RYB 854: Starting Over Today with Just My Laptop To Make Money (Detailed Strategy)

00:00 So, what I would do is I would map out 10 different blog posts. Okay. That were like a book that I would put into a guide. I would put into the ultimate playbook. I know any of that stuff. And then I would start to write those or create those in sequential order. And I would add them to my website way. Hey, Hey, what's up, everyone. Welcome to the rock, your brand podcast. I'm your host, Scott. Bowker a serial entrepreneur on a mission to help you.

00:29 This show is designed to teach you, to inspire you, to motivate you, to take massive action and build a future proof business. So whether you're just starting out or taking your existing business to the next level, this is your home. Now, if you're ready, I'm ready. Let's rock your brand. What's

00:51 Up everyone. Welcome back to the Rocky brand podcast. This is episode eight 54 and today, well, I am going to be going over the exact strategy, the plan, the roadmap as if I was to start over from scratch with just my laptop. And the reason why is because I get this question quite often, and there is a lot of things that I would do now that I have also done in the past. And a lot of times people just want to hear what that is. So what I ended up doing is a, did a coffee talk in one of our morning sessions. If you want to join us, you can head over to take action crew.com. And that is where you can, uh, you can join us over there for a coffee talk. We also do the jam session by the way, on our Friday episode.

01:42 So you can always head over there and, and join us. So take action crew.com. But what I am going to share with you today is a little segment from a session that I did there. And I went over the exact strategies, the exact plan. And honestly, I even go over one little part that I would do now, uh, moving forward because I think we can speed up that growth. And, uh, I'm going to let you listen in on this. So this way here, you can hear exactly how I would do it. Now. I also share a real example from someone that I did a live review of her website, and I actually reveal the niche because she allowed me to, and she wanted me to do an actual, uh, you know, review of her website and to give her some ideas. And as I was going through it, I started to build out the plan for her.

02:37 I also started to build out this little cash machine that she could be tapping into, uh, possibly if, uh, if she deploys some of these things. And so, uh, what I think you should do right here now is listen, all right, listen to this and start to think about your own situation, your own business, or the business that you want to create, because a lot of people overcomplicate it and it doesn't have to be over complicated at all. I also mentioned in here, our brand creators playbook. So I'm going to give it a little shout out rate here. If you have not downloaded a copy, printed it out. I recommend that you do. I am going to show it. If you are watching this on video, if you're not watching this on video, well, I'm holding up the playbook right now, and it's pretty thick.

03:25 It's pretty heavy. It's 107 pages by the way. Um, but you can go to brand creators, book.com again, that's brand creators, book.com. You're also going to hear me mention a brand creators Academy in this session. We are not currently open. We were open, uh, at the time of this recording, but we are closed as of right now. But if you do want to jump on the wait list of when we do reopen, which will be, uh, in a couple of months, probably three months, depending on when you're listening to this, you can just, again, grab the playbook you'll be notified, or the checklist you can get@brandcreators.com forward slash checklist. And that will take you over to the brand validation checklist over there, where we'll actually show you the niche validation and the things that I'm talking about in today's episode, go hand in hand with both of these, and you really do need to have clarity on the niche and the example that I'm going to share with you today, we'll demonstrate this perfectly.

04:23 Alright, so I'm going to stop talking now so you can listen to this session that I did on a coffee talk really going over how I would start over today from scratch with just the laptop. All right. So sit back, relax and enjoy. All right. So let me just jump into it. Um, first off I get this question a lot, and that is Scott. Like, what would you do if you had to start over from scratch? And the funny thing is, is that I have started over from scratch many times, um, and it always follows these principles pretty much. Now there are some things that we can do differently. There's things that we can say, well, I'm going to be the face of the brand. So I'm going to be driving it a little bit more. So ma maybe I'm going to do video. Maybe I'm going to do different types of content, but for the most part, I'm starting with the niche market.

05:09 First, very first thing that I need to do is I need to validate the niche market. Okay. Got to find a niche market. Okay. And then from that niche market, what we need to do is we need to value, uh, validate that it can be built okay. That we can build, build something inside of that market. Um, so I've talked about this before guys. It's that whole three step process. Is there traffic? Okay. Is there traffic in that sub niche? Okay. And the actually there's the three parts is sub niching down in a market. So you're not going to go after the main market. You're not just going to go after, um, let's just say outdoor sports, uh, outdoor sports stuff, right? Like you're not going to go after that or you're not going to go after, even if we said, we're not going to go after, uh, let's say it's hiking.

06:00 Right. We're going to go, we're going to go deeper than that. Right. So I always look for, where is that? Where is the angle? Right. So yesterday we actually did a whole website review for Mel and it was on, uh, herbal, uh, more or less like just, no, I don't want to say herbal medicine, but like, just like, um, the benefits of using herbs in your, um, you know, in your life, in your diet, right. To have a better life and, um, and to live better, to feel better and all of that stuff. But what we found out is that the angle that she could go into, and this is where I would have did my research is in like gut health. So I would have went after like herbal remedies for gut help, or I would have went after that angle, even though I know that the herbal market is bigger.

06:47 Right. So I'm always looking for that as the identifier. Right. I'm trying to see if I can niche down. So there's not so much competition. Right. It's gonna be easier to get traffic. And that leads me to the next thing, if I do niche down okay. In this market, is there enough traffic? Right. So first thing is, is I need to niche down in a market. Okay. Knowing that I could come out of that market though, too, and go wider down the road. So that's the future potential, but I want to look at that sub niche and I want to start looking at the traffic. So if all I did was focus all of my energy on like gut health, herbal, um, herbal remedies for gut health. Like if that is where I was going. So gut health, and then herbal that's where I'd be looking, I'd be like, okay, what kind of traffic can I, can I, uh, can I, you know, possibly get, and just by doing that yesterday, I mean, there's like 33,000 searches a month just for like, um, uh, can you use herbal or herbs for gut health?

07:48 Uh, like that, just that one search. Right. So that tells me on just that one little thing. And there's quite a bit of traffic, right? So niche down, right. Sub niche down, see where that sub niche is. Number two, I got to look at the traffic. Is there enough traffic there? And then three, can I make money? Okay. So it goes through that process. So what I would do, I'm starting all over again. I'm going to find a market that I'm going to see if I can niche down in that market. Is there enough traffic? And if there's enough traffic, then from there, I'm going to start looking at the monetization side of things. Okay. And the monetization side could be a variety of different things. It could be ad networks. It could be affiliate offers. It could be my own physical products. It could be my own digital products.

08:33 Right. It could be any of those and any other things that are being sold in the market. Okay. Um, it could be private, uh, affiliate offers, not just Amazon or eBay or Etsy or any of those. So I'm going to look at those opportunities. Okay. Once I do that, once I've done all that and I go, okay, it's go time. We're going to go ahead and do that. I got my laptop. What's the first thing that I'm going to do. No. If I had this where you guys could actually see it, I kind of have it back here, but basically, and you see that? Not really. Huh? Um, I build a website. That's what this first thing is, by the way, right here is building that website. So I build the website, okay. Building the website. That's my home base. That is where everything is going to reside.

09:19 It doesn't matter if I'm going to be doing video. It doesn't matter if I'm going to be doing Pinterest. It doesn't matter on any of that stuff. Right now. I need a home base. Okay. Because that home base is where everything is going to reside. That's where the customer journey is going to happen. That's where traffic is going to be coming. Right. So I need the home base. I'm going to build a website. I'm going to go find a domain name. I'm going to, I'm going to spend maybe a day going through domain name ideas. And then from there I'm going to choose one. I'm going to buy it. And then I'm going to buy some hosting. And then from hosting, I'm going to go ahead and add my domain to the hosting and I'm going to install WordPress done. Okay. And by the way, timeout here real quick.

10:06 Um, and this sounds familiar. It's because I've been talking about this for a long time and I've actually got my little brand creator's playbook here. And it's exactly what we're doing here. It's, it's the exact same process. Um, so two things. Number one, if you haven't grabbed a copy, you might want to, and you can grab that by heading over to where is it? Brand creators, book.com. The other thing is we're opening up brand creators Academy next Monday, July 6th. So if you're interested in joining, you probably want to grab the playbook and you probably want to be ready on July 6th. This is exactly the same process. Okay. It's everything that we do on a regular basis. All right. So moving along here. Alright, so now I've got my domain name. I've got, uh, I've got my website up. Uh, didn't take me that long. If you have a hosting company like HostGator or Bluehost, they usually have a quick install right there.

10:58 It will install WordPress for you. Choose a theme. Don't spend a ton of time on trying to pick a theme. I use generate press. Usually it's a very clean, lightweight theme. I get it installed. Then I go to Fiverr and I get a logo made cost me like 10 or 20 bucks done. It doesn't have to be perfect. I can always go back and change it. Now I've got my home base setup. There's some plugins that I'm going to add. I'm not going to go into all that right now. I do go over that in the book though, by the way. And I go over and brand creators Academy, but just understand, I'm just, I'm just putting in some plugins to help me, um, with certain things like SEO, I'm going to, I'm going to install a plugin called Yoast, right? It's free. Uh, I'm going to, going to install, uh, another plugin that will allow me, uh, to use, um, uh, well, when I get into it, but it'd be look more or less for social sharing.

11:46 I'm going to, it's called social pug. I'm going to use that plugin. I'm going to install it. Okay. Um, maybe an image compressor for WordPress. So that way there images become smaller. So just, there's like a little checklist of plugins, but even if you didn't do those, it doesn't matter. So I got the home base. Now I'm going to spend my next bit of time figuring out what is the first 10 to 20 posts. And I'm going to go through my three buckets questions, how to in products, that's what I'm going to start building. Okay. Now I do have something that I will do if, if I feel like I want to shortcut this and if I want to get some money coming in quicker, um, which does require a little bit more work, but I'll talk about that here in a minute. And I've talked about this in the past and you guys probably know what I'm going to say, but I'll walk you guys through it here in a minute, but regardless I'm still building content because I want to get, uh, traffic coming to my website from Google, Bing and Yahoo.

12:44 Okay. And I also want to be able to do the next step, which would be building an email list. And when I build that email list, I'm going to automatically direct people over to my content on my website. Right? So start building content by filling out those buckets and whether I write it or have someone else write it, um, I'm going to build that and start to put that content on my website on a regular basis. And I'm going to probably be aggressive out of the gate. I'm probably going to do two to three articles per week to start all right. Now, if you're just starting, it might be one article a week, but I'm basically going to do two to three, maybe even five, and I'm going to start getting those things going. Okay. And then while I'm doing that, I'm also going to start building my email list.

13:27 Okay. And that email list, this is why it's important that you know, what subnet you're going into and what is the main thing that you're going after. Right? Because if you do that, just like yesterday, when I went over Mel's website, we talked about how we should probably come up with like five things to avoid for gut health. And then from there, that would be my lead magnet. Okay. That would be my email in, or maybe I'm going to do this. Uh, maybe I'm going to do a contest. And in her case, maybe I'm going to do a bundle of herbs that help with gut health. And I'm going to run a contest using Facebook ads to build my email list, whatever it is, it's gotta be related to my market, my sub market that I'm going into. Okay. So I got my home base.

14:09 I got content starting to be a planned out in, in, and built and installed right on my home base. I'm starting to build that out. Right. And over time, that's going to organically start to rank. I'm going to build my email list right. Alongside of it. Okay. Either using a lead magnet or using a contest as a lead magnet to build that list pretty quickly. Um, and that's what I'm going to be doing when I build the email list. I'm now going to be directing people once a week over to my blog content and letting them know, Hey, I got a piece of content here. It is. Right. And so that's like the basic framework. Okay. Now, okay. As we're doing that, we're like, okay, what's the next thing that I would do to get traffic I'd use. Okay. Now part of my validation piece might be using Pinterest because I want to know that I can go on Pinterest and use that.

14:58 So now part of the process is going to be every single blog post that I create. I'm going to create a pin. That's going to reside on the blog post to direct people over to Pinterest to pin it on their board. And then I'm also going to start up my Pinterest account, where I'm going to have pins that are going to be directing back over to my blog. Right. And I'm gonna be doing that side by side with all of those other little components there. The content is being produced, email list, being built, emails, being sent out to promote the blog content, being done weekly Pinterest part of the blog content, and then part of my weekly routine. All right. That's the basic framework now. Okay. So how do you make money? Well, the first thing that you could do is you can say, well, okay, I'm just going to build this over the next eight to 12 months.

15:44 And I'm hoping to start getting up enough traffic in maybe six to seven months where I'm going to be able to turn on an ad network and maybe make 500 bucks a month, maybe after six, seven months, or maybe I'm going to, I'm willing to wait a year to make a thousand dollars per month. Okay. That's like the ultimate goal. Like that's where I want to get to where you're, you're able to produce revenue from just the traffic, from people visiting the website. Okay. That's like the Holy grail, right? You don't have to sell anything. People just got to show up ad networks pay to be in that spot. Okay. The other thing is, is as I'm building out this content, you heard my three buckets, right? Questions, big one. The first one that I always start with is questions. Cause they're easy and they're also easier to rank for because they're long tail.

16:28 Um, the second one is your, how tos your third one is product based posts. So in my product based posts, guess what I get to also talk and mention affiliate products that I could potentially be paid for. As I'm sending an email to my list to promote a piece of blog content that could be five different fishing lures to catch more bass, right? They're going to go there because they're interested in catching more bass. It just happens to talk about five different lures, which I might sell my own, or I might just direct them over to a platform that I'm an affiliate for. Okay. So that is, this is what I would do now. I would do this on a regular basis. Now I didn't mention YouTube. Okay. Because for me personally, it's going to be harder to jump on video and get all that stuff going.

17:14 And I think that's going to take longer to get traffic now. Yes. There's some rare situations or, or, uh, circumstances that, um, that you could, you know, get picked up and go viral. Yes. Um, but, um, I wouldn't bank on that unless I was like, you know what, I'm the bass fishermen. I'm out in my boat every weekend. That's my content. And then I'm going to turn that into a blog post. Yes, I would do it then, but for me right now, if I'm thinking about going into a market, that I'm not really going to be the face of, then I'm not going down that route rate yet. Okay. So that's that now Facebook, I am going to create a Facebook fan page pretty early on now, not net, not necessarily to build up likes and to get, you know, like that page to get traffic it's more or less.

17:55 When I start to build my email list, I am going to need a Facebook fan page because I need a Facebook ads account and I need a Facebook fan page to do that. Okay. And as a byproduct, you'll probably build up some likes. So that's going to be another piece of that now to build a page it's super simple, not hard at all. And then you can repurpose some of your content from your blog over to the Facebook fan page. Right. So it kind of works together. Right. But I'm really building that Facebook fan page for one reason. That's why I can run Facebook ads. Okay. So those are the core pillars that's happening in any bill that I do. Any new project, any new brand is going to go into that, into that area of like pillars, right? Like I'm all of those different things that I just talked about now.

18:42 There's not a lot, once you build the website it's built now, you just got to basically take the content and basically, um, uh, add it to your website and then optimize it and tweak it. Yes. You know, the Pinterest stuff, you're going to basically get that going. And then once you get it going, it's just maintaining it. Right. And then the email list you're going to email once a week, people say, well, Scott, what do I email people? You email them what you just wrote on your blog. Right. That you just send them there. Okay. Um, so that's everything there now, one thing, and I'll, I'm going to talk about this more tomorrow, um, on our coffee talk, but one thing that we can do to shortcut this, and this is what I definitely would probably do now, depending on the market, it does depend on the market.

19:24 But yesterday when I went over Mel's website, it really stood out to me that it's a perfect opportunity to speed up the process for her to number one, sell more product, but also create her own digital product. Alright. So what I would do is I would map out 10 different blog posts. Okay. That were like a book that I would put into a guide. I would put into the ultimate playbook, any of that stuff. And then I would start to write those or create those in sequential order. And I would add them to my website. And then from there I would take that and bundle it up, have it edited, add some more stuff to it. And I would make it a digital guide, a digital product. Then I would create a lead magnet that basically led to that digital product. Right. And then from there with cell, uh, maybe something else that I have to offer or maybe an affiliate product, whatever.

20:16 Okay. And then this way here, I can still take my Facebook ads. And then I can start to run that traffic over to my lead magnet, which would then in turn, promote the digital book or the digital products. Okay. So that's what I would do there. And that would speed that up. So yesterday when we had, um, when we went over Mel's website, the, the review that we did, um, she sells herbs. Right. Well, if we're talking about, if we're talking about, um, uh, let's say we're talking about, uh, uh, you know, gut health, right? So we're talking about gut health. What are we, what are we going to do here? Okay. With the gut health? Well, what we want to do is want to create a lead magnet that could either tell people what to avoid or mistakes that people make with gut health.

21:02 Right. And then what we want to do is that this was for Mel is then we want to leave people over to her free lead magnet. Right. That's saying like five things you need, um, to know about gut health, right. Or myths or whatever. Right. So you're going to help people with that on the thank you page to getting that free thing, you'd have a small little offer for your ebook, your guide, your ultimate guide to gut health. Right. And then you'd also add in there a little order bump, we call that which could be like the, the, um, the ultimate herb pack three pack or something like that, um, for optimal gut health, right. That would be your product. So you see how that all just tied together. So if I wanted to set all that stuff up that I just talked about, and let's say I wanted to make my first 10 posts to build out that ebook.

21:51 I could do that right now. I'm not sure that I would do it depending on the market. Right. And depending on how fast I wanted to do this. Right. Yeah. Because a lot of times I'm starting one of these from scratch for the long tail. I'm not looking to get paid on this thing for maybe up to 12 months because it's like, I just, I'm building a piece of real estate that I'm going to then rent out a year from now. Imagine you're building a piece of real estate that is being worked on for 12 months before you're going to be able to put it on the market to get paid. That's kind of how I look at it. But we could, if we see that opportunity that as we're building content, that we can create an ultimate guide and package everything up and then offer that for sale.

22:33 Why not? So many people are talking about like, okay, build a niche website, get traffic, monetize the traffic. And I agree it's a great way to go, but no one really talks about building that digital product or a suite of digital products. Right. Maybe it's a four different guides that serve four different parts of the market. All right. So again, this is exactly what I would do. So if I'm sitting down at the table and I am planning out, I'm starting with the market, then I'm looking, can I sub niche this down? And then from there, I make sure I can get traffic. I make sure I can make money by taking that traffic and directing it to offers or products or even just ad networks. Okay. And then from there I'm building. Okay. And then I'm building everything. Okay. And that's domain name hosting on a website or for a website.

23:25 Then from there you install WordPress, you install a basic theme, some basic plugins. You create your first piece of content after you've went through and filled your three buckets. Okay. And then from there, start to build an email list from there, start directing traffic over to the blog content from there, I make sure that I'm starting with Pinterest and I'm starting to promote the content. And then there, I may think about adding in a digital product. That's it guys, that's the plan. Okay. And I would just repeat that for any brand that I wanted to build. Now, if I, like I said, if I seen an opportunity for using video, because this was a really good video, um, type, you know, market or niche where you needed to see stuff, then I might consider that, but that will slow the process down for me. So I don't want to slow down the process.

24:14 I want to get momentum and then I can plug that in later. I can always add that by the way. I don't have to do it now. Now did you notice, I didn't talk about Instagram. I didn't even add Instagram in there. Why? Because the ROI on building a social media platform like Instagram is going to take so much time, so much effort for you to go on there, like [inaudible] or unfollow follow, do all of the other, you know, black Hattie, gray hats type stuff, and you're going through, and you're doing all this stuff. And you let's say that you get to 5,000 people that like your page, you might get 50 people that pay attention. Is it really worth it? I'd rather build a list of 5,000 people on an email list and send them a message and have 25 to 30% of people see my stuff.

24:58 See? So I don't even go there. Right. But you might see something in your feed, like the ultimate Instagram strategy to profits. And then you're like, Whoa, shiny object. Yes. I want to do that. No, I don't do that. Right. I'm not doing that. I'm not doing LinkedIn. Do they work? They can. But that's not where my energy is going. My energy is going exactly what I just outlined and nothing else. Nothing else. All right. So there you have it. Okay. So that is the exact plan. That is the exact strategy. And again, I want to point this out. It does not have to be complicated. All right. Once you have the direction of the niche or the sub niche or niche, however you want to say it, uh, you basically just have to then create the 30 day roadmap. And then from there, continue on that roadmap.

25:49 All right. It is as simple as that now, is it, you know, is it easy? Uh, no, it's going to require some work, but it's not hard. All right. Uh, it just has to be done and you got to commit to it, but you, you got to figure out that first piece and that is your market. And if you listen to that entire thing and you didn't skip pass anything, you would have heard me go over that niche. Okay. In gut health or really herbs, but we tailored it towards just gut health right now, because we want to sub niche it down. And it also really leads itself into a digital item of some kind that will lead to a physical product. So if you're a physical product owner right now, or as someone that sells physical products, go back and listen to that, build your own little funnel there that would lead people in to your funnel that would buy one of your physical products.

26:37 That's how you would do that. All right. So you might want to go back and listen to that one again. And then the last little thing here, I want to remind you, if you have not grabbed the playbook yet, you might want to grab yourself a copy. Cause this is everything that we live by. This is everything that we do. This is everything that I described just in great detail, literally all the way down to, you know, finding your domain name, finding your hosting, setting everything up, building your email list, all of that stuff. Content creation, everything right here. So if you want to grab a copy, just head on over to brand creators, book.com and a well, you can grab a copy. All right, guys. So that's it. That's going to wrap it up. This is episode eight 54 of the show notes. The transcripts, all the goodies can be found@brandcreators.com forward slash eight 54. And, uh, yeah, you can get it all over there. All right guys. So that's it. That's going to wrap it up as always remember, I'm here for you. I believe in you and I am rooting for you, but you have to, you have to come up. Say it with me. Say it loud, say it. Proud. Take action. Have an awesome, amazing day. I'll see you right back here on the next episode. Now let's rock your brand.