AP 1186: Can I Succeed Managing Two Websites AND Still Balance My Life?

AP 1186: Can I Succeed Managing Two Websites AND Still Balance My Life?

Pat Flynn:
What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to episode 1,186 of AskPat 2.0. You're about to listen to a business coaching call between myself and an entrepreneur just like you.

And today we're talking with Daz over in the UK. Daz manages two different blogs. He also has another full-time job in construction in the UK, and he's wondering whether or not he could succeed managing both of these different websites and balancing being a family man. Really great conversation. You'll hear me, in fact, talk right away about what I see in his background when we get on a video call together. You won't be able to see it, but we're going to describe it, and it really reflects one of his passions, which one of his websites is about. That is retrogamerdaz (D-A-Z).com and all things nerd and pop culture. It's just pretty spectacular. Toys, collectibles, and he blogs about that, and he's gotten a following from that. His other website is NextStopWDW.com. That stands for “nextupWaltDisneyWorld.com,” and he travels with his family, he likes to offer tips and document his journey through Disney properties, and he's built up a following there too. Can he manage both? Is it possible? Should he focus on one? What should we do here? Well, that's exactly what we chat about today. So hope you enjoy this conversation and here he is, Daz.

Hey, Daz. Welcome to AskPat. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Daz Cater: Thanks for having me, and thank you for your time.

Pat:
Of course. You know, we've interviewed or have had over a thousand people here on Ask Pat before, and I have to say, I'm actually seeing Daz right now on camera. You can't because you're just listening, but I just have to say you have the best background I've ever seen anybody have on video before. If you'd like to describe for everybody who's listening kind of what's behind you, I'm sure they'd love to hear about it really quick.

Daz:
Well, I'm in my man cave at the moment. So, behind me, I've got a collection of toys, arcade machines, retro games, and all the stuff that I like collecting.

Pat:
I love it. I see an X-Wing in the background, an arcade cabinet, some Pac-Man stuff, some really cool things. I will have to have another exploration with that later, but for right now, why don't we get to know, other than a collector, who it is that Daz is and what do you do, and we'll go from there.

Daz:
Well, I'm based in the UK. I live in the east of England. I'm a father; I've got two kids. My daughter's 13, my son's 11, nearly 12, and I work in the construction industry in the UK. But back in the end of 2018, I started my first blog, and then in March 2019, I started a second blog. One of them has taken most of my time over the last few years, but I want to try and make a go of both of them. And so really, I reached out to try and really get your thoughts and any ideas on am I being sensible in what I'm trying to achieve and sort of the best way of trying to manage two websites, two blogs, and do real life as well.

Pat:
Yeah, I mean, so three things, really. Can you tell us blog number one, that was in 2018, and then blog number two, and then we'll go from there?

Daz:
Yeah, blog number one is NextStopWDW.com. I've been lucky enough to have quite a few vacations with my family to Florida and Disney World. And after the first and second trip, I realized that we were doing a lot of research, and reading a lot of content and watching a lot of videos about planning a Disney World vacation. So I decided to start my first blog on how to help other people with guides and tips and some of our experiences of planning and experiencing a Disney World vacation. So I've been doing that since the end of 2018.

Last year, when the pandemic hit, my traffic just took a great big nosedive. In the beginning of 2020, I felt like I was starting to get somewhere, and then just within the space of a few days, I just pretty much lost all my traffic. Last year being a funny one, I sort of paused a little bit and decided to focus on my family, my real-life job, and focus on what I thought was the important things. And then I started writing content again, sort of September, October. But my second blog, which reflects my background and everything you're seeing, is RetroGamerDaz.com, where I write about retro gaming and arcade games and toy collecting and all the sort of lovely nostalgic stuff that I get a bit of a buzz from.

Pat:
That's really cool. So NextStopWDW, for WaltDisneyWorld, dot-com and then RetroGamerDaz.com is number two.

Daz:
That's right, yes.

Pat:
Has the traffic on the first one come up a little bit? Because I know that WDW has opened up a little bit now. Are you starting to see some traffic come back to it?

Daz:
Actually, from the end of December, I started to see traffic starting to grow. I had my best month in March of this year, and this past month, I'm sort of seeing about 12 to 13,000 page views a month at the moment.

Pat:
Okay, so not a small amount. That's a good, that's a great number, and that can likely go up from here as more people travel. Right?

Daz:
Yeah. My anticipation is that I can see my UK audience starting to go up a little bit, and me being based in the UK, me and my wife are keeping a close eye on everything that's going on. We want to book another vacation, but we don't want to do it until we know we can do things like we normally would. So, my assumption is that's probably happening for a lot of families. So, I would anticipate that the UK audience will at some point this year start to increase as well.

Pat:
That’s cool. And it helps us gauge how well that site is doing as far as at least traffic. How about on the RetroGamerDaz.com stuff? Where would that lie in terms of comparison to the other?

Daz:
It's probably about one and a half thousand page views a month. It's only got about 40 something articles on it. It's the one that I haven't focused on as much because I have saw the initial growth with the first blog and I went quite heavy with writing the content and the articles for that one. And now I'm trying to even out a little bit. One thing that I did notice, that I don't know if it's because I'm involved in the scene a little bit and I've got a decent Twitter following for my retro gaming side of things. But I have noticed that I find it easier to pick up an organic audience for the retro gaming side of things, whereas the Disney stuff can be quite competitive.

Pat:
Yeah, super competitive for sure. But it's competitive partly because there's a lot of opportunity there. For sure there's definitely a lot of money being put into that space as well. As far as money is concerned, if you are able to, or are comfortable sharing, what's the business opportunity or business things that you've done on each of these websites, if any?

Daz:
Okay, well, I've put ads on both of the websites. I put ads onto Disney, NextStopWDW.com last year. I went with Ezoic to begin with, and this past month I've had my first $200—over $200 in a month. So, for me, that's a milestone.

Pat:
It's huge. That's great.

Daz:
Yeah. So I've seen that increase as audiences have come back this year, which is really positive. I've got a long-time goal in my head of where I want to try and achieve from hopefully both the websites long term. I'm not thinking short term. I know I'm in this for the long game. It's not— nothing's going to happen quickly, but the aim is to try and be able to earn sort of $200 a day from two websites. That's my initial thinking of going forward. Obviously, ads at the moment is the main factor. I get a little bit of Amazon money from some articles that I've written. So it's a case of trying to work out how I can monetize these sites going forward, really.

Pat:
So there's a lot of different things that I'm thinking about in terms of how to manage both of these sites. Now, in general, I think it's kind of well-known that the more time and effort you focus on one, the more that that opportunity is heightened for that one to do some great things. But I wouldn't be somebody to just tell somebody to “Go cut this off because this one has more opportunity,” because I myself have done a lot of different things at the same time. I wouldn't say that to you either. But what I do want to understand more is what are you more excited about in terms of your energy levels and the idea of having to write a blog post on each of these? If you could rate on a scale of 1 being, “I'm not excited at all, this feels like a job to me,” to 10 it's like, you don't even care if you get paid; you love to do it anyway. Let's do each website one by one scale of 1 to 10 in terms of content creation. How energetic are you for each?

Daz:
At the moment, it's like a 9 for retrogamerdez.com because I haven't written a lot of content, and there's so much that I can write. I'm interested in writing, whereas with NextStopWDW, I'm still pretty enthusiastic about it, but it's probably a seven because I've done 130 articles. I'm getting to the point where I'm updating things, but then I'm trying to find the enthusiasm on what I think people would want me to write.

Pat:
Are you planning on potential business opportunities beyond ads for either of these websites in the future?

Daz:
I like doing designing. I like doing a little bit of design, so I've done some Disney inspired prints that I've started an Etsy shop on, which is very, very quiet at the moment, but I haven't sort of dived into how it should all work and what I need to do to get the SEO right for the shop and this, that, and the other. And I've also created a load of gaming/retro-inspired designs as well, which I think could be some pretty cool posters and things like that, which I've done some designs, but I haven't done anything with them yet. I've also done a few notepads that I've done on Amazon KDP, because again, I can design. I haven't got to put the content in. I can just do some nice notepads for perhaps people that want to write lists to do with collecting like I do, or Disney or whatever. So that's as far as it's gone.

Pat:
I'm thinking about you, as you and the connection that you have with your audience. You've mentioned, for example, for your store that you're not yet focused on search engine optimization or anything like that, but as you probably know, having followed my work for a little bit and maybe others that when you build a relationship with your audience, the SEO, and like all those like technical things don't matter as much because you have this relationship now, and if you write a blog post or you send an email and you're like, “Hey, guys, I got this new poster or this new limited edition merch that's out. Like, here's the link to it on my store,” then people will just go directly to it. Right? It seems like on your retrogamingraz.com website, you're fully showing up. This is you, this is, I mean, you are in the name of the website, and it's your collection. You're sharing all these bits and pieces of history, and there's probably, and I don't know how you said you've had this for maybe a couple of years now, a year and a half so far. Have you felt a little bit of an audience that's coming now? That's kind of like looking forward to you and your stories and your craft and like, do you get a connection with those people there? Or is it just purely kind of a one-sided conversation right now?

Daz:
I get some really good feedback on social media, from different people saying, “I really enjoyed this article.”

Pat:
Oh, yeah. You said your Twitter account’s pretty big there, right?

Daz:
Yeah, it is. It's getting towards 26,000. So it's healthy.

Pat:
Whoa. That's great.

Daz:
I can sort of throw things on there, and I know people are going to see it. I've had some positive feedback, and yeah, it's been good so far.

Pat:
That's great. And the reason why I'm queuing this up is because there are a lot of different ways beyond ads and even beyond merch and things like that, and designs, to make money. When you build an audience and you have this relationship, there's a lot of tools such as Patreon, where you could have people pledge to get access to you, to do Q&A once a month, for example, and they're paying you, I don’t know, $5 a month, for example. The cool thing is when you do the math behind this, it's like if you have a person pay you a dollar per week, because you come out with one article per week or something, I mean, multiply that by a thousand true fans, you have $4,000 coming in a month, just from a thousand people. So, even though the numbers were lower there, you may be building an even stronger relationship and getting, having people get to know you and want to support you there too.

So, maybe when people started listening to this show, they're like, “Oh, well, the Disney one has way more followers; therefore, you should go there.” That's not necessarily true. I mean, there is way more traffic. I mean, there's a lot at play here, and I think as far as, I mean, I'm just looking at your background. I don't see very much Disney, other than Star Wars, which is owned by Disney, versus the other collectibles that I see behind you, which I think that if I were to go, "Hey, Raz, I think you should stop retro gaming Raz, and then go full on with Disney stuff,” you'd probably feel a little disappointed and would push back against that. Wouldn't you?

Daz:
Yeah, I would.

Pat:
So all this to say, you know, we have to have a balance, right? I think that both are things that you're interested in. Both are things that you could be good at and provide a lot of information for. It's just a matter of time, priority, and balance. Where do we put our time, and how much time would you say do you have to dedicate to both of these websites each week?

Daz:
This is the challenge, because with NextStopWDW, I've really pushed my email newsletter this year by giving away a free 10-page Disney World parks guide, which has done really well, and I'm getting a hundred new subscribers a month for the moment. Yeah, which is really good. So, I'm trying to do a weekly newsletter. That takes a little bit of time. I try not to put too much time into it, but if I go down the route of, then I haven't got an email newsletter at all yet for RetroGamerDaz.com. It’s something I'm thinking about, and I've got some ideas, but it's again, a case of having to do two newsletters or the social media stuff. I get about 30 percent of my traffic for the Disney site comes from Pinterest. So I'm having to make sure Tailwind’s up to date, whereas Twitter and Instagram works better with the retro stuff. So, it's all this sort of juggling all the time, that it ends up eating up hours.

Pat:
Yeah. I mean, the truth is you can do both, but you have to be able to be very disciplined when it comes to your time management in order for that to work, or else, like you said, it's just going to be blurred. The trouble is, we don't often realize how much time we're wasting when we switch from one thing to another and then switch back, then switch back. You can't get into the flow, it's very hard to write. It's very hard to get deep into something when you have the switching back and forth all the time. The approach I would take if I were you, and I don't know if you've tried this before, or if you take a more organic, “Hey, just kind of what I feel today is where I'm going to be focusing on.” But the way that I've been able to manage multiple projects, the way that I’ve been able to manage multiple pieces of my business but still move forward on them, is to actually have certain days of the week dedicated to certain things.

So, for example, Monday is my writing day where I'm just going to be writing, and I know that when I wake up on Monday, I'm going to be writing and I'm prepared for that, and that's my writing day. And because of that, I'm more focused, I’m not transitioning, and if I had to, or a couple of businesses, then maybe half that day is spent writing this, and half that day spent writing that. Or, Tuesday’s my podcasting day, Wednesday’s my meetings day, Thursday is sort of cleanup, and Friday I try to take off, but it doesn't always happen, and then kind of rinse and repeat.

Now, I do often reserve Friday for another project. If I'm going to be working on something new, I don't do that between Monday and Thursday. On Friday, that's my sort of 20 percent of the time during the week to focus on something new where I can experiment or try something new. And with two already on the plate for, maybe you don't want to experiment with trying something new, but it's like, okay, “Monday might be my WDW day, and that's literally the only thing I'm focusing on, and my goal this coming Monday is going to be to get a newsletter written and maybe start cranking away on another article, and that's it. Okay, Tuesday will be this day, then, or first half of the week, second half of the week.” It's going to have to happen. Boundaries, that helps with discipline. How much would you say are you disciplined in that realm of creating boundaries between these projects right now? Or are you feeling like it's kind of blurred?

Daz:
I feel like I'm improving because certain days I am starting to do certain things. So, it's getting in a routine. Yeah, it's just the fact that I’ve escalated the content on one website, the retrogamingdaz.com, and I always feel like when I'm working on one, I'm neglecting the other, but that's always been the case.

Pat:
When you look at the numbers, you can't argue that, right? You could be putting these hours here, and then you work over there and you're like, “Well, I could put those hours here. You just kind of have to get over that.” I think that that's just going to be something that you're going to go, “I've chosen to have the ability to work on both of these, and the benefit I get is I get to have breathing room from this one thing when I'm working on the other, so that when I come back into it, I'm going to be that much more focused. I'm going to be that much more energized.” And then when you're focused on number two, you're not neglecting number one, you're sort of letting it breathe for a while, letting you breathe, getting more energy to go back into it the next time you come around, and it just might be a story that you're telling yourself that could help you.

Daz:
Yeah. I think having this conversation with you at the moment, that the way it pans out for me is that the WDW stuff is second half of the week things, and the retro gaming is the first half, because at the end of the week, that lets me catch up with all the Disney related news that I can throw in my newsletter, and off it goes on the first day. Yeah. That sounds like a plan.

Pat:
Yeah, that sounds really good, and then if you have it written somewhere or it's in your calendar, even better, because it's easy to say these things, but when you see a time block and you have your other job and you have family, of course. So if you say, “Hey, family, hey, me, Daz, there's this two-hour block during this day. I know what I'm going to be focusing on that day, and here's the goal,” and just kind of continually making progress. I think it would be beneficial if you were like, “Here's the next thing, and this needs to come out by a certain time.” But if there's bigger projects, just continue to make progress on them. I think that as long as you have that discipline and that time blocking, that that progress is good; you're going to be moving forward, and eventually whatever you create, if it's another project, that that'll come out at the time that you wanted to. And I'm enthusiastic about the newsletter on WDW. That's great. I think that that'll give you direct access to your audience. And I can imagine an audience there, too, is getting to know you and your style and getting more information from you at a price eventually at some point, right? That can happen. So that's really exciting.

Daz:
The newsletter is a big positive so far for this year because it's becoming my, other than the blog, it’s Pinterest, and the newsletter is coming up in the ranks, so to speak, as to how I can reach people.

Pat:
Yeah that's really great, especially. I know people in the Disney space, when you find something out, you want to share it with others. So, this becomes something that will go into a person's inbox, and you can encourage them to forward it to their friends and to their family and their—everybody else is going to go on these trips with them. “Oh, you've got to check out this checklist that Daz gave us, because it has all the things that we need.” Like, “Here, guys, check it out.” And then they start getting introduced to you. You know, it'd be interesting to start to see how you can highlight some of the people who are in that community on that newsletter. “Hey, we helped this family. Here's their story.” That way, maybe some of that content is now created and crowdsourced from your people instead of you. That could be a cool way to start taking yourself out of the equation a little bit more, and that also helps others who are in your community go, “Wow, Daz pays attention to his community, and here's other community members stepping up to help too.” That can create a really good feeling and also help give you more time for some of the other stuff too.

Daz:
Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah, I'd love to be able to do something like that. It's fantastic.

Pat:
That's becoming more commonplace now, and I think that's where you benefit from highlighting the community and getting time back and making people feel good. So, the fact that you could potentially use this other time elsewhere, it's like, hey, let's get other people to write for you then.

Daz:
Yeah. Excellent.

Pat:
Cool. And then the retro gaming stuff seems to be one where maybe that's not as possible because this is your history, your collectibles, your gaming. And you know, that to me is really neat that you can connect with your audience on social media in that way. And what are some of the plans that you have for that website, you know, in the future? Where do you want it to end up?

Daz:
I just want to keep building it and just try, I think it has got the potential to have a really good audience, because there's a really nice split between UK readers and US readers as well. There's a wide interest, and I've sort of got my own little audience already. I know a lot of people within the community, especially in the UK. So, I think there's a lot of different avenues that I could go down in the future. I’d love, eventually—I've always thought in the back of my mind for the past two years, that somehow I'd like to write a book about perhaps my growing up with gaming, or, not like a autobiography, but a tale of growing up through the ‘80s and ‘90s through games and consoles and toys and movies and things.

Pat:
Yeah. Oh man, that lights me up. I'd be down for that for sure. That could be a fun project that you kickstart maybe on Kickstarter, right? You can get some funds coming in, even before it's created, and it can help you. And if you're managing big projects like that—this is last thing I'll say—say, for example, you're going to write this book. That would mean, okay, well, you're going to need a lot of time there, and maybe that means leading up to when you're going to work on that stuff, you maybe get a little bit ahead on your content calendar, or have a guest writer come in for a month, or something to give you the time to do that. Because when you're cranking on the normal route, you can be disciplined and you can have those sort of differentiations between the two things.

But when you have those larger projects, that's when it starts to go, “Oh, I don't have time to do that additional thing.” You kind of have to find the time somewhere, and you don't want to just abandon the other thing. So planning ahead, and then maybe getting ahead on the content. Maybe you write a month's worth of stuff within a week just to kind of have a month in the bank, if you will, or hire somebody, or have some team of writers help you, or maybe another family member can step up. I mean, imagine your 13-year-old's perspective and tips from a teenager's perspective. That could be a cool series, actually. So, I'm just thinking out loud for ways that you can get some time.

Daz:
Yeah, I actually tried to bribe my son with a free code for a PS4 game at the weekend, and he could have this code for this game. He had to write a review on it, and it didn't work.

Pat:
Oh, no! Okay. Well, you might have to get a little bit more creative if that didn't work, but yeah, that's cool. I mean, I'll be doing similar stuff too when my kids are that age. They're about the same distance apart actually as yours. So anyway, that's really cool. I'm really excited. So, one more time, it'll be NextStopWDW.com for everybody listening who's interested in that, and I'll be checking that out, because we're interested in going to WDW hopefully very soon here, probably within the next year. So, I'm looking forward to those tips and signing up to your newsletter, as well as RetroGamerDaz.com. Collectibles are huge right now, so I think that being an authority in that space is pretty smart. So, you can do both. We've got to manage that time and then buy time or get time elsewhere or borrow time, if you will, without abandoning the other, if you're going to work on these bigger projects.

Daz:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Pat.

Pat:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Daz. Daz, thank you so much. Such a pleasure to speak and chat with you today. And I think this conversation will help a lot of people too, because a lot of us want to do more than one thing, and I think it really, really matters on a number of different factors. Hopefully all of you listening who are going through something similar can get and pull some value from this conversation today.

You can find Daz over in two spots: NextStopWDW.com. So, if you're traveling to Walt Disney World, definitely give him a ring. And also, RetroGamerDaz.com. That’s retrogamer D-A-Z dot com. If you want to get coached, just like Daz did today here on the show, all you have to do is head to AskPat.com. You can also see the archive of other episodes and people who we've helped there too. And make sure you subscribe because we love to help people out here, but not only that, we love to bring people back on the show who've been on once before, and we do that at the end of every month here. So, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss this and other tips, so you can get insider conversations just right in your ear buds.

Thanks again for listening. I appreciate you, and I look forward to serving you next week. Cheers, peace out, and as always, Team Flynn for the win.

Thanks for listening to AskPat at AskPat.com. I'm your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. AskPat is a production of SPI Media. We'll catch you in the next session.