Matt: John, I'm ready to blow up, let’s do this.

John: Yes. Matt’s the founder of marketbeat.com, a financial media company that has attracted more than 450,000 email subscribers, and receives more than 4 million page views each month. He’s also the host of Startup Q&A, an online video show that answers your questions about building businesses online. Matt, take a minute and fill in some gaps from that intro and give us a little glimpse into your personal life.

Matt: So I am probably the only online entrepreneur in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I'm out here by myself in the middle of a corn field. I've been doing this for probably about ten years now. I've tried a bunch of different things. I've had like a WordPress consulting business. I had a personal finance blog. You know, everything that everybody tried I did. And then about six years ago now, I landed on something that really blew up, and that was MarketBeat. It was then called Analyst Starting’s Network. I've talked about it on the show a couple of times, episode 186 and 1077. I'm surprised you're already at like 1670 episodes now.

John: I know it's crazy.

Matt: Yeah. You know, it's really grown up since then. I figured out some strategies that really work for email list growth and just monetization. You know, we were on Inc. 5000 list last year. Almost hit the Inc. 500 list, but we grew from like $320,000 in revenue three year ago, to about $2.7 million in 2016. So if you can grow that much, I figure we're doing something right. So yeah, MarketBeat has just been a great little business. We've got employees now. We've got an office. It's like we're – we have a 401k plan.

John: It's like you're real.

Matt: I know it's like it's a real company. It's amazing what's happened.

John: Well, congrats, brother. And Fire Nation, like Matt said, 186, 1077, and now 1673. He is one of the incredibly few rare three-peat on EOFire, so you know he’s got some good stuff going on. And the last time you were on Matt, it was about mid 2015 or so, you were like 240,000, 250,000, as far as subscribers, and you’ve grown. You’ve grown now to 450,000 subscribers. I'm sure it's even more since you sent this over. So what's going on, like how have you achieved this growth?

Matt: We spent a lot of money. We've spent about half a million dollars building out our email list in the last couple years. So we do that through Google AdWords, obviously. And then we were experimenting with Facebook ads. We do some coadsorption advertising, we do a lot of that, actually. And we started an affiliate program that has worked out really well for us, so it's been a big cash investment in advertising to build that list, but it's been well worth it.

Because I know that for every two or three dollars I spend in acquiring an email address, I'll get seven or eight dollars back, so I'm willing to do that all day long on any legitimate lead source. We've got affiliates that we're writing checks at $10,000 a month to because they run our opt in forums for us. And we make, we’ll pay them two dollars a lead, and there's one person that’s giving us 5,000 leads a month, so it's a lot of strategies like that that cost us a lot of upfront money, but we've literally build out just a great asset, and that has really paid off in dividends.

Because there are advertisers, big name financial media outlets that will pay us $40.00, $50.00 CPMs to email the list, so if they want to know that whole list it's 450 times $50.00. And then the agency that sells it will take a 30 percent cut, so we can still net a lot of money off that.

John: Totally. Now, one thing I like about you is number one you're willing to spend money to make money. You're willing to invest in yourself. You're willing to test. And you're a very analytical person, so you know your numbers. I mean, you know your numbers across the board. You know what your exact ROI is, and that's so huge, Fire Nation.

You can't just throw money into something to quote, unquote test, like you have to have the numbers down packed. So when I ask you this question, I'm pretty confident you're going to be able to come back with an actual real answer. What business models are actually working right now?

Matt: You and I have both been around long enough to see all the different fads that have happened.

John: Oh, yeah.

Matt: In 2006 it was the made for AdSent sites, people building crap website with Google AdSense on them. 2012, we had the Kindle website, or you know Kindle Books, where people would just pound out really garbage Kindle Books and make a lot of money. We had a trend with online courses for awhile. Now it's Amazon FBA and Amazon Associates, but that's really about over because Amazon just announced some big changes to their affiliate program.

And that revenue is going to decline by 40 to 50 percent for a lot of people that are reliant on Amazon Associates. So it's, you know, you see trend, to trend, to trend, to trend, and then once something becomes really big with a big company that it kind of revolves around changes the game. They make not as good of a deal as it used to be. It’s already happened for Amazon Associates. It’s probably going to happen for Amazon FBA, but that's kind of a good message that maybe we shouldn’t be so reliant on these big companies.

You know, there are a few trends that I'm seeing right now, obviously Facebook is huge. I've seen people build just massive e-commerce businesses off Facebook ads. And Amazon Merch is something that I'm seeing that a lot of people are doing. I know one gal that’s making $30,000 a month selling t-shirt on Amazon through Merch. So through their Merch program, she just makes t-shirt designs. She uploads them, sets a price, and writes a description.

And she’s got a few thousand designs, but in December she racked home $30,000 in just royalties on t-shirts that she didn't ship or do anything. It's just she made the designs, she uploaded them, and she got a check for $30,000 for doing it. I think that's something that's going to be seen as the next kind of easy money thing that people are going to chase for awhile, but ultimately I think these easy money things last for 18 to 36 months and then they go away and people move on to the next thing.

John: Well, they get saturated, so the margins decrease. And then the quote, unquote professionals come into town, and then that gets taken over. It's just like trend, which is exciting because that means there's always that next thing. and if you just follow people like Matt and MarketBeat, and you just keep your finger on the pulse, that next thing that comes, you can be that person that he’s talking about now that's making $30,000 on Amazon Merch.

But I want to do a little bit of a back track Matt, because I'm curious personally, I love how you broke it down. 2007, one of the fads was AdSense, 2012 it was Kindle, 2014 it was selling online courses, today is Amazon FBA, and you wrote, but that's about over. Now, I'm curious on that personally, for personal reasons, because I'm currently quite a user of Amazon FBA, but maybe not in the way that you are saying it's going to be over, but maybe, so I'm curious.

For instance, like I have two physical products, they're journals, the Mastery Journal and the Freedom Journal. I got them produced overseas at a very low cost, and then have them come over to my distributors in the U.S. and I do sell from my own sites, the Freedom Journal and the Mastery Journal.com. But I also do then ship a bunch to Amazon for FBA, Fulfillment by Amazon, and I do really well selling the journals there. So what are you talking about when you say that Amazon FBA is about over?

Matt: I think you're going to be okay because you have a differentiated product that not – you know, not everybody can make the John Lee Dumas’ Freedom Journal or Mastery Journal or whatever it is. They can't use your brand and make that journal, so you're going to be okay.

The challenge for a lot of my friends that are doing FBA is – you know, I know a guy that sell pillows on Amazon. You know, how many other people are selling pillows, and how do you make pillows that are different than anybody else’s, if you're a no name brand.

John: And what are your profit margins, too. Like, how many pillows do you have to sell to actually make a decent amount of money? Like, do you have 4 cent profit margin, do you have a 40 cent? Because I know that, like because I have $29.00 per sale profit margin that I can go pretty heavy into Amazon advertising, their AOS systems, and really spend three or four dollars per sale and still come out way in the green.

Matt: I think what’s going to go away is the people that are just going on Alibaba looking for whatever, and white labeling it and selling it. I think that's going to go away because I think Amazon, they are just going to go themselves into all the popular niches and sell stuff under their Amazon Basics brand. I think they're going to push people out of the market because they aren’t paying the 30 percent or whatever cut that Amazon is taking.

They're paying it themselves, so they can afford to exist on much lower margins. So they’ll probably come and eat up a lot of the great niches.

John: Well, can we talk about that for a second, because I think this is a great point that you're making?

Matt: Yeah.

John: For instance, I went online a few days, not a few days ago, a few months ago to buy some medicine balls for my gym. And the first few that I got were from this company like Valor or something, and they were pretty expensive. But then I went back on like a few weeks later, because I wanted to get a couple of heavier and lighter ones, and all of a sudden I saw this new option that popped up. It was an Amazon Basic medicine ball, and it was so much cheaper.

And I was like: whoa, that's the exact same thing. It’s beautiful colors, like you could tell it was great. So what is this Amazon Basics and why should we be a little of scared of this, if we're focused on FBA, not our own products, but other products?

Matt: That's Amazon’s house brand. So like for Sam’s, they have their Sam’s Choice, and Costco has like Kirkland Signature, it's their version of that. So if they can sell – they can buy the same thing on Alibaba that you can, and they can sell it. And they can – they’ve got 30 percent more margin to work with because they're not paying themselves that fee. So they can sell stuff for cheaper and still make money off of it, where you can't.

So there are a whole bunch of people that are just going to get their lunch eaten by Amazon. Some people already have, it’s just going to keep moving in that direction. You know, plus when you compound that with the fact that so many people are doing Amazon FBA now, it's just the prices are going to go down and the margins are going to shrink, and it's just not going to be worth it. And a lot of the marketing strategies that people were using on Amazon FBA just aren’t working as well as they used to.

You know, they banned incentivized reviews, so now you actually have to go get real reviews. And the times are definitely a changing for this hot business model trend. It's just not going to be as easy and as lucrative as it used to be.

John: We have a lot more to talk about, so I don’t want to spend too much time on this next topic, but I do want to dive a little bit more into Amazon Merch, because you did say that you think this is the next trend and business is coming. So you talked really eloquently about the woman who is uploading the graphics and doing the great job with the shirts, etc. what exactly are some other opportunities or success stories that you're seeing within Amazon Merch?

Matt: She’s the one that I know that's doing it. I have a few other friends that are doing $1,000 a month. It’s really just a matter of –

John: But what are they doing, is it all shirts?

Matt: Yes.

John: Or are there people doing other things besides shirts?

Matt: They only do there-shirts right now. Theoretically it was designed for like a band that wants to make t-shirts online, but people figured out that it's kind of like TeethBring, so you just upload your t-shirt designs and they do all of the work for you. That gals name is Elaine Haney, by the way, she’s great. I think she has a podcast about Merch now.

John: Yeah, she does. And she actually wrote a really good article, one of them is on Dig and Reddits. Yeah, it s a Reddit article. So it’s just shirts now, do you see them expanding into other kinds of merchandise?

Matt: I think that's just a matter of time. I think they had a lot of problems with copywriter issues and people copying other people’s designs, towards the end of the last year, and it actually shut down the application process for new accounts for awhile, and nobody was getting approved. So I think Merch kind of started out as a small team and then it got really popular before they really knew what they were doing and had the staff to handle the big issues, so they had to shut things down for a little while, until the Christmas season was over.

But now, you know, people can upload design again, and I think it's only a matter of time before Amazon recognizes the business opportunity that it is. Because I think they set like a minimum price of like $15.00 a shirt or something like that, and you know they can make money selling t-shirts at $15.00. And then whatever the Merch, you know, I guess, Elaine or whoever uploads the design, she can add money on top of that to make her money.

But Amazon is going to always make $15.00 off the shirt, so they're definitely going to do that. but, you know, people sell other promotional products too, mugs, and pencils, and hats, and stuff like that, you can only – you know, it's only a matter of time before Amazon jumps into some of that other stuff as well.

John: Got it. Fire Nation, you don’t want to go anywhere because you’ve been hearing some value bombs. We're going to be talking about the trends for getting web traffic in 2017, after we get back from thanking our sponsors. So Matt, we are back. And as I promised Fire Nation, we're going to talk about the trends, about getting web traffic, because if you can create a good offer, and then you can send traffic to that offer, you're going to win, it's just that's going to happen. That's a pretty simple recipe for success. So what are the trends to getting web traffic in 2017?

Matt: I think the big thing that we as marketers need to focus on now is that so many of us have built businesses up, you know, a single traffic source. You know, people have built AdSense sites that just get Google traffic. People have built app businesses that only get traffic from Apple and Google. You know, Amazon businesses that only get traffic from Amazon. I think that – I'm hoping that we as a community are wising up to these things.

And we're getting to a point where we say, you know we're not just going to be reliant on this one big company to send us people because we've seen this come and go before, so let’s not do that again. So the people that I see now that are doing really well, they're using Facebook, they're using Amazon, they're using five or six different advertising or marketing strategies to get people into their business.

So they have a website, they’ve got their own funnels, maybe they use click funnels, maybe their selling a physical product, maybe they're selling online educational content, but they really own the platform, and then they're just using these other channels to drive people to it. So it's really we need to be in a business model, where our acquisition is federated. We're not doing SEO, or maybe we are, but that's not the main thing.

So when one of those things goes away, then we can lean on the other ones to pick it up. You know, all the big Amazon people I know are trying to build their own e-commerce stores now, so they're not just reliant on Amazon. And I think that's definitely the trend, and what we all need to be doing.

John: Yeah, you know, what was pretty cool for me is that one day not too long ago, my Shopify store went down, like it was just for no good reason, like it was down for like an hour. I mean, my website was still up, but just the link to buy from Shopify was down, like Shopify was having an issue. So I was able to change the button to just directly to Amazon.

And so I was able to kind of keep sales going. And so you could at the same time, like you want to make sure that you have these kind of redundant situations Fire Nation, whereas if your Amazon store gets shut down, where a lot of people are going to be like where’s the Freedom Journal, so they’ll probably Google the Freedom Journal, and guess what, thefreedomjournal.com is going to come up.

They can go over there and buy it. So definitely be thinking about redundancy, protecting yourself, all of these things. And you kind of went through a few things, but you did say you need to focus on paid traffic, can you kind of expound about that a little bit?

Matt: Yeah. so when you are just a publisher in somebody else’s ecosystem, so if you are an Amazon FBA seller, you're a podcaster, you're somebody selling apps on the app store, you're somebody with a website on Google, your interest and their interest aren’t perfectly aligned, because what they want is what's best for their customers, and that's not always what’s best for you as a publisher. But when you are doin paid traffic, Google, or Apple, or Facebook, or whoever that is selling that you ad space, they want you to keep coming back and buying ads.

And they know that the only way that you're going to do that is if you get a return on your investment. So your interest and the big company’s interest are better aligned when you're paying them money for traffic, because then you become their customer and they want to make you happy. So those things, they tend to stick around a lot longer than the kind of free rides that we've all been taking for years that come and go. You know, I've had my AdWords account going promoting MarketBeat for probably six years now, and I haven’t done a whole lot to mess with it.

It just keeps humming away with the keywords that work for me. And Google takes me two or three dollars per read, and I get my seven or eight dollars back. You know, I've been using that strategy for six years, and I think it will probably go another six, maybe longer. So when you're paying somebody money for advertising, there's just a better alignment of interests, and it's going to stick around longer and be a more sustainable strategy. So I think that's really what online entrepreneurs should focus on.

John: Spending three and getting seven, that is the type of math that works, Fire Nation. Now, let’s talk about some of the new technologies that most web marketers, so that's you, Fire Nation, are not using yet?

Matt: Yeah. So my favorite on is web push notifications. So in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, not Internet Explorer yet, they have built in a notification system, so that if you go to a website that has it set up, it will ask you if you want to allow notifications on that website. And then if you click allow, they can send you a little browser notification in the bottom right of your browser window, just like you would get on your phone. And then you can put whatever you want in that browser window and send it to all your subscribers.

So you get a little picture, you get a headline, you get text. We've got about 38,000 people on our web push notification list. And we built this up in like 90 days on our various websites. But what's really cool about it is that whenever I send one of those to promote like a webinar or something that somebody is doing, you know I can get 1,000 people click through in a period of like an hour, which just is amazing. The click through rates are very good, the engagement is good. It's a great way to hit people that are on their web browsers right now.

They don’t miss it. They come back later, they’ll see the push notification. It's a very high engagement rate kind of thing, and it's just a great way to make people that were on your website at one point come back to it, maybe you promote a product, maybe you promote new content. There's lots of things you can do with it, but I think it's not quite email marketing, but it may be the second best thing to it, just in terms of a way to make people that come to your website come back for more.

John: Now let me see if I get this right, because I might not be understanding it completely. But if people come to say my website for, let’s just say they go to podcastersparadise.com because they're curios about maybe a webinar that's coming up, or just my community. And they click allow push notifications when they get there.

And then say two days later they're on espn.com looking up their sports team on that browser, but I'm about to have a webinar, I can send a notification to them on that ESPN browser? Hey, John’s doing a webinar in an hour, you should come hang out.

Matt: Yes, you can.

John: Come on?

Matt: That is the magic of it.

John: That's magic.

Matt: They don’t need to be on your website. Yeah, if you go to marketbeat.com in web browser, you’ll see that, as long as you're not using Internet Explorer of course, but you’ll see that request. If you click allow, you're going to get stuff – you're going to get a message from me every day saying: you know, here are today’s stock broker ratings, go check these out.

John: Let me play devil’s advocate for a second, though. So have you tested bounce rates? So people get to your website, then the first thing they get is this pop up that says do you want allow notifications, and they're like screw this, boom, they're piecing out. I mean, have you tested bounce rates?

Matt: Yeah, it doesn’t have much. you know, it really doesn’t make an impact because it's not like a big black screen pop up, you know, we do use those, but it’s not like that, because it's just – you know, it's maybe a 300 by 100 thing that shows up in the top left of their web browser.

John: And I might be wrong on this, but I bet a lot of times people don’t even associate that with your specific site.

Matt: Yeah.

John: They might just be like this is a browser thing, like yeah, definitely.

Matt: Yes.

John: Interesting.

Matt: I think anybody that’s not using this is missing out right now. And almost nobody is using it. You do need to have SSL set up on your website, but everybody should be doing that anyway for SEO reasons, now that it's a ranking factor in Google.

John: Okay, so specifically for this trend, where can we go to learn more on MarketBeat?

Matt: So to learn how to do web push notifications?

John: Yeah.

Matt: I did write a blog post on how to do it, how to set it up on your website, and then make it so every new blog post would go to your push notifications.

John: Just shoot me the link and we’ll put it on the show notes page.

Matt: Yeah, it's on mattpaulson.com if you scroll down a little bit or go to the second page it will be there, but we’ll definitely get it in the show notes, too.

John: It will probably be like the fifth or sixth page by the time this goes live. So we’ll get it in the show notes Fire Nation, we’ll have that for you. Let’s talk about paid advertising through content recommendation ads like Tabula, because they are cheap.

Matt: Yes, they are.

John: Tabula Ad Play to Revcontent, there are a few big companies that have kind of set themselves up, and just have worked the phones, worked the email inboxes to get on everybody’s website. They ads pay reasonably well, so we run some of them on our websites. What they cost the publisher is just very, you know, it's probably an order of magnitude smaller than Google AdWords would be. So if you're paying $1.50 a click on Google AdWords, you might be paying 15 cents a click on Revcontent or Tabula.

It’s just a different type of ad, and it's in a different placement, and it's more content driven. So if you can create some compelling content that – you know, the top ten mistakes that podcasters make in their first 20 shows. And you make that and you put it on Revcontent, or something like that, and you target people that have website that are relevant to your niche, you can get a lot of reasonably target traffic. And then once people are on your website, you can put picks with them, you can retarget them. You can have an opt in form.

You can ask them to sign up for web push notifications. So once they're on your website reading your content, there's just a ton of different ways that you can do that. You can just get it done really cheaply, too. I think it's definitely something that most marketers are under utilizing right now.

John: Okay, so as we kind of wind up here, let’s talk about Facebook retargeting, video on Facebook. You know, I know live video is just all the rage right now. So talk about those two and then we’ll wrap it up.

Matt: If you have an email list, I'll float it to Facebook. And you can target your email list with paid products on Facebook. You can create, I forget what they're called, but they're a list of people similar to what's on your email list. So you could find the people that should be subscribing, but haven’t subscribed yet. You can find some very interesting audience analytics, or you can learn like the gender of your audiences, the age, where they live, what their incomes are, just a ton of very relevant demographic information, and geographic that kind of stuff too, just by uploading your email list to Facebook.

So there's just a ton of different things you can do with retargeting through Facebook. Even if you don’t run the ads, do it for the audience insight, there's just a lot of great stuff you can do there.

John: Yeah. And that’s a look alike audience.

Matt: Yes. So Facebook Live video obviously, I don't know what there is to say about it, but it's a huge thing that's not getting utilized well. I know the ultra spiritual guy, what's his name, the guy with the long hair that does funny videos, JP Sears, that's it. He does his shows on Facebook Live and he gets a thousand people watching it just on their phones and on Facebook. And you can do this with your audience, too.

John: Yeah.

Matt: Every now and then I'll go on Facebook Live, I may have 1,500 friends, but I can get 400 or 500 views by the end of the day, just any video.

John: I just did one the other day for two and a half hours. And by the end of the video alone, I had over 2,000 views. And then by the next day it was over 3,000. And there was 350 comments, it can really just rev up. And it looks good to have that many views, that many comments, that many shares, that many likes, so good stuff.

Matt: People need to know is that it works if you're not john Lee Dumas, too. If you're just a regular person –

John: A regular person, what?

Matt: It works because you get notifications on your phone that says: hey, John is streaming live on Facebook.

John: Yeah. And what was cool is that during my two and a half hour live, like I literally had Michael Hyatt drop in, Chris Ducker drop in, like Michael O’Neil drop in, Sally Hogsted came in. And I was just like how are these people even knowing that? But they were just at some point going into Facebook and they're getting that notification, and they're like that was like an hour and 15 minutes in. So I'm finding like long – if you're willing to do a long term live video, like you're getting good results.

Matt: Yeah, definitely.

John: Brother, you have been awesome as always. And you have something that if Fire Nation doesn’t take advantage of, I'm just going to say it Fire Nation; you're silly, because this gold that Matt’s been dropping, he’s put it all together. He’s got this great thing called Online Business From Scratch. And you, Fire Nation, can get a free PDF copy at mattpaulson.com/eofire. That's Matt, P-A-U-L, so Matt Paulson, S-O-N, mattpaulson.com/eofire. It's free and it's genius. I literally have already gone and got this because I'm just fired up about it. Matt, tell success a little bit about that and then we’ll say bye.

Matt: I think three years ago now I wrote a book about internet business, it's called 40 Rules for Internet Business Success, which is free on Amazon right now. But I decided that now that I know three years more worth of information, I should probably write that book again. And really write it in a way that's comprehensive and has kind of a step by step, kind of format where it's niche selection, brand selection, content creation, marketing, sales, product development, everything you’d want to know about building an online business, where you sell some kind of digital product, or have advertising.

This is kind of a soup to nuts guide on how to do that, and how I've done that. So if that's something if you want to learn, I'm not trying to make a ton of money off this book, just wanted to create a resource for all the people that ask me for copy, so I can just give them book instead. Yeah, go check it out. It will be free as a PDF to you guys. And if you like it, maybe leave a review on Amazon, so other people can find it, too.

John: Yes, do.

Matt: But I’d love to give you all a copy of that book, so definitely go check that out.

John: Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You’ve been hanging out for the third time on EOFire with MP and JLD, so keep up the heat. If you head over to eofire.com, and you just type Matt in the search bar, all three of his episodes are going to pop up, every one is great, so listen to them. And these are the best show notes in the biz, so the timestamps, the links that we talked about.

Matt is going to send me over that article that he wrote about web push notifications, that will be in there. And of course the final CTA, Online Business From Scratch, get it. It’s a free PDF for you over at mattpaulson.com/eofire. Matt, thank you for sharing your journey with Fire Nation today, for that brother we salute you, and we’ll catch you on the flipside.

Matt: Thanks, John.