The Exchanges

Q You know, let's talk about monetization. You've built this blog. Now you need to monetize it. How do you make your first dollar?

A Made my first dollar with AdSense. My goal was to get Traffic to get eyeballs on the site so that I could make money from AdSense. It was the easiest thing I could do. Going forward, I moved away from AdSense because I didn't like the way ads looked. They were irrelevant to my content, and I took that off and focused a hundred percent on affiliate marketing for many, many years. In fact, that was the only way I made money, probably up until I started to develop products. The first product I created was a PDF. That I sold. At first for 50 bucks, no one bought it. Then I dropped it to 40 bucks, no one bought that. 30 bucks, some people bought it. 29, more people bought it. 24, a lot of people bought it. And I was like, okay, I found the price point. It took me years. The next product I created was the Pool Care Handbook, which did a lot better. I'd learned everything from the first one. It was much bigger. And I added courses to them. So then it became like a video course and e-book combination. And then I actually printed our book. Been the majority of like how we make money is through the course material and the, and the books.

AI assessment note: “Made my first dollar with AdSense.”

Q So you're building this thing, you're making money. How do you grow it? How do you grow into a business that's making a million a year?

A It's the same exact thing I've been doing since day one. It's just content. Put out as much content as I possibly can create. We start with the video, the long form video, the script. We take that, we rerecord little bits for short form. So I do one long form video a week. Three short form videos a week on YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, anybody that will take a short form video basically. And then we take those scripts and format them and turn them into blog posts that rank on Google. Anybody that comes to us from there, hopefully signs up for our email list. And then we have an entire email newsletter where we send two to three emails a week to those people. And we run ads as well, which helps supplement all of that. But the same video that dominates Every single year. It's a PowerPoint. There's no script. I just, you know, developed this, like, here's what I, how I think about pool care from start to finish. We can't beat it. What that tells me is it doesn't matter how good your video is. It just matters that the content is good.

AI assessment note: “It's just content. Put out as much content as I possibly can create.”

Q You run this business. It's a family business. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

A Yeah. There was a moment where I was working with Steph, my wife, thinking about hiring more and more people, but I was like, let me see if my brother wants to do it. He was like, yeah, I don't want to do that. I was like, oh, okay, cool. Um, you're hired. And so I thought, let me use this business that I have this asset to take care of everybody. So my wife, she writes long form scripts for YouTube. She also writes all of the short form content. She also edits And publishes the long form content on YouTube. My brother does short form edits and he does all of our customer service. And then I do literally everything else. So I read the scripts and into, into camera, do email marketing podcasts. I do articles. So all the stuff that with the website, any technical things that need to be taken care of, any admin things that need to be taken care of pretty much. Yeah. Fill in all the gaps of like running a business. I do all of it. And we all Get paid the same so that nobody feels superior over. I don't feel like a boss. No one feels like a boss. I don't, you know, need to make more than everybody else just because I own the company. I want everyone to be taken care of. That's the point. It's kind of a rising tide lifts all boats scenario.

AI assessment note: “my wife, she writes long form scripts... My brother does short form edits”

Q So you're a terrible writer, but you have the self-proclaimed, but you have the confidence that you can put this blog out into the world and build a business out of it. Where does this come from?

A I was confident in website building and design. So like I could open up notepad and build a website in pure HTML. And I, you know, I did graphic design. I was an, you know, as a kid, I, Drew a lot. So like I had that. I could make something look like a legit website. If you have read it, it was really bad. Like really, really bad. There was no periods, nothing, no commas. Like it was just poorly written from someone who like knows how to talk right, but doesn't know how to stop. It's kind of like written by a third grader, but visually I can make it look great. And I knew how to get it online.

AI assessment note: “I was confident in website building and design.”

Q Can you tell me about your backstory and how, how do you become an entrepreneur?

A So I just had a job like every other kid had a summer job. I stayed at that company for a while. I got, I went to another pool company. I went to another pool company. I moved up in marketing. And then in that moment, I'm like, okay, so they're coming in, I'm testing their water. They're asking me for advice. I'm handing them chemicals. I'm like, you need to buy this. You need to buy this. You need to buy this. And here's the steps in which you need to add those things. I thought I could do this at scale. If I just wrote this as a blog post or made a video about this and then say, Hey, if you want to, you know, get rid of algae, you want to clear up your Pool or whatever. Here are the four products we recommend to do what I just told you to do. But I know I'm not good at English. I knew, I knew I was like, my grammar was terrible. So I worked so hard to get good at it. I was working at this company as a marketing director, as a pool company. I would go home. I would work on the site at home. My boss found out about that. And fired me. And so I was like, oh, ok, I'm gonna put everything I have into making this work, and I made 20,000 dollars that year on the site, and I used the rest of that time to do website design to kind of supplement it. The next year I made 40,000 dollars, and then I was like, I have a real business, and then from there it just kept going up.

AI assessment note: “I thought I could do this at scale. If I just wrote this as a blog post”

Q What are your thoughts for maybe someone who's watching this video on picking the right niche, picking the right business to work on?

A It's always been based on What I am interested in, so I have this, like, practice that someone gave me where it was like, walk around your house and just start writing down things in your room, and then you can find a niche that way. It's like, if you just walk around this room, there's so many things that I could write down and just be like, oh, wow, yeah, I guess I am interested in that. I wonder if people are talking about that, because I like that thing, and I would say pick something that you know and that you're least interested in, because when the going gets tough, when it's hard to, like, create content, at least You like the topic a little bit.

AI assessment note: “walk around your house and just start writing down things in your room”