Yaro Starak – Starting and Growing Your Blog for Business

Blogger and Internet business entrepreneur from Australia – Yaro Starak

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We go in-depth on how to really start a blog, what to do, how to structure it, and what to not worry about!
Yaro tells his ‘secrets’ for becoming a big name in the blogging and internet marketing world.

Go to Entrepreneurs-Journey.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Any questions or comments on the podcast let me know!

Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Yaro Starak on the show. He runs an awesome blog called Entrepreneurs-journey.com and I'll link it up in the show notes. He also has a lot of companies under his belt one of which is called Crankyads.com which is really cool. He also has a podcast which I highly recommend you check out. He has interviewed quite a few people that I've interviewed like Neil Patel and also some of my friends like Erica Douglass and Farnoosh Brock. So definitely check that out. I'm really excited to have him on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on, Yaro.

YARO STARAK: Thank you for having me, Jaime.

JAIME TARDY: So tell me first, right, you're an internet entrepreneur. What do you tell people when you meet them at like a networking event what you do?

YARO STARAK: I've had this question before from you know David from The Rise to the Top podcast?

JAIME TARDY: Oh yeah, did he really? Oh man. I'm asking the same questions as David?

YARO STARAK: Don't feel bad about it. It's a common question, right' I remember answering him and I was thinking it really depends who I am talking to because if it's a networking event you talk about what your business is but if maybe you're socializing and it's a girl you like, you're not going to say well I'm in internet marketing. It's like oh you're in porn. Okay, so that's not a good thing, right? I don't know what you would think, Jaime. Generally, you'd probably be okay with it actually given what you do but writer or blogger is what I normally lead with mainly because that's the part I enjoy the most. It's the writing and the sharing. So I think by saying writer it's kind of romantic. It's also actually what I do. So it works.

JAIME TARDY: That makes sense. Trying to get in really good you have to say the right stuff. That's awesome.

YARO STARAK: You know what it's like. It's hard to say what you do when you're online. It's a lot of multilevel marketing or spamming people.

JAIME TARDY: Or scamming.

YARO STARAK: There's a lot of distrust. They perceive you are in the make money online niche. That's skepticism there.

JAIME TARDY: That's a really good point though too because that's the thing. You do a really great job as far as not being scammy. You're a real person. I love following you because of that reason but what do you think separates you from them because I see a lot of internet marketers that are also pretty, they seem like they've got integrity and you sort of look at their offerings and then realize that they're totally trying to like use the top, the craziest copywriting and stuff like that just to get you to buy now. So what sets you apart for sure?

YARO STARAK: I'm guilty of using some of that copywriting too. It converts. That's the sad but true thing. I was actually just interviewing Jeff Walker recently and he's the product launch formula guy and he's got, there's a solid base of people that just don't like the launch process. It's kind of almost like his fault so people don't like that. I was saying it's copywriting's fault. I think that's the biggest place to put blame on for not trusting a lot of internet marketing because of the language people use in copywriting. You don't have to of course but I think most people who go and test online it works better.

I mean direct response marketing has been using copywriting for 100 years ever since print media was a selling tool, right? It's one of those things you can test and often it does work better. I'm glad that the internet has given us the option to write a blog and do so in a conversational tone which can do all the relationship building for you which I think probably answers the question as to why someone like me and a lot of other people like people you mentioned before and Pat Stern obviously more recently as well have been able to just be themselves really and be very transparent, use language that's I guess down to earth although that might be a bit of a cliche nowadays.

But that works well and I think from my point of view my blogging has always been not copywriting where a sales page or an opt-in form has been. So it actually, I think it turns a few people off but it depends where you're sourcing traffic from. My sales page and my landing page may not be coming from the same place as the blog itself. I've always used the blog more to be me I guess and other materials more to be a direct response marketer.

JAIME TARDY: That's it to a tee, which I didn't even think about before. I had Dane Maxwell on the show last week, actually the week before last and he was talking specifically all about copywriting. That's sort of his shtick. No offense, Dane. He was awesome too and he sort of laid out the land of, you listen to the same people, especially from way back when and you're like this is what they say and this is what works. This is why people do it.

But you made a key distinction because now you have a blog. I think that's one of the pieces, like you said, a lot of the internet marketers that are doing launches don't necessarily have a blog and therefore don't have the rest of that integrity to sort of back up these crazy converting very well might be a little crazy sales pages. So that's huge. Do you think the internet marketers would do better off if they started a blog?

YARO STARAK: It?s funny we use the term internet marketer and blogger like they?re mutually exclusive.

JAIME TARDY: Like they?re different. I know.

YARO STARAK: I mean think most internet marketers would go you?re a blogger and using the internet to sell, you?re an internet marketer. And for the blogger, we go are you writing a blog? No  It's funny we use the term internet marketer and blogger like they're mutually exclusive.

JAIME TARDY: Like they're different. I know.

YARO STARAK: I mean think most internet marketers would go yoyou're not so you're not a blogger. That's what makes me different. So we might grab on to that and make it part of our identity. To answer the question, I've talked about this to internet marketers before and I think there's no internet marketer who wouldn't benefit from having one. It makes a lot of sense.

For them though, it's often a I guess an ROI question. They don't see the time required to make a blog big be worth spending that time on another place. For them, it's often about JV's and building relationships so that they got the big people promoting for them. They have a mailing list often but they do a couple launches a year with some partners mailing. They ad 10 or 20 or 30,000 subscribers in this one launch which is what, three or four years worth of blogging potentially. You can see where they are coming from in some aspects.

If it's purely about newsletters subscribers, the relationship side of things is often a bit different. That's something you don't do instantly and I guess that's blogging's strength, the ability to build over time a relationship and have a reputation. You wouldn't be interviewing me if it wasn't for my blog I guess and that was seven years ago when I started it and I am still writing to it. I think the important point really is what you enjoy first of all then picking and choosing the right pieces of marketing to put together to make it a viable business as well.

For internet marketers, blogging might be what they want to do, maybe they don't have time, maybe it's just not their thing. They don't want to be a writer in that regard. Some just have a newsletter and that's all they use and that's enough for their relationship building. At the end of the day, it's just having a tribe. Whoever has a tribe and builds their relationships, whatever mediums they use, seems to do well enough on the internet.

JAIME TARDY: That's the thing, you interviewed Neil Patel. I did too and he was like you start a blog when you have a company that you want to take to eight figures is what he was saying and it'su're a blogger and using the internet to sell, you're  sort of like it took everybody by surprise because they were like wait I thought you just started a blog to be a lifestyle entrepreneur. So who do you think should really start a blog? Who would benefit? Do you think it's everybody or do you think it's only certain people that would benefit from a blog?

YARO STARAK: I think everyone who does it well could benefit from it. There's no doubt about that. I mean Neil is a good example of someone who doesn't need to in terms of financial success or success of his software company. He is doing great. But I think he also wants to position his personal brand well and, like you said, that helps him with the valuations of his company. It was interesting to listen, when I interviewed him, how he used the platform the blog built to get a lot of connections in everything he did whether it was looking for investors, finding customers, getting people to promote his actual services. So the benefits are immense, if you do it well, and Neil does it well.

I think the biggest problem is the people who just see it as another marketing tool where they can kind of spend a bit of money, release a bit of content and make it work; the way you can do that with like buying an ad or going to Google ad words and spending ten grand on clicks and seeing what converts and what doesn't. There's a nice AB linear process where blogging is a little bit almost holistic in a lot of ways. You're putting content out, you're connecting with people. You're playing around with different ideas. You're seeing what gets response, what doesn't, what you enjoy.

For me, it has always been about what I enjoy first. I'm very selfish. I come before my audience honestly. I admit that. Whatever I like writing about is generally what I write about. Sometimes I don't hit the nail on the head, sometimes I do. Whatever it is it's what I enjoy and that's what keeps me motivated. So that's the important thing. To answer your question, I think so. You've got a blog, right?

JAIME TARDY: I know, we're talking the same language so we have to say yes, right? Tell me about, because I get emails, it's funny, because I don't necessarily only interview internet entrepreneurs and I don't interview bloggers all the time. I know, internet, internet, internet; but the question is that I get a lot is how do I make money with a blog? How do I start a blog? I'm like well that's not really my shtick and I sort of send it over to other people, but what do you say; especially for people that have these incorrect expectations that they're going to start a blog and start making tons of money right away.

YARO STARAK: It can happen. Let's not totally put out the possibilities there. There are some people that go and three months later they've got an audience because they just really hit the nail on the head and they can make some money from it. Personally it took me about a year to get to about $1,000 a month and that was a combination of advertising and affiliate promotions. I didn't have my own product yet. In hindsight, maybe it would have been smarter to go straight to my own products. I might do that now.

It is really so many variables here. It's what you feel you can teach, if you're going to have a product or what you feel you can sell. It might be a physical product or someone else's product as an affiliate. Advertising for me is always the easiest. That is the lowest hanging fruit but I meet a lot of people who don't want ads on their site or certain types of ads on their site. You mentioned Cranky Ads, the software startup. One of the biggest challenges we have with that is often the sites we get into our network they don't like a lot of the ads that go onto their site so they say no.

That's totally, they're allowed to do that, it's their priority so you have to kind of balance out what sort of advertising you want on your site and I'm guilty of having some fairly hype you make money online sponsors on my site. Some of them have legitimate products and use, we talked right at the beginning of this, copywriting.

JAIME TARDY: They're just good. We shouldn't call it bad. They're just really good at what they do.

YARO STARAK: They're just going out there and testing and seeing what traffic converts and members do not get a high click through rate. They haven't for a long time but you get a few of them it can do well. As a blogger who is just getting started or thinking about getting started, to me, I have always said focus on audience building for a set period of time. Six months is a good time frame to feel out your blog, feel out your audience, feel out your industry you're in. See who is writing and publishing already in that space. See what sort of an average expectation of traffic you can get in six months.

For me, I think I had about 300 people a day reading my blog after about six months. It was a small industry back then but a less crowded on. So two sides of a different coin there. Whether that's reasonable, you could do worse or better. Some of the people I've coached have only made it to a 100 people a day within six months but then there's a few other people who have made it to 1,000 people very quickly, because they just find a little market that no one is tapping into and Google finds their website and sends them traffic.

Really, for me, the expectation management that should come into this is why are you doing it. That is the most important question. So if it's just for money you probably should look to something that's a lot more linear like going on ad words, buying traffic, going on Facebook buying traffic nowadays and selling a product, because that's just simple. It's here's my product, get some traffic and make sales. But the blogging part it's I want to share my topic. I want to explore it, maybe teach it, maybe just comment on other people's content. Maybe do interviews like we're doing now.

Whatever it is you want to participate in a certain community and become potentially maybe a thought leader and build a platform there and when you do that, that's when you get the fun part of deciding how you want to monetize. Advertising not your thing, start day one; build a newsletter then sell an introductory course or an eBook or something like that. If I had my time over again, that's what I would do first off just because I know it's the cleanest in terms of controlling all aspects - not sending traffic away, keeping them within my own ecosystem. I like information products. It's a nice way to kind of continue to build your platform while you make money.

That doesn't mean advertising and affiliate marketing doesn't fit in but again, in hindsight, that's just how I would do it now. But what I've done is I've built a platform that I have made very consistent money from advertising so I don't say no to that money right now, but things do change. The last few years I've had three different products come and go. So there were times to promote different things over the last few years.

JAIME TARDY: Let's talk about that, because I get this question all the time, so now we have the expert on so he can tell us what to do and I can just say listen to this interview. If you were to start a blog again, I would love to know what the first three things you would do and how you would grow it. I know this is a huge question but I'd love like a step by step what you would normally do, if you were going to do it again.

YARO STARAK: Got a couple of hours?

JAIME TARDY: Oh yeah, we totally do. All night long. It's like 10:00 here, 11:00 here so yeah, we're fine.

YARO STARAK: You look surprisingly fresh for 10:00. It's only 1:00 in the afternoon for me so I am good. To answer your question, I would, well I've actually just started thinking about starting a new blog so I've asked myself this question, so good timing on this.

JAIME TARDY: Awesome.

YARO STARAK: First thing is newsletter opt-in box from day one. Didn't do that. It took me a year. I think nearly every person you interview you will hear them say that same mistake. I didn't put a newsletter on my blog.

JAIME TARDY: Took me six months, yes.

YARO STARAK: So from day one, even if it's just get my latest updates as soon as I release new blog content. Some form of this is how you can give me an email to stay in touch. Simply because, well, first of all, newsletters and email marketing have made the most money for me. It's the best direct response method I know of online to reach people. Blogging is great, but you kind of rely on people to come to your blog or read you through RSS.

It's more of the kind of they come to you method where email is something we do every day. So sending an email out means you're going to get their attention that day at some point. That will not change unless we stop communicating by email. Not as effective as it used to be obviously. It's a bit more spammy and there's more emails coming at us, but it's still something, I mean I check my email every 10 minutes. Right now I'm having withdrawal because I am talking to you and not checking my email.

JAIME TARDY: I'll wait, if you need to check your email.

YARO STARAK: Obviously Facebook and social media has become, it affects similar in terms of how much attention we give to it. So there's a lot of opportunities there I think. So that's another thing. I would definitely look at how you plan on integrating social media into your platform. You better be careful with that because, like, for example, with me, I'm not going to suddenly build out a Twitter, a Facebook, a LinkedIn all at the same time once I start a new blog. I'm going to focus on new blog content first. I'll register all those profiles so that I can put out the blog content through them, but I'm going to build the foundation for the blog at the beginning.

That's writing articles. I would just sit down and write. It should be easy at this point. It's a brand new blog. You've got fresh ideas. So you just take what are the fundamentals for your industry or the best stories you've got, the case studies, and start writing about them and fill your blog up with at least, I don't know, I like 10 or 20 or 30 articles so when those new readers come, when you start actually marketing your blog, they see something there. Nothing worse than seeing one blog post that was three weeks old. They don't really see you as a consistent writer. So enough value there to go I might subscribe and keep in touch with this blog.

That's the other thing I do at the start is a newsletter, some sort of foundation content to begin with. I'd also look at making sure you've got some kind of relatively SEO friendly theme. There's quite a few of those out there nowadays. You've got your genesis and your thesis so there are frameworks for Word Press. Don't know how much basics we have to go in here. Obviously I'm on the WordPress.org platform and I use the genesis framework. Genesis has lots of child themes as well but there's plenty out there that has new things, if you type in premium themes, you'll get lots of options.

The important part, I think, is the SEO aspect and making sure your blog is ready to go from a search engine platform point of view because Google will be the largest source of traffic, for free, that you have. Will very likely. It is for me. It's for most people I talk to, the same deal. I'm not really a keyword research kind of guy. I do a little bit of it but I'm not going to spend like the amount of time a niche marketer would be doing, if they were starting a tea website or a security guard training website.

JAIME TARDY: That's Pat. We love Pat here. Okay.

YARO STARAK: Pat is very focused. I think he would research. It's very necessary to get traffic but, like I said before, I tend to throw ideas out there and see what I like and then what the audience likes. You need to be in a place where you have the luxury to do that. Like you asked earlier, when do you expect to make money, don't expect to make any. Ask yourself how you will survive and then start the blog. That's a better mindset to have.

JAIME TARDY: Thank you for saying that, yes. So I have questions about that though too. First, what makes good content? You sound like you're a writer. Some people though, I'm not really a writer. I don't call myself a writer though I am writing a book, but I don't call myself a writer, but I am a communicator. So for someone who maybe doesn't feel like they're a writer, what would make really good content? Give us some tips on that.

YARO STARAK: You should note that I didn't start a blog with any previous writing experience or expectation of being a writer. It was actually through blogging that I decided I enjoyed it. So don't make that assumption until you actually do it first because that's the test to make. After that, it's a case of deciding what mediums you work well with. I'm thinking you might work well with video and interviews, Jaime, is that kind of where you lean towards?

JAIME TARDY: I don't know, you tell me.

YARO STARAK: I look where the energy goes and I don't know how much you write for your blog, but I did have a look before and there were a lot of interviews I think.

JAIME TARDY: I like interviews, yes.

YARO STARAK: That kind of platform gives people the opportunity, if you are a person who wants to get in front of a camera and talk, or even just behind the microphone and talk. I do that too. I enjoy doing the podcast, but I can't do that sitting in a caf? and that's part of the whole difference for me - sitting in a cafe and writing my articles. It's a case of testing these things. You can do interviews, you can do podcasts, which can be interviews or just teaching content or commenting, like a radio show. You can write. It's really finding where your best medium is and experimenting with it.

My friend Gideon Shalwick, he's not a reader or a writer. He's a video guy so we don't ever read each other's blogs because mine is all written and his is all video. So we don't know what's going on but we're good friends.

JAIME TARDY: Don't you love that?

YARO STARAK: Your strengths are. I guess you can look more that what makes good content, it doesn't matter what format you're using. We're talking about formats there. The value comes from hitting the need points in your audience. I think one of the best value propositions out there are case studies. There have always been case studies. I've looked at people and asked them from start to finish how do they achieve what they achieve, because that's usually what they're for.

Same with my writing. It has always been about telling people what I am doing now or in the past and what has worked and what didn't work and what I learned from it. So it's either my story or someone else's story. That, to me, by far, is the definition of fantastic content. Every single blog I read out there is either one of two things ' that it's case studies and interesting stories from people's lives that teach your or entertain you or it's news, which is your more short bursts of whatever is going on right now, which is a fantastic blog format too, if you are spending a lot of time online and you want to write shorter articles and you really stay up to date with certain subjects.

That works as well. Not my cup of tea, because I don't have enough I guess energy to spend all day publishing 100, 250-word articles. I like to sit down and bang out 1,000 to 2,000 words and call that one article a week and that's all I need. The most important thing is hitting those needs. That really is the answer to the question and you won't know that until you start putting stuff out there, have conversations with people, start selling stuff. One of the best ways to figure out whether you actually have value is to start asking for something from other people and that's why you have a newsletter.

Hi, I've got more of this. Here's a newsletter, opt in to get that. You can find out how many people then subscribe, which is almost like saying, 'Yes, I'm interested." So they're actually doing something not passively, they're actively doing something, which is the first step in the buying process, which is the first step of you potentially making money from it. That's why the newsletter is really, really important. It's also research. So that's a great way to figure out whether you are offering value or not. Ask people to do something, even leave a comment.

JAIME TARDY: That's a good one. Yes, because usually you assume you have to ask people to buy and that's sort of the first step but it's not. That's awesome. So let's talk about SEO and getting traffic, because say you have this great theme. You're like yes I'm writing great content and most of the time, if you only do that and you don't do too much else, you hear a lot of crickets for awhile, right. Tell me about some traffic strategies. I know you said with SEO we're hoping to be picked up. Google has been changing their algorithms like crazy lately. Actually, I just have to say one thing, I don't think anybody in the audience has really heard this, but I'm No. 8 on the first page of Google for the term "millionaire" now. I'm very proud of that. I don't do SEO though. So I didn't do anything. It just started happening.

YARO STARAK: So why do you think that's happened?

JAIME TARDY: That's what Pat was asking and everybody was asking me and I think I provide a lot of content and a lot of video content. So therefore I have started getting ranked higher. I also rank, this is interesting, actually Erica Douglass who owns Wish Traffic is all about SEO, so she gave me this answer, not me. But I also rank for "eventual" on the first page. I'm like No. 5 or 6, for the term "eventual." So now Google has done this thing where it's not specific for the keyword term, it's also for the keywords, which I thought was really interesting. Not that anyone is looking up eventual and hoping to find my site, so it's not exactly that relevant, but I'm excited about the millionaire. So that's sort of the new stuff. Have you been seeing some crazy stuff going on too'

YARO STARAK: No. I look at my stats for traffic changes and I actually sort of stayed pretty much at the same level for a long time actually. I have certain articles that will sort of creep up every now and then but there really are a foundation of top articles in my archives. One I wrote about the 80/20 rule. One was about top 10 methods to make money online. Sort of these certain subjects that just hit the sweet spot in keywords and then I've just owned a No. 1 or No. 2 spot for years, like the 80/20 rule article has been I think No. 1 for 80/20 rule for probably five or six years now. I wrote it in the first year of blogging, so you can see what can happen there.

JAIME TARDY: That's impressive.

YARO STARAK: Right and I wasn't writing it for search traffic. It was just me sharing a thing that helped my life. So I think that's probably what happened with you, as well. I think hopefully because you're using the word millionaire in a lot of your content. Obviously the first two words in the title tag on your homepage, that's a big deal when it comes to SEO. That's an area to think about, like the first two words or three words, whatever it is, on your homepage title tag, I believe that will be what you rank for the most out of any individual, it's not really long tale. It's not like a niche sort of search phrase so much as your brand name or what phrase.

I played around with it. I actually had internet marketing blog and I had it as a business blog, because I didn't want to rank for entrepreneurs journey. I knew I would rank for that but, again, who is going to type that. No one can spell entrepreneur. In hindsight, my domain is terrible but I started my site as a hobby. It wasn't meant to be what it eventually became. The important thing I think with SEO is doing a little bit of keyword research nowadays just because it's more competitive. You can't really luck onto this as easily as you could have in the past. That's why even going to Pat's site or something like that or just grabbing a copy of Market Samuri, that took, or going to the Google keyword tool, I do that every now and then.

I'll just think okay this is an article I've just written. I know it's about this subject but why not spend two minutes just to see which way it is being phrased that gets the most traffic. The interesting thing is I coming from Australia, the way you spell favorite is different from the way you spell it in America. So it pays for me to spell favorite the American way, because there's more Americans on the planet than there are Australians. You look at those kind of little things that you don't really know until you actually do a keyword research.

I was doing this recently for Cranky Ads. The phrases we were looking at is things like ad rotator or word press ad rotator or banner rotator and things like that. It was interesting to see which of those phrases were the most popular and the least competitive or the ones where you could hopefully find a sweet spot for and obviously the longer the niche or the more specific, I should say, you get with the niche. So word press banner ad rotator, that's more words, more specific, easier to rank for, but the traffic was actually in phrases like, I think banner rotator was the number one in terms of what we were going for. But it's a bit more generic.

Where word press ad rotator was easier to rank for. I think we're starting to rank for that. I just started playing around with those words in the title tags and that's pretty much all I ever do with SEO nowadays is go to my individual articles as I've just finished them, make sure the phrase has the title, so the headline I should say, the headline on the article makes sense for humans first and then start looking at the title tag and maybe potentially changing that to match something that's more search engine friendly. You've got the headlines, which humans really will see in the title, which will appear in the Google results.

That's more like the one you want to get the search traffic from, where the other one is more like getting them to click through and read it. Long story short, I barely do anything. My blog, for the entire seven years, I have just had the SEO title plug in and now the genesis themes does the same thing. I have not done any keyword research ever for that site, in terms of just going for a certain key phrase really hard other than every now and then out of curiosity. So I think the important thing is to do content production on a regular basis.

I'm a big fan of the concept of owning more of the internet. A bit like Pat Flynn's with the be everywhere. I think he was one of the first people I heard say the phrase owning more of the internet and he just was referring to the fact that the more pages that have you on them, the more likely you are to come up for search results. So it's the same principle with be everywhere. You are releasing podcasts and videos and writing articles. The more of that you do, there's just more of you everywhere. That's why I am happy to do an interview, because it's another one and I think I've lost track over the last seven years. I've probably done 300-400 interviews and I don't know which ones are still bringing in traffic, because it's too big a job to try and track it all.

But the long story short is the more of me out there, the more traffic trickles back to me, even if it's just two or three people a day from one interview here, another one there. It's all compounding. It plays a huge part in this. It can really make a difference. The most prolific people often win on the internet. It's just a fact of benefit of hard work. Be prolific and you can do really well.

JAIME TARDY: That's awesome. The reason why I say that what I want to ask is you have a blog since seven years ago, which means that you have tons of back links. You have age, your domain age is awesome. For you, right now, it's has probably been a little easier in order to rank for anything. If you were to start that new blog though, would you not pay attention to SEO except for the things that you're still doing on your site now or would you do a little bit more?

YARO STARAK: I would but I think the main thing I would be doing is just niching it down more. The difference between back then and now isn't a lot in terms of the way the algorithms work. I know if you were an SEO expert you would really talk about all the penguin updates. There have been a lot of devaluing of certain types of links and increasing the value of certain other types of links but at the end of the day, we're still talking about links. So it's links and keywords - that's SEO right there. There's nothing else, where you're getting linked from and what keywords are being used to link to you and what keywords are on your page.

That's always been all there is with SEO and you can look at the social media impact and the helpfulness of getting lots of tweets and likes and things like that to help boost the rankings and those things help but they're still just a link and Google is attempting to value links through looking at people's behavior. What I would do and the difference in why I say I would be more specific now with my niche is it's simply more crowded and that means I have to become much more of a specialist in whatever I do go for.

That's where the keyword research can really help. Again, I mention Cranky Ads with the ad rotator example. It's the most recent keyword research I've done. I might have in the past gone for banner rotator, but that's the top level subject in the banner rotator industry basically. So nowadays I might actually go for a bit more specific. We are a word press plug in so I definitely would go for word press ad rotator or word press banner rotator. There's probably less traffic on that phrase but there's more obviously targeted traffic. We are a word for Zonni plug in. You can take this to whatever subject you're doing.

Nowadays you wouldn't do a cooking blog so much as you would bring it down to a cupcake blog or even a raw food blog might be too top level. It depends on how prolific you're planning on being. You might just be a raw desserts blog instead and then you do your keyword research in relation to what are people searching for in the raw dessert area and writing your articles to relate to that. I think meal services with Crazy Egg and looking at what phrases people currently search for when they come to your website. Give you some great ideas of what you are actually ranking for now but maybe not serving.

Putting those sorts of stat tracking tools and checking Google analytics to see what you show up for and this all comes when you write more or produce more. Like I said before, creating content isn't just about getting traffic. I mean it is just about that, but it also gives you the benefit of learning about the traffic that comes to you. It's the best form of market research you'll ever do about whatever you want to do online. There's stuff out there. I don't understand people who spend hours and hours researching to never actually produce.

I guess they don't want to waste their time producing but heck they'll be wasting their time researching in a lot of ways, because you won't know until you actually go here's something I created, do you like it? Yes? No? Here's something else I created. Do you like it? Oh it's a little bit to the left of that. Okay, let me give you that instead and that's how I'd go about building a blog today. It would be moving to keyword research, a lot of content production, a little bit of analytics - checking my keywords and what people are coming to, looking at my competition and then good old fashion link building.

So I'd be making connections, I'd be looking at doing guest articles. I'd be doing interviews like this and trying to get myself onto other interviews. I would probably start some form of social media campaign. Not my strong point but I know a lot of people out there really enjoy maintaining social media. I still tend to do it only for social media sake, not for marketing sake. I think I kind of just like sharing photos of what I eat. I'm a typical Instagramer. But there are a lot of people out there who do great things. Just like Brian Moran, who I recently interviewed.

He's fantastic at creating, generating leads from Facebook. So there was some great learning there. It's a case of picking the channels you want to go for and get good at and that's where I pick one or two. I'm good at writing so I would spend my time doing that and then I'd probably just pick one other form of marketing, in my case, probably interviews, like you're doing, because I know how great they are at building relationships and then you don't need to do more. That's the best thing about interviews, both participating as a subject and interviewing other people. It makes you want to get out there and do more work. That's the key to SEO really right there - doing more work.

JAIME TARDY: It's funny that you mention that building relationships comes like crazy when you actually interview and I think that's one of the highlighted pieces that I don't get to talk about a lot and you probably don't either. When you're interviewing a guest you're so busy asking them what they need and how they can help your audience that there's the behind the scenes is oh wow, now we're friends and now we chat and wow, my business is growing because now I know all these other people and it's sort of the backstage kind of stuff that nobody really hears about.

Can you tell us about some of the relationships that you've been able to build? I mean you also had quite a few of them before you started your podcast, because it's newer, but any cool relationships that you've built because of your podcast?

YARO STARAK: Well the podcast isn't that new. It's actually, I only started that within the first year of blogging. So it's actually about six years old. It's not just something I did.

JAIME TARDY: Bad interviewer.

YARO STARAK: It goes back, because I've not been primarily a podcaster. I'm primarily a writer. I go through spurts of podcasting, maybe one a month here and there. I think my back catalog shall be 80 episodes over six years. So it's not heaps but it's funny to go back. My first podcast was me talking into a, it was an iRiver MP3 player because we didn't have, I think the iPod had just come out. Long story short, I started a long time ago. Relationships have certainly come from podcasting, or interviewing in particular. It doesn't have to be face to face. I think audio for me has always been my thing. I had to have a shower before this one. You're making me work, Jaime.

JAIME TARDY: I know, thank you for that.

YARO STARAK: Yes, especially for me in Australia because I don't get to attend all these events in the States. So I am missing out on a lot of contacts that I would otherwise be making by going to a few events. When I started podcasting, I was heavily involved in the internet marketing space. So I was a blogger, but I was crossing over into internet marketing a lot and actually I think I was one of the first people to bring those two worlds together in both what I was doing and writing about. I met a lot of what you might call people in the syndicate nowadays. I don't know what other phrase you call it.

The Jeff Walkers, the Rich Sheffren, Mike Filsame, John Reese. The Stomp Internet Guys Andy Jenkins and I am forgetting the name of the other guy. There's a lot of guys in that world obviously. Jeff Johns, there's a few and they're all like, most people will know about them because their materials have been going out for years and they all have done product launches. They're often responsible for any of that kind of dislike people have of the launch process, because a lot of emails go out and if you get two or three launches in the space of a month, it's heinous how much comes at you.

But when I was learning, these are the guys who said have an email list and I watched them and what they can do. I remember, who was it? One of the very, very early guys, he's actually a reasonable blogger, at least he was, I'm not sure if he still does it. I can't remember his name. He had a newsletter and he was initially an email marketer before a blogger and he was just writing on how he would write this newsletter to his 30,000 subscribers and have like $20,000 come back in commissions, within two days. I was like, wow, that's amazing. I was thinking what's the best lifestyle; well, write an email and have $20,000 come back.

JAIME TARDY: Smart, Yaro. That was good catch on that one.

YARO STARAK: It wasn't happening so that's why I was like maybe I should get into this email marketing business. I connected with these guys for the product launch formulas, but also in the blogging space. It's hard now, but back in the day, I had ear to ear with Darren Rouse and Brian Clark, who really nowadays it's hard to get a hold of those two guys. Like I've tried recently. They're both in charge of fairly large global, Farrens it's large footprint online, you know, with his photography. You'll see problogger and Brian has got the genesis and the studio press and all the other basically word press add ons and that's a multimillion dollar company, as well.

These guys are busy speaking at events. They're traveling all over the world. Back then though, they mailed for my initial product launch for Blog Mastermind. They gave me testimonials for my stuff and that came about, Darren, maybe because we're both Australian. I met him at a couple of events here and I've spoken at a couple of his events and Brian, I met him once at a product launch formula affiliate appreciate event, but I had spoken to him on Skype a few times. Kind of like what we're doing now. You get them for an interview and then you can ask when you got something that maybe they'll consider sharing. It's harder.

JAIME TARDY: I was going to say, because it does seem like nowadays you have to have a good relationship to even ask. I think Pat Flynn and I, I knew Pat Flynn for two years before I got a guest post out of him. He's going to hate that I said this but I was like, "Come on, Pat. We've been chatting every single week for two years. Come on, really!"

YARO STARAK: Pat is trying to control his ecosystem. You'd never go to Pat saying, we've tried this, but would you blast out our launch. It's just not his style. It's not going to fit nowadays with a lot of people. There are still plenty of people who are very keen on affiliate marketing. Brian Moran, his Facebook offer just recently, I mailed for him because I like the video he released. Actually, it opened my eyes. Oh that's how you use Facebook to generate leads. I was like I'll just share this with my people for that reason alone. He was my affiliate link too.

Then I was looking at the affiliates who were promoting him and there's still a bunch of people who are still constantly mailing for each other and it's not a world you necessarily want to get into with the reciprocation of product launches. I don't know, you get kind of jaded and you get too many emails and you worry about sending your people, your very hard-earned newsletter subscribers onto someone else's list who is then going to blast them with more and more junk. Like you're in a mastermind with Pat and a few other people. I think that's the best way to figure out what everyone's boundaries are and then work within what people expect nowadays.

So maybe it's a guest post and that's what you can hope for. Maybe it's a testimonial. I got a testimonial from Pat for a report I wrote recently. That's helpful. Pat's talked about me on his blog a few times. That's helpful too and I know, in the right frame, in the right subject matter, he will promote and I am certainly happy to do the same for him and now I'm open to listening to you, Jaime, because we've talked face to face. There's no guarantees with this thing. I think he's got another business partner named Lesley. He's taking over our "become a blogger" project, which we recently did a launch for. He's pretty much taken over the whole thing. He does all the videos. He does all the marketing. He does all the customer service and myself and Gideon have stepped back from it and that relationship came about first, because he was one of my very first students and did a lot.

He's an incredible action taker and I noticed he was very talented so I said, "Do you want to potentially take this over?" He was keen and so he did. He started looking at the future now because he's actually located in the USA, he's thinking about how do I get basically webinars. He wants to get on webinars promoting, first of all doing a teaching lesson to certain affiliates and then promoting our become a blogger product at the end of it. He's just done one with a guy named Adam Short from Niche Profit Classroom.

JAIME TARDY: Oh yeah.

YARO STARAK: I have promoted Adam a few times and Adam promoted with us and we always do well with each other. It's a great offer. That's a good example. That came about because of my preexisting relationship and Gideon's preexisting relationship with Adam and that allows Lesley to do promotions.

JAIME TARDY: It is about who you know. It's so funny, that's sort of the shtick, right? It's about who you know, but it truly is and nowadays it's more about friendships than just sort of going hey will you do this for me when I just sort of met you? We start to work with the people we like. We're lucky enough I should say to work with the people that we actually like instead of well he, I don't really like him very much, but I have to do this thing, because, you know. We're so lucky nowadays to be able to do stuff like that. You probably work with pretty much only people that you like.

YARO STARAK: Pretty much. I have worked with others. I don't like their marketing style. It's hard for me to judge their personality beyond what I see online. That's the other thing. Once you get to an event and hang out with someone it's different. There's so much behind the scenes stuff you just don't know about too. It's too hard for one person to manage everything. All you can do is work with what's in front of you and try and make the best decisions based on what you're doing. Is Pat really who he says he is? He seems pretty genuine.

JAIME TARDY: He is. Yes, unfortunately. No, no!

YARO STARAK: That could be going into, are you a massive pyramid scheme marketer?

JAIME TARDY: Oh yes, you're just really good at what you do, right? But I think that's what is so funny. I'm speaking at New Media Expo, which used to be called Blog World. So they have a new one coming up in Las Vegas in January and I am going to be speaking about podcasting there and it is really kind of amazing, especially to go in the speaker's room and then you can see all the people that are like the speakers in the blogging world and how cool they are. But they're having computer issues, you know what I mean? They're just people where everyone online is like oh my gosh you're amazing.

YARO STARAK: I think we all know what it's like though. I am not trying to say this too much on public interviews, but I used to play a card game called Magic The Gathering, which I have written about in the early days of my blog and that was when I was in high school and sort of a geeky first year university student.

JAIME TARDY: I played D and D, not Magic, but, yeah.

YARO STARAK: Really?

JAIME TARDY: I know, I though Magic was a little uncool. Sorry, keep going.

YARO STARAK: D and D is uncool compared to Magic. You guys were below us, I'm surprised. Wow, okay, anyway.

JAIME TARDY: Side note.

YARO STARAK: What was I saying? One time I was lucky and had a good result and made the Australian National Team in 1998 to go to the world championships in Seattle. It was like the highlight of my Magic career.

JAIME TARDY: I didn't know there were Magic careers. That's amazing that you had one. That's awesome.

YARO STARAK: I know, it's funny. My life before internet marketing. I go to the Stats and I am part of the Australian team and I was a pretty avid follower of all things Magic and there was a professional tournament series so I knew all of the players. I read about them in magazines. I followed the coverage online. There were certain players who were well known and just like you said about bloggers and the internet marketers how they're somewhat big fishes in small ponds, there are celebrity tribes. I got there and I played a few guys. I actually beat one of the guys who I admired and I lost to one of the other guys who was a well-known cheat and all these kind of things like that. I saw them outside of the actual tournament environment and it was so humbling because they're just normal people.

From that point forward, I never could look at a celebrity, at least unless they're like really huge, like a president or Oprah Winfrey or Gandhi or something like that where you go okay you're kind of a big deal. Fair enough. Or like head of the niche subject areas. I just saw them as normal people who did a bunch of things well and practiced and practiced and practiced. They had the same problems, they made the same sort of mistakes but they were just so knowledgeable of the industry they were in and the marketplace. They just know it. So they're less likely to make mistakes. They still do. They just know the space better and that comes about because of pure hard work and just a passion for the subject. That's really what separates I think the average person from the celebrity or whatever you want to call it.

JAIME TARDY: Thank you for that. That's awesome and that's why I am bringing millionaires on here. That's sort of the whole point. To go real person. People make spelling mistakes too. It's not that big of a deal. I think that's huge because, if someone, especially just reading stuff and going oh my gosh they're amazing, you'd have people come up and be like oh my gosh you're you! It's like yeah.

YARO STARAK: You've had that?

JAIME TARDY: Oh yes. I was at my, my husband is a performer and my husband, lots of people know who he is and all that stuff. I was at one of his shows and someone that listened to my podcast was like you're Jaime Tardy's husband. He was like I've never had that happen before and he came over and they were like oh my gosh, I love your podcast and I felt very cool. He's like you're like a celebrity. I'm like I'm from Maine. I don't think that really happens. I'm the biggest celebrity in Maine. No! I think it's just sort of funny because it feels weird to be called that now. I don't feel that big anyway, but it's really weird how people put that on you. I didn't say that. It's just put on you.

YARO STARAK: How did you get there? What did you do?

JAIME TARDY: Don't start interviewing me now, Yaro.

YARO STARAK: Like what have you done?

JAIME TARDY: That's sort of the thing. People think that because I interview millionaires that makes me really huge. Oh well now you know all of these millionaires. I'm like all it took was me asking them. I emailed you, Yaro. I didn't know you at all. You've interviewed some of my friends and that's pretty much it and I emailed you and you said, "Yes." I was like sweet, Yaro said yes. Awesome! You didn't know who I was or anything and I think that's what is sort of amazing. You go out and ask and it might be easier than you think.

Amazing. We're doing all these amazing tips. I know we're running a little bit long. I could probably talk to you for a really long period of time. But what I always do is I like to wrap up with one last question and it's what's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million?

YARO STARAK: Maybe we should just say, "Just ask." I mean that seems to be what we've come up with here. I think, in looking back over what we talked about today, it's probably more a case of the action takers win and the repeat action takers I think, from my point of view, there's any time you do something new, there's that horrible sense of repeat failure. Basically you're looking for any sign that will give you an experience that reinforces as step towards what you want. That's what you're dying for, whether it's make that first dollar online, lose the first kilo in weight loss, whatever it is you want to experience, because before then you're all about the positive thinking, having faith in the process, learning and studying and taking action, but until you feel that experience.

For me, the biggest thing was actually developing almost like I don't want to call it thick skin but just a sense of I will keep doing this no matter how many times I fail because this is the thing I want the most. It's as simple as that. It really is a case of you want this bad. Like I can't stand my full-time job, I've got to get out of it. I need to make this make a living online thing work. So I will keep doing it. Even if the one technique doesn't work or even one entire system doesn't work, I will keep trying until something does stick. You'll know if you don't have the passion whether it is sticking. So I think the thing to take away, to answer the question is, as an action step, is to really ask yourself are you prepared to continually face I guess the knockbacks and the negative mindsets and all those things and reframe it.

You have to keep reframing it. So any time you have a thought today that's like I'm just not getting the response I want or I keep doing these things and it's supposed to work and Yaro and Jaime said if I keep practicing and keep taking action, you'll get the results, being prolific wins, but nothing is happening yet. Those are the thoughts where you got to go slide them away, we don't need them, because they don't really help. They're really just a whoa is me self pity kind of thing and from my own experience, the hardest thing I've found is comparing myself to others with this situation, as well. It's so hard to go well they're succeeding and they did half of what I did.

Or they're just naturally more talented or gifted or whatever in this space so it's effortless for them. You know what, that might be true but you're working with what you've got. What else can you do? The most important thing is don't be a hindrance to yourself. Be your best cheerleader. You really got to be positive about what you're doing and kind of disregard everyone else unless you're using it as inspiration and get the job done regardless of what the real results today are telling you. Eventually you get there.

JAIME TARDY: Perfect. That's one of my favorite answers to that question so far, actually and I've done seventy something interviews. That's awesome. You eloquently put it; you can tell you're a writer too. So why don't you tell us where we can find you online, how we can follow you and watch all your stuff and get on your email list and all that fun stuff.

YARO STARAK: You know, I'm still going and I say this joke every time and I don't get tired of it. I'm going for the Madonna thing because my name is just really kind of unusual, Yaro, Y-A-R-O. If you remember that and you Google it, you will find my blog and everything I do. That way it's way easier to spell than entrepreneur which is my blog, Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. Terrible domain name so Yaro, Y-A-R-O. That's the easiest way to find all my work.

JAIME TARDY: They can Google that. Nice! You've got it. You're like Oprah.

YARO STARAK: You are so wrong!

JAIME TARDY: And sign up for, if you're listening to this on iTunes, make sure you look that up and sign up for his podcast too for sure, because it's great. Thank you so much for coming on today, Yaro. I truly appreciate it and maybe we can have you on again in the future.

YARO STARAK: Look forward to it. Thanks for having me.

Just to note, you can download the top ten tips from these millionaire interviews on the blog.

Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: blog, blogging, Business Growth, internet marketing, millionaire interview, Online Marketing, Yaro Starak

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Featured Millionaire Interview, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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