SPI 904: How to Win Big in the Short-Form Era

Pat Flynn: Way, way back in the day when I first started blogging, there was a creator who I saw as one of the first people to really utilize video in their brand. Come to think of it, there were a few that were early on, and for some reason, they seemed to be all in Australia. Darren Rowse from ProBlogger, Yaro Starak, but this person, our special guest today, Gideon Shalwick, also from Australia, has created one of the most helpful tools that I use today to help me get more reach, to help me gain more authority, to help me, yeah, generate more revenue too. And if you are at all interested in short form video, or just videos in general, this will be the episode for you. Gideon Shawwick, I've talked about some of his tools before, Splashio was one, and there was another one that helped people create Facebook ads in a more automated fashion.

But this tool, Vubli.ai, is one to help you distribute your one single short form video across all platforms almost instantly. And do it in a way that makes sense. So we're going to talk with Gideon today about sort of the history of his businesses, but also how we got here with short form video and how to best maximize the opportunity with it.

And we'll, of course, offer a fun little offer for Vubli for anybody here who's interested as well, once you learn about it. So here he is, Gideon Shalwick, founder of Vubli.ai. Here we go.

Gideon, welcome to the SPI podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Gideon Shalwick: Hey, Pat. Yeah, awesome to be here. Looking forward to it.

Pat Flynn: It has been a long time since you and I have really had a chance to sit down and connect because we had once done that before a long time ago, back in the 2010s era in the blogger days. And you were a different kind of creator and entrepreneur back then. Tell me what Gideon was like back then.

What properties were you working on? And I know you did a lot with video. You were in fact, one of the earliest to get involved with video. I've always known you for video, but it's changed over time. We'll get into that, but if you could give us a quick account of what it was like when you and I initially made contact and became friends.

What was life like back then? What was the world and entrepreneurship like back then for all of us?

Gideon Shalwick: Oh my gosh, how things have changed. I think back then it would have been 2008, 2009, right about there that a partner of mine, Yaro Starak, we launched a program called Become a Blogger. And that was all done on video and, you know, one of the little claims to fame we had was that it was the first, we thought it was the first, it was one of the first at least, courses completely done on video.

And I was the video guy, I created all the videos painstakingly, oh my gosh, it was such a painful thing to do back then. But it was all done on video. Yaro was more on the promotion side, but I was on the creation side of the content, but that was sort of my first big success online with that particular training.

And I think that's probably how we met because, you know, you're doing the blogging thing, Yaro's doing blogging, I was doing blogging training. But before that, I had two years of essentially depending on how you frame it, struggling or preparing, you know, for, for what was to come. And because I really quickly got into the video thing, even two years before that, when I just became an entrepreneur, it was 2006.

I started doing video because I wrote a book and I wanted to promote the book. And so, Hey, this, this is YouTube thing. Let me check this out. Maybe I can get some extra traffic because I struggled with traffic. Okay, let's figure out this, this video thing. And, a camcorder and I started interviewing some of the best people in the industry and just wanted to hear their thoughts for how they became successful.

But I had a camcorder and an old PC and the files were in, I'm not sure if you remember this, I think it was called HDR format. Oh yeah, wow. Okay. Yeah. It was like a compressed kind of a format that worked really quick and well with the old Sony handicams. And the trouble with him was that if you wanted to get them onto your computer to edit them, they immediately increased by 10 times the size.

So the video file size is so big. I had the most awesome project where I interviewed some of the best people in the industry. I had about 12 to 20 interviews lined up and I was going to edit these interviews and what happened was the files were too big for my computer, my computer died, that poor project never saw the light of day.

But in the process, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about video cameras, studio setup, and just how video specifically works online. Because it's a different beast online to offline. But anyway, that was like, you know, like a two year process essentially to, to get to where I then launched something with Yaro. Did the Become a Blogger thing, and then from there I just did video project after video project, online video project specifically.

And always using video for building audience, but then also using video for delivering product. So my background's in content, you know, I've got a content guy. But yeah, since then, I've been moving more into software, which I'm sure we'll cover later today.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, back in 2005, 2006, I mean, YouTube was just brand new.

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: At that point. And a lot of people weren't thinking about it as sort of a way to become known for things. It was more of a, just a place to kind of be a repository for cat videos and, and funny things. There were some, some personalities and brands showing up. A lot of comedians and stuff were, were on that platform, but education stuff wasn't really on there.

And it was really cool to see you kind of take that on and lead that in a way. And then I remember Yaro very much he was a big inspiration for me. And that's how you and I got connected was, was kind of through him and become a blogger and the various projects that you've worked on. And you did dive into software.

What was one of the first video related software projects?

Gideon Shalwick: So, one of the things that happened in my career is I started noticing people needing video animations, like logo animations and outro animations and lower thirds and that sort of thing. And it was kind of painful to create and everybody wanted one, you know, and it was just like a cool thing.

So I started a company called Splashio. That was the original thing. And I remember we, I think we created a few animations for you guys as well with a couple of your brands. And, you know, at first we just, we did it all manually and, but then the dream was to then automate that later. And we kind of did, we, we sort of, we were on our path there, but I think we, we were too slow.

Anyway, someone else beat us to it and they took the same idea and did a really good job with it. By that time I met someone else. The co-founders and I said, well, I wanna automate this thing, but I need a software team. So we teamed up together and we said, well, it's, instead of doing it under Splasheo, the original company, let's create a whole new company and, and target something else that's a little bit more specific.

So we targeted video ads in particular, video ads on YouTube. And we said, okay, well, let's, what can we do? It's like the five second skip thing was just a thing. It just came out. And we thought, okay, well, really well positioned for that. Let's create something in this space where we automate the animations for creating a 20 second video ad.

So teamed up with some people for that. And that was called VeeRoll and I'm not sure we were the first, but we're certainly one of the first people to automate the production of video ads for YouTube and later Facebook ads as well. And it was incredible days because I don't know what the numbers are today, but back then, because of the ads, the way they were different, not sure if you remember, this was only there for like six months, but when a skippable ad showed on YouTube, the whole video was clickable, not just the link or some other small area on, on the video.

The whole video was clickable. So because of that, we could create our animations so that you could have a call to action where you say, click here or click there or click anywhere on this video to go to my landing page. And we used that in combination with a targeting tool that we built as well. So we could you could do a keyword search and it would show you all the videos that ranked on YouTube for that keyword and all the channels and you can pull those in and then say, okay, run my ad against these specific videos in these channels.

And because of that, we were getting like an 80 percent click through rate, like eight zero, not eight, or 0.8, it was an 80 percent click through rate on our ads. It was just like, I mean, we thought it was just normal back then, but as we progressed, we realized that it was quite a special thing. But anyway, that was VeeRoll.

I did that for about four years and exited that. And then I jumped back into Splashio, and then by that time, you know, the market moved on quite a lot. And with Splashio, we then pivoted to, to turn it into a short form video production agency kind of company. But the vision for me there was always to automate that as well.

Again, I was too slow. And we got the, the manual version of it pretty well dialed in, but we never, you know, we automated a bunch of it. Like it was, when you looked at the software, it looked like a SAS. That was really interesting. It looked like a SAS for the user, but in the back end, it was human beings doing the work, you know?

So, so people would come in and place their orders with our beautiful interface. And there was a lot of software there that we built for that. But then when it came to the delivery. We have human beings doing it and then pop it back into the system and it flicks out an email. Everything seemed automated, like, you almost couldn't tell it was humans doing the work.

Yeah, that's interesting. So we never quite got to automating that. Someone else, again, beat us to it and did a really good job with that. And then I thought, well, this is a couple of years ago. And I thought, well, what's next for us? You know what? What should we position ourselves for? You know, where's the world going?

This is just when AI was coming out. ChatGPT was just making his entry. We're about six months into it and I thought, well, the writing's on the wall. We've got to do something here where, you know, AI is going to take over. It's going to take over all the creative stuff, all the editing, everything. Maybe a little bit too profiteer there, but we thought, let's do it.

Start positioning ourselves for that. So we created this new brand called Vubli, 100 percent software. So this time we started with software instead of manually doing stuff. Built a team around it and created some software that just looked at one very small slither of the, the pain points when it comes to the whole video marketing process, which is the, the distribution of the contents.

Like, you know, it's one thing creating the content, but it's another thing actually distributing and promoting and getting views and, and getting it out there to the world. And that company was called Vubli. Yeah. That brings us to the. The current day and age.

Pat Flynn: To present day. Yes. So AI was really the big unlock for the automation component of this to read and to see and to view these things that people are uploading and then be able to make decisions off that and then have the tool actually create and make decisions based on those things that were uploaded initially.

And I've, I've had the opportunity thankfully to experience Vubli and all it has to offer and a lot of people know that I've been diving pretty deep into the short form world across different platforms from YouTube, TikTok, to Reels, to Facebook. I post the same videos on X and all across the board and it takes time to do that.

I publish the same video but it still takes time and Vubli solved that problem for me. It's, it's awesome. And you can have it write the descriptions and titles for you. It understands where to put thumbnails and which thumbnails to use. It's pretty darn amazing what you've been able to do here. And I'm curious because you could use this tool in so many other ways with long form videos.

But you specifically choose to focus on short form and short form only. I'm curious why that decision, because this could be used for other things as well, but why just short form video?

Gideon Shalwick: 100%. We actually started Vubli with long form focus, because we thought that's where the biggest pain was, because we thought people wanted to upload their videos, but the files were really big, for example, and there were no schedulers back then that could do really large files.

You know, as a, as a creator, you spend so much time creating great looking video. And then if you wanted to use a scheduler, you know, it just it kills the quality or alternatively it doesn't even accept it. So we actually built Vubli for long form. So you can actually upload like really large files, up to 50 gigabyte large files to the system.

But as we were working on it, we realized that the pain point wasn't as much for long form creators. I mean, yes, it can help you, but you know, how often do you upload a long form video, like even if it's a podcast, it's like once a week maybe, or maybe twice a week. In most cases, that's like the maximum, so you only feel that pain twice a week.

Whereas when you look at the short form world, totally different game, the quality of files or videos are still important, so you can, it's still important to be able to upload larger files and files that look good, but now the pain point is at least once a day, you know, maybe twice, three, four, like five times a day.

And if you're just posting to one platform, sure, no problem. You can probably still handle it or maybe someone else can handle it for you. But when you start posting to multiple platforms, that's where the pain really starts kicking in because now all of a sudden it's, it's not just a copy and paste job.

You know, if you want to do a good job with it, you've got to create unique titles, descriptions and tags and you know, captions or whatever else for each different platform. Even if you're using so much Chat GPT, it still takes time to do that, you know, five or six times for each platform. And then the other thing, and I don't know why this is, but when you go to any of the platforms, you still have to upload your videos from your device.

There's no, there's no integration with any of them as far as I know with something like Dropbox or Google Drive or any of the other sort of file sharing services. And what that means is that, okay, it's a little thing, but if you've got to do it five times a day, you've got to upload your video from your computer or your device, your mobile phone through your own internet connection.

And sometimes your internet connection is not that great to the social media platform, and then you've got to do it. For the next platform and the next one and the next one. So it's, it's like a little thing like that, that it all adds up. So the uploading thing, the creating of the, the, we call it meta data training, your title descriptions and tags or Instagrammers call it captions, the text that goes with your video and you're creating all those things, it all adds up and then for each video. And then if you do it multiple times a day, there's like, you know, it's potentially hours of time, you know, so if you do it yourself or even if someone else does it for you. So we thought, why don't we just remove that pain because it's, it's almost like you get so excited about creating a great video and then I don't know about you, Pat, but oftentimes you get to, you know, you kind of finish and you're like, yes, I'm ready.

The video is now, it's going to go everywhere and you get, oh, and I still got to publish it. And then it's like that final little straw that sometimes breaks the camel's back. And I know you're a consistency guy and, and I think for me to be consistent, you've got to remove as many friction points in the process as possible.

And so this is one of the major friction points we decided to remove. It's just like, once you got your video, you just want to, you just want to upload one place and basically, ideally, just click a button and everything gets taken care of for you. And that's exactly why we built Vubli.

Pat Flynn: That's the magic wand wish that we all have with things and Vubli is that for short form video. I mean, if you, again, almost at a minimum, you need to be publishing once per day on these platforms, right? And to do that once per day on one platform, some people can't even handle that. Try to do daily. Daily is great. Quantity is important in the short form world.

There really is no penalty posting too much. Even the CEO of Instagram said as such, the videos will find the right audience at the right time is really what happens. So of course, still, like you said, have a quality video, one that has a good hook and is, you know, going to hold people as long as possible.

That's always key. Of course, we don't want to put junk out there, although a lot of people are doing that. But let's say you did create a great video and okay, you're publishing. Once on Facebook, and now you have to, like you said, take that video, upload it, then also to Instagram, and then write all the data, all the metadata, the description and caption.

Then you gotta publish it to YouTube shorts, which is a little bit different. And there's a title for that. And then a certain other way to get a thumbnail on there, which you have to do it on your phone to go to YouTube, not YouTube Studio, but the actual account on YouTube to then select the thumb. Like there's, there's so many different steps for each of these platforms that they add up.

And if you then. Publish maybe two videos per day. I mean, you're just exponentially creating more and more effort and more and more friction. That's not going to make it easy for you to do that. I think I saw somebody yesterday talk about one of these channels in India. That's just seeing 9 billion views per day.

For example, they're posting a hundred videos per day and it's insane. And I, of course, we don't want to recommend that. And a lot of it may or may not be great, but quantity is important. So any tools out there like this to help us is, is great. And so what you do is with Vubli, you upload the video once.

You've already connected your accounts where you want to post this, a Facebook page or pages, Instagram, of course, TikTok. I think you can, what else can you integrate with? X.

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. So YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook Reels, LinkedIn and X. So there's six at the moment, but you know, we'll add more over time.

We've, we've had some people asking for Pinterest in particular, quite a few. So we'll probably add that one next, but yeah, whatever. So, so in terms of, we try and respond to our users and don't just add things just willy nilly. For example, I was just listening to your, your podcast earlier today on my walk, we talk about your update about short form video and you mentioned Snapchat, but it was a horrible sort of experience for you.

It felt like a boomer, you know, using, using this, this young person tool, but no one's asked us for Snapchat yet, which is really interesting. So maybe it's just because we don't have a big enough user base yet, but I'm sure that'll get mentioned as well.

Pat Flynn: Sure. I mean, I, I will raise my hand and ask for that because it's, it would just solve one of those problems, right?

And the interesting thing about Snapchat, I heard this recently, is that it has more active users then Instagram and TikTok combined. Wow. But they're all between 13 and 17 years old, right? Or like 13 and 21, right? That, that's different. That's why nobody's asking you cause. You probably don't have access to that audience.

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. So is this with your The Pokemon stuff. The Pokemon audience, their younger audience. So they'd be using Snapchat more. Yeah. So I think our audience might be slightly older perhaps at this stage and that's maybe they're not asking for it. There's something interesting you mentioned, Pat, I think I just want to touch on, you know, I forgot to mention that the thumbnail thing as well, cause it's a relatively new feature for Vubli, but it reminded me of, of, of a bigger idea there.

And that is what we've often seen with clients who come from not using Vubli. To then using Vubli is that they would either do a terrible job with the text that goes to the video or they would like they were just like really terrible copy for example and then copy and paste that same text to each platform right because they think So, in other words, they wouldn't do it properly at all.

Like, they would just have some random or, you know, mediocre text and then copy and paste that over. So, either do it bad or not do it at all. And the same thing with thumbnails. People would either go, ah, this is too hard to do it individually for each platform. And so they'd either not do it at all or do a terrible job, you know, in either case.

So, and I think that's where Vubli can really help is like, you know, for each platform it does it individually. So, it creates unique content in your own voice. And that you can train by the way as well, we've opened that up as well, we've completely opened up our AI prompt so you can personalize it 100 percent for you and make it suit 100 percent for your situation.

But then it's also different for each platform. So for example, and you probably noticed this, I think you mentioned how TikTok was kind of a weird platform, platform for you, right? And the reason is because the audience is different there and Snapchat, again, different audience. So, so why write the same content for them, for people on YouTube, if it's different people on TikTok, you know, you need, you need to tailor it specifically for each platform.

And I think that's really useful. So with Vubli, it allows you to do that very quickly with, you know, using AI, which means you get a better result. So not only does it get done, but it helps you get a better result as well, because A, you're going to be more readable for your different audiences, it's going to be more attractive for the different audiences, because it's specifically written for that audience, that platform in your own voice. But also it means that you're actually doing it as opposed to just the copy and paste sort of job that sort of looks terrible and the results are evident. You know, people coming in from just a terrible version using Vubli where it's specifically looking for keywords that are search engine optimized and this sort of thing and specifically each platform it all helps and builds to help your videos become more discoverable.

It's just not just about time saving. It's also about getting more exposure. And then the thumbnail thing, the more I looked into that, it's like, I can't believe it. This is the weird thing, and this is within the context of short form. Now, it feels like I haven't done any, any Like data research on this, but it feels like a lot of people are missing out on a huge opportunity there.

Like if you look at, if you look at YouTube long form, you'll know this, all the big creators know this. Your thumbnail is almost the most important thing for discoverability for your videos, right? Your thumbnail, your title, and then your content. It's like in that order, right? So we've got these big creators for long form spending all this time on their thumbnails.

For long form, but then you're going to look at the short form. It's just like, there's no thumbnail. It's just like this random shot that YouTube chose or that, that Instagram chose or whatever else. And there's no thought behind the thumbnail. And most people think, okay, sure, but that's who cares about it because most people just do the thumb scroll.

So there's no thumbnail there anyway. Not true. Not true at all. The thumbnail shows up in ways that you wouldn't expect way more. Like if you go to YouTube right now. To both, actually any of the platforms, if you go to both desktop and mobile, the thumbnail of your short form videos show up everywhere.

Everywhere.

Pat Flynn: They're heavily promoting it. I mean, it's like, you see two or three long form videos and then a whole array of short form video thumbnails from people that you've watched or people that YouTube thinks that you want to watch. And it's a particular frame either from that video or an uploaded thumbnail and so it is a huge lost opportunity for sure for some additional reach in ways that you might not even know is happening.

Gideon Shalwick: A hundred percent. So that's one of the key things we wanted to solve as well. It's like upload one thumbnail. And then get it added to all the different platforms in one go. Now I must say, there's a little caveat here, YouTube is the only weird one where the API doesn't allow us to add it 100 percent but it will get you 50 percent there.

So basically you still select your thumbnail within Vubli and what we do is we actually add it as the first frame in your video. Some people like that, some people don't like that. But then what, what it does for you is when you open up your YouTube app and you go into the edit for that particular video, then basically just select the first frame and automatically already has it locked onto the first frame when you open up the editing screen and you just hit the checkbox and you're ready to go.

And then your thumbnail is perfect on YouTube and all the other ones, we figured that as well. So it automatically will show you YouTube without you having to do anything else.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, it's obviously important on Instagram. A lot of people go to your Reels feed or your video layout in your profile, and they'll see those, right?

So that's key, especially, you know, for my Pokemon channel, you could see clearly how important it is because I'm showing off the pack before it's opened. In fact, Before, when I was just uploading the videos, and it was still working, I was getting views, I saw a lot of people comment and say, Oh, you spoiled it for us.

We can already see in the thumbnail that you open the pack that you say, Should I open it or should I keep it sealed? Well, you've already answered it on the thumbnail because you're showing us the inside of the pack. So I was like, Oh, I guess people can see these things. I mean, there's proof right there.

So, going back to the thumbnail and using it, and I've also found that when there's some action happening or there's some like for me in the card space when I'm holding the pack but somebody else Is holding the pack and there's like some exchange happening or some movement or some action that's happening those seem to do much better and then it ties to the beginning of the video where i'm actually in person negotiating with somebody about that thing.

So there's sort of a story being told with the thumbnail there versus just a random frame. And you know, a lot of the ones that I click on that I see are ones where it's a person's reaction or there's some curiosity in there. A lot of times people do go so far as to, and I'm curious your thoughts on including text on short form thumbnails.

I know that's sometimes in important long form, depending on the context and situation, but do you think it might be worth adding and maybe going into Canva, for example, to just add some text on top of a thumbnail if you have that opportunity or time?

Gideon Shalwick: Great question. I think the answer is probably depends on your audience as you've got to test it.

I think that's what it comes down to. I will say this with one experiment I ran, I basically had every video where it was very text heavy. In fact, I blurred myself out in the background and then I just had, if you can imagine the vertical mobile screen size, and it was basically just text kind of filling up the whole thing.

And I thought, you know, like reading is one of the most captivating things you can do because when people read, they don't see the letters. When you read properly, you don't see the letters. You create a picture in your head of what you're reading. When you read a book, you know, you don't remember the letters, right?

You remember the picture in your head that you create. And so I thought, if I'm good with creating text that can invoke a visual image, you know, that can oftentimes be stronger than the actual image itself. But then I showed it to one of my mentors, Aaron Soghi, amazing guy. He's got like 700,000 followers on TikTok and he recommended I should test without any text at all and just, just to see what would happen.

Cause then you get the face there and so it allows you to be a bit more creative and create some more variability as well. I didn't get around to that yet for that particular experiment cause that experiment just ended at that, when I got that advice. But I think that the bottom line is I think it's worth testing, you know, like test with text.

Test with text plus image and then test with just image and see what happens.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I've had in some thumbnails that I've created, I've had time to like put an arrow pointing to the thing that I want to make sure people see or are looking at, especially if there's a situation where there's a lot of things happening on a thumbnail, because it's the frame from something that's happening, I want to draw attention to where I want attention drawn. And a lot of things that we teach inside of our community related to thumbnails for a long form is about sort of like less is more, you know, don't tell the whole story. Just kind of create something of curiosity so that people will click through. So anyway, we're getting into tactics now, which I'm curious.

So let's keep going with this. By the way, if you want to check out Vubli, check it out. You can get, I believe, your first three months at 50% off if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/vubli, you can sign up for an account there, and again, kind of just upload once and then distribute everywhere.

That's great. It almost makes the short form videos feel, in a way, like how podcasting kind of feels. You just upload it once to your host and then it kind of gets distributed out there, and you can fine tune it to the different platforms. I've had a really good time experimenting with it, and I've even provided some feedback directly to you, Gideon, that you've already made changes about, which is really cool to see.

And that's why I love working with companies like you. And, you know, full disclosure, Matt and I have come on as advisors to the company as well, because we see this being something that will be utilized very, very heavily for people who are getting into short form, which we continue to talk about, and we'll be running some challenges earlier next year to help people do this and distribute these videos far and wide, hopefully.

So I'm having a lot of fun with it. Anyway,  SmartPassiveIncome.com/vubli. Go ahead and check that out. That is an affiliate link, of course, and thanks for that special deal for our people. Gideon, that means a lot. What do you see working out there for creators? Obviously, get them on as many platforms as you can using tools like Vubli, but what other tactics are people using to grow their short form presence?

Gideon Shalwick: A couple of things that's come up, which I think it's worth mentioning. One is the whole debate with, should you focus on just one platform as opposed to spreading yourself too thin with, you know, multiple platforms at the same time? That's one thing. And the other thing that's, that's cropped up a few times, which is kind of debunked all small spoiler alert has been debunked quite a lot, which is whether your reach gets affected with using, you know, third party tools too to distribute your content. So if that's of interest, we can cover that.

Pat Flynn: Why don't we start there? I mean, that's literally the number one thought I had because there was once a time, especially on, I think it was X, back when it was Twitter and Facebook and other tools, there were a lot of distribution tools that when you would use, it always felt like your growth or reach was stunted because these tools preferred you to post natively on those platforms.

That was just ingrained in my head for a very long time, but you had mentioned, and I've also come to learn that this is debunked. Can you talk a little bit more about why it's no longer the case?

Gideon Shalwick: It's a very interesting little story with quite a bit of a history. So in different layers, I should say as well, it's different layers, which sort of makes it a complex story.

Basically back in 2010, there was an article that came out of someone that tested their content. I'm not sure if it was just the video content, but testing the content with a scheduler and they saw a massive reduction in reach when they used a scheduler compared to when they did it natively. And, and then this article kind of went viral.

And to this day, to this day, people still quote that article from 2010. So what happened was, just full disclosure, I did this research through ChatGPT, but you can, you know, it provides you with a link so you can go and check it out. You can do this for yourself as well. What happened was apparently that was a bug in Facebook's API.

And then they fixed it. They had an update and then that problem went away. But people talking about it didn't go away. So that was one thing that happened that was really interesting. Okay, so there's one layer. And it was only Facebook and this is 2010. Now the next layer is these different kinds of content.

Which is, there's text content, there's image content, there's video content, but very importantly now, more recently, there's short form video content and we know that kind of all of them, like even with YouTube, they had two different algorithms, I'm not sure if it's the same one now, I think they might have combined things or marriage is a little bit better, but essentially it was two algorithms running separately and then you've got TikTok, which, you know it's only short form.

And then you've got Instagram, which was IGTV and then became Reels. And now Facebook was posts and then Reels. And I think now they're calling everything Reels or something like that, right? A lot of changes has happened. And to make a claim that one size fits all in this, this context is not really fair.

So that's another layer, like these different algorithms for different things and different rules, different things. So just, just to inject something here. From what we've seen, and also from the research I've done, we've seen zero effect of using a third party tool on your reach. Zero effect, and in some cases, from the research I've done, you might even get an increase in reach, and the reasons are a little bit fuzzy on that, but from what I can tell is that one of the reasons is that when you're using a scheduler, you're more likely to keep on going and being more consistent.

And as a result, then you get more rich. But one of the key findings we found was that, and this might have a real effect, is when people use a scheduler to post their content, what sometimes might happen is they might schedule their content and either schedule it during a time that they're not there, they're either asleep or they're thinking, Oh, it's getting scheduled and I don't have to be there.

And what we've noticed with all the platforms, I'm not sure all of them, but certainly X and YouTube, Instagram. Maybe all of them, is they're looking for those engagement signals very soon after you've posted, so if you're using a scheduler and you post your video and you just leave it, you're sleeping or you're on holiday or whatever else, and there's no one either from you or from your team to then interact, like, say someone leaves a comment, like, I know on X that's really important, I think they recommend within the first half an hour or an hour, if someone leaves a comment, you've got to get back right away, like, as quick as possible, that sends a really positive signal to the algorithms, so if there's zero engagement from you, then of course that's going to affect your reach, but that's got nothing to do with what tool you're using to post your content.

So there's all these different layers, and I'm the bottom line is, from all the research I've done, it always comes back to this. When you're creating the content, the most important thing to help you get reach is the quality of your content and how well you engage with the audience, regardless of where it came from or where it was published from.

So it's a really interesting debate and I know it's top of mind for a lot of people who think, oh no, you know, another, yet another layer, I forgot to check this yesterday, but it'd be a very interesting number to find. Is the scheduler industry as a market, how big is that? And you look at all the bigger players, they've been around for a long time.

And the big question in my mind is, if you are getting penalties for reach, why are these companies still around? Surely they wouldn't survive, you know, if when the users post content, they that would stop getting rich, but people keep on using them and they are multi million dollar. Like I said, I wish I found, I have a number, maybe we can find that number afterwards, but what that industry size, it is huge.

It's not a, it's not an insignificant market size for those sort of companies. So, and yet another layer just to sort of maybe the final layer that I could add is why the heck would these platforms provide APIs in the first place to help people post their content. They want to give people as many options and possibilities for posting content and API is just one of those reasons, one of those methods that they've created to help people post their content. So why would they want to restrict? You know, it doesn't make any sense to me at all. And like I said, we haven't seen any evidence ourselves from our users.

We haven't seen any evidence. So, but you know, studies are getting done all the time and sometimes the results are biased. The hard thing to find is an unbiased study from academics, say, for example. I think there was one or two done, but it was a long time ago. And like I said, short form is a whole new game again now, so.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that's interesting. It reminds me of some early studies that were done about eggs and cholesterol that were published that then put this thing in a person's mind back in the seventies and eighties that eggs were bad, like don't have too many and high cholesterol, et cetera, that like we just kind of assumed is truth when, you know, new studies have been done that have debunked that or have gone deeper and realized that, okay, that wasn't necessarily right.

So, I mean, in the same way, I think all of those arguments kind of lean toward okay, the tool itself is not going to be the problem. If there is a problem, it's going to be your content and, like you said, the engagement, which leads us to that second part that we talked about, which was your first prompt, which was, should you just stay fully engaged on one platform and be fully present there?

What are you losing by spreading yourself too thin? Because you can't possibly reply to every single comment on every single platform. Is it worth it to still do that? Obviously, you have a tool to enable us to be everywhere. Are we losing out because we are everywhere?

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. And that's a great question.

I've, you know, like I said, at the start of this interview, I've always been a content guy, because that's how I cut my teeth back in the day. So I come from a content background and I remember teaching this as well, where I would, where people would ask me, where do you start? There's so many different platforms, you know, do I post on all of them, et cetera.

And I always tell people, pick one, master it, and then add another one once you get bandwidth. So that was the advice I'd given in the past. The advice I give now, now that we've got automation and AI, is that the game has changed? So things change all the time. Like I noticed you, you changed your position on long form versus short form, for example, right?

So you're allowed to change, you know, because the world changes, the only constant is change. So the advice I have now is focus on one platform as your hero platform. But, use tools like Vubli, or anything else that you want, to help you still post everywhere else as well. I mean, why not? If it doesn't take any extra effort, and you can do a good job with it, why not?

You know, why not? Because we ran this experiment as well, and I think you saw this too, sometimes you might post a video on YouTube, and it does something totally different on Instagram. Or totally different on TikTok. So it might, it might be mediocre on YouTube and Instagram, and then all of a sudden it goes viral on TikTok, and you go, what the heck happened there?

You know, it's a different audience, you know, different algorithms, etc. So why should you limit yourself to just one platform if there's massive opportunity to be had elsewhere? Without any extra effort, it's like a no brainer. And that's part of the reason why we built Vubli, because I recognize that. I come from that position of focus on one thing, you know, because you're, what's that book called?

The One Thing, right? Amazing book. It is your, from a strategy perspective, having that laser focus on one is your, is your best chance of success because you're honing your resources and it just increases your chance of success, right? So my advice doesn't change. It's like, keep doing that, but select a hero platform, and the hero platform is simply the one that you focus most of your attention on, but then use something like Vubli to still post everywhere else and garner that additional exposure and reach.

And as you grow, you build your team. Just because you start with one platform and just because you have one hero platform doesn't mean you only have that focus on the one platform forever. You know, as you grow, things develop, and you start getting more money coming in, your team starts growing, you can, for example, at one point have one person in your team just dedicated to one platform, if you wanted to, that becomes their hero platform.

So I think, I mean, obviously you can get great success with just focusing on one platform, absolutely, if you're just one person and that's all you want to do, 100%, but my argument is, with all these other audiences out there, why not? Why not access them as well if it doesn't take much or any extra effort?

Pat Flynn: Here is a story from my end that will support this as well. I had not posted on Facebook specifically because I just am not a big fan of Facebook in general. However, I recently, and by recently I mean three months ago, started to notice that there were a lot of Facebook pages claiming to be me, Deep Pocket Monster, and they were getting to the point where they were Reaching out to audiences, pretending to be me, and then scamming people.

And people were losing money, and that didn't make me happy. And a part of the problem was just, I was not on that platform to have the official brand there. So I said, okay. I don't want to be here, but I have to be here. I'm going to show up and I'm just going to republish my content that I've been publishing everywhere else.

I'm going to publish the same videos. I literally don't have the time to engage there. But at least I'll have the main Deep Pocket Monster Facebook page. I can use that to get rid of all these other ones that are fake, because I can prove my identity and all that stuff. And I have the IP and X, you know, et cetera.

So I set up shop there and three months later, I have done very little engagement there. I mean, every once in a while, because I'm there, I'll see a comment, I'll reply to it, but it's nowhere near my hero platform like Instagram and YouTube are. 200,000 followers now on Facebook. Wow. $150 to $200 a day in additional revenue from simply posting the exact same video with zero engagement.

And people are still replying to comments, saying they enjoy watching, saying that they now watch me on Facebook. A completely new audience that wouldn't have found me otherwise. Yes, in an ideal world, I would also engage there and show up. I could probably generate more revenue and more fans there, if I were also present there.

But I just, I just can't. So do I take all the videos off? Of course not. They're there, and they're serving the audience. Because the videos themselves are entertaining and now I have this following there, which also as a byproduct, now I have another property that when I'm doing a brand deal or sponsorship, I have another place to post those videos and more followers and more views coming in, right?

Those views add up. It's 25 to 30 million additional views per month that I can now sell. Yes. In a way, which is awesome. Again, another benefit, right? Imagine you have only one home platform that's providing 100 percent of your, your revenue, your followers, et cetera. Imagine you have half the amount of followers and zero engagement on so many others, but that's still so many more new followers and eyeballs on your videos that you could add into your sponsorship package. That's huge. That's absolutely huge.

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. And you know, short form, and this is why I love short form videos so much because it's, it's such a, it's such a different beast, you know, look, it's, if you think about the way that people consume short form, they don't always engage.

The difference in engagement is how long they watch. That's the engagement. It's not a comment, it's not a, like even, it's not a subscribe. Like it's subscribing is now like really low down on the list. And that's why you can get a very successful, like a TikTok, TikTok is probably known more for this. You can get a channel or a TikTok page or whatever with not many followers, but you go and look at the channel and go, huh, millions of views, millions, you know, and maybe not for every video, but each video almost seems like it's treated independently of your previous existence or your previous track record. It's like, right. It's like, no, here's the new video. Let's see how it goes with the audience. Let's treat this video as an individual unit. And if it's awesome, let's flick it out there. Why not? You know, why, why limit someone's channel based on their subscriber rate, you know, a number of subscribers.

So, and for me, that makes it really exciting for pretty much everybody because it means it levels the playing field. No longer do you have to have like a hundred thousand or a million subscribers like you used to do in the, in the day to be able to compete. You know, now it just comes down to how creative can you be and how consistent can you be?

How awesome can you create the content, and how consistently can you post that? And, and so the creativity of, you know, there's plenty of tools to help you with that, but when it comes to consistency, we'd like to think, we wanna help you there. So we'll remove at least one of those pains to help you be more consistent.

Pat Flynn: And that consistency is exactly what combats my initial thought about short form, which was you can't build a relationship with an audience with 60 seconds, right? It takes time. I used to, and a lot of the audience knows this because I've used this analogy a lot, I used to use the metaphor that short form videos were like Halloween candy, right?

People come to your house, they get the candy, then they leave and they move to the next house. They don't remember you. Right, they might get a nice candy and then move on and then they don't see you until next year, but the truth is, if you are consistent, and for example, if you're publishing daily, it's not just a Halloween thing, it's an everyday thing.

Every day they're coming to your house, and maybe if you have the king size candy bar, then they're gonna remember you, and they're gonna come back the next day, and then come back the next day, and then talk about you, because it's not one 60 minute video, it's sixty one minute videos for 60 days, right? And it's like You can build a relationship.

In fact, a lot of the people who watch my channel, the short form channel, if I don't publish at 830 p. m. Pacific time, people wonder, what happens? Where are you? I've now become a part of a person's ritual or day. A lot of parents come up and say, hey, it's like a fun thing my son and I do every day before we go to bed. We watch one of your videos every day. And it's just such a cool thing because it is consistent. And that's why you have to keep hitting publish. You have to keep showing up. And that's more than why. Showing up across the platforms, all of them if possible, and again, Vubli is a great tool that can help us do that, is a great thing.

So I'm all for it, this is why I'm happy to be an advisor and an affiliate and to have you on the show and to push this out there because we can take this one message and this thing that we do that we put our time and effort into and put it out there in front of people who maybe wouldn't have followed and found us otherwise if we just kind of limited it to one or just two platforms.

So, Gideon, this has been really, really great to have you on and to talk about a tool that is so useful right now. If everybody wants to go and check out Vubli, you can get 50 percent off your first three months if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/vubli and you'll see the deal there. And a little bit more about the tool.

It's very easy to use and onboard all the technical stuff that's required is there's tooltips and things to help you through that. And again, Gideon and his team in there are there to help you as well. And it's always improving. So I appreciate that. Any final words of advice for the short form creator that's out there, whether they have been creating content for a while and are trying short form, or maybe they're a brand new creator and short form feels like a kind of easy entry into content creation.

What tip would you have for success, Gideon?

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah, I think the, the tip I'd have is to, something that I learned from you, and that is the consistency thing, but also something that I've recently been, I've known about this lesson for many years, but I haven't implemented it properly. And that's from Nathan Barry from Kit, creating flywheels and building momentum.

And the thing with that is that the mistake that I made in the past was that I thought I was building momentum, but I ended up just creating dots. Dots, dots, dots and straight lines. And then a dot would finish, a line would finish. And it wouldn't have a feedback loop to start again. And the key difference was to then say, Hey, if I want to be consistent here, I've got to create a flywheel, if I want to build momentum, I've got to create a flywheel, I've got to close the loop.

You know it's, it's, it's one thing creating one video. But it's another thing to create a system that allows you to create one video or post one video a day or two videos a day, five videos a day. So it's about, you know, thinking not just about the video, but the system behind it to help you build something that can create momentum.

And, and a big part of that is to remove as many friction points as possible from that process. And the posting and distribution part of it is one of the big key pain points. So if you can remove that friction point, it's going to mean naturally that you're going to build that momentum a lot easier and a lot faster as well.

So, yeah, for me, the bottom line with this stuff, if I look at you and your success, it's consistency. I mean, your first 60 days with, was it Short Pocket Monster? Yeah, short pocket Monster, yeah. Was 35 days. Nothing. Right? But you posted every day the number 35 boom, 750,000 views, and then all of a sudden your flywheel was spinning.

So the, the first bit is a bit more tricky and hard, but then as you build, that momentum builds sneak into that breakthrough point. So that'll be my advice. Build a flywheel and, and that helps you be more consistent, which helps you build that momentum and helps you get to that breakthrough point.

Pat Flynn: I love it, man.

Thank you so much for today. Appreciate you. I know all the way on the other side of the world might be what? What time is it over there for you right now?

Gideon Shalwick: Oh, it's nine o'clock in the morning here.

Pat Flynn: Oh that's not too bad. It's 3:00 PM here. That's perfect. Yeah. And you're off, you're in Australia.

Gideon Shalwick: Yeah. That's it.

Pat Flynn: Very cool. Gideon, thank you so much for this. Appreciate you and everybody appreciates the hard work you've done to make things easier for us. So thank you again.

Gideon Shalwick: You're welcome. Thank you so much.

Pat Flynn: Alright, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Gideon, always a pleasure and a wealth of knowledge coming from him.

And just to see the focus on short form video, I mean, this completely makes sense. Again, it's exactly why Matt and I became advisors to the company, why we're an affiliate for it, why we wanted him on the show today to talk to you about this. So if you go, again, to SmartPassiveIncome.com/vubli, you can get 50 percent off the first three months there if you want to check this out.

If you're doing any short form videos, go You might as well publish them out everywhere and do it in a way that doesn't take too much time and helps you do it in the right way. So again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/vubli. Check it out. And thank you so much for today. We're going to continue to talk about superfans and short form video and get you going, especially leading into 2026.

We're going to make next year the best year ever for you. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out. Cheers. Thanks so much.

SPI 899: It Only Takes 67 Days to Win Big with Dr. Shannon Irvine

Dr. Shannon Irvine: 90% of every decision, isn't coming from our thinking, planning part of our brain. It's coming from that subconscious part of the brain. It's like there's a brake pedal being pushed down as hard as you're pushing the gas pedal, and It leads to kind of spinning in circles and getting us stalled out.

So if something's in control of 90% of my decisions and my actions, I wanna understand the good things that are in there and then uncover these limitations, limiting beliefs, automatic negative thoughts, they're always firing when you're trying to do something big. And so this enables us to not just try to not have limiting beliefs, but literally remove them from your brain. We can see 'em in scans where they literally disappear and are not able to fire or wire together anymore, and that's when we see big pops for our entrepreneurs going to six, seven, and eight figures.

Pat Flynn: You know, we talk a lot about strategy and different tactics to help you succeed in your business and in your life, and none of that is going to work unless you know how to plow through all the mental barriers, the, sometimes they call it the limiting beliefs, the conditions that we've been grown up with that actually hold us back.

And this is something that was so apparent to me once I started learning entrepreneurship, when I tried to build my own business and my perfectionism got in the way, for example. And my procrastination started to show up. And this is why I'm so grateful for people like our featured guest today. Dr. Shannon Irvine, who once was a student of mine, we used to work together. I used to coach her and she was very, very important in my history as one of my very first students in one of my very first courses who provided so much incredible feedback. This was for Power Up Podcasting, so thank you just publicly to Dr. Shannon Irvine. And also thank you for writing this newest book 67 Day Year. Now a year, of course is 365 days, and this is all backed by science by the way.

She says that you can accomplish your annual goals that you set out for yourself like during New Years. And of course, we're coming and approaching the end of the year here. So this is a perfect time for this episode. She says that you can accomplish these goals that you set out for yourself every year in just 67 days. This is proven. She's run this as a lead magnet in a program before, and now she has a book 67 Day Year. And I know if you've. Been around teenagers and middle schoolers.

The term six seven has been an interesting meme and inside joke between the youngins and I happen to catch wind of this because I have a couple young ones in my home as well. And if you're sitting in the car right now and you have kids, they're probably laughing because of six seven and have probably yelled it out already.

If you're listening to this in the far distant future, then it's probably overdone by now. Like many of these memes are or do. Anyway, Dr. Shannon Irvine. She's here, our special guest today, and make sure you listen all the way through, because this could be the episode that you listen to that changes everything.

Here she is.

Dr. Shannon Irvine. Welcome back to SPI. Thanks for being here.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: So happy to be back on the podcast with you.

Pat Flynn: Yes, and I'm happy also because your book 67 Day Year, just recently became a bestseller. Congratulations.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Thank you.

Pat Flynn: So happy for you. Yeah, thanks so much. I've been there since the beginning of the just origin story of this book.

How does it feel now to be on the other end of it? It's out there. People are leaving reviews and comments, like, what does it feel like now, especially since this is your first book.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yeah. In fact, I, I didn't expect this but I actually feeling a little emotional 'cause you have been there the whole time and you know, there's nothing better than taking all that you've walked through for the last 10, 15 years, all the processes that work and be able to give them to people that may or may not come into your world. And I know you and I talked in the beginning like, what is the real goal for this book and, yeah, I mean, some people will come into our programs or get certified through us, but really I wanted it to get in the hands of every single human being that desires an outcome and wants to achieve something they've been working on for a long time and can't quite figure out why they're not getting there and that most people won't walk into coaching rooms, but this can get into your hands in the living room, and I really wanted to make a difference to that single mom sitting on the couch with three kids wanting to start the side hustle. All the way up to the CEO who's running, you know, billions of dollars and trying to figure out how to achieve more. It's really how our brains allow it all to work or not.

Pat Flynn: You know, the topic of success and mindset is not new, but the way that you approach it is definitely different. I mean, this is not a business book about strategy because you could have all the best strategies in the world.

We've talked about this before. You can have every strategy in the world and all the right buttons to press, but unless you have your mind correct as you approach that, none of that's gonna matter. And I feel like now more than ever, we're just so cloudy with everything that's going on around us, it's very hard to think clearly.

And so what is this 67 day year, first of all.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: I know.

Pat Flynn: The six, seven thing. If I know you have kids that are in high school or middle school these days. Yeah. You know. There's this meme going around with six, seven and that you didn't plan for it, but it might be a blessing in disguise. 'cause now it's like.

Six, seven. Oh yeah, the six seven book.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Six seven.

Pat Flynn: Has that come up at all, like in your marketing or?

Dr. Shannon Irvine: It has. There was somebody who grabbed it yesterday on TikTok and did a whole thing with it, and I was just cracking up. I'm like, oh my gosh. But if you read the book, dude, like it'll actually help.

Pat Flynn: That's so good though.

Hey, who knows? I mean, maybe this can get in the hands of middle schoolers and teenagers. I mean, that would be great.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: That's the ultimate goal. Both of us help. Business owners, entrepreneurs, those who are growing either from a side hustle all the way up to a big business. But ultimately the goal is to get these models, these methods, these processes into college first, and then ultimately into our high school, so that all of our kids can understand that they have the power to create in their brain the outcomes they want.

They don't just have to believe everything that their emotions or their thoughts tell them. For sure.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. And you're coming at this from a semis scientific point of view. Yeah. As a neuropsychologist. Right. Versus there's a lot of people who do talk about similar things, but they're kind of in woo woo land.

Yeah. Quite a bit, you know, which is not bad. There's a, you know, many people will respond to that and have gotten help. I, I even have, however, having some scientific basis and foundation to lead into this is great. So tell us what is the framework in a nutshell? And then like, let's maybe just kind of dive in a little bit and explore.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: I always say these are the frameworks of why the Woo Works, and I'm a step by step kind of person by nature. And the whole thing came about, and Pat knows this story, but where I hit my own glass ceiling. That frustrating moment where you're doing all the right things. I mean, we are in a season of gluttony, of strategy, a gluttony of content, a gluttony of information, right?

So it's hard to know what to follow. And I, I remember being at that place in my business where no matter what I did, I couldn't get past a certain glass ceiling. And it was so frustrating for me and I always joke around saying the doctor in front of my name stands for desperate enough to go get a PhD to figure out why I couldn't get past that place and really, it was the reflection of my mentor at the time who had multiple eight figure businesses, but she thought differently. We had the same exact strategies, but I couldn't clear past a certain dollar amount, like under 200,000 in our business, and she had three eight figure businesses. And the only thing different strategically, we were identical, identical.

I was so disappointed to find that out, right? I was waiting for that magical elixir, but I found out she thought differently about money worth, enoughness capacity, ability, all of those things, and that started this quest that ultimately ended me up in a neuropsychology PhD, unpacking, how does my brain get to the state where her brain was and the models, I'd love to say I walked into those rooms Pat, and then they like, oh, like they unfurled the the red carpet of how you do these things, but as we all know in the educational space, it's somewhat knowledge for knowledge acquisition and so it's, you know, learn synaptic pruning, learn neuroplasticity are great concepts. We hear a lot of people talking about 'em, but no one was doing the great, that sounds fantastic, but, how, like how do you do it?

Don't just tell me. My brain has the capacity to do those things. Tell me how do I remove a limiting belief? How do I build a neuro pathway toward what I want? And it was in that quest within those rooms where these models that are all in the book were birthed. And I was the unicorn that I was testing out on.

I was trying to uncover really all those subconscious programs that were running. 90% we know from science now 90% of every decision, therefore every action, therefore, every result that we have isn't coming from our thinking, planning part of our brain. It's coming from that subconscious part of the brain.

So I got to work on the three simple step model to wire my brain, wire your brain to achieve more and less time. The model itself is pretty simple. It's clarify, erase, and automate. Clarify, meaning really understanding what is it that you really want and why you want it. Stuff that we think we do, but if you think about traditional goal setting, it's saying, I want this thing and it's outside of myself.

I want a million dollar business. I want to have three vacations, whatever it is, and that particular action, the way smarter goals are set up, puts your brain in a literal tug of war with what you want. Firing off all kinds of neurochemicals to stop you from achieving that. And so we've gotta get really, really clear, but do it in the language of the brain, which is certainty.

And we deep dive into all those steps within the book. And at the same time, you heard me say this metaphor a lot, a lot of your listeners, Pat, are gonna be the type of people who they're naturally. Wanting to achieve, right? Their, their foot's on the gas, their, not many people are having to get motivated, maybe a little bit, but they're really wanting to achieve things.

Their foot is on the metaphorical gas pedal, right? All the time, right? But this 90% that is automated in the subconscious. That didn't happen yesterday. That happened. From zero to 20, think about how I was at 20 years old and those automations happened because of what was being repeated around us. And so all those stories about money worth, enoughness capacity, ability, were hardwired into you before that part of your brain that could call BS could say, I don't think that's true.

And so we've gotta get in there and, if you think about it, if those things are running 90% of every decision and action you're taking, it's like there's a brake pedal being pushed down as hard as you're pushing the gas pedal, and we know where that leads. Right? It leads to kind of spinning in circles and getting us stalled out.

Pat Flynn: Right? I love the metaphor of pressing down on the gas 'cause everybody's feeling like they're trying so hard and going nowhere while we have this invisible thing, pushing down on the gas at the same time. And it's within us from, like you said, just the way we grew up, the way we were conditioned. So how do we unlearn those things?

And what are some common sort of forms of that brake pedal we experience as entrepreneurs?

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yeah, I love that question because there are some common patterns, and the great news is literally it's four steps to recognize, refute, and rewire those items once you uncover 'em. But the big piece is starting to listen to the thoughts your brain is serving you.

If you're just chilling on the couch doing what you've always done, not trying to achieve anything, you're not gonna really recognize those intrusive thoughts. But if you're starting to drive for things that you don't have, that's when the subconscious like will literally allow the thought to bubble up into your brain.

We've all experienced this, right? When we're about to go live or we're about to get on a stage, or we're about to, for me, I remember it was when I was about to press play on my very first podcast, 378 episodes ago. I know you have more than that, but that was I remember that moment and the thought floated through my mind of like, who's gonna listen to you? Like, what value do you have to offer?

We aren't taught that those are just patterns of someone else that because they've been automated, we just believe they're true. So then we retract, right? We pull back, or we take a safer action than the one we already know. So the key to uncover them is first to realize that you are the creator of your thoughts.

You don't have to give every thought residency in your mind, right? So when you're leaning into a bigger thing, listen to the thought that's floating across your mind and just ask yourself, does this bring me to where I want to go? Or is this gonna keep me from it? Some of those big patterns for us revolve around money.

Is it evil to want money? Does it make me a bad person when I have money? One of my students had a very successful father and was an entrepreneur, right? And she just loved her dad so much and would like try to go to work as often as possible with him. And the thing was though. He was her hero, but she rarely, rarely, rarely ever saw him because he was working so much, so hard, so many hours, right?

That old idiom and her business was starting to grow and then all of a sudden she would just kind of go MIA or not really do stuff and she couldn't understand why she was doing it 'cause she wanted the results so much, but she was literally what I call entrepreneur procrastination, going and creating another product or getting distracted.

Well, we uncovered the thought was she's a mom and she has two kids, and her brain had hardwired that if I get to this $300,000 level, I will become a bad mom. I will be not present for my kid. That wasn't something she was choosing. That was something that got hardwired when she was really, really young.

'cause she loved, her dad was a hero, but he was never around. And so these are the kind of things that can get hardwired. She wasn't afraid of failure. She was afraid of succeeding and then therefore her kids suffering like she did.

Pat Flynn: It sounds kind of like therapy.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: It's not, and that's the great news.

Everybody says, why don't you go be a therapist with this stuff? It's because I don't like sitting in therapy. I like quick solutions. And so when you think about how the brain works, all we really need to do is uncover that story, determine the correct story, and then record the correct story so that you're listening to it all the time and building it on autopilot without needing to deep dive into therapy.

I always say we don't need to snorkel back into the history. All we need to do is, first of all, understand that, that subconscious is running 90% of the show. So I don't know about you, but if something's in control of 90% of my decisions and my actions, I wanna understand the good things that are in there and strengthen them, and then uncover these limitations, limiting beliefs, automatic negative thoughts, they're always firing when you're trying to do something big.

And then we have a process called the mind matrix, which is just recognizing, refuting, bringing the truth into the situation. Rewiring or hardwiring that new belief in. But it is a simple process and it's just, most people don't slow down long enough to hear that thought. We just react to it emotionally and retreat a little bit.

And so this is enables us to not just try to not have limiting beliefs, but literally remove them from your brain. We can see 'em in scans where they literally disappear and are not able to fire or wire together anymore, and that's when we see big pops for our entrepreneurs going to six, seven, and eight figures.

Pat Flynn: I'm remembering certain moments in my life where I felt like there was some automated response to try and keep me safe when it was against where I wanted to go. Like when I wanted to learn how to become a great public speaker, I was always so fearful of getting up on stage and the story I would tell myself was similar to when I was a kid and had to raise my hand in class and just like maybe said a word wrong and kids laughed or I got embarrassed, and so I kind of just always avoided that. So even though one side of me, the business side of me was like, yes, get up on stage, get recognition, build authority. Great. That made sense.

But I was having this push and pull with my condition and growing up and kind of what I believed about that. So what I've learned over time is to just one, like you said, be aware of this or this recognition of it, but then discovering what the real truth is. Yeah, and I remember when I was launching, for example, some of my online courses, I was very scared of the way that I had experienced other people's online courses, feeling like it was just the money grab, feeling like it was not valuable, not ever hearing from the person again and who wouldn't gimme my refund. And this, all these negative experiences with selling courses. So when it was my turn to sell a course, I was very slow with it.

I was procrastinating because I was always avoiding 'cause I didn't wanna be that. But then when I discovered that those thoughts were happening, I, like you said, began to find the truth within that. Would I be somebody who would actually do those things? Would I put out a course that didn't have value?

No. These are all false thoughts. So then I found the proof of those truths, like testimonials from people, letters from people like you who are one of my first beta students who said, I got my podcast up because of you. And so that has always helped me now understand that these are demons in my head, just trying to stop me from where I want to go.

And I found now Shannon, the best things happen when I am able to overcome those thoughts, always. If I'm not having those thoughts, then I might Maybe not trying hard enough.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: Right. Because like you said, the person who's just chilling on the couch, they're not gonna have those thoughts 'cause they don't have any goals.

But now I look to find where I can get a little uncomfortable to be my compass and direction. So thank you for that. And what a beautiful way to more easily define these things, and I'm sure the matrix and the other things in your book can help that. What's the 67 though? Like where, what's the 67 part of this?

What does that mean?

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yeah, so 67 days, you know, we probably heard. In past 21 days to create a habit. Well, we know from neuroscience. Now that's not necessarily true. 21 days, if we were scanning your brain, we could see a new neural pathway being built. So that's where that idea came from. Oh, look, we can see it being built.

So therefore that's the new habit. Well, in reality, yes, it about 21 days that new pathway is being built. You have to build as well as remove. So we wanna be building that new pathway as well as removing. So at right about midway through, we see the new pathway being built even stronger, and that old pathway starting to shrink or reduce. At 67 days, we call this the compound interest or the speed moment. Because if we were to scan your brain about that limiting belief, your brain would only show that new pattern, kind of like you said. You started thinking about the positive truths and all of that kind of thing, we take you through that step by step in the matrix, but now that pathway is hardwired, 90% of every thought is getting fired from that place of your brain. And then the old pathway, the one that thought, I can't sell this, you know, I'm gonna become one of them. That pathway is completely what we call synaptically pruned. In other words, it cannot refire. And so what happens when we hit 67 days is there's just this compound.

And you've experienced that. I've experienced that. When we hit that kind of trajectory moment where speed just starts taking over. And we think it's because we've done a strategy in a certain way when in reality it's our brain is now hardwired to get there and then it collapses time. And so 67 days is that moment where old pathway is completely gone.

New pathway is completely governing that 90%. That's firing for decisions, for actions and therefore results. And so it's an interesting moment to be using that scientific number. My daughter is getting all kinds of interesting comments in her school.

Pat Flynn: You mo mom wrote a book called six seven. What?

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: That's so funny.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: But you know, one of the things I want you to think about is. We intuitively know this, right? We intuitively feel, I'll hear words like I'm stuck. I'm not sure. I don't know. That's this evidence of this kind of gas pedal, brake pedal action that's going on in your brain, and the best metaphor that I've ever seen, it reminds me of a time where I was with my best friend and we were golfing. It was a charity event, and. Short story. She's super competitive. So am I. And I knew she was gonna challenge me to a race that's just her DNA. I knew it was coming. We were making all kinds of money for our charity, which is fantastic for the orphans in Uganda.

And we get to the end, we're tied. So I knew she was gonna say like, let's race. What she didn't know is I was on my, in my personal golf cart, which didn't have a governor. And a governor is that device that you've seen on golf courses where the person could be driving and they're going like five miles an hour and they're flooring it, it's the governor.

It governs the speed in which she could go. She was in the club's cart. And the club's car had a governor and mine didn't. Now of course I bought her dinner anyway 'cause she didn't know that. But the difference between her and I was such a visual for me that the only reason why I was able to get ahead, why I was able to get to that destination and she wasn't, it was because there was this invisible governor that she didn't realize was on her that restricted her speed. And these tools in the 67 day year, clarify, erase, and automate, and all the step-by-step that's in there is going to help you take that governor off. And that's how you get speed towards something.

It's not that newer strategy. It's utilizing this God-given gift of your brain and using that 90% aligned with where you wanna go versus where you've been.

Pat Flynn: You know, a governor on a golf cart is there to keep the passenger's safe.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: It is. Right.

Pat Flynn: And I imagine that in our brains we have this metaphorical governor again to keep us safe.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: So where do we draw the line between like playing dangerous games and going about this in a way that is beneficial for us when we take off this governor?

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Well, if you think about it, what's slowing us down is the desire to get somewhere we wanna go. So we're telling our brain, I want to go to this place, and our brain's job is to keep you safe and familiar.

That means everything that you currently have and nothing more. No one gave us the operating manual that said, we have to actually fill our subconscious with alignment at the finish line, not at the start line. That to me is where the breakdown and what we're taught in January, we sit down, we, I want all these things, and then we put that away and then October we bring it out and go, okay, well, we'll, let's modify those.

It's not because you're not smart, capable, or able, it's because literally you put your brain in a tug of war with where you wanted to go. Firing off all kinds of neurochemicals, like procrastination, perfectionism, overwhelm, all those things. And so in the 67 day year method, which is how we teach people to set and achieve goals, we teach you how to literally build what you want, from the finish line versus the start line. It's the language that the brain naturally accepts, which is the current state or the, the present tense. If you think about every goal you've ever set, it's a future tense goal. And so just that one action puts us in fight or flight puts us in all these neurochemical storms to keep us away from it like it's a tiger.

Like it's like a bear at the end of the of the runway there. What we do in the 67 day years teach you how to set goals, how to set KPIs, all the things that you want, but in the language that the brain is now going to see as safe, see as familiar and literally through a system called the reticular activating system start to allow you to attract, you talk about manifestation in the Woo world.

Part of that attraction is happening when you're able to hardwire your brain or automate your brain to feel it's safe to have now, and then more opportunities come they, it's not that the opportunities weren't always there, it's just you're open to them now. You're open to them. Finally. And that's the process that we teach.

That's why we can create a year's worth of achievement in 67 days. Not because we're giving you some super fancy, sexy strategy, but because everything you've been doing finally starts to work.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. That's wonderful. You had mentioned before we started recording that there was a place that people could go to get more of this and kind of get started on this journey with you.

I wanna make sure we don't miss that. So where should people go to get that and what is that exactly?

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yeah, so the big thing is to get the book, you can go to 67DayYearBook.com/pat, and over there you're gonna see a couple things. You can order the book right there and we'll take you to your favorite retailer and then come back to that page because we have about $1,200 worth of bonuses that we wanna use to support you in your journey of hardwiring yourself to achieve the big dreams, the big vision and big goals. With the audiobook is there for you to immediately listen to workbooks, and then we're giving you a backstage VIP pass to a three day event where we're going to hold your hand and walk you through the process.

Pat Flynn: That's amazing. Before we finish up here, Shannon, I wanna ask you a couple things. Number one, once a person starts to understand the language and takes the governors off, I know a lot of people who've gotten to that point, and then it's almost like the golf cart just goes wild. It just goes crazy, right?

It's like, I've unlocked this new tool and now you're all over the place. How do you still remain in control while you start to experience a little bit of freedom and openness with the way you think?

Dr. Shannon Irvine: I love that. Everything that we do within the 67 day year world, that method itself is meant to bring you, I say it's like a bullseye, right, to where you wanna go. And part of what we walk you through in that sense is how to achieve those things so that you're not veering off to the left to the right and taking all these wild, crazy courses, but you're really like a focused bullseye heading toward where you're going.

And so we walk through that method with you step by step. It's how the brain allows you to achieve goals is really in the micro. And that's probably could have a whole nother podcast about that. But the more we go micro, the more your brain adores it and wants to bring more to you. And so again, starting with clarify, really clarifying where are we headed, what's the target and defining that in the brain's language of clarity so we can start to draw it to us erasing those brake pedal beliefs and then putting all that on autopilot so it's not effort. This is the simplest and easy step-by-step process, but it seems like it should be hard, but it's really not. It's just a secret weapon for you.

'cause remember that 90% was created just by repetition. And so we are just gonna repeat the things that are gonna get you to the end goal that you're headed toward. And that's how you can really stay on course and start to achieve the things you've been dreaming about for decades maybe.

Pat Flynn: Is the automation stuff you're talking about more like habit forming, creating habits to support?

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Yes, but it's hacks. So we think we have to effort our way to habits and you know, we sat down and we like, okay, I'm gonna go to the gym, or I'm gonna go do these things. It's really about your brain believing it so that you can see it. So how we do that is through a process we call brain priming, and again, another step-by-step process that's in the book, but it's building a recording that you listen to.

It's not affirmations because affirmations are very generalized. Like, oh, the money is flowing to me and all those things. It's not bad, not saying anything bad about those things, but your automations, your brain, primes that we set up are very specific to you. Your desires, your wants, your needs, and specific to installing that pathway toward the truth in opposition to those limiting beliefs. So it's very customized and when you listen to something that customized, and of course just like music as the more you listen to it, you, you kind of sing, you talk out loud, we're doing that in the morning, right when we wake up.

So we're filling our brain with that before we put our feet on the floor. And then at night, this is the hack of it all, we listen to it right before we go to bed. That is the time where your brain goes into cleanup mode and removes everything that doesn't align with what you just told it. And so it, it is a shortcut, a hack to be able to go in and right at the very end of your day, your brain now, if I gave it a voice would say, okay, wait. That's what he wants. That's what she wants. So I need to get rid of the things that don't align with that. And so it's this hack this super computer kind of way to get in and start to use your brain systems to speed up time. And my favorite question that I get from my students and my clients is like, Shannon, my brain primes, I'm listening to, I'm doing 'em faithfully.

Should I change them? And I'm like, well, tell me more. They're like, but all that has happened and it's been like three weeks, so should I change them? And I'm like, you should just maybe move the bar. Again, it's not that, remember I had to discover what was getting in my way, and that's where these methods and models came from.

And when you're able to build an automation that's gonna run 90% of your decisions and actions, then the results just naturally follow.

Pat Flynn: Amazing, everybody. Go check out 67 Day Year, and that's 67DayYearBook.com/pat to go and get all the goodies there. Shannon, thank you so much for coming on today and for, you know, we don't live in the head space here on SPI as much anymore as we used to. We talk strategy quite a bit, but like I said earlier, if you don't have the mind right, it doesn't matter what you learn, none of that stuff's gonna work out. So I really appreciate you coming on and giving us a new way to think about this.

And it's really reassuring that this can happen in a relatively short period of time. Just takes a little bit of discipline and a little bit of a help and support, and I'm hoping this is a good starting point for a number of people to really make that change that can help them get to where they want to go.

So thank you so much for that.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Oh, thanks for the opportunity to share this mission and this passion with your listeners.

Pat Flynn: And best of luck with the book it's already doing excellent and looking forward to seeing it in more people's hands.

Dr. Shannon Irvine: Okay, thanks Pat.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Dr. Shannon Irvine. Shannon, thank you so much for everything that you've done for me personally. Another thing that Shannon taught me once, and this is when I was going through some tough times based on what people were saying to me. There were a lot of haters. There were a lot of trolls. She is the person, I use this phrase all the time, I wanna make sure I give her credit for this.

Hurt people, hurt people. So if you're dealing with trolls and haters out there, you just have to realize that that's often coming, not because of things you've done, but you simply become the target because somebody else is going through something. Yeah. And when you dig deeper, typically the people who are hating on others are ones that are going through things themselves.

So thank you so much Shannon. I appreciate you for that. And definitely check out her book and all the goodies that you can find at 67DayYearBook.com/pat. Again, 67DayYearBook.com/pat and I look forward to serving you in episode 900. Coming up very shortly here, so hit that subscribe button so you don't miss that, and I'll see you soon. Bye.

SPI 898: Business Tools I'm Using More than Anything Right Now

Pat Flynn: Over the years, I've probably used 500 different tools to help me run a business in some way, shape, or form. Now that's a lot of tools and a lot of those tools have come and gone. Some of those tools I still continue to use. I'm not gonna tell you about all 500 of them, but I am gonna tell you today about 10 that you should be paying attention to, to help you in some way, shape or form. Whether it's to save money, to save time, to help you brainstorm, get things done faster, all those kinds of things.

And I'm gonna start with one tool that I've been using more than anything recently, and that is Poppy AI. Poppy AI is sort of a layer on top of popular AI tools to allow you to visually connect things together to a chat window so you can understand exactly where it's pulling the information from, and you could train it on certain things.

For example, if I want to write a newsletter, I can upload my own newsletters and even my own voice and my books and my YouTube videos. And then prompt it to create a new newsletter for me. This is exactly how I write my unstuck newsletters, and I know they're gonna be in my voice because the source material is literally my own material.

Let's say I wanted to create a video essay and write a script for it, but I don't know how to do that. But guess what? There's a lot of people who have taught for free on YouTube how to do that, and I could pull those videos as source material to then train this system to be able to then create my own video essay.

I can even include my book in there, my book Lean Learning, and say, Hey. Take the learnings from these video essay teachings on YouTube and write a video essay about my book Lean Learning. So there you go. I'm training it on material that I know it's coming from and I'm able to work on it from there. You can get pretty sophisticated with different things and inputs and outputs out of this thing, and I've used it for multiple things, including exactly how to write my newsletter, write YouTube scripts, and even social media clip ideas, all of it coming right from Poppy AI.

Now, let's say you get a script and now you need to edit your video. In fact, I've been using this tool every single day to edit my short form videos that then go live on my channels that have now been seeing over 12 million views a day. This is my show or my little mini show called Should I Open It or Should I Keep it Sealed?

And this is gone kind of viral now, and I use a very simple tool to edit this. I use. ScreenFlow. The ScreenFlow for Mac, the equivalent would be Camtasia for PC. And this is a very sort of light version of what an Adobe Premier or Final Cut Pro would be to allow me to slice, dice, and edit my little short form videos.

And this, combined with the systems I've created, the folders that I have to pull my sound effects from and all those kinds of things, templates for the same style of show every day. I can edit one of my videos that gets seen millions of views per day in just about 10 minutes. My recommendation if you're using this tool or any other tool to edit videos is just stick with one, stop bouncing around and then learn the shortcuts.

For example, I know that if I wanna freeze a frame, I can hit command shift F, and that will freeze a frame to then take a part of a video and turn it into a photo, which allows me to do this sort of zoom in thing every time I jingle pops up. You only learn those things over time, the more you use these products.

And if you're consciously going in there asking yourself, how can I get a little bit faster every single day? So ScreenFlow has been amazing. Yes, there's a lot of other tools to help you edit videos, everything from Cap Cut to Instagram's editing tool to bigger, higher end tools like Vegas, and of course, Final Cut Pro and even iMovie.

But man, ScreenFlow has been with me for years and I absolutely love it. Now let's shift from editing videos to actually recording videos and specifically recording a video podcast. There have been a number of tools over the years that I've used everything from Skype. I remember Skype call recorder, back in the day to then using Zoom, and then I used Squadcast, which then got acquired by Descript. But now I'm using Riverside.fm and Riverside has been an incredible tool.

It has all these AI things baked into it to make life so much easier. It can even edit your podcast as soon as you're done recording it. Of course, it records locally just like a lot of these other tools to allow you to have the best quality with the videos that come through, even if you're recording with somebody from the other side of the world.

But more than that, you can do things like remove filler words immediately. You can actually get clips for social media, right inside of Riverside. So if you wanna check out Riverside SmartPassiveIncome.com/riverside and use the code smart to save, and if you go there, you'll get a one month on the Pro Plan free if you use the code smart.

So again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/riverside. Use the code smart and using Riverside has been a very, very cool thing that has allowed us to just capture the best audio and video for our podcast and do it with incredible efficiencies. You can even schedule your interviews there and it sends out the invites, connects with Google Calendar, all the things you need.

Riverside.fm. It's been great. Now, there is a brand new tool that has come onto the streets lately from a person who is an old school guest. In fact, this person has been a guest way back in like 2010 of the podcast in the early days within the first year. This is Gideon Shalwick and his new tool, Vubli.

V-U-B-L-I. This is literally brand new. I think it's Vubli.ai. Let me verify that. Yes, that's true. And what bubbly does is it allows you to distribute your short form videos across multiple platforms, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and of course YouTube shorts. In just one full swoop, and it understands each of those platforms.

It's built specifically for short form video, which I really, really love. It knows that on certain platforms that in order to have a thumbnail, you need the first just frame to be included, and then you can choose it for that. I mean, it's just. A brilliant tool that's very specific. And if you are capturing these short form videos, or if you're pulling from your podcast with a tool like Riverside, or if you're using something like Opus Clips or something to do that, well, this will help you distribute it in a very, very quick manner.

So Vubli.ai, not an affiliate for that tool, not yet, actually, I'm still in the testing mode with it, but so far my tests have been very successful and I highly recommend again that you check it out, Vubli.ai. Now, let's say you're recording videos. Live and you are broadcasting these videos live and you want the best tool to be able to do that, to distribute your live videos to multiple platforms, or to be able to add multiple cameras during your live streams, or to be able to put text on your screen and switch between cameras and actually bring in live comments onto your live stream.

There are a lot of live streaming tools like OBS and Stream Labs, but I absolutely love Ecamm Live. I use this tool literally every single week on Mondays I go live in front of my Deep pocket Monster audience. Have about eight to 10,000 people watching concurrently. Yes, a grown man opening Pokemon cards, and we have that many people having fun watching these cards getting opened.

I'm giving them away, and I'm using Ecamm Live to do this. It makes it very, very easy to click a button and just go live. As soon as you schedule something on, for example, like Facebook or YouTube. It then shows that that is going to be ready to go and you could just go live and it's just there. It's awesome.

And you can even record these. You can even use e camm live as a virtual web camera, meaning if you want all those fancy devices and your multiple camera angles, the text popping up on screen, but you want to be on Zoom or you want to do a live presentation online, well, you can use e Camm Live to do that, and now you have this really impressive sort of stream where instead of just a webcam alone, you're using all these fancy things that you have available to you through again, Ecamm Live.

So definitely check out Ecamm Live There. Absolutely incredible. The team over there. Is awesome. From Katie to Doc Rock and just everybody else over there, they're awesome. They even sponsored Card Party, they're so awesome. So thank you so much for doing that. Ecamm Live, they used to be called Ecamm Call Recorder.

That was the tool that would actually integrate with Skype, so they've been doing this forever because Skype no longer exists and Ecamm Live is now its own thing that's been just coming up with so many brilliant new features over time, and I highly recommend you check it out again, Ecamm Live.

Now another tool that I use in my business outside of video. Now, we've talked about video a lot. This is something that's gonna help you manage the finances and the payroll of your team. It's something that's gonna help you with a lot of the benefits of your team members and yourself, helping you pay yourself a paycheck, all that kind of stuff.

This is a tool that if you've been running a business for a while, you may have heard of. But it is up there and we use it all the time. It's called Gusto, G-U-S-T-O. Gusto. And Gusto has been incredible for, I mean, I log in there pretty much once a month to go in there and update things and make sure I could see my pay stubs, all that kind of stuff.

Make sure the team gets their benefits, et cetera. Everything from integration with tools like Guideline to help you with 401k and match planning and all that kind of stuff to your dental. It's a little bit confusing, a lot of the HR and administrative related things when it comes to running a business, but Gusto has been a lifesaver, so I highly recommend checking out Gusto and signing up for it. If you are serious about your business, you have your business entity, your LLC, your S corp, or C corp, whatever it might be, connect it to Gusto so that you can actually properly manage everything, your finances, everything that needs to go, where it needs to go.

I mean, there's a lot of things that I wouldn't even begin to understand, but Gusto makes it very clear, especially when it comes to paycheck and where certain monies should be going and how things are handled. It also makes it very easy for my tax people to be able to go in there and just collect everything they need to be able to do what they need to do.

So G-U-S-T-O checkout Gusto.

Now, the next couple tools I'm gonna share with you are tools that you've probably heard me talk about before, but we continually use them. They continually support our business. They are part of the infrastructure of what we do as a business. The first one being Kit for email.

Now, what's really cool about Kit. Formerly known as ConvertKit is, I've been with them since 2014. I've been an advisor to the company. I can see firsthand just exactly what they're doing to help all the creators that are using their software. It is incredible. It's not just email. It's connections with other people in the email environment to be able to share subscribers and help you grow your list and help connect one another together.

It's payment platform to be able to collect payments. It's an ability to now have a paid newsletter if you wanna go down that route. It's the ability to integrate with so many different tools and with their app store, they have a lot of other tools, including tools like wordsmith, which is one of my favorites because you can take a YouTube video of yours and with just a couple clicks, turn it into a newsletter.

That gets put into Kit just automatically. That's the power of their app store. Being able to utilize these other apps that exist just right within your email system. It's really cool. So again, Kit is the place to go, and B, if you're doing email plus very recently, if you haven't heard the news, you can get up to 10,000 subscribers for free.

On their free plan. That's, I don't know anybody else who's doing it that big, so there is no excuse not to get started with Kit. All you have to do is go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/kit, get started there, and the Creator Network, the ability for you to see who else you might be able to connect with, who can then help you grow your list and vice versa.

That's been a game changer for helping people grow their list, especially if you're just starting out. There's a lot more I could talk about with Kit. We have some videos here on the YouTube channel. That can help you with that too, but we're not gonna go too deep into that. But I do wanna go into another part of our infrastructure in the SPI business that has been helping us, and that is, of course, Circle.

This is where we are hosting and running and managing our community, our SPI community. This is where we host our courses now. We take people through an onboarding process as soon as they sign up and they take a little quiz to make sure they know exactly where to go and how to get the most value out of it.

From there, they take the courses, they join the conversations in the communities. We host live events in there. My office hours are even now hosted inside of Circle because they've integrated live video. What's really cool is during those office hours, I could spotlight different people's questions and talk about 'em, which makes 'em very, very easy to find later.

The directory and the ability to search through that to find other like-minded people who are in the community that you're in is awesome. And the modular approach to the setup is unlike anything else when it comes to building a community. So yes, you can build communities pretty much anywhere now, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera.

But if you want the information and the education to go along with it, if you want the ability to control the sandbox that you're gonna be having your people play in, well then Circle is the place to go. SmartPassiveIncome.com/circle is where you wanna go. That's our affiliate link. And can't say enough about how much and how important Circle has been for us and how we are able to provide value to our community and all the members of SPI.

So thank you and a shout out to all the members of SPI as well who are listening to this. You know who you are. And also, of course, the founders, Sid and Andrew over at Circle. I'm also full disclosure and advisor for that company as well, which means I also get insight into just all the developments over there and everything that they have going on for you to help you better serve your people.

And community is the future of business. It's here. I wrote about it in my book, Superfans that was published in 2019, even before I created communities, and it's so important. That's where the human to human connection is nowadays. It's where you need to be because everything is becoming artificial now.

Nothing is real it seems anymore. But the human to human, whether it's online or offline, those interactions are gonna be key to success in future-proofing your business and building your brand. So check it out. That's Circle.

Next. This is tool number nine here on the list, and it is a great one. It is called ScoreApp by Daniel Priestly. ScoreApp.

We had Daniel Priestly here on the podcast not too long ago. I use ScoreApp to generate leads from my book Lean Learning. In fact, if you wanna check it out in its form right now, you can go to LeanLearningQuiz.com. That's actually ScoreApp in use for my business to generate leads for lean learning in our brand right now.

So what ScoreApp does is it allows you to create an online quiz. But the beauty of this is that number one, it's relatively easy to set up, but number two, what you do is you're building leads by creating value. You're offering information through the personalized responses that are given, and you can have different responses for different people's selections.

You can have different call to actions. You can lead people in different directions depending on their answers. And this is the next level of generating leads. It's not just, here's A PDF and everybody go download it. It's take this quiz so you can find out more information and, hey, I'm just using this as an example based on your BMI, you might need some help in these parts of your health and fitness, and here's some resources. Here's my course. Here is where to sign up for coaching to get some help on that thing that you specifically marked as what you needed help with because the results and the data say so. So this is sort of next level.

If you remember back in the day, I mean this isn't anything new, it's just new how quick and easy you can get this set up through score app. So again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/scoreapp if you wanna check it out. And Daniel Priestly is the king of creating quizzes for leads and has taught us a lot, and I'm again using it on LeanLearningQuiz.com.

What we're doing there, or what I'm doing there specifically, is capturing information about how much people learn and depending on how much people learn, but how much they're finishing, depending on that answer, I can help guide them to lean learning the book itself or some principles within it, and of course some of our courses that can help them stay more honed in and focused on what they need to be learning about.

So again, a brilliant way to take information and also kind of approach the lead generation as value giving first. And not only that, it like literally sends an email and a PDF file that's specifically with their answers. It's genius. So well done to Daniel Priestley. Again, ScoreApp is where you want to check out at  SmartPassiveIncome.com/scoreapp.

Alright, this next one. This has been probably the most useful tool that I've used across most of the years of my business. It is a tool that you have access to. It's a tool that is free for anybody to use, but when I find a lot of students of mine, when I ask them how much they really care about this tool, they're using it, but not with the right mindset.

What is this tool? It's Google Calendar. Yeah, it's just a calendar. But I wrote about this in my book, Lean Learning, the idea of using your calendar. As not just a way to know what to do what or where to go and when, but as a way to time block, and I don't mean just creating blocks of time for you to do things, but to literally block out anything else that should come in during those moments.

So I'm not just talking about scheduling meetings. I'm talking about scheduling when you are in your creative mode and when social media shouldn't be a part of that. When you are in family mode. My calendar includes family time because that is of importance. It's interesting when you look at a lot of people's calendars, you put it on the calendar 'cause it's important.

But most people's calendars just have business related things on it. Work meetings. Why isn't the time that you're spending with your family from date nights to just playtime with the kids to dinner? Why isn't that on the calendar? Shouldn't that be more important? Shouldn't that be something that should be honored?

Absolutely. So again, this mindset around your calendar as not just, here are the work things I have to do, but here is where I should be focusing and when on what. And it's not just business, it's family and everything that you have going on, your health, your fitness, prioritize that as well. If it's on the calendar, it's a priority.

If you wanna show me what a person's priorities are, show me their calendar, is what I like to say. So those are the tools. Lemme know what you think. Did any of those stand out to you or have you used any of them? Are any new to you? Let me know and I look forward to serving you in the next episode. I love these sort of brain dump episodes of just things that we're working on and using right now.

It just seems to hopefully help you more than just kind of theory and principles, but like getting down and dirty with the things and the tools that are gonna help you move forward is great. And if you could just use one of these tools to help you, great. Don't go to all of them. Pick the one or two that seem to be most interesting to you.

Check 'em out, give 'em a trial run and see how it goes. Thank you so much. I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Until then, hit subscribe or follow the channel. Thank you so much. I'll see you in the next one. Peace.

SPI 888: What's Working in Affiliate Marketing Right Now

Pat Flynn: Here's something kind of crazy. Nearly 50% of my overall revenue ever since I started online business in 2008 has come from affiliate marketing. By connecting the audiences that I've built to products and services that are meant to help those people. And that's always gonna be the golden rule, right?

Whenever you have an audience in mind or a target market, you wanna know what is helpful. And what will be a solution for their problems, something that would make their life more convenient. That's the golden rule of affiliate marketing. Don't promote something that doesn't actually help the target audience that you have, right?

If you do that, you are breaking that rule. You're going to break the trust that you've earned or are trying to earn with that audience always come from a place of service. However, let me just say this times have changed a little bit. We are now in 2025, and if you're still trying to build a following first, trying to build a massive social media subscribership or YouTube subscribership before you start affiliate marketing, you're doing it backwards.

If you're gonna wait until you have thousands of subs to make your first dollar, you're missing out on money that you can be banking right now. And if you think affiliate marketing is all about just throwing as many links out there as possible, hoping people will buy, well, that's exactly why most people who attempt affiliate marketing fail.

Not just today, but that's always been why they fail because you don't have the strategies. But today we're gonna talk about the strategies that are working right now, not the theory that you're gonna find online and on in other YouTube videos and podcasts. The real tactics that are generating results right now for people who are just starting out, and for those who've perhaps hit a plateau and can't seem to break through, maybe that's you.

I'm gonna show you why you don't have to wait to start making affiliate commissions. How to generate revenue even with zero followers. That is possible. And the content strategy that's working better than anything I've seen in my 15 plus years of online business. So whether you're brand new to affiliate marketing or you've been stuck at the same income level for months, by the end of this episode, hopefully you'll have a clear roadmap to start generating affiliate income or finally break through that ceiling that you've been hitting.

So let's dive in. We're gonna take this in five parts, and in the first part here we're gonna talk about the two path strategy. And the fact that you don't have to wait, because the big myth is that you have to build a following first. You have to gain an audience. And yes, of course, things are great when you have an audience.

You don't wanna not build an audience. If you have an audience, great. You can survey them, you can understand them. You could serve them with products and recommendations. You probably already have access to them. Great. But you don't need to wait for that to happen to generate revenue. You can start making money while you're building your audience.

You don't need 10 K followers. You don't have to build your audience first, then monetize. Nobody will trust your recommendations without a big following. These are all old limiting beliefs. The reality is you can build your audience and generate affiliate revenue simultaneously. Here is the analogy I like to use.

When you find a product or service that can help people, imagine you have just a small audience of five people, let's say even you just have one and metaphorically, they're drowning in whatever ocean of inconvenience that they might be in, right? Metaphorically. You know, they might be overweight, they might be unproductive and running into procrastination.

They might have puppies that pee all over the house. Whatever their version of drowning is, you have an opportunity to throw them a life ring. Now, what you say to that person who's drowning in the ocean of whatever it is, I'm sorry, there's not enough people here for me to throw this at you. So I'm just gonna wait till there's more of you drowning before I send this off.

Of course not. You would throw it out there in an instant. If this was somebody you knew in real life that you could see there, well guess what? Those people are there and you don't have to have any sort of following to be able to serve people. That's sort of big lesson number one. Yes, building an audience.

It is important for long-term success, but you don't have to wait to start generating revenue. So here's path number one, the audience building strategy, right? This is long-term wealth. Here's why. Building a loyal following can create a sustainable, scalable income. First of all, there are higher conversion rates from people who know and trust you.

We know this. They know, like, and trust you. So therefore, those recommendations matter more. You have an ability to launch your own products later as well with an audience that you build. You can generate multiple revenue streams of income beyond just affiliate marketing. And these things can compound over time, especially if you focus on serving those superfans.

They'll bring new people in, they'll make those recommendations on your behalf, and you'll just continue to exponentially grow from there. But it can take six to 12 months to build a meaningful audience. 12 to 24 for significant affiliate income. Keyword significant from an audience that you've built.

It's more sustainable. It's exactly what has kept a lot of my businesses afloat over the years is that continuation of those relationships that I built with many of you. But that is the audience building strategy, the one that we all kind of know already. But what about the search first strategy? What this really means is you are now targeting people actively looking to buy right now, whether they are followers or not.

Hopefully they do buy and then become a follower. Great. But this is why this works more immediately and why you can get revenue sooner than later. You're targeting buyer intent, not building awareness. People are already on the hunt for something and you can get in front of them in different ways, and we'll talk about those in just a minute so that your recommendations show up and they can take those recommendations, right?

People are already in that shopping mode. There's no need to convince them that they have a problem. They know they have the problem, and you can start generating revenue sometimes within a month if you do this correctly. And the best part is these two paths both compliment each other, right? Search content can help build your audience.

Audiences can amplify your search content. You're not choosing one or the other, you're doing both. So here is the golden platform for doing this. Where to focus your efforts for maximum ROI. When it comes to affiliate marketing, the Golden platform, you guessed it, is YouTube. It serves both strategies perfectly.

You can build your audience and following with a subscribership on there. However, the way that you can get found is through these recommendations that you offer. And over the years, I've created several videos, individual videos that have continued to provide income for years, some in the five to six figure range, not in ad revenue, although ad revenue is sort of a YouTube bonus after you unlock monetization, that's just extra dollars, but through commissions.

I shared relatively recently a success story of a video that I created for a product called Descript. Descript, if you don't know, is a podcast and video editing tool. It has built in ai. It can clone your voice. If you kind of miss parts, you can just type it in. It goes in there and it automatically transcribes your podcast.

You can create little clips from it. It's, it's wonderful. And I shared a video talking about the tool and how useful and how much time you could save with it. And that video when it was published, saw several tens of thousands of views and people started clicking on the link, the affiliate link, and then I started getting a commission from that.

It started to work so well that I created a second video. A cool rule of thumb on YouTube is if a video is working about a particular theme, keep doing more of that. So this video about Descript was doing well, and so I decided to hone in on a very specific tool that I knew was going to get a lot of engagement because it's somewhat controversial.

It's the idea of cloning your voice and the idea that you can sort of upload your voice to Descript and then use it to create a podcast. And I just showed some different examples and I also opened up the discussion in the comments section about whether or not people thought this was a good thing or a bad thing, whatever your opinion is on ai.

I just opened up that conversation and that video saw over 1 million views within six months. It kind of piggybacked off the success of the first video. Both videos sort of support each other, but that one took off. It had a really good title and thumbnail. The tool is called Overdub, in fact, and again, I demonstrate it on that video, and thousands of people have clicked to check out Descript as a result of seeing it in action and wanting to get access to it themselves.

I have seen over six figures in income just from these two videos alone, thanks to the commissions coming in from Descript. And they continue to work for me every single day. 'cause YouTube, once they see a video do well, they wanna share it with more people because I'm keeping people on the platform, and so not only am I getting affiliate revenue, I'm also getting ad revenue and I'm gaining subscribers at the same time.

People are either searching for information about this tool or about the problem that they have, and tools that could potentially solve that problem. I'm building an audience. I'm getting ad revenue, I'm getting commissions, and I'm building trust and this long form content. Yes, this can work for short form content as well, but long form content, especially for bigger tools and recommendations, you're gonna need to really show this thing in action.

A lot of times, short form videos are just going too fast to really convince somebody to then spend some money. Versus long form, people are looking for answers. They want depth and they want reality. They want to see an example, a demo video. And that's what's really cool about YouTube. So definitely if you have tools that you recommend anywhere else on your podcast, on your blog, in your email newsletter, why haven't you created a video about those?

You don't have to go through every single piece of that particular product or tool or software or program. You just have to talk about how easy it is to use. That's really important, and perhaps one or two of your favorite things about it and show off the transformation that you've been able to gain from it or that your students have been able to gain from it, or other people.

You need to show this thing as actually having helped people. People wanna see what they're gonna get before they get it, and if they come across your video. Well, then you get some commission. It's very similar to Amazon. Amazon came on to the scene with videos after people started noticing that they could make money with YouTube.

If you go to Amazon, you'll often see a lot of videos inside of a product page of people promoting that product. Why? Because Amazon caught on to the fact that people want to see this thing that they're potentially going to purchase in action. You can be the person to step up for your particular audience, for your particular market, to show all the different options they have and what works and what doesn't to help them make a decision.

You become the expert curator, and by becoming the expert curator, that is the value that you're adding to the community and the niche and the market that you're in. You're helping save people time. You're helping save people from the frustration of decision fatigue. You're helping to make the decision for them.

YouTube is the golden platform, and we're not gonna go over specific YouTube strategies here, although I will say that the title and thumbnail are very important. And again, create multiple videos about the things that are working. I don't know how many Kit videos I have, but there are quite a few, and the more that I create, the more that they can each feed into each other and the more commissions I earn over time.

Now, YouTube is not the only platform. There are other platforms that can help you with affiliate marketing that have proven to work really well. Pinterest is a great search-based affiliate content platform. I am not an expert at Pinterest. Not at all. It's one of those platforms that I know works, but just have opted out of.

I've chosen to focus my time and effort elsewhere. However, Pinterest is, if you wanna dive into it more, a place that can work for you for affiliate marketing. Your email list of course, is a great place. If you have people who are starting to follow you, you can go and start to build a deeper relationship with them and promote things through your email list too. Yes, blogging can work. SEO is on the downhill run right now with, I mean, if you search anything on Google, you'll see an AI based answer first and then maybe some ads, and then probably Reddit and other forums before any sort of specific search result that is of a regular person like us. But it can still work.

It depends on the topic that you have. And if that topic is maybe not as spoken about or written about as others, then maybe you have a chance. And then social media. Social media can be great too, and especially yes, with short form videos. Like I said earlier, long form on YouTube is king for affiliate marketing.

But short form can work too to help people understand quickly what different things are. And I think if you're gonna do affiliate marketing on a platform, especially for physical products, yes, Amazon works and you can put Amazon links across many different platforms. But TikTok shop, and its built in affiliate program is quite amazing.

It's probably the best one that's out there in terms of an all-in-one platform that allows you to sell other people's products, promote them through the videos on the same platform, and earn a commission very easily. I myself have purchased many physical products on TikTok. Grandpa's Weeder is one of them a little gardener tool, Grandpa's Weeder. It's not a drug related thing, although who knows what grandpa's getting into. Anyway, I purchased that off of somebody else's video who had earned a commission from me because he showed me exactly how this thing worked in his garden, and it just kind of worked in an instant.

And I was like, I need that because we have weeds growing in our garden. And I got it, and it came immediately. I literally clicked the buy button on that person's video. This is again in the TikTok shop. Man, I clicked one button, double clicked for Apple Pay, and boom, it was at my door a week later. It's insane.

Now, we're not talking about affiliate marketing in the sense of selling, but if you are selling a physical product, yes, TikTok would be a great place to have your product in its catalog for others to then promote and serve their audience with. They earn a commission, they're making money, and you are making money as well.

Let's move on to the content strategy that is absolutely rocking it right now, right? So this is structuring the way that you create content for high converting affiliate offers. So it's a three part structure. This is the framework, right? Again, we're going deeper here. A lot of people who do affiliate marketing take the easy route and see easy route results. That is not very many or not very much. The easy route is let me get an affiliate link for a product and let me just share it a couple times and that's it. I'm not gonna do any thinking about how I promote this, how I set this up, how I create a campaign around it.

You would do that with your own product, but for whatever reason, when we choose to promote another person's product and share it with our audience in the same way, we just don't put any effort behind it. So here's the three part structure. First problem, we need to identify a specific and painful problem that your audience faces.

If you don't know any of the problems that your audience has right now, then what are you doing? That's literally the first step you need to make this problem emotional and relatable. So for example, if you wanted to set this up in a video, in a blog post, in an email newsletter. You might say something like, if you're struggling with specific problem, you're not alone, then you can dive into your story as well and make it relatable.

Share the things that you literally felt yourself. And yes, affiliate marketing is always easier when you're promoting things that you yourself have used because you get to demonstrate it, yes, but then you get to speak to it honestly to your audience and identify with who it is that you're serving and make this thing relatable in some way, shape, or form.

So the first thing. You need to know what the problem is. That's part one. The second part of this framework is the solution. So this is the middle, 70% of the content. If the problem was the first 30 seconds, the solution is the middle, 70% of content, right? This is where you present the solution, the product or the surface as the solution.

Not one of the solutions, but the solution. If you promote it as one of the solutions. For example, you're doing a video and you're like, Hey, here are five different ways to solve this problem. Five different tools, five different pieces of equipment, five different services. You're just making it more confusing for your audience.

You're just showing them more options that they're gonna need help choosing. Why don't you do them a service curate that really go into figuring out which one is best, and then own that, focus on the benefits of the product, the one single solution, not the features, and show the transformation, not just the tool.

Here's this button and here's what it does. If I'm showing off a podcasting product. Yes, it has a ton of features on it. Cool. It does all these things. It makes my voice sound good. Great. But let's take a listen. Here is what my podcast episode sounded like before. Now here's what it sounds like after.

Hey, everybody, Pat Flynn here. Thank you so much.

I just clicked a button, but you know what I mean. Having a significant change as a result of using the tool, will demonstrate the tool for you, and that transformation is what people want. They see that in themselves. I want that too. I want that to happen to me. I want my voice to sound like that too.

Now, hopefully you don't publish podcast episodes with voices like this, but I'm just having fun clicking some buttons over here on this side using my Rodecaster Pro 2. You see what I did there? Showed you some tools and then I dropped the solution. If you're looking to add some, some spice, your podcast, maybe you wanna make the voice sound like this, well then you need the right tools to do it.

Check out the  Rodecaster Pro 2 by Rode. I'm doing affiliate marketing right now, although I'm not giving you a link 'cause I'm not here to promote that to you. Okay, we talked about the problem Next, the solution. Finally, this is most important, the proof, your personal experience with the product specific results.

The more specific you can get, the better, the more general you get. The worst. 'cause everybody's talking general, people want specificity. They want real life stuff. And then finally, with the proof, the whole point of the proof is to prove people wrong when they start wondering, is this even real? Is this not a waste of money or is this just fake?

No, you need the proof and address those common objections, right? Address the common objection. For example, if I am promoting. Riverside as a tool, you might say, well, you know, you don't need Riverside. You could use something like Zoom to record your podcasts remotely. Well, that is an objection, right? And that is a story people will tell themselves to then talk themselves out of purchasing Riverside, if that's something that I would promote, which I do use Riverside now to record remote interviews.

And I'd say no, because Zoom will compress your audio and it's gonna sound terrible. And in the world of podcasting right now, your audio needs to sound great, or else you're gonna be left behind. And so that's a rebuttal. There are several for that particular argument, but I just wanted to give you an example.

Now let's go for another strategy. So we talked about the problem solution proof framework. Now let's talk about the comparison trap. This is how to dominate the best of sort of comparison searches. People want to know the best of things, and so when you search for a product, oftentimes you are searching about a product in its competitor.

When you're trying to buy something, Dyson versus Shark, which one is better? If you go on TikTok, you'll see a lot of people who are promoting things will show you two different versions of something. Here are the, the one that's going around lately. The pitch is like, you know that your back camera on your phone is better than your front facing camera, the selfie camera.

So there's this tool that you can connect to your mag safe on your apple that Bluetooth connects so that when you're facing. The back camera and you can't see your screen. It provides you a new screen for it, essentially. And you'll see like, Hey, other people are talking about this product, but this is the new one on the block that everybody's using.

It's much cheaper and the higher quality audio or video is better. So the comparisons are working really well. This isn't really a new strategy, it's just we have new tools and we have new ways to frame it. We've always seen comparisons but not, Hey, this one is better if you're this and this one's better.

If you're that. It's no, this is the better choice against this other popular choice. There's lower competition than generic product reviews. When people are searching for these comparisons, there's higher conversion rates because people are often, when they're finding these things in a buying mode already, and it works again for both search strategy and audience building.

if you can bring some personality into the comparison, even better. So here are some frameworks for titles that you can use in emails or YouTube videos just to give you an example. X versus Y, which is better for blank Shark or Dyson, which is better for a clean home. I tried five product category. Here's the winner.

I tried five microphones for podcasters. Well, here's the winner. Product review, 30 days later. Rodecaster Pro 2, 30 days later. Rodecaster Pro 2 review 30 days later. Or the Stream Deck by Elgato Review, 30 days later. People wanna see that you've done something and that you've used this product.

Right? Why I switch from AWeber to ConvertKit? That's literally a title of a blog post I used that went crazy for commissions back when ConvertKit was named ConvertKit. Now it's named Kit, but I did in fact switch from AWeber to Kit, and it was the best decision that I ever made. So again, make sure you pick a clear winner when it comes to these comparisons, right?

Don't be wishy-washy. You wanna be very clear and you wanna explain why it's better for specific situations. And if you know the specific situations that your target audience is going through, even better, you can connect it to that. And you can include both pros and cons if you say everything is perfect about this product.

I recently purchased the Sony FX3 digital camera. To film even more cinematically, and it's not perfect, and I watched a lot of reviews about that. I compared it to the FX 30, to some Nikon cameras, to even some Canon cameras, and I was originally a Canon user. I still use the Canon EOSR, but I decided on the Sony FX3.

I went through somebody's affiliate commission on YouTube, and it was a very honest review. He said there were certain things about it that he wish were better. Those were made up for with these other features that were features that I actually wanted. So again, I'm not gonna get into the details of exactly what those things are, but I'm just using this as an example.

Another framework you can use for content that crushes with affiliate marketing is the Beginner's Journey Content series. So what does this mean? This means documenting your learning process. And taking people along for the ride. This provides maximum authenticity. This also is a great one that, as a bonus, helps you build more of an audience.

'cause people want to subscribe to follow the journey. You're not just doing it all in one video, although you could, your journey to becoming a pro podcaster. And then within that journey, sharing some of the tools that you're using, some of the courses that maybe you've taken, like Power Up Podcasting inside of the SPI Community, all these things.

You have a reason to take action on these things you have because you're sharing your journey, a reason to learn from these resources, a reason to make these decisions, and people seeing that in real time will be so relatable. It builds trust through vulnerability, and that is important when it comes to eventually these recommendations that you make.

So here are some content ideas. Title wise, 30 days with blank. Here's what happened. 30 days with Elgato's brand new Stream Deck. Here's what happened. Beginner's Guide to blank. What I wish I knew. Beginner's Guide to watercolor painting. What I wish I knew. Then you take people through a journey when you started, the tools that you use, the cheapo items that you got from the art store versus what now you use because you've upped your game and you can see it in action with the video that you've created.

My Biggest Mistakes with Blank people wanna know what mistakes to avoid and when you show up and share the mistakes that you've made, makes you more trustworthy week one versus week four with product week one versus week four with the Sony FX3 How cinematic have my videos become? Okay, that's a lot of great content that you can use.

Even one of those ideas could be something that could turn into additional revenue down the road for you. So let's move on to the next part of this podcast episode. Let's talk monetization strategies that work now. We've gotten specific with some of the different types of content. We've talked about the approach for affiliate marketing that works so that you can go deeper and build real relationships and even build an audience at the same time.

But how you don't have to wait and you shouldn't because you have these things that can be helpful. There's specific rules and strategies that you should implore so that you can maximize your opportunity for conversions. So first of all, this is gonna be kind of obvious to many of you, but it is the immediate value approach.

We need to share some immediate value when it comes to helping people and helping them understand what we have to offer them. If they're gonna know that they're gonna have to go through hoops or wait a long time, then it's never gonna happen. They're never gonna convert. So when it comes to creating content, when it comes to sharing things online, I like to follow the 80 20 rule, Pareto's Rule, 80% valuable actionable content, 20% affiliate promotion.

Never start with the affiliate promotion. Hey guys, I got a great tool for you and it's gonna help you do this. And so here's the offer and now let me show you how I use it. Let me show you what it can do for you. That's a hundred percent sale right there versus, Hey everybody, I've had this problem for a very long time.

I know many of you have had it too, and here's what I've tried to do to fix it and it never worked. However, I did find one thing finally that seemed to work and look at where I am now. And in this blog post, in this video, in this podcast episode, I'm gonna tell you about this product. I'm gonna show you how exactly I use it, what to look out for if you choose to use it yourself.

And ultimately, I'm gonna help you figure this out because this is a pain for all of us. So I lead it with a story. Valuable, actionable content. Relatable. Always important. A lot of people ask me, Pat, when it comes to giving away your content and information for free, how much of that do you do? I give all of my best stuff away for free.

You should. First of all, information, people couldn't find any information about anything from anybody, anywhere. So if you're holding your best stuff back, you're only making it so obvious for people that there are other people that can help them better. So give away your best tips for free. Also show people how to solve problems without buying anything.

So case in point, back in 2010 when I was sharing information about how to build niche websites, I had built a security guard training website, and you might remember this, it was called the Niche Site Dual. 'cause I was building a website alongside somebody else and we were competing to see who could make their first dollar and who can make the most revenue from it. I ended up winning that because my security guard training website hit number one in Google for the term security guard training in just 73 days, and I had generated tens of thousands of dollars from that website, even though I knew nothing about security guard training, but I knew everything about collating and curating information to then put it on the web to make it easy for people to do anything, and in that case, it was to become a security guard.

Anyway, there came a point in that process of teaching, which again, I taught everything for free. I showed people all the steps, and through those steps, of course, I shared different tools, the hosting company for the website, the tools that I used to help write content and hire assistants for creating content.

And in this case of the example I'm gonna share with you here more specifically, the keyword research tool I used. I used the keyword research tool to discover that security guard training was an underutilized keyword that had a high revenue potential from ads. So that's what I built my website about because I used this keyword research tool and then I held a webinar and I said, you know what?

I wanna show you how I did all this keyword research. And so come live with me. I'm gonna go live, I think it was like on Ustream or something like that. It was before any of these webinar tools ever existed. And I said, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna show you how to do keyword research and the principles that matter, and you won't have to pay for anything to do it.

I'm just gonna show you for free. And everybody's mind was blown. I showed them how to do it for free. I took 'em through a 30 minute process. To dive into Google AdWords, which was a free tool people could get access to, to then discover the keywords, to see the search volume, how then I went into Google with those keywords and found other things that can help me understand whether or not there was a lot of volume related to that search, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

30 minutes people had everything they needed to get the end result. And then I said, you know, this can take a lot of time, especially if you're going through a lot of keywords. I found a tool that can do everything I just showed you in 10 seconds. So let me show you this tool. It was a tool that no longer exists.

It's called Long Tail Pro. No, and actually it was Market Samurai at first, and then Long Tail Pro came along, which was better. But I ran this webinar a few times 'cause it was so successful. But. I then shared the tool, and after people saw just exactly how long it took to do it manually, it became so clear for them how valuable this tool was.

I showed people how to solve the problem first without buying anything, and then they said, oh my gosh, now I want that because it's gonna save me so much time. Right? The product is the accelerator or the upgrade. It worked like crazy. I later coined this phrase to talk about this strategy, and it's called the free way versus the headache-free way.

People will pay to get rid of a headache, so help them get rid of this headache, and then in return you can get paid commission. Now, of course you could promote your own products too. If those things can, of course, reduce that headache for people, make things more convenient for them. But when it comes to affiliate marketing, the  free way versus the headache-free way. comparison works so well.

So well finally, when it comes to more principles, there's two other things I wanna quickly talk about. The multiple touchpoint strategy. So you don't wanna just rely on one piece of content to make. A sale. This is very underwhelming when you just share one link and just kind of hope for the best. You wanna create different kinds of content that promote the same tool in many different kinds of ways.

Most people need seven or more exposures before buying something. So you wanna create a content series, not one-off reviews, and you can cross promote them between platforms as well, which is something we have available now that we didn't have available before. You can take that same piece of content, you can turn it into different formats.

Audio, video, long form, short form, social media, Facebook, TikTok, Reels, Instagram, Pinterest, all these things can work, but it's not just taking one piece and repurposing it. It's again, creating a series. So it might look like, first an introduction to the topic to create awareness, introduction to audience building to create awareness about the different ways to build an audience.

Number two, common mistakes in audience building. Relying on just SEO and writing, and you know, sometimes people need a little bit more to hear your voice, and this is where real connections happen, et cetera. Number three, my experience with podcasting and how I grew my audience and built trust through podcasting.

Amazing. Here's how to get started with podcasting. Here are the minimum tools that you need to get started. Here's my recommended microphone, the Samson Q2 U. Here is my recommended software for recording podcasts remotely, Riverside now. How to get started with generating revenue on your podcast? Here's an email list.

Here's how to get it started. Here's using Kit. Here are my 30 day results with starting a podcast. Day one compared to day 30. Here's how many more subscribers I have. Here's how much more business I have. Is podcasting worth it? My final recommendation for those of you getting started, so that's just a made up sequence of pieces of content, each of which could be repurposed and broken down and distributed elsewhere.

But creating a series worked. And when I think back to what worked best, even back in 2010. That Niche Site Dual was a series that I created. The first part was, what the heck even is this? And how do I build a website from scratch? And this is the ultimate goal. Follow along. Again, I'm building my audience.

Number two, how to choose the right topic using keyword research. Boom, insert that. Tool number three, how to build a website around that topic. Boom, insert hosting program and WordPress theme. Number four, how to write content so that you'll get found on search engines. Number five, here are my 10 day results.

Here's how much traffic I've already gotten. Day 20, here are my results. Again, just creating a reason for people to continue to follow along the sequence or series is the secret sauce.

And then there's the bonus stack method. That is you can differentiate your offer amongst others if you offer something in addition to the product that you're recommending. You might have a quick start guide for something that may be a little bit more complicated that you're promoting. Great. A quick start guide. I want it in order to get it, you gotta go through my link and send me your receipt and I'll send this quick start guide for you on how to use Descript. Again, I'm just using that as an example.

You can use it as something that enhances that product, makes it even easier to use. Maybe you have some software knowledge, and this software actually works in conjunction with this thing that you're offering and recommending that is from another company. And this is where a lot of people who are developers have thrived. They'll create little tools and add-ons that go with other products. For example, different Shopify plugins. Shopify's the base product that sells things online for people. But there's a lot of third party companies that have created tools that can then inject itself into Shopify to make it easy for you to do all kinds of things from making your content on your website for Shopify more dynamic to creating an affiliate program right on top of your Shopify account, et cetera, to connect with ShipStation and other tools, right?

If you can create those kinds of things and have those as bonuses, if people go through, for example, your Shopify link or whatever the case may be. Then it could be great tutorials, guides, one-on-one consultation calls for higher end products, right? Don't do that for everything because people are gonna hit you up all the time.

But if there's a product that you earn hundreds, if not thousands of dollars commission on, maybe you can offer a bonus call. And that is what pushes people over the edge to get that product. 'cause they're also getting a little bit of you with it. Be careful with how much you offer yourself though in that kind of regard.

Templates, checklists, worksheets, you know, all those kinds of things work really well. Have a dedicated landing page for this product with those bonuses mentioned in. Mention the bonus in all of your content that involved this product that you're promoting, and of course, again, make them relevant to the product that you're promoting itself.

So let's talk about some tools, different tools that work and systems for success for you, the affiliate marketer. This is sort of the fourth part of this five part program here today. We're going a little deeper into this. Affiliate marketing has been huge for me. And I love where it's going. It's being more honest.

It's being more proof-based and this is what you have to do. The old ways aren't working anymore, so some tools, screen recording, you can use something like CapCut, especially if it's on your phone or just Loom. I use ScreenFlow, whatever you need. Even QuickTime can help you record stuff on your screen.

But that's a great thing, especially if you're just, again, showing people and you're gonna be putting those videos onto YouTube. Your phone is an amazing tool for promoting physical products. You can take slow motion video of the thing that you're using. You could show people your progress with it. You can actually speak into the camera so you can be relatable as if a person's in the room with you while you're using this product, while you're talking about the product, whatever it might be.

You have most of these tools already. Now if you're creating graphics and things like that, especially for landing pages and whatnot, using something like Canva can work. I use Canva for YouTube thumbnails, social media graphics, those kinds of things. Now links. Links are key. Obviously you need an affiliate link from these different companies.

If you're promoting on Amazon, Amazon gives you an affiliate link. If you're promoting a specific program that an influencer maybe has, they have their own affiliate program. Many of them are different. I promote, I think 50 different things right now from all different kinds of people, products, services, physical, digital.

It might sound like a lot, but they're all sprinkled in the right places on the website across thousands of things. So it's not like I'm always promoting 50 things at the same time, although 50 things, in fact, are being available at the same time across the website, and it's the links that matter. So when you get these long links from these different places, they're usually gonna be filled with huge character strings and question marks, and equal signs and numbers and letters that make no sense at all.

Those are just essentially affiliate cookies to connect you and anybody who purchases through your link to you and the commissions that you'll eventually earn. If you promote those long links on a podcast and you say those letters, it's never gonna work. Same thing with a YouTube video. You want to shorten those links and make them prettier.

Hence, a tool for those of you who are on WordPress called Pretty Links. Pretty Links is a wonderful free WordPress plugin that you can pop in any long string character link and you can basically have whatever other link you want, right? So if you go to, for example, Smart PassiveIncome.com/kit, it will then forward through and then end up on that really long string that is my unique affiliate link or kit. So that every time I purchase a, a purchase happens through that link, I get credited for that and get a commission 30 days or 60 days later, whatever the agreement is. Bitly is another one. If you don't have WordPress, B-I-T-L-Y for creating short links, it's not the best. However, you could also create a domain for an affiliate link and have it just forward through. I used to have a tool that I promoted, I think it was like BestPodcastMic.com.

I don't have that anymore, but I would just say, Hey, if you want the best podcast mic, just go to best podcast mike.com and grab your Samsung Q2 U, and people would go through that and it would just forward through that longer affiliate link that credited me, and it was just so easy to remember. I even remember the domain name now.

I just made the mistake of. Letting that domain inspire, or I think that was the exact domain name or something close to that. So yeah, YouTube Analytics very important as a part of your system, if you, again, are using the golden platform of YouTube, you wanna know what's working and what's not. Really focus in on your impressions and click-through rates.

That is an understanding of whether your, your titles and thumbnails are working. You can use the thumbnail split tester to split test variations of different thumbnails to make sure more people are clicking, and if your videos aren't getting a lot of views, you can continue over time to try to hone in on a thumbnail that works and you can potentially see spikes and growth after that, so it's not just a one and done kind of thing.

Most important on YouTube, however, is your retention graph. You wanna pay attention in all of your videos, not just your review videos and comparison videos and all those kinds of things. In all of your videos, where are people dropping off and what might you be able to do to stop that from happening, and where are people sticking around and how might you incorporate more of that?

It's a very simple thing, but when you think about it and you start looking at your graphs a day or two after your video is published, you quickly begin to understand how to hone in on what is working and what is not, and then take action on that. Of course, with email marketing as you build your audience, that's a quick way to get in front of a lot of people in their inbox to then promote other items.

Kit is the place to go to for sure, and if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/kit, there you go. You'll be able to get access to that. You can get access to their creator network as well, and begin to start growing your email list quite shortly too, and you can start building your list on day one.

And as you start to hone in on your affiliate marketing opportunities, really start to hone in on the systems that you use to promote these things. Start to rinse and repeat with new products. Pay attention to what worked and what didn't, and just do more of what did and less of what didn't work. Right? You can use spreadsheets to track. Unfortunately, a lot of these affiliate products are across a multiple different platforms, so you're gonna need.

Some home base or place to be able to keep track of your links and where things exist. 'cause it can definitely get outta hand if you don't, or you can lose out on affiliate commissions that you'll have to redeem if they don't get automatically placed into your bank account. Especially with content repurposing and creation.

Think of the system so that you can get them more refined over time and you can get some of that time back. Systems is the answer for getting your time back and then it's people. Hiring people, operators, help assistants, virtual assistants, whatever the case may be, to do these things that you now have in a system that are repeatable, and then removing yourself from the process and making this as passive as possible.

The final thing I'll say here is just a gentle reminder. It's the fifth thing, but I wanted to repeat it. What's already been said, make sure that at all times you are genuinely promoting these things because you know that they can help people. As a result and a byproduct of that, that is how you generate revenue.

As I always say, your earnings are a byproduct of how well you serve your audience. So just a quick final note there for you to make sure you keep that principle in mind. Because I've fallen into traps before where I've promoted things that had a very high commission because the dollar signs, right? I had the dollar signs kind of like bursting outta my eyeballs, like in the cartoons.

That is a sign that I was doing it for the wrong reasons and number one, I didn't see great results with those, and I saw a lot of angry people for promoting things that didn't really make sense, and I lost trust with certain segments of my audience because of that. And I learned those lessons and I wanted to pass those lessons on to you.

So hopefully these affiliate marketing lessons have been inspirational. Actionable today for you. So make sure to re-listen to this if you need to. Maybe you've taken notes, maybe you put this particular podcast episode into Poppy AI, which is another tool that we've been more recently promoting as an affiliate, and many people have been enjoying it.

You might remember the episode not too long ago with the founders of  Poppy AI but you can take this podcast episode or the webpage that this podcast episode exists, which is, what episode is this? Episode 888. That's great. And so. Go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/session888. By the way, that's using a pretty link to make that happen.

 SmartPassiveIncome.com/session888, and you could take that link, pop it into Poppy AI to dissect this episode, to then connect to the audience that you've trained your AI on, or what prompts you give it to then create a affiliate marketing plan for you. And by the way, if you wanna check out Poppy, 'cause I use it almost every day now, SmartPassiveIncome.com/poppy, and you'll get a discount code for that purchase if you choose to check it out. Can't rave about it enough right at this point. So thank you so much for listening in. I appreciate you. This is a little bit longer than usual, but I had a lot to say about affiliate marketing 'cause it is definitely a huge opportunity for all of you.

And if you take these strategies and implement them, this is what's working today and hopefully it will work for you too. Thank you so much. Hit that subscribe button. We got another what's working today, episode coming your way very soon. You are not gonna wanna miss out on it. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.