How to Get a Book Deal from Blogging with Millennial Revolution | Business Survival Livestream 013

Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present. 

We live. Yes, we are live the red buttons glowing. This is the moment where you can’t undress anymore. Alan, this is the stuff where people can actually see it. Now, no one knows what’s going on. This has happened on one of the live streams before and I think we still have video evidence. I’ve got a feeling we might push it a stage further tonight, because we’ve got some Mischief Makers that have joined us so we’re just going to wait a few seconds for said Mischief Makers before we get them introduced properly by the mighty Alan Donegan. Alright, let’s just check that we’re all up and running here. Oh, yes, it’s looking good. slight change of scenery tonight. We’ll explain a little bit more about that as we go through. Allen, you’re looking you’re looking you’re bringing the LA beard back. I’ve

noticed. I think that’s just the lack of shaving is it?

Are you going to chisel and you know, do that thing.

I shaved this bit off. So it’s looking reasonably smooth. But I do want haircuts. I brew I’d really like to get rid of the bush.

This reminds me of Mad Scientist when he when he initially first retired. And he the first thing for whatever reason he decided to do was grow this big long Santa beard, but it didn’t look good. It just looked like he was homeless. So he did. Yeah, he did. And I was just joking. And it kept getting longer and longer and finally talked to him. So it’s like I was telling you like Brandon Richard that you’re getting the more homeless youth are looking so like what’s up with?

I think you get to a stage where you don’t care. Because

Oh, he was a he was totally passed. He was yeah, he was quarantining before it was cool.

So look, guys, we’ve got a bunch of people jumping on. Please comment, we’re going to dive into some of the questions that we’d like you to ask in a short while. Please share this post so that lots of people get to see we are on a Facebook Live from the pop up business school broadcasting live from people’s bedrooms and a kitchen somewhere on the other side of the planet. Alan, I think it’s over to you. So the introduction.

Yes. Hello. Welcome, everyone to the live stream. And I’m really excited tonight, because I have my friends, Christy and Bryce. They have launched one of the most successful financial independence blogs about being nomadic and travelling around the world called millennial hyphen revolution.com. And they have also taken the practice of launching a blog and use that to become writers of the best selling book. And they weren’t the book quit like a millionaire, which has, we found it in Thailand, when we were out there in a bookstore there. It’s all around the world. I had great fun going to New York with them and looking in the bookstore there. And the book is actually excellent. And one of the reasons I’m so excited to have Christine Bryce on his they’ve actually had a huge impact on my life and the way I live with their knowledge, expertise and ideas. And I’d be wanting them to share that with the pop up people as well. So Christy and Bryce, thank you for coming on the show and welcome. Thanks for having a lovely to see you here. Lovely

I look um, before we get too much further into this, you too, are responsible for my business partner leaving the country and also for the longest serving team member of the robot Business School Henry, who you guys met with me and Alan last year, Henry decided to go nomadic now. I didn’t even I think this word didn’t exist in any of our lexicons until quit like a millionaire. The millennial revolution turned up in our lives. So could you please stop sending my team a bro Oh, look at that. I’m gonna come actually I’m gonna join you.

Oh, that’s the impact he was talking about. I would just I thought he was referring to when I introduce Alan to weed.

This I have to say

no, no, we didn’t do that. This is not evidence. I’m not admitting it. We’re not admitting anything. Yeah, it’s

lucky. Luckily, no one notice that I’m just gonna read out a few things from your website. Jack’s gonna post the link to manual revolution. He’s already done it. That’s because that’s the legend is that is Jack. So just on the Press page on your website, just to give people a flavour of, of blogging royalty that we have with us tonight, which is amazing. I mean, I bet the numbers are higher now. But the last time you updated your press page, your segment on CNBC had over for almost four and a half million views. And you’ve been quoted in New York Times. CNBC, CNN Business Insider yahoo finance the UK independent by made the Globe and Mail, Rockstar finance blogs JD Ross money boss JL Collins, the godfather of financial independence, and the list goes on and on and on. So the thing that went through my head,

we all like we all at once it sounds it certainly sounds like more important than we actually are.

Yeah, well, you wrote it. I love it. No, it’s phenomenal. And I think, you know, I know that there’s lots of people that are in the pop up business school audience that have either started a blog, or dream of having a blog. But sometimes they struggle to get started. Or if they struggle to get started the challenge. The challenge sometimes is maybe they’ll post three or four times, and I’ve been in this camp a few times, I get loads of energy for three or four posts. And then I struggled to get the momentum, and then I lose momentum. And I don’t visit again for a while. And I don’t and I wanted to take you back to the early days of the millennial revolution. Has it always been the millennial revolution? What was it like, you know, how did this thing start this journey? Because you’ve just achieved so many things with it. Oh, it’s

actually not our first blog. Exactly. It’s like our fourth

blog. Oh, yeah. The other three were abject Yeah. That nobody ever read.

Yeah, one of them was actually called. It’s like two nerds, one dream zero results. And that documented our horrible faceplant journey of becoming an author.

Well, you’d be the only one.

I think our even our parents didn’t want to read it. That’s how bad it was.

Yeah, so it really is. So this is our fourth iteration of the blog. The first one was called tuners wondering what was on our writing journey. The second one was called millennial millionaire. And that was basically just us bragging about. The third one was called FII. Academy, because I wanted to make it a little bit more academic and whatever. And then fourth one, we hit on 1 million dilution, that’s the one that took off. So it like so I totally intimately understand what it’s like to be like, I have this brilliant idea, write three articles, and then just like nothing happens. Yeah. And it sucks it doesn’t it because it’s like, you just don’t know when it’s going to. So the and you can kind of tell from the progression of those ideas that we had that we start off just like everyone else started, which is when we first wrote a blog, we wrote a blog talking about ourselves. And that was what everybody does, they kind of go it’s like, right, well, you know, right, right? Well, you know, you know yourself the most so people kind of right? Pretty, like talking about myself, here’s what I ate today sell pretty self centred things. And when it was only when we kind of, we realised kind of two things. One, which is a very pop up business II type thing, which is you have to help you have to be willing, your blog has to help your audience do something. Right, and for us, so it shifts your thinking of like talking about yourself, like talking about the reader, it also causes you to ask more questions, what do readers want help with? What do readers want to know about? And then kind of going to that? And then the second thing, which is a little bit less obvious, which is, we needed to find enemy to point out in yellow, a

common enemy, a common enemy

economy, and it was

not sounds familiar, Alan?

Yeah, yeah. So it was it was right after Trump got elected. And I was talking. I was talking to a friend of a mentor of ours that was a politician. And then we were talking about the election. We’re like, what, like, what’s going on? He was like, oh, yeah, that because he was he was in politics. And he ran elections before. He was just, like, just stand up and passionately yell at passionately talk about us versus them. And it works every single time. And I went back home, and I went, huh, who could I yell it? And yes, it was all people.

Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna talk about that. And I think I’m going to let I’m going to Alan dive in. In a second one. One more question that was on my mind is, when you when you started writing, you know, those first few iterations of blogging? Did you set out to write a blog? And then the blog become a business for you guys? Was that always the intention? Or did you start off with with different thoughts in your mind?

No, this actually, what’s really weird about this blog is like, in the beginning, we, when we wrote to nerds one dream, we thought that oh, yeah, this is going to take off this blog is going to be amazing. It’s gonna make a lot of money. So we had the intention of making money, versus this blog was really just born out of frustration and trying to solve a problem, right, which is what our peers, a lot of other Millennials are saying, We can’t afford to buy houses, our jobs are not stable. So all this advice, like the blueprint of finance that our parents gave us, completely doesn’t work. So it really was from that frustration, because I had the exact same problem, and then solving that problem for other people. So we never thought about making money for this blog at all. And that’s the one that actually was successful.

You know what the most frustrating thing is, when we were before we started doing the blog, we would have been writing and trying to become a novelist for like, five, seven years, something like that. And our idea, the idea was we’ll hit a best selling book and the cuz it’s can’t be that hard, and then the richest will follow and then we’ll party up with JK Rowling all day. And that didn’t quite work out. But when you’re we’re in that phase, we were begging people to read our like our manuscripts in this kind of stuff. And they were all just all the agents were slamming doors in our faces 200 rejections, and when we stopped trying to get

to 100, recover five years, I write three manuscripts

that fail, right now three full length manuscripts that were like 75,000 200,000 words each. That just went nowhere before we ended up getting published. And we got to a point where we were scared of our phone pinging because we’re like, Oh, my God, who just rejected us today kind of thing, right? So that’s, that’s kind of why writers tend to be the least happy people in the world. But anyway, that’s a whole nother that’s a whole other thing. When but when we stopped trying to get published, and we stopped trying to make money from a writing, and we started trying to help people, all of a sudden, people started throwing opportunities at us the quit like a millionaire that came out because a publisher from an editor from Penguin Random House, one of her clients, wrote a book and she was asking her for ideas. Hey, is there anyone that you find that’s interesting that I should reach out to you then her name is Faye? Well, she’s an actress in Hollywood. And then that person was just like, I read this blog, they’re really good. They helped me understand how all this like retirement stuff works, you should check them out. And then that’s when she came to me read our blog and said, Hey, would you like to write a book? And

our first response was? No, I don’t think so. No, our

first response was, first response was, Where the hell were you five years ago? Yeah. Right. And our second response is, no, thank you. We’ve been on the publishing merry go round for like, for like, so long, we don’t want to do anymore. So she ended up having like, convinced us to write the book, and then that became a best seller. So it’s like, it’s like, you know, it’s like dating with if you’re desperate, the the party, the person can smell it on you, and and then they don’t want to have anything to do with you. But if you’re just like, Yeah, let’s just do whatever, I don’t care, then all of a sudden, it works. It’s just

reversing this thing that I don’t know, I often talk about how we’ve built a business out of helping the people. That’s what Bob up has been about, right, since the very first course that that we ran and why we set it up. Alan, you’ve known these guys a long time now. And you’ve spent a whole bunch of time with them. And we’ve got time on some of those stories from Thailand, especially. But let’s just before we just before we get on that road, Alan, what I’ve got about a million questions for these guys. But I know you get some stuff into what’s on your mind for these guys. I mean, you know, thinking about the early days of them brought in and launching the millennial revolution, what grabbed you about them? And what’s on your mind?

Well, I think having listened to this, and I’d love the audience to take this away, is the number of times Christy and Bryce got rejected. Yeah, but going. And so many people come on our course, they send five emails and go, everyone’s rejected me. Sorry. Well, if you have approached five people, you’ve not approached everyone. You’ve not gone out there. And I think it’s that ability to go through rejection to get where you want to get to, whilst learning as you go, because I do think there is some magic ingredients. You can’t just take knows without ever improving. We have to take the know and get better. But like, how did you? How did you go through that? Like, how can we deal with 200 knows?

That’s a very good point. Because everyone see says, Everyone sees an entrepreneur when they’re already famous. And like, oh, Steve Jobs will cover he is I want to be that. But you nobody sees the long tail of string of rejections and failures and everything fired

from his own company. You don’t mean that’s a pretty safe plan.

So you don’t get fired from a company? Like Ed Sheeran used to live out of a car.

Yeah, he was homeless with Ed Sheeran. Yeah,

you’re gonna say something.

So I was gonna say, so having attended one of the pop up business business schools in Redding, I absolutely loved it. And one of the things that I really remember I was saying one of the things I remember Alan saying was, you have to know your why, like the why of why you’re doing this. The why is what gets you through all the obstacles. And that that was absolutely absolutely true. I knew that if I had died without actually becoming an author without learning how to write, I would regret it. So for me, the why was strong enough to wake up early every day before work and write and then write again, when I actually go home, and then skip out on all sorts of social activities and really funny events with my friends in order to stay in and write on the weekends. And then all through those rejections, even though it was really painful, and we were so terrified of our phone. I just I knew that I had to keep going. There was just no question about it. It’s like if I don’t do this, and if I die without becoming an author, then my life would not have been worth it.

Yeah, she used to when she used to walk past cemeteries. She used to be like, oh, yeah,

I was terrified because I was like, oh my god, I’m running out of time. I have to, you know, there’s so many things I want to do. But now that we’ve, you know, fulfilled our dreams. Now I can just go to a cemetery and just realise it’s a cemetery. If I die right now I’ll be perfectly happy and fulfilled.

She does have a flair for melodrama, which is why we’re writers, you know?

Well, I think it’s interesting about the why pulling you through those through that amount of rejection and to go through what you need, you need a really strong why otherwise, you’re just not going to go for it. But I’d love to talk about is, there is a cost to being a great blogger, there is a cost to being a writer, and you paid the price. Early, you worked in the evenings, you got feedback, you got rejected, you paid the price. And I think this is the bit people don’t realise is to be a successful entrepreneur. To do all these things. There is a cost The cost is not always money in fact, it’s rarely money. The cost is time energy, effort. Ego. There’s there’s other costs so egos,

egos a huge one. Who is it that the escape from people from reading

Katie and Andrew from time drop escape rooms?

Yeah, they I think they literally like the story that you tell about them, like going from room to room or from hotel to hotel, asking for room. It was literally like, every single store in reading all the way to the end. And then the last one said yes. But it’s like, everybody else would have given up like way beforehand. And that was the cost of it. You know, you know, keep saying no, but you keep going like I tell people that a writer is just a person who just refuses to take no for an answer. Like you just can’t get the hint that they don’t want you. How about now when I went out, I went out for years, you know,

I think that’s a massive, massive lesson for all of us that are, you know, in business, you know, whatever, whatever the product or the service is that you’re doing is that refusal to accept no for an answer is part of what I’m talking about, I guess the price that you pay is that you take the hit and you still keep going, especially if it’s something that you’re passionate about. And I often talk about this, like I read it somewhere I need to check my facts, but I’m pretty sure passion is Latin comes from the Latin Passio to suffer. And like hearing you talk about that it does, you know, you’ve actually skipped out on a whole bunch of fun things in order to get the writing done. So I wanted to invite people watching the live stream to ask questions. I’m going to suggest that perhaps if you have questions about blogging, if you have questions about getting a book published, if you have questions about about something, as I say, Oh yeah, press about how to get press attention because your list, it’s long and I’m really interested to know how that journey happened. Please post your questions in the thread and then we’ll put it to these guys. So whereabouts in Canada, are you right now? We are we’re not gonna come and find you.

We’re in Toronto, we’re like in smack dab in the middle of Toronto. And what’s been interesting about this pandemic is that Toronto is usually one of the last places we want to travel in because it’s so expensive. We left Toronto because it’s so expensive. But one of the interesting things about this pandemic is that because because there’s so many units of conflict condo units that have been bought up and then rented out as Airbnb s when the travel restrictions got hit hit every Airbnb just emptied out right so now like the which caused the Airbnb prices to absolutely crash. I mean, like, this place that we’re staying in right now usually goes for have to convert the pounds Goddamnit like maybe like 75 pounds a night. And right now we’re renting it for like 25 Yeah, 2025 pounds, something like that. Yeah, right tonight. So it’s like so we’re somehow like saving money while in the centre. It works in London, too. Because, as I show no Oh, yeah, we looked at London to central London is crazy cheaper. So

oddly enough, this month, we’re spending less money in one of the most expensive cities Toronto than we did that we spent in January in Thailand, just because there’s nowhere to go. And there’s no no way to spend money like entertainment, all that eating out, all the restaurants are closed. So we’ve actually had to learn how to cook,

which is we’re not happy about it all. But it’s one of the side effects of it has is is that proper living expenses massively.

You see you say this stuff very easily, but actually, and I’ve asked people to ask questions about the blogging and the publishing and so on, but the vehicle which has enabled you to do this and the things that you’ve been writing about the enemy that you’ve been fighting, you guys have got a very, very different approach to thinking about money. So anyone that’s watching this that hasn’t read your blog, or hasn’t read, quit like a millionaire. It really is fascinating stuff. And even just I remember when we sat down for about an hour, Bryce, I felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole in the sense that you know, you just position how you could be on a beach in Thailand, and actually making more money than if you were back in Toronto working. I mean, this is just crazy. I think what’s the bit that’s really getting getting interesting for me is The, the the enemy if you like. So I’m guessing that both of you had people in your family that would kind of say, no, no, no, this isn’t the way you do things you don’t retire at 30. Right? You know, you don’t make a career out of blogging, right? Someone with your education needs to be leveraging your degree and you need to be you need to follow the path, you need to follow the blueprint. And talk to me about that for a second. What was that like for you? Oh, yeah,

well, after I told my mom that I’m a millionaire, and I don’t need to work anymore. Her response was so odd you, you don’t even have a house. So that kind of shows you that mentality of, you know, our parents giving us this blueprint, you have to go to school, you have to get a job, and then be loyal to one company until you’re 65. And you get a pension, and you just buy a house. Right? And, and none of those. I mean, those things probably worked out really well, 20 years ago for our parents, but it doesn’t work anymore, like houses in Toronto is at least 10 to 15 times the average salary, like how can you afford that? And then the fact that they think you can just have one job and then work until you’re 65 and have a pension? I don’t know anybody that has pensions. Do you know, yeah, that doesn’t happen anymore. So basically, we’ve rewritten the rulebook, the money rulebook, we’ve rewritten it, and now we have a whole new blueprint to how to live to live your life. And it’s worked out much, much better than the old one that no longer works, right? So

sure, I mean, there’s pictures of Switzerland, there’s pictures of you drinking, the largest pint of beer, even a pint, it looks like two litres. And in a spa in Iceland, it was some hot springs, it looks like it’s sort of working for you. Where did the inspiration come from? What did you read? Who did you speak to? What was the moment when you remember going hang on a minute, this isn’t broken. There’s another way?

Yeah, it was the so we write in the fire space, which stands for financial independence retire early. And some of the earliest influences that we had were, you know, JL Collins, who wrote the book Simple Path to Wealth, Mister Money Moustache and those people. So from them, we kind of learned, okay, instead of taking all your money, and then buying as much stuff as possible, or even putting it into houses, as our parents were advocating, invested in a way that makes a passive income. So using index funds using bonds, and I’m not gonna get into the weeds here, because this isn’t really a finance podcast. But by doing that, you and doing it a certain way, when you have enough money invested like that, it starts spitting off passive income, and once every year, regardless of what the market does. So even now, when the markets like crashing right now, it’s still spending on passive income. And once that passive income is enough to meet your living expenses, then you can, then you don’t need your job anymore. And that’s when you can do whatever you want, you can retire and travel the world, you can keep working, if you’d like you can go follow a side hustle, you can go do that, you know, side business, you’ve always wanted to. That was the first part what we didn’t actually realise the second part, which is, when we started travelling, we could use travel to drop our living expenses even further. Because when you’re living in a place like the UK, it’s really expensive. But when you’re living in things like Thailand, you can drop your expenses by like half while increasing your quality of life. So what we realise is that by combining the lessons that we learned from the fire space, like the financial investing part of it with travel and digital nomadism, you could have the best of all worlds, or you could be sitting on a beach in Thailand or Southeast Asia, or drinking wine in Portugal or in Prague is in Poland. Not right now, like not this instant right now. But like normally. And while having while having your money invested properly, you could actually it’s possible to actually be making money while while vacationing so like you can. Yeah, so that’s what we realised. And that’s what we kind of went, Whoa, that is a really weird, like, confluence of things that we realised that’s what the book in the blog are about how to make money while vacationing.

This This sounds like a thing that every bird should be reading. And what was the moment when you realised that there was a different route to cash? And how does your attitude to money and the blueprint for life coincide with these guys?

Well, I think it’s quite interesting. My I think my dad showed me there was a different way because he broke all the rules. He also showed me that that ends up in prison occasionally. Break and then I think I tried to follow the traditional path and get a job but it just wasn’t working for me. So I started reading the books. And eventually I started going. I think I realised that doctors, judges, all these people in positions of power, don’t get it right regularly. They get it wrong and the As soon as I saw that, like I stood in court and a judge told me, No, this is the law. And I break the law, I knew it wasn’t true. And we had that argument. And he ruled against me. And then I managed to overturn him in court, I started to realise, it’s not the way people tell you, they’re just all making it up. All of this stuff is made up by someone, all the rules, all the stuff is made up. And you get to decide there are obvious rules, like don’t kill people, like don’t do that. It’s not what I’m talking about. But the rules of here’s how I want to live, here’s how life is here’s how businesses, most of it’s made up by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. So let’s come up with a different way. Because times are changing and things are changing. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

I love the good news that you’re not planning on killing anyone. I don’t we heard it here first on the pop up business school Facebook livestream. Not currently, actually is the Yeah, exactly. This whole blog series that we’re doing is called the pop up Business School Survival Guide. And it doesn’t really work with that. So that’s really nice. Yeah, yeah. Well, we’ll edit that back out. Luckily, it’s not live. Oh, no, wait a minute. We’ve got some really, really cool questions in the thread. I just wanted to visit a couple of those one of them. I think the first question that I saw is from Jennifer Mar, and you’re getting lots of love from Jennifer Maher, who has read your book, Jennifer has said, She’s asking for tips about newbie content creators. And I guess if the question I can fire at you guys was, you know, if you’re, if you were starting a brand new blog based on your experiences of succeeding, and a few kind of early ones that you say that no one read I’m not sure I believe you. But I really want to read the two notes when by the way. But yeah, I guess she’s asking for some tips for content creation for you know, if you’re a newbie to blogging, what would your tips be? What would you be doing if you started a brand new blog tomorrow morning?

Yeah, so one thing that was really helpful for us, just learning from the four, four blogs that we created is write 100 topics. To assess whether that blog is you’re going to be able to sustain that blog, you’re going to be able to consistently write, because what the thing with blogging is you need to be able to love writing, and you need to, in the beginning, write at least two to three times a week to get that content going to get the audience. So I would sit down and write like whatever topic you’re thinking of doing for your blog, write 100 topics and see if you can do that, because that’s going to show you whether that topic has fertile ground or not

remember how to make bubble tea that was a site that we came up with.

Yeah, did not have topics. We talked about how to make bubble tea. I just spent the entire time drinking bubble tea and not writing anything. So we’re done. Yeah.

That’s great advice. I tend to just launch into things and then realise that I’ve run out of stuff to say, I’ve done that a couple of times. And what’s your what’s your approach to content creation? Because you’re fairly new to blogging, or certainly blogging consistently? Through Alan donegan.com? We need to stick that link in there, too. I’m sure Jack will do that for us. Alan, what’s your approach to content creation?

I have two main approaches. The first is I regularly talk to people about their businesses and their ideas, and they tell me their problems. That gives me all the content you could ever need. Right? You could write about what’s going wrong in their businesses. What you could do, and my whole blog is, how can I help people? And it’s basically based on the subjects that I’m really interested in? How can I help people, build businesses make money, have fun, live a rewarding life? There’s a little bit of financial independence in there, because I love that stuff. And I’ve been learning it myself. And I focus on how can I help people and what problems can I fix? That’s, that gives me 20 ideas a day. And you should see the list of blocks I’ve got. But I think there’s an interesting question in there from Kathleen harsh Simon that says, When do you decide the blogs not working? Because we beforehand, when did you decide to ditch those three? And how long did you work on them before moving on?

I think it took us about what a few months at least Yeah, I would say maybe around the six months point we realised you know what, this is just not going anywhere. Right? You have to consistently do it for a while before you realise that it’s not working because you don’t want to give up too early. But at the same time, you don’t want to just continuously, you know, put your head down and not really look at the big picture and then waste a lot of time.

That being said, I want to change the wording a little bit than that, you know, you’re not abandoning a blog or you’re not abandoning a writing project. The more you write, the better you get. So the journey of like it’s almost kind of like irrelevant when you switch from one blog to the other. And the thing is, you don’t have to like, just because you are changing the blog, okay, I’m going to write from this thing I’m going to, I’m going to turn from writing about this thing to this other thing, it doesn’t mean that you’re giving up, because everything that you did everything that we did on all the failed manuscripts on all the the failed blogs, were, it was a stepping stone and helping us build the skills necessary to make the blog that eventually did take off work, right. So you don’t have to, you know, you don’t have to kind of have that kind of commerce, you know, look at your blog says, like, Okay, I give up. If you if you think of another topic that you think will be more fertile ground, you don’t have to kill that first one, you can just build that second one. And then you can see like, kind of where it goes, sometimes you really can’t tell which one, which one takes off. And you and, you know, it can take you by surprise. But the important thing is with, with blogs, you don’t have to shut anything down. It’s not like a storefront, we have to give up the lease. And then you go like, well, that restaurant failed, you can have like three or four blogs, running at the same time, and then just see which one takes off, which is kind of the approach that we use.

It’s kind of like pivoting like you have to be flexible enough to pivot from one idea to the other. If you figure out parts of it is working. And then I’m gonna, you know, just pivot into a different type of data

and was writing it does feel sometimes that that this article like this was a waste or something like that. The fact is, every article that you write, you get a little bit better. So really no article is a waste.

Question from I’m just going to dive back into the thread in a second. There was a question a bit of love for the bubble tea, I think you might have a reader for the bubble tea, someone’s asking the question, What’s bubble tea? Can you just give us 30 seconds on bubble tea as, as on behalf of Canadian bubble tea bloggers, just to help explain what bubble tea is for our audience.

Okay, so this is a drink that unites all Asian people. Like we were literally in Germany in very small town called Athen. And I found one Chinese restaurant that actually had bubble tea. And as soon as I took it, I went outside, like five Asian people came up to me and said, Where did you get that in German. So it’s basically tea with milk, and theirs comes in different flavours, and you drink it out of this big massive straw. And the reason why the straw is so big is because there’s these little round like black balls of tapioca that are really chewy that come through the straw. So it’s kind of like, like a snack and a drink at the same time. But for people who drink it the first time, I’ve had friends who almost like ended up in the hospital because the bubble tea got stuck in their lungs. And so that’s so be very, very careful when you’re drinking bubble tea for the first time. Yes,

this is supposed to be the survival guide here. I’m starting to get a bit nervous about a couple of the conversations today. I love that. There you go. That’ll help. That’ll help these understanding of bubble tea and a few others, I’m sure as well. Alan, what’s on your mind?

Well, there’s a question here from Helen that I think is really useful. Helen Lawson, thank you for the questions. A really good one. Helen says I’ve been asked to collaborate on a book that fair, I might be very things in to feedback. How do you cope with negative feedback? And I know, that’s about this, but how do you cope with it? First,

I just want to say that is completely normal, like the first time that we sent out a query letter, which is basically a summary of our first manuscript, we couldn’t even look at the response coming back to us, like we saw the subject. And then we said, Oh, my God, okay, then we just kind of ran into a room and then refused to open the email for an entire day, like we had to psych ourselves up. And then when we read it, obviously, it was rejection, and it sucked. And then we were sad about it for an entire week. So it’s perfectly normal to feel that in the beginning, I think what really helped us is having support, like having a writers group of other people who are going through the same thing, so you don’t feel like you’re alone. And it takes time to build that Teflon skin. And you just need to support and you need to kind of it’s like exposure therapy, right? The more you do it, the more rejections you get. And after a while you you can separate yourself from the failure like you, you are not your rejections, it’s just a way to actually learn, right? That’s just part of the process. But I would say support and then just exposure therapy to failure over time.

But you also have to be careful where you get the negative feedback where you get the feedback from negative feedback is the month is the most valuable thing you can get in in from a writing a book as well as in business and anything like that. But you have to be careful where you’re coming, where it’s coming from, if it’s coming from another person who is kind of in the same boat as you like a novice, it’s not nearly as valuable, you kind of need to seek out people who are better than you to act as a mentor, because then that feedback is very, very, very valuable when they say this character is not working for this other reason, then, then that really means something. But if it’s just your cousin saying like put more vampires in, it’s like that’s not useful.

We actually had a rule that was quite helpful later on for a site like figuring out what feedback is useful and which ones are not. Because sometimes you get feedback from literary agents that saying this character is very strong, and then another agent will say this character is too weak, and you’re like, they’re all opposing views. How could that be? Because it’s subjective. So then we made the rule that if like, We send it out to a bunch of readers, and the same piece of feedback keeps coming back, then we know that it’s something we need to fix. But then if one person says one thing, another person says the opposite, then we get to choose because it’s, it’s just subjective. Yeah, it’s not that what

about what about the, I mean, you’ve got 1000s of subscribers, that people that leave comments on your social media, or on the blog, if you experienced any negativity, or any nasty stuff that comes through social media, and so on. And how do you handle that? Is it a similar approach? Or do you do something different?

I don’t know, does 1000 hate comments on the CBC, which is like the CNN of Canada account, where everyone’s like, you’re like, I hate you, You’re terrible. You’re probably you probably have a rich daddy. And that’s why you’re rich. And like, 1000 hate comments. Does that count?

Yeah. So yeah, that would count. I guess that’s in that territory. Yeah.

That is significantly less, less useful. Because again, they will just like, they will just say like, opposite things. The same people will say, Oh, I love this. I love this article about people, I hate this article. Again, it’s, you have to find a peer group that is either at the same level of blogging, or, ideally, better. So if if Money Moustache, for example, said oh, this is a really good article, or this is really like that, that would mean something a lot stronger than like the 1000s of hate comments from before. Because when you are trying to write a blog, hate is not necessarily a bad thing. Because you when you are trying to write something on the Internet, what you’re trying to get is elicit an emotional reaction and or our reaction of some kind of thing. The like, so when people say, Oh, I love this, I love your blog. That’s great. If people say I hate that blog, that’s less great. But it’s still good, because they’re still reading. The worst reaction is indifference. Right? So that’s kind of why it’s, especially when it comes to, to find this blog. So I keep telling people take a stand on something because a lot of people just kind of say, here’s how a 401k works. And they don’t have any opinions, they don’t take a stand in everything, because they just want to be neutral. And please everyone, which just ends up with everyone just bored and leaving. So you have to kind of take a stand on something. And if the hate mail comes, then that’s actually a sign you’re doing it. Right.

Right? Is that how you grew the Teflon skin? Because you believed in what you were doing? Is there? Was there anything else in the early days, you know, those first few nasty comments that came through? How did you make sure that you stayed? How did you make sure that you got up the next day and kept writing I guess, was what was on my mind?

Cuz I’m a vindictive bitch. And I’m like thinking, Okay, I’m gonna prove every single one of you wrong. And then I’m gonna, like, take my success, wrap it around a lollipop, and then just send it to you because you can just suck it.

Which is the probably the cleaner version of the other version. I’ve heard.

This lollipop goes.

I can guess, Alan, follow that.

We had a James Christiansen question, which was, what are some ways to get eyes on your new blog? And I know you’ve got a different strategy to most on that.

So the traditional strategy is, you know, figure. So first, identify the audience, figure out what problem they have, and then go find them. So go figure out where that audience is going to complain, right? So if you’re writing, if you’re writing a like, if you’re if you’re writing stuff on real estate, like you would go to say, a site like BiggerPockets, which there’s all these forums in which people, you know, complain about their tenants in this kind of stuff. So that’s one, that’s an option that tends to work out really well. Another one is targeted Facebook advertising it which Jack and then which Jack can do his entire thing about what worked really well, for us specifically, is because mainstream media, so we, we kind of when our blog launched, we got a story into the CBC, which is the Canadian BBC, you know, that kind of thing. And that went everywhere. They they wrote the byline, or the headline, as you know, millennials get rich by not buying a house, which is sacrilegious in Canada, right. So that kind of generated all this traffic. And then that launched the blog. And then from there, we just been writing media ever since that’s a strategy that’s been working out really well for us. And I guess, so that was good in that we we figured out how to pitch to reporters and get them to cover our stuff because everybody pitches reporters being like, Hey, would you like to write about me? Would you like to write about me and they get a million pitches a day? What worked really well for us was we found and researched the heck out of the reporters and what kind of beats that they that they covered. So this particular reporter with the CBC, she covered a lot of real estate stuff right and she covered a lot of people frustrated by how expensive rents were and and how expensive living in the city is. And she did a lot of this millennial, you know, millennial, like, you know, millennials can’t make it this these days in this kind of stuff. So when I knew that she was already interested in this kind of in this kind of material, so when we pitched her, we kind of went, This is Our Story, like we’re willing to be willing to talk about that. Here’s what we did. We got We became millionaires. We got rich by not buying a house and oh, yeah, we’re also millennials. And then she wrote back within like two minutes. Yeah, she’s like, Yes, please. And then we set up a time to talk. So it’s about so with the media, it’s important to know who the reporter is, what they write about, and what their own personal biases and opinions are. And then kind of present your story as a gift wrapped gift to them. Nice. So then they just kind of go, Ooh, a tree. Ooh, and easy, like an easy because when one of their articles goes nuts in views, they look good. Yeah.

So do you help someone do their job? They will love you. Yeah, they will jump to help you. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. We’ve got some money questions. Theresa is interested to know, she wants us to roll our sleeves up and get into the money stuff. So. So millennial revolution was born out of the three previous pivots that you’ve done, and you start writing, at what point did monetization happen? And what did that look like for you guys? And how did it feel?

I think it’s a staged process. Because in the beginning, we weren’t thinking about monetization, then the media hits came in. Because of that CBC article, we had 55,000 views in one day. So then at that point, we’re like, we should probably turn on Google advertising, because right now, we’re not doing any monetization whatsoever. So that was the low hanging fruit. And that’s completely okay. Because in the beginning, you don’t know what you don’t know. Right. So that’s the only thing we knew about which was Google advertising. So we put that up. And then as a result, this is like, again, it’s an staged, ongoing process. As we kept writing, people were saying, Oh, you’re talking about investing, you explain it really well, can you make some sort of investment series or explain it in a way that we can understand. And then so that came, as a result of people’s recommendation, we made the investment series, and it’s performing really well because of affiliates. So we like our so our manifesto is basically we don’t want to charge people like, we think that financial advice should be free and accessible to everyone, regardless of what your net worth is. So we made the workshop completely free, very, like, you know, not to Alan and his model. So like, we want to help as many people as possible. And then so that started performing as a result of affiliates. So the affiliate income was from people who actually sign up to the brokerage that we recommend. And then that was the second level. And then later on, as we did more research on advertising, we realise, hey, Google, AdSense is really bad, like, you get a lot of hits, but then they pay you very small amount of money. The reason why so many people use it is you don’t really need to have a certain amount of readership, anybody can just sign up. And then we discovered an AdWords network called Media vine. And then what media vine requires is that you need to have at least 25,000 sessions, so approximately, like 50,000 views per month, before they will agree to partner with you. So then at that point, we had actually reached a level of readership that was beyond that. And then that was so much better than Google AdSense, it was like 5x, the amount of money and then

third molars selling your product. So so that’s, you know, we wrote the book. We publish it with traditional publishing. But then we put a, like a big banner for our own book on the side of our site. And so that, and then we use the affiliate link for Amazon. So now when people click through to buy the book, we get money from the royalty, then we also get money from the affiliate income from Amazon, and we get money from the advertising banners and all that kind of stuff. So that’s the kind of business model that we used. Yeah. So there’s other models that you can use, like subscription models, Patreon. That kind of thing. It didn’t, we tried all those, it never really quite worked for us. But this is kind of the model that we figured out. It seems to work.

I just feel like I just want to start writing. Can we end this early? I feel like inspired to just get on with it. Did you ever feel like giving up? That was one of the questions. Did you ever feel like you know what, I’m tired of this? I’m not enjoying it. And that was? And if so, what made you keep going? And if not, why do you think that was? I think I think a

bit your projects? We did. Yeah,

we kind of just like it was so painful.

This isn’t going yeah, I’ve learned that I can’t write romantic arcs. I wrote an entire why a novel in which it was supposed to be this, like the the two romantic leads. And then one of our readers read it and then said, Oh, I thought that guy was gay. And I went, god damn it. Okay, we’re not doing that again. So I can’t write romantic arcs. So I’ve learned that about myself. But so yeah, we do give up on individual projects, but not the craft.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there are some points in which you should give up. Like, there’s some projects in which we were trying writing we’re like, this is not working at all. Like, why are we trying to jump into writing about like Angel fiction or like Vampire fiction, because we’re trying to jump on the Stephanie Stephanie waggon Ben bandwith Stephenie Meyer bandwagon. Yeah, it’s like well, that that’s that ship has sailed. So why do we Why do we keep doing that? There are some times in which it just so many rejections, you just need to take a break. Like it just affects your mental state so much that we’re in such an emotional state that we just can’t we just need to take a break. Like sometimes you’re just like, we’re just not going to write for a week. Just need to get some distance from it and then come back to it. Yeah,

you Do get very emotionally needy after. Yeah, needy writers now I totally understand. And then you you start stalking people online?

Oh yeah, there was a lot of Twitter stalking of agents. Oh, I heard this crazy story from one of the literary agents we became friends with. He went to a Writers Conference. And he went into the bathroom and he closed the stall. And as soon as he sat down the toilet, somebody took their manuscript and shoved it under the stall, to force him to read it, and they wouldn’t. Yeah.

I don’t think he’s I don’t think you got sign. Yeah, I

don’t know. Have you ever followed any business prospects to the toilet?

And what kind of business were you got? Were you looking for? In fact?

I did actually have an incident in Winchester Starbucks after I have heard this. Yes, he did have my presenting skills course for many years, it was one of the stories about gaining eye contact in an inappropriate place.

I think we’ll pause there for that one. So look at Alan, the thought that went through my head, whilst we’ve got these guys here. Both of you have experienced pitching content recently. You know, TV content, blog content, book content, and so on. What’s What lessons have you learned about pitching? That? Perhaps surprised you? I mean, Alan, you’ve been pitching for years. I’m sure you guys have as well, Bryce and Kristi, like, but what you know, what are your recent learnings from pitching content to the media and to other potential buyers of the stuff that you’re creating?

Teaching is a very like, it’s a very, like succinct art form, right? It’s almost like telling a joke. It’s like trying to get your idea across in as few words as possible. Like if you can’t distil your idea down into like, 15 or 20 seconds, then you need to, like you need to keep working on it.

So one thing that helped us a lot, again, like everything that you learn, even if you give up on a project, that skill is useful later on, you just don’t know when it’s going to come in handy. So while we were writing fiction, we entered some writing contests in which you have to distil your pitch down into 140 characters, because it’s a tweet, right? So that was very, very useful. And you do that multiple times for many, many agents. So later on, when we actually were pitching to the media, we knew that shorter is always better than longer. So we try to distil it down into a Twitter pitch. If you can’t distil your business idea down into 140 characters you need to work on it.

I remember we were in a pop up with you, Alan reading and it was one of the one of the students was like trying to explain this like really complicated like business idea. Solar,

I think, as a solar jacket, right?

I know it was someone else that I’m referring to. But at the end, Alan kind of went around and be like, does anybody know what she just said? Like what her business is? And then everyone like blink, blink, like nothing. And then, and I was like, I think you’re getting some feedback here. Right? So like, people tend to be very long winded, but it’s Yeah, pitching is pitching. It’s like it’s like a very, I forgot about the Twitter pitch.

Shorter is always better. Yeah, sure. is always better than longer. Yeah.

I think it’s just, I love how you can see. He’s trying to get to that he realises. Oh, come on.

Sorry, I don’t think Go ahead.

So I’ve just added in that, for me, the way I practice pitching, and it won’t work for everyone, but it’s kind of similar. You’re sending them in tweets. I do it verbally. So I will distil down and I’ll go okay, here’s my two minute pitch. And I’ll tell someone, and I look at their face and go, what was their reaction? Did they smile? Did they lean in? Yeah, they look at you and go. What was their reaction, and then I take our pitch, and I repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it to everyone. And actually, some of the magic of pitching is telling people you don’t expect anything to come from. Because you never know they’re going to say oh, you should speak to them, or this should happen here or, and you just practice that pitch 200 300 400 times telling different people and always refining it, to try and find the words that elicit the response that you’re looking for, which is engagement, or excitement and all of that other stuff.

Yeah, and for people who are trying to write books out there, your title is you should treat your title as a pitch. Right? Yeah, but when you read the title, you should it should inspire and it should, it should ask a question like what we’d like to do with our titles is we like to, in as few words as possible create a juxtaposition inside the title. So quit like a millionaire is a juxtaposition because why would a millionaire need to quit? Right? And the other books that we like when we started figuring out that technique, because immediately you kind of go Huh, right. So the other books Like, like the other books that we did, there was one angel fiction that we wrote in which nobody wanted to read it. And it was called the other side. It’s about it’s, you know, we were talking about like the afterlife in this kind of stuff. And then when we kind of went and we kind of learn how to pitch and how to do this juxtaposition thing we retitled it staying dead. And then because this person couldn’t stay dead, right, so all of a sudden, people kind of went, Oh, that’s why do they want to? They want to stay dead? Right? And why can’t they stay dead? So a title is a very, very, it is pitching in an extreme, like, in a, in an even more intense version of it.

I feel like there’s new pitches from the Alan Donegan brain that I need to hear, because you’ve been pitching to TV recently. And I’m fascinated to know exactly what you said in those pitches, because we’ve not really had time to talk about it with all of the other things that seem to be happening around us at the moment. But this thing about pitching and it’s something you’ve done for a long time, isn’t it? You pitching differently from what you would have taught a few years ago? You know, how does your as your your model for pitching evolved from what we’ve been teaching a pop up for all these years?

No, I think I, I think with any of this, actually, it’s doing the basics really well. So the basics of pitching are, ask questions and find out what they’re interested in. Because you can’t pitch until you understand what they want. Then, pitching, get them excited. Like, exactly as Bryce said, as quick as you can, how can you get them excited? What’s the real small line? And then it’s only then that there’ll be interested to hear the rest. I think it’s about the, it’s about doing the basic, really, really, really well. And actually putting thought into it. I think a lot of people treat pitching as I’m just going to word vomit over the other person. Yes. And just destroys. When people do that, to me, I just I shut down inside.

I’ve seen that happen many times. It’s like a small piece of Alan just died. Please don’t word vomit over him ever again.

happens. So it happened so often happens, what we were watching, because we were in Thailand with our friend of ours. And she was trying to come up with a podcast. And she was trying, she was trying to still developing the idea. And we could see kind of as she pitched it over and over and over to people her refining and refining it, refining it. And because initially, you should just word vomited. Like Alan and then Alan just got confused, right? She was kind of saying, Oh, it’s talking about I’m really good at conflict resolution, and I want to bring together different generations and and then I’ll just kind of went, what, and then we just kind of okay, you know, it was like, Okay, keep trying, keep trying, keep trying, keep trying, keep, keep pushing it, but make it shorter every time until eventually she got to the end of our time in Thailand. And when she quits, you will just call like, it’s a podcast where Asian people complain about their parents. It’s called baggage. And everybody got it. I never just kind of like, I want to complain to my parents, I want to sign up. And I was like, I was like, there you go. There, you got it. She liked it. I get it, I get it. Right. That was the first thing, the first project she’d ever tried to pitch on. And she got it. And then she figured it out. But it took like, you know, the developed dozen tries, but she got a little bit better every time. It’s not, it’s not rocket science. Just, it’s just when someone’s eyes glaze over. That doesn’t mean oh, they hate my idea. It’s pitched better.

I think we also get a lot of pitches from people who want to write on our blog, or people who want to partner with us. And most of them are just, again, word vomiting, right? I think the the ones that works and gets my attention is when they focus on the benefit rather than the feature. So they’re say they’re saying like, I want to do this, because this will benefit your blog in this way, rather than let me tell you about myself. And then like three paragraphs. Yeah.

Very nice, very good tips, that you’ve just given away a tip for pitching to Christie and Bryce, for their blog, which you might get a few more pitches from some of the audience now. I wanted to ask you this a few questions here about about getting granular over the writing process, I guess. It’s a few questions, I’ll just sum them up. One is about whether you use a shedule. Another is about how do you push through with writing when you’re not necessarily feeling the energy that particularly there, you know, do you write to a schedule? Have you got a strategy for that? And do you use any apps? Or, you know, do you use you know, voice activated stuff to help you get the words out? Or do you type do you handwrite what does it what does all that stuff look like for you around the content creation?

I know we’re actually quite different it depends on the personality to like what tools we use because for you, you tend to be more like cerebral in your head so you tend to like work it out and then just write it for me I’m more tactile so I actually physically like to Allen’s post it like the thing that I like to do which is use posters, I do something similar with cue cards, and I sometimes write in a notebook. So I think it depends on the has to fit your personality. One thing that i Another tool I found is really helpful for writing books is Scrivener. Because Scrivener allows me to because I’m not a type of person that just writes linearly I think you do Linear, right? It works really well for you. So your documents is perfect for you. But for me, I have little pieces of ideas. And sometimes I need to rearrange them and sometimes I need to replace them. So Scrivener was really good in like chunking the ideas down to like letting you separate it. So that okay, I need to write 70,000 words, okay, I’m going to divide and conquer. And I’m going to do that in the next nine months. Okay, so that means like, you’re going to write 3000 words, I’m going to write 3000 words, but then it allows you to chunk it down to like, Oh, I’m gonna write six 500 word sections. And then now I can move the sections around. So Scrivener was really good and helping me have that flow without it. Like forcing it to be linear

Scrivener is one of these things where it’s other writer will love it or hate it. And it has a personality there.

I’ve actually watched Bryce’s process quite regularly and Bryson’s to go around and tell everyone the same story for about a month. And then a month later, there will be an article on it. And that’s basically what I’ve watched him do, and I think is genius. He just pitches it talks about it talks about it sees people’s reactions, and it’s very clever, very clever.

It’s the Yeah, so that that does happen. And then the articles then, like, then become aggregated into a book. And then like, that’s, that’s kind of how the, the book is almost like a crowdsource best hits of the blog, which is really a really, really cool thing about blogging, because when you write a book, if you just go straight into publishing, it’s really hard to figure out whether it’s gonna be six, whether anyone’s gonna like it or not, because the process of writing a book takes a while for us to like a year, once you’re actually sell the damn thing. The process of it going out into the stores takes another year. And so you have this two year gap between what you write and in hitting the audience. And so you have no idea what like what whether they actually wanted or not, a blog is much more like a much faster, more direct way to access to audience they leave a comment, they you have the views, you can tell what it is that they want stand up comedy is probably the most direct feedback you can get because within a half a second, they laugh or they don’t write. So in terms of like a book to stand up comedy like that’s that like that. It’s this wide spectrum of how fast your feedback loop is. So blogs are great, and that that feedback loop is relatively fast. And then from there, you have a pretty, you’re pretty confident that when you turn that into a book, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what the audience wants.

This is awesome, absolutely brilliant. We’ve got loads of people saying thank you in the thread for sharing your knowledge and advice. I’m going to hand over to Alan for his closing thoughts in a moment because I cannot believe that an hour has gone by. And I think I mean, I’m kind of up for pushing on through till dawn. I’m not sure if everyone else would be as excited about that. But I guess the thought that went through my head, Alan, just before we sort of go to you for closing thoughts and so on. What’s your strategy for writing? What tools do you use? And is there a bio rhythm in it for you? You know, can you do kind of always go? Yeah, first thing in the morning is when I like to write, that’s when I can really flow? How do you get over writer’s block.

So in terms of tools, blogging, I actually like to do it straight into Weebly, because I can throw in the title and then work on that I can throw in the pictures and work on that. And I put all the elements together and I can see it coming together. And I really like the actual creativity of it. In terms of writing other articles, I use OneNote to capture all my ideas.

use OneNote to capture everything in his life. If OneNote ever goes down lol know how to like get groceries. Yeah, I will just

collapse. I think we should arrange that was Microsoft just for a joke just for an hour just to see what happens.

Watch his head explode live.

OneNote is an excellent capturing tool Evernotes another version, use whatever you want. But you need a way to capture ideas. And I have a big note page that is blog ideas. Every time I have a blog idea or someone says you should write about this. I’ll put it in there. I think it’s over 100 in there so far. And I have about 25 in development on my blog. Like, you need to capture the ideas as they come to you. How do you get over writer’s block? Sometimes I get to a point. So like, when I was writing my movie, I actually wrote two movies at the same time. I read a romantic comedy, and it was going to be a superhero movie, but it turned out vigilante movie. But when I get stuck on the ramen calm and I need a break, I go and write about death and violence and crime. And I feel a lot better. And then I come back to Romans and I was back on it. So sometimes it’s not about forcing yourself through creative blocks. It’s about taking a little bit of space to allow your brain to work on it and then coming back when you’re ready to write it. But the thing I always did was kept writing about something and that would keep me going But if I get blocked on one subject, I’ll take some time and come back to it.

You know, Bryce and I were both smiling at the fact that if the romance wasn’t working, you like to write about violence instead. And there’s a therapist would have a field day with that one, Alan.

Oh, yeah, that’s that’s a textbook somewhere.

Look, we’ve had viewers, we’ve had people watching the Facebook Live from from all over the place, as we normally do. We’ve got Chad, who I know you guys know from California. We’ve got David in Boston, David. Just as a point of order. David said that it’s the difference between schedule and schedule. I think I might have said shedule. And he’s made a comment about that. So let’s just have that right. A quick question from Chad was about if you’ve got to move a blog, you know, what do you do? Do you leave the blog where it is? And change the content? Do you move the posts over? Have you got any experience of moving blogs from one platform to another, and all of that kind of stuff. If for whatever reason you feel you’ve got to move something over?

It’s, it’s a little tricky. If there, oh, boy, when you say move a blog over I’m not Chad, we’ll talk about this. In addition, because it’s a bit technical. If there’s a lot of Google like links that are already going to your existing blog, then you kind of have to do like a migration over using like what are called 301 redirects and this kind of stuff, so that Google knows, oh, this article is now over here, that gets kind of complicated. So that’s a little bit more more involved. But if you need to, if you need to move it over to another server, you can do that invisibly by just changing your host or changing your blogging platform. But if you want to move it to a completely new name, and a completely new domain, just do it and and then just have a just and then just set up your existing blog to then automatically redirect people that go to your old blog that then come they can forward it to your new blog, you know, that whole like, we’re redirecting, you click here for fun, if it doesn’t happen in five seconds. So you need to set that up. So that’s more of a technical question. And we can chat more about that later on.

Yeah, nice. Bless you for that. One last question. And I’m going to hand over to Alan. So my last question for you just quickfire tips. front of mind. If someone’s launching a new blog tomorrow, how are they going to get people to view the blog? What sort of stuff? Would you be thinking front of mind?

I think it depends, you have to think about who is your reader. So go where the readers are, and really appeal to how it’s going to benefit them. Like I think people keep forgetting that you’re writing the blog for someone else. So there’s a saying in, in writing that professional writers write for other people. And then amateur writers write for themselves. So there’s nothing wrong with just writing for just as a hobby and something you enjoy. But if you want to write professionally and you want to actually make money from it, you have to think about who your reader is, and then go where they are. So for example, when we were trying to find our readers who we were writing about rent versus own, we knew that a lot of them would be reading the CBC in this particular reporter specialised in writing about renting, so all the renters would be reading that and people who are buying houses as well. So we knew that that was where the eyeballs were going to go. So I would say definitely focus on your reader and figure out where they’re going to be.

That’s awesome advice. Awesome advice. Belinda was watching from Namibia. And we’ve also got Chris from Yeovil in Somerset, we’ve got people from all over the place. Laura’s in Wales. She’s also doing Airbnb geo arbitrage at the moment with cheaper prices. So I know that she’s dove into your book, and you’ve inspired her as well. So I guess that the hours are up. You guys have been absolutely awesome. I’m going to hand over to Alan for his closing thoughts. Alan, what’s in your head.

So I think something that Christy and Bryce have exemplified is their ability to decide on a goal and keep going through rejection whilst learning on the way. And I think if you want to be a writer, if you want to be a blogger, if you want to be an entrepreneur, it is your ability to take reaction, rejection, and bounce back and do it again and do it again. Do it again and learn every time. And I think, like Christie and Bryce to me are incredibly impressive with what they’ve achieved through their blog and their book. And I would highly recommend anyone listening to read the book quit like a millionaire. It’s a fantastic read. Thanks, Alan. It’s a pleasure. It’s a pleasure. I truly mean it. It’s had an impact on me. I became nomadic at the beginning of the year. And you are one of the biggest influences in those areas of my life. So I really appreciate that. It’s the closing message for everyone listening is you if you’ve been rejected, good, you’re on the right path. Yeah, going. The more you can get rejected and learn every time the better. And if you’ve been rejected three times and given up. You’ve not tried hard enough. Please say that in the right way. Get out there and get rejected more.

I love that. Christy and Bryce, thank you so much for giving up your time. All of our love from the pop up team to you guys and we hope to see you in the craziness ends. And thank you to everybody watching from Yeovil to Wales to the USA to Namibia, and all of the other places. Thank you everybody. This video is going to be on the pop up business school website on our blog, the Survival Guide, and with a whole bunch of other live streams as well. Please join us on Thursday. It’s a big hitting week this week. We’ve got another author on Thursday. Jamie smart is a Sunday Times bestselling author. He the two books that he wrote that changed my life actually in I read I first read one of his books called Clarity about two years ago. And it had such an impact on me that I was stalking this guy on Twitter for about eight weeks, and then practically bullied in him to make him friends. And and we’ve been friends ever since I’m fascinated to hear what he has to say about mental health, about coaching about running an online business. And it’s going to be a fascinating chat. So once again, guys, be safe, and we’ll see you again next time yeah