like that. And so I have been 10 years, almost 11 years now, full time Internet marketer. I specialize in membership sites and these last few years has been podcasting as well. Just like how you and Scott kind of have noticed that it's a lot more profitable to focus on the publicity and the marketing, getting yourself out there, which is an easy thing to forget. So, basically, long story short, started off as a computer programmer. I still do software, but now also courses and podcasting.

Awesome. Scott. Todd, what are your thoughts? Oh, wait, Scott, you're on mute.

All right, sorry, sorry, sorry. That's the thing I think a lot of people miss, like, when they go to start a business. Like, I spent, I can't tell you how many hours I spent, like, just thinking of ways that I could start my own business. And the one thing I always thought of is, like, I was trying to create something that's completely new to the world. Right. Like, you know, and I think a lot of people fall into this trap is, oh, well, the world needs this, this. And then that task is so huge to go do to, like, change what the world doesn't have today and in fact, show them that they actually need. It's really complicated. Doesn't really always lead to success. You have those freak examples like, I don't know, Facebook, for example, or YouTube that has led to success. But you can't. Not every business is going to start out is going to be that. That big. But I think a lot of people need to make their money, right? Like, they still want to start a business. They want to break free of the corporate chains. They want to have their own deal, Find what other people are doing, like computer programming or whatever it is. Go find what someone else is doing and copy it. I mean, like, don't copy.

Exactly.

Bring your own creative influences to it. But if this guy can make money doing something, why can't you make money doing something? I think that's a big lesson there.

Well, and I was gonna say.

Go ahead.

Yeah. You mentioned Facebook. And you think of, like, you know, Facebook wasn't a pioneer. The Pioneer was MySpace. And look where they are now. And you think about how Microsoft came out with a tablet in 2000, but it was too relieved for its time. Imagine if you invented a cell phone in 1970. It's too much of a gap. It's too much work to be in, too big of a scope. And a problem, as you're saying there, Scott. So there's definitely value in seeing what's already out there, see what's already been done. And maybe you can apply your own spin on it, make it a little better, make it your own. But yeah, and that's, it's a hard ego lesson to keep in mind that maybe someone's already done what you want to do, or maybe they're 80% of the way there and you could be the Facebook to their MySpace.

Yeah, absolutely. I think if I were going to, you know, be someone's, let's say uncle, and they said, hey, Mark, what three attributes would you want this kid to have coming out of college? I'd want them to be Robert Plank, because I guarantee if they have these three skill sets, they'll always be able to make a very, very good living. Have the technical chops of coding, because that is leveraged. Have marketing chops and have sales chops. You combine those three skill sets, you've got somebody that is going to be able to figure out how to make a very, very good living. And what's the best part about that is they won't have solo economic dependency, which means if they're not working, they're not making any money. These are all leverageable skills. So you can solve your money problems and your time problems. Because, Robert, I mean, how many hours a week do you have to work?

It changes. But I would say I take big breaks in the middle of the day. Some days it's two or three hours, some days I'm really motivated. It's eight, nine, 10 hours. But it's dependent on how excited I am, how much time I want to put into the business.

So for someone listening and they're thinking, okay, I've got some of these skills and I've got some expertise. I want to start a membership site. But it seems like it's just overwhelming. I've got all these barriers and there's already a billion membership sites out there. There might be membership site fatigue. This would be sort of a thought that might come their mind and they would stop themselves, their tracks and they say, screw it, I'm going to take a 45 minute commute back to Procter and Gamble and go back to my cube and keep working. What would you say to that person? How can they get over those fears and get started with their own membership site?

I would say look at some of the competition out there, like take inventory of your, your skills and what problems that you can solve that are easy for you. Hard for others. And look at the competition out there. Do some Google searching, look at the Amazon books, look at the courses, look at the what's on Udemy, what's in the Google search, and look at the competition. Definitely not with the mindset of copying, but knowing that you're gonna be a little angry. Like you alluded to a little while ago, you're gonna be angry at how this idiot is making money and at this thing that's really simple for me. And this idiot is barely teaching anything. It's so light on content and it's so high in price that I could kind of fill in the price gap and make something that's maybe the same price but delivers a lot more, maybe slightly undercut him in the market. But I guarantee that if you have those four things we talked about, that passion, that skill, and the things that people want like a problem to be solved, plus they're willing to pay money for that. If you can dial in those handful of skills that you, that you have, those real problems that you can solve and you go and you look at how the problem is kind of sort of trying to be solved right now, you're going to be angry at how bad a job some of these competitive future competitors of yours are doing and how you can do a way better job. Just like how if you look at Facebook today for versus how MySpace looked back years and years ago with all the animated graphics and the crappy fonts and the text, it's like night and day. But they were onto something. So I think the answer is look at that competition, look at who's on to something and figure out how you can do something better in a number of ways. Because it doesn't always have to be that you give someone a way bigger result or that you have way more hours of videos in your membership site. Maybe all the, for example, real estate courses out there are so complicated and everyone who takes them, they just get more confused than when they started. What if you kept things a little more on the down low? What if you made things simple? What if you said, Instead of making $10 million in real estate, I can show you how to flip one house, I can show you how to make ten grand. So sometimes the value is in you making things on a smaller scale or simpler or more accessible for others. So look at the competition. I guarantee you'll get angry at how they are. They're, they're doing a worse job than you will do.

Interesting, Scott. Todd.

Well, I mean, you know, that's the thing is Is we all bring, we all bring different skill sets to the world and you know, there's no reason to copy somebody else and there's no reason to, to think, well, oh well, he's already got that niche. No, no one's going to get a, get a quarter on the niche, right, because you're going to bring your own skill sets to it. But what I would say is that whatever you're going to go do, well, you should have some experience. More than, you know, like just waking up one day and going, man, I got the money this guy's making, I'm gonna go do what he's doing. Well, you may not have the knowledge to bring the skill sets, even though you think you do. You need to have some experience with it, right? Like you got to be able to walk the walk and talk it and to deliver it. And that's the thing is, you know, go find what you're really good at, what's core to you. Bring that out to the world.

And you know, what's great about what you just said there, Scott, is that, you know, we all live different lives here, right? Like we were saying as we were starting up, Mark was reading like, I do all these things and Mark, Mark has all these layers in his past. I'm sure that you do too. So there's no downside in picking up some skills, right? Especially if someone is young or starting over in their life. There's no downside to getting that job at Procter and Gamble in order to get some on the job training or figure out some of these skills that you can then teach. But I love what you said there about how don't just make one aspect of it the thing that you can go out and learn real quick and teach it. It's way easier if you have. And we all have these skills built in. We all have these past lives from jobs, careers we've had, past businesses. And maybe we can teach that thing that we already know and that really shortcuts the process, Right? We don't have to do research or as much because we, we already know the ins and outs of this thing that we're looking to teach. So yeah, I love that point you made.

So Robert, what's some of the worst advice you see or hear given in your area of expertise, of marketing?

For sure, it is the advice that things need to be perfect. Nothing is perfect. And so many times that idea of perfectionism, procrastination, it's based out of fear, right? It's based out of. I'm in denial. And I'm so afraid of putting out the book or putting out the course because I'm worried that one person might hate it, One person might refund, one person might make fun of it. And there's a lot of cognitive dissonance and self doubt and just self sabotage and lying to yourself and all that baggage. And it's really just based out of fear. But you can't just look at it directly and you can't admit that it's fear because then that makes you seem weak, and then it makes you feel bad about yourself. So the wrapping that it's covered in the. I don't know, the disguise is that it has to be perfect, and nothing out there will be perfect. I mean, for centuries, people thought that California was an island. For centuries, people thought that the world was flat. We didn't even know Pluto was a planet until 1930. And then every college textbook that you've ever gotten has had a list of errors that they corrected in the past edition. So nothing out there is ever perfect. Even Facebook has bugs sometimes. Even Twitter crashes, sometimes even Gmail crashes. Nothing is perfect. But the biggest disservice you can do to yourself is believing that perfectionism is necessary, because that means that it's an excuse for you to never get it done. So don't believe in perfectionism. Do it anyway.

Yeah. As Scott Todd would say, always be moving your feet. Scott, do you like when I quote you?

I do, yeah. I should have my own quote book, I guess.

You should.

You really should.

The title of it should be always be moving your feet by Scott Todd.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I think if you just do what Robert said in the beginning of the podcast, you could have that thing done by tomorrow.

And I'll start working on that. Unless you're going to write it for me.

Oh, there you go, ghostwriter. Well, I can quickly unpack the. The formula for making that book in a day, if there's time, if you're interested.

Yeah, let's do it. Let's write Scott's book right now.

All right. Perfect. Well, I mean, in Scott's book, it might be a little bit different because we're talking about a quote book. And so in that case, it would be a matter of, like, piling in the big list of quotes and then looking through and kind of sorting them and figuring out, like, what groups they are and what order. But in general, when we're talking about just a book, in any case about raw land or about courses or podcasting or whatever, the. The formula that I use is, well, first of all, a very important part of this is that we name the chapters of our books as questions, knowing that later on we can always rename the chapter. But the most important part of this kind of mindset is create a list of questions. And then in between. In between the questions, you answer them, and then you later on remove the questions and that becomes your whole book. And so the idea here is you say, well, I want to make a book about this or that solves this problem that's for this specific person that doesn't have this figured out yet. And you pile in a lot of ideas, and you are basically looking for 10 questions that someone would have if they know nothing about raw lands. And then once those 10 questions are answered, then they have the whole entire book. And so you list of those 10 questions, and the way that it's going to work is the first three or four questions are going to be pretty easy, right? They're going to be like the, duh, most simple questions that you can think of. And, and then those middle questions, maybe 5, 6, 7, are going to be a real struggle, or maybe they'll be kind of dumb ones that you just thought, like, put out there because you had to. But then questions 8, 9, and 10 are going to be the really good ones that you wouldn't have thought of if you didn't kind of go through the rough, impenetrable forest, so to speak. And so you have this list of 10 questions that someone would ask if they were looking to start a raw land business, for example, you have this list of 10 questions, and then you want to remove three of them. You want to remove the three weakest ones. And so some of these questions might just be total crap. You just completely cross them out. Some of them you might notice, well, I really want to keep that thing in there. So then you might have to like, say, well, maybe this other one's a little bit weaker, or some of these questions you might combine together. But you list 10 questions, you reduce it down to seven. And then once you have these 10 questions that you're going to answer, you kind of rearrange and figure out what. What's a logical order. And usually the way it works out is four of those questions are going to be the really simple basic ones, and then three of them are going to be kind of the more advanced chapters where it gets into more specific scenarios or case studies. And then, so that gives you basically your outline. But then to flesh out your outline, you use this formula called wwh why, what, how to what if? And what that means is that within. So you have your seven questions, your seven chapters, and then you want to create four sub questions for each one. And then you say, why blank? What? Blank. How to blank? What if? Blank. So for example, one of your chapters in your raw land book might be how do I look into property records or something? And you say, well, why is it important that I use that I look into property records to get my raw land? You explain the context, the reason why they've come to this problem that they're looking to solve. Then you go to the what? And you say, well, what are land records and what are county records? And so this way people understand the principles, the concepts, the terms, the tools in the toolbox. And then the meat of your chapter is how to. How do I go to the county office and look in that records? And what's a little bit of the process? What kinds of things am I looking for? What are the, the step by step things I should do? And then the final part of that chapter is the what if chapter. And that means, well, now that I know this information, what should I do now? What's the next step? And now that I know this, what does that lead into? So now that you know how to find those land records, now what's the process towards maybe doing more of your due diligence? Maybe that's the next chapter and that transitions and that flows nicely. So that's why, what, how to what if? And then I know we're blasting through this really quickly, but what we want to do is we want to answer each of those sub questions in about two minutes. And I mean, you can talk for two minutes about anything if you know raw land, if you know your expertise. So you talk for two minutes about why is it important that I use county records to find my raw land? And you talk for two minutes about this. And what you end up with is you end up with eight minutes of you recording this one chapter. Now you have seven chapters. So eight times seven is 56 minutes. And you can just. And once you. And there might be a little, maybe like an hour or so of fleshing out this exact outline, but once you have the outline, you speak out each little item for two minutes and you can choose to sit down at once and speak out a book in an hour, and I've done that a few times. Or you can split up your time and just do it in two minute chunks, eight minute chunks, but you end up with a 9,000 word transcript once you get it transcribed, then you go and run spell check and take out a little bit of the problems. Maybe add in maybe some like a checklist at the end of each chapter, maybe maybe throw in some interesting graphics. And that is very easily a 30, 40, 50 page paperback book that you created in an hour. And then all Amazon needs to publish your book is a word document containing the pages, the insides of your book. They need a cover, which you can go on freelance sites and get for five or ten dollars. They need to know the title of your book, your name as the author, a quick blurb so people know what they're buying. They need to know the price. So a few little items, but basically. And then Amazon takes a few hours to approve it and they've never taken longer than a day or so. And there was one morning when I Woke up at 6 in the morning, I took a walk. I got an idea for a book called the Checklist Mindset about Productivity. I did this, I outlined it, I spoke it out. I had it submitted to Amazon by 2pm and had it live by 6pm so one hour of work, 12 hours, start to finish of a book. And as long as you are excited, you have a template, a structure, and, and you don't waste a lot of time. You know that you'll never get to perfectionism. You can always make that book better later. That's how you do it. So I'm not sure if that helps you get on the road there, Scott, as far as your quote book, but that is my process for getting it out there, getting it done.

All right, I'm doing it now. Mark, do you know what he just did?

What?

He just laid out for us a recipe, right? Like that's what it is. It's our recipe. And like I always say, recipes, they work every single time, okay. Like it's something that you can explain. And if people follow the directions, I can just follow these simple directions. Next thing you know, I'm pounding out books every day. I could do a book a day.

Ooh, do that.

Absolutely.

Do 365 books in 365 days.

I mean, yeah, 20% are going to be winners, 80% are going to be losers. Who cares?

Let the market decide.

Absolutely. It's, it's called the, the Little Wayne philosophy where if you, you know, publish enough music, some of it's gonna be good, you know, you enough books, some of it'll be good.

So one of my favorite musicians is a guy named Wesley Willis. And he's dead now, but he Hits the demo button on his synthesizer keyboard and then just wraps over it and he's world famous.

There you go. There you go. Well, before we get to the tip of the week, I just want to remind the listeners that today's podcast is sponsored by Flight School. Learn more about the recipe of how you can get out of solo economic dependency and have Scott Todd lead you up that mount of land investing quickly, efficiently and safely. Learn more@thelandgeek.com training. All right, Robert Plank, I think your mentorship has been phenomenal, this podcast, but now we're going to ask you for another tip. A tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What have you got?

What I have is my book. You can get it@wwhwbook.com and there's a research for you, but a tip, like a really easy tip, something that I just came across this two days ago, I was on YouTube and I found a speech by an MIT professor named Patrick Winston, and he's dead now. And he gave this like 90 minute talk about how to become famous and how to deliver good speech. And he had a lot of ideas. But the one tip, the thing that really stuck with me, he said, build a fence around your idea, which I think that's such a cool concept, right? And we've been talking about how do we stand out, how do we get confidence and all those sorts of things. But think about a way that you can alienate some people and you can differentiate your idea and maybe explain how your idea differs or is better or is more appropriate to a certain type of person. Build a fence around your idea so that way it's uniquely yours. Spend a little bit of time explaining, like, what your idea isn't and who it's bad for. So that way the people that it's good for, it'll really match up. So that's my two tips. Wwhbook.com and then build a fence around your idea.

I love that idea. Dan Kennedy was famous for saying, if you're not insulting somebody by noon, you're not working hard enough and essentially saying, build a fence around your idea. It's for these people, it's not for these people. Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week?

Mark, I'm going to give you another book and I'm going to tell you. This book I know for a fact was not written using the method that I just learned. And it probably took the guy a lot longer to do it. But in fact, he is. He is like somebody that I am just like, I'd love to meet this guy and pick his brain. And it's a book by Robert Iger, and the book is called the Ride of a lifetime. Lessons learned from 15 years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company. And I don't know, like, this guy has transformed the Walt Disney Company. It's amazing to see what he's done with it. I watched the master's class with him. It was really kind of cool to see that. So check it out. It's a good read. Get in the mind of a top CEO.

I love it. The Robert Iger book. All right, well, my tip of the week is learn more about marketing, Creating a podcast, writing a book, making a membership site. Anything you want to do, go to robertplank.com robertplank.com we will have it in the show notes as well as all the other tips. And just a little reminder, please, if you're enjoying the podcast, if you're getting value out of it, just do us three little favors. You got to subscribe and you had a rate. You had to review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review to support thelandgeek.com we are going to send you for free the $97 passive income launch kit as well as the latest wholetailing course, how to double your money 30 days or less in land investing. So please do that. All right, Robert. Flank, are we good?

We're great.

Scott. Todd, are we good? We're good, Mark. All right, I want to thank all the listeners again. And Here we go. 1, 2, 3, let freedom ring. Pretty good. Not bad. All right. Thanks, Robert.

Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income podcast. Start your journey at www.thelandgate.com and www.scotttod. net Rate and Review the podcast and email supportthelandgeek. Com. Your screenshot for a free passive income launch kit.