Andrew: Hey there Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner; I’m the founder of Mixergy.com home of the ambitious upstart. Hey, is there really any money in blogging? Well joining me today is a blogger who turned his love of travel into a profitable business and I think he’s an example of how, yes, there is good money in blogging. Matt Kepnes is better known as Nomadic Matt online. His site is NomadicMatt.com. It teaches people how to take their dream trip on a budget. He’s also the author of “How to Travel the World on $50 a Day: Travel Cheaper, Longer, Smarter.” I invited him to talk about how he built up his business, how he got the book deal, and to talk about the specifics of how you can turn a blog into an actual profitable business.
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Once you pick someone you can start work with them the next day. Maybe its 40 hours a week, maybe its 20 hours a week, maybe it’s a little less. Whatever you need and here’s something that is a really gutsy thing that they do. They offer a no-risk trial period. What other developer shop, what other place can you get a developer whose top of the top at no risk to you? Go to Toptal.com. T-O-P-T-A-L.com. Get the best of the best right now. Matt, welcome.
Matt: Thanks for having me.
Andrew: Hey Matt, I’m new at this sponsor. You are someone who’s worked with developers. Before I ask you questions about your business what do you think of the way that I did that sponsorship message?
Matt: That’s pretty good. I like the no-risk guarantee because the worst thing you can do is have a developer that’s not very good and then you’re on the hook for all of this money.
Andrew: Yeah. All right. Good.
Matt: I’ve paid for results. Not anything else.
Andrew: You know for a long time all I wanted to do was just do a great interview here. Pull out the key ideas from my guests and just focus on that. Advertising was not the main focus. But now I realize selling is always important. It’s always important. So if I’m going to make it important I don’t just want it to be at the top of the interview I want to keep improving, and improving, and improving. What you’re saying is pay attention to that guarantee. That goes a long way.
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: All right. We’ll talk to you in a bit about how you do a guarantee but first let me ask you this. What kind of revenue are you doing with Nomadic Matt?
Matt: A little under half a million a year.
Andrew: Half a million in sales.
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay.
Matt: Ghost revenue.
Andrew: Where does that come from?
Matt: I run tours. I have a number of electronic guides from how to blog to destination guides such as “Nomadic Matt’s Guide to New York.” As well as lots of affiliate marketing and once in a while I do some consulting.
Andrew: All right. Let me break that down here. What’s the top of all of those? Biggest revenue generator.
Matt: The affiliate sales.
Andrew: Affiliate sales where you sell other peoples’ stuff.
Matt: Right. So you would come to my website and book your trip to Hong Kong, and through my links I would get a portion of the revenue from the flight, from the hotel, travel insurance.
Andrew: I see. Just like everyone else from Hip Monk all the way up to Travelocity and Priceline.
Matt: Exactly.
Andrew: Okay. So affiliate is number one. What’s number two?
Matt: My ebooks.
Andrew: Your ebook. Your ebooks sell for peanuts.
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: What are we talking about? Twenty bucks. Right?
Matt: Yeah. Between $4.99 and $24.99.
Andrew: That’s really small and we’ll talk later hopefully about why the prices. All right. So ebooks, number two. What’s number three?
Matt: The tours I run. So a couple times a year I take groups of 10 to 12 people on tour. I do two in Europe and one in Thailand.
Andrew: Okay.
Matt: I might do an Australia one.
Andrew: You go along with them and you show them a good time that they get the kind of experience that they get to read about on your site.
Matt: Right. Right. So we’re living how I travel. All right. So I take them with me. We stay at my favorite hostels. We take local transportation. We go to my favorite restaurants. Do my favorite activities. We’re seeing the world through my eyes.
Andrew: Hostels.
Matt: Yes.
Andrew: One of the best parts about going to a place and staying at a hostel is that you get to date. You get to sleep with people at the hostel.
Matt: Wow.
Andrew: Does that happen?
Matt: With me? No, I don’t do that.
Andrew: No, your customers.
Matt: If they do, they have not told me yet.
Andrew: Really?
Matt: I’ll just let them keep that private.
Andrew: All right. How many people go on this trip?
Matt: Between 10 and 12.
Andrew: All right. So tour’s number 3? What’s number 4?
Matt: I do a little bit of phone consulting and speaking throughout the year.
Andrew: You get paid to speak?
Matt: Occasionally. Once in a while. But that probably brings in $5000 to $6000 a year. Not a lot of money.
Andrew: Okay. All right, so that’s almost insignificant if you’re talking about roughly half a million in revenue. And then the book is making you some money. Royalties, right?
Matt: Right. “How to Travel the World on $50 a Day,” I hit my advance so I’m now starting to generate royalties on it. So this year, depending on how the second edition does, I could see a nice boost in revenue.
Andrew: The second edition is what’s coming out in 2015. By the time this is up, people will have an opportunity to buy it. “How to Travel the World on $50 a Day.” What kind of advance do you get for a book like that?
Matt: In travelling, you don’t get a huge advance because it’s such a narrow niche. I got in the mid five figures. I don’t really want to give an exact number, but it was good enough for me. But I’m also of the philosophy that I would rather have a smaller advance and start getting royalties sooner, than have this gigantic $200,000 advance and never see any money ever again.
Andrew: You hired Ryan Holiday. Frankly, that’s the only reason why I’m… I wasn’t going to do an interview this week. I was taking some time off to just sit and clear things up. They said, “Matt’s on the schedule.” I said, “Great, can we please move him?” They said, “Matt came through Ryan.” I said, “I’m going to come at night if I have to. I will do it.”
What do you pay Ryan for that kind of experience? He opens doors like you wouldn’t believe.
Matt: Yeah, so I met Ryan last year and we’ve become friends and so I hired him to help me with this book launch. He is paying the five figures, but I don’t really want to tell an exact number because…
Andrew: Oh, he’s paying the five figures?
Matt: I’m paying him.
Andrew: Oh, you’re paying him five figures? Got you. But you don’t want to say how much? And what does Ryan get? Beyond the fact that he has incredible friendships with people like me who will do anything for him. What, more practically, does he give you?
Matt: Ryan’s really good at thinking about strategy and where we need to go, what websites should we be on, how should we frame your promotion. A lot of this book tour that I’m doing and the idea of travelling around the country on $50 a day, and sort of living my book, came through Ryan.
Andrew: I see. You’re doing a book tour and you’re actually going to live on $50 a day?
Matt: Yes.
Andrew: Okay. What else has he given you that helps shape the way that you present the book?
Matt: He edits a lot of guest posts I plan on doing, because he’s just really good at crafting words.
Andrew: Do you have an example of how he changed one of your words or how he changed a message that you wrote and made it better?
Matt: I did a guest post on Tim Farriss’ website last year and I handed it to Ryan and Ryan just came back and added in all these details. So Ryan’s really good at getting me to get the details out. Because when you’re an expert, you know everything so you make leaps in people’s assumptions about knowledge when you’re writing because you make that gap. So you don’t always put in all the details that a newbie might need to know. Ryan’s good at picking that up for me.
Andrew: I see. All right. I try to do that as an interviewer and you’re right. People who do often don’t remember the details of what they do and how they do it. And they can’t put themselves back in the frame of mind of someone who has no understanding of how it’s done.
Matt: Right. It becomes a habit for you. It’s just subconsciously ingrained in your mind, so if you write it down you will make those leaps.
Andrew: All right. I want to understand how you got here. It all started back when you were working at a hospital just before you got into blogging. What were you doing at a hospital?
Matt: After college I graduated and found myself as an unemployed high school history teacher. So I got a job at a hospital. Just something that came up. I did administrative work in their surgical department as an executive assistant to the Vice Chair. I also worked in oncology doing administrative work there. That was about four years and then decided I think I’m going to go travel the world for a year. That was eight years ago.
Andrew: Eight years ago. I’m just putting a note here to come back and ask you about your drip e-mail. I think the way you sell is simple but it’s really effective and I want to study. But I don’t want to start from how did you get to where you are. I don’t want to start with how you got to half a million in revenue, give or take. I want to know how you started with your first sale and built it up and built it up and then the drip campaign will make more sense.
So you’re working there. What got you on this path? Was it a trip that you took?
Matt: Yeah. I went to Thailand in January 2005 and while we were there, my friend and I, we were in this little town and I was in a bus going up to this temple in the north. A city called Chiang Mai. In there, I’m meeting a Belgium couple and three Canadians. We all got to talking about how long we’re in Thailand, what are our travel plans. They were all gone for very long period of time. When we got to me, “How long are you here for?” “Two weeks.” “Wait, that’s it?” “Yeah, well, you know, I’m just an American. I only get two weeks vacation a year.” They were like, “Wait, wait, back up. You used your entire vacation in January?” “Yep.”
It got me thinking about how we get the short end of the stick sometimes in the States. The next day we were at this cooking class and I ran into them again and I thought, well, this is fate. So I peppered them with some more questions. A week later I turned to my friend, Scott, and said, “Hey, when we get home I’m going to quit my job, finish my MBA and go travel the world for a year.” And I did that. I finished a master’s degree because I thought I was going to go back into business, and I just kind of never came home.
Andrew: You just kept travelling and travelling.
Matt: I just kept travelling.
Andrew: All right. And you were trying to make some money along the way. You had some AdSense sites.
Matt: Yeah. The original fund I had saved up lasted about a year and half. I came home to see my sister graduate, tried to get a temp job, realized I hated going back into the office. So I just took off again and that’s when I started getting into the blogging space. So I built my website. Then I started really getting into internet marketing. Because my original goal was how can I keep travelling more and being a writer…
Andrew: What’s the shadiest site that you built back when you were trying to make some money?
Matt: The shadiest website?
Andrew: Shadiest.
Matt: I would say How to Take Care of Your Pet Turtle.
Andrew: That’s not so shady. What made it shady?
Matt: I didn’t even write the site. It was total spam. Just there to exist for you to click on links.
Andrew: I see, that took you out to AdSense sites.
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: And how did you get traffic to it?
Matt: At the time, SEO was a lot easier to game, so I just bought a bunch of links to it. I once had a site on Goldfish, Training Your Beagle. That was actually a legit site. I got an actual dog trainer to write the content.
Andrew: What kind of money could you make from building these sites back in the day?
Matt: I was pulling in about $3000 or $4000 a month.
Andrew: Total?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: That’s really good.
Matt: Yeah, I had about ten of these. Whatever the keyword was. And for me I was just trying to travel more so that was really good, because you can travel easily on $3000 to $4000 a month. I was trying to build up my freelance writing portfolio, so this was meant to be supplemental income while that happened.
Andrew: I see. I know when I was backpacking through Europe not too long ago, $50 a day would have been more than enough. I mean you have to do it right, but you could do it $50 a day. I felt like I could live like this forever. There’s no stopping me.
Matt: And you can, and you can.
Andrew: Yeah. But I also dated on those trips. You apparently didn’t. You didn’t meet any women in any of these hostels?
Matt: I did have some girlfriends along the way.
Andrew: I did, too. For me it was romance like in the movies. You’re on a train, you want to meet someone. Didn’t exactly happen on a train, but yeah, it was fantastic. Once in a hostel. A woman was reading a book and I asked her about her book. We started a conversation and we started dating. Next thing I know we’re travelling through Europe for a little bit.
Matt: Yeah, that’s how I met a girl in Southeast Asia. We were at a hostel and we started talking and four months later we’re travelling together.
Andrew: Yeah, you’re kind of shoved in almost like shoved in together with all kinds of people who you wouldn’t get to know otherwise. There was one guy who was just hitchhiking through the US who came to Europe for a little bit, who taught me how to roll cigarettes. Another person who’s really uptight and thought because she was 30 years old she couldn’t go out after 10:00 because she was just too old for that. You get to meet all these different kinds of people and some of them you connect, other people just disappear.
Matt: Yeah and when you’re in that setting, there’s no past, there’s just now. You meet people unencumbered because there’s no baggage. Nobody cares who you were or what you did in your previous life. They just want to know, “Do you want to go get a beer right now or not?”
Andrew: Right, right. Do you want to go and check out the city and there’s always something new to do and something to talk about because it’s a brand new experience for you. Just not getting lost is something to talk about. It’s a really fun experience. I used to think that it was just a waste of time. Why would anyone travel like that when they could be working, when they could be making more money, when they could be making more impact. And then I realized, there’s a romance to it, and there’s a romance about meeting someone. There’s also a romance about really getting to connect with yourself. What’s it like when you’re meeting a whole bunch of people and you’re too chicken to talk to some of them but you have to. How do you deal with that?
Matt: It’s sink or swim. I have some of my best friends in the world I met through travelling, and even though I might not see them for three or four years, when we get back together, we just pick up. You form this bond because you’re with that person 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So you have to either really like them, or you’re not going to become friends with them.
Andrew: That’s why when my wife and I started dating, I said, “We have to go backpack somewhere. Let’s see how we do.” We’re fully backpacking, we ended up picking out places to stay when the bus arrived and I wanted to see how do we work in a situation where we’re together 24 hours a day, where the place where we go sleep and spend the night is who knows where it is, who knows what it is, or what it will be like. How do we handle those situations? It created a strong bond. It was romance plus more of a personal connection with the way that we handle the world.
Matt: If you can travel with somebody, you’re meant to be with that person.
Andrew: I agree, really if you have any doubt. At least in my experience. All right, so I see how you’re doing all of this. Why give up all those other sites if you’re making a few thousand bucks a month and you’re able to travel and do what you love, why give up the Turtle site and all those others.
Matt: It wasn’t really fun. I wasn’t passionate about it. I’m passionate about travel. I really love travelling. I started the website as a way to get freelance to travel writing gigs because I like writing and I like travel. This other stuff was a means to an end. One day I was having a conversation with my friend Mark who said, “Why do you do all this? You know travel, that’s your expertise. You could just write forever and ever and ever on travel. Why not build up your own website and get rid of all these sites that you don’t really like doing, that take up your all day, every day.” And I thought, “Hmm, it’s a really good idea.”
So, I phased those out over the course of about a year while I focused in on the website.
Andrew: And this is roughly 2010?
Matt: Yes, so this would’ve been, the middle of 2009 I began the shift to just focus on the website. By 2010, a year later, that was the only thing I focused on.
Andrew: And when you focused on it, was there enough revenue coming in from that business that you could give up all the others?
Matt: No. It took about a year to remake $3000 to $5000 a month, which was at the time enough for me to live on. I have no home, I’m just traveling and you’re making 60 grand a year, you’re traveling on 20, life is pretty good.
Andrew: And when you’re passionate about it, you feel like you can keep growing it. And when you’re not passionate about Turtle sites, it’s easy to let those dwindle away.
Matt: Yeah. I love working on my website. I love writing. I love doing the marketing for it, figuring out what gets people to click on one page versus another page, talking about travel because I love my website.
Andrew: I get that feeling. I do too. All right, so the next step was getting affiliates. What kind of affiliates did you get?
Matt: I just signed up through commission junction, regular mass affiliate’s sales. You go to Expedia’s website, you click on “Affiliate Network.” You sign up, you get a link. Nowadays, given the size of my site I can create my own custom commissions and affiliate links and programs. I only work with websites I use, so you’re not going to find a luxury travel website on my site, even if they pay a great commission, or a tour operator I don’t like.
Andrew: Do you work with them directly?
Matt: Yes. I work with a lot of them.
Andrew: How do you get a company directly on the phone and start talking to them about an affiliate deal?
Matt: You do a lot of volume and become very well known in your space, where they start paying attention to you.
Andrew: I see. And all of that happened for you when you were using commission Junction and all of those other big networks, that they’ll take just about anyone. If you have a real site, and you’re not a scammer, they’re going to have you on board.
Matt: I used default links, and as the site grew, I started getting known in the space and being able to contact these marketing people or meeting them at conferences. It was a lot easier to say, “Hey, I’m your affiliate, but I know I do a lot of volume, I have a big website, I can send a lot of referrals. Let’s work out a special arrangement.
Andrew: And these were all banner ads or buttons on the site, right?
Matt: Yes. I use text links now.
Andrew: But I do remember in the early days it was these square boxes on the site, top of the site somewhere. I’m going to Google it right now to see if I can find what it looked like. You know the other thing I remember? A lot of links to copyright pages. Let me see if I can find one. You would have in your navigation: About Me, My Travel Photos, and then copyright link. And the copyright link wasn’t just copyright 2010 or whatever. It was pretty intense. If you’re using this please… do you know what I’m talking about? Do you remember?
Matt: Yeah, I used to have it up there. It’s now in the footer. But every site has a copyright link, but back in the day when I didn’t know anything, I just included it on every page on the top navigation bar.
Andrew: Oh, I see what it is. When you have a WordPress site, it naturally will take whatever page you create and put it in the navigation bar and you said, “Okay, that’s what will happen.”
Matt: Yeah, so I had Home, About Me, Travel Photos, Contact, Copyright, Disclaimer. It took me a couple years to realize you don’t really need to click on this stuff.
Andrew: Yeah, it took prime real estate on the site. All right, but that gives me a sense of what you were coming from. Who built your first site?
Matt: I did.
Andrew: Using what theme?
Matt: I didn’t use a theme. I hand coded my first web site, which was annoying for my friends who were teaching me coding, because I would always email them, “I broke it. I broke it.” But I hand coded it and then I realized how dumb this was to keep up, so I moved into WordPress in July 2008, a couple months after I started. I just got an out-of-the-box theme. I think my first one was StudioPress.
Andrew: StudioPress, okay.
Matt: Yeah, whatever they were before they were the Genesis theme, and then I had somebody hand code it and hand design a couple of years ago for a custom theme.
Andrew: Okay. And at one point you were using WooThemes?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: Now I see the old version of the site from 2008. Hand coded? Wow, that’s pretty impressive, especially if you are new at it. And it even has an Add Me on MySpace button with a view guestbook link.
Matt: Yes, MySpace.
Andrew: The good old days. No, they were not good old days, but I get it. I see where you were. How did you get anyone to come to your site?
Matt: You know, back in the day, which is not that long ago, 2008, but in internet years that might as well be 1850, there weren’t a lot of travel blogs out there. Maybe a handful, most were just starting at that period. So I had the first mover advantage. In the space, there were only a couple dozen of us, so we got to talking. We all knew each other. We’d just share traffic. So when everyone searched for a travel blog, me and my friends were always on the top of the list. I really got into SEO very early on. I started writing very information heavy list posts that did very well in Google, then also happened to do really well on sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, because everyone likes to look at 20 great pictures of Iceland. So that really helped move things…
Andrew: Did you take all those photos yourself?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: You did.
Matt: So I’ve… in the beginning, not always, but they’ve since been replaced.
Andrew: And when you didn’t, it was just 20 great pictures of Iceland and then you’d just go and find 20 online and you’d submit it to Digg.
Matt: Yeah, I’d go to Flickr, and you know.
Andrew: That makes sense. That’s pretty clever. What’s the one best SEO thing that you did that worked for you back then?
Matt: Well, back then it was all about building links, so the best thing I did was just getting other bloggers to give me links. You know, I would give them links in return, but asking, “Hey, you just came from Thailand. Can you put this link to my Thailand article on your website?”
Andrew: Oh really?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: So anyone who blogged about Thailand, who posted photos, you’d say, “Hey, can you also include a link to this? I think it’ll be helpful for your people, and it’ll help me.”
Matt: Yeah, and we were all friends. I’m still friends with many of them, but back when you have less than a hundred people professionally blogging about travel, you know everyone. So you’re always doing favors for each other.
Andrew: What are you doing now that works for you? I just want to skip ahead. I know that at this point people are dropping out mentally and saying, “Ah, it worked for him back then. It’s not going to work for me now. Whatever he has to say is just too outdated.” Give me one thing that works for you right now that anyone can do.
Matt: The best thing I do is network outside of my industry.
Andrew: For example?
Matt: For example, I go to World Domination Summit, which is a conference in Portland with a lot of other entrepreneurs. I talk to a lot of finance websites, because there’s an overlap between they want to save money and I want to save money, so I try to be the travel guy for everybody outside of travel.
Andrew: So, let’s suppose you meet Mr. Money Mustache, he’s got a really popular site on how to save money…
Matt: [inaudible 00:00:12]
Andrew: Sorry?
Matt: I would love to meet him. I just came across his site recently.
Andrew: It’s a fantastic site; suppose you meet him. What do you do that will help you get more traffic?
Matt: I would probably do an interview or a guest post on his website, showing his audience how they can take their themes of living more and spending less into the travel space. So, when they’re on their trip, how do they live for $50 a day? Because his whole lifestyle is…
Andrew: I see, so you said you’d do a guest blog, that’s one option, and I can see how you’d make it fit. The other option is an interview. What do you mean by an interview?
Matt: Oh, something similar to what we’re doing here.
Andrew: But you would interview him on your site.
Matt: I would try to do both, right? So, I’ll interview you if you’ll interview me, we’ll find where we can both overlap.
Andrew: I see.
Matt: I would also say anything I did on your site gets promoted on my site, through my email list, through social media. You don’t really want to make it a one-way street.
Andrew: So, should I have, when I asked you to do an interview, said “And you should interview me too, for your site”.
Matt: Well, I’ll definitely share everything we do, but, you know, quite possibly.
Andrew: Interesting. I should have said, and I’ve seen other people do it, say “All right, but you should post it up on your site.”
Matt: Oh yeah, that’s guaranteed. This will be on my site.
Andrew: So, you know what, Jordan Harbinger, who I interviewed from The Art of Charm, said his guests do that all the time for him, and I think all he does is he asks them before he starts, “Will you also post this on your site, email this to your audience?” I don’t want to speak for him, but that’s my understanding.
Matt: You know, I know The Art of Charm, and I’ve heard him speak on other podcasts; I think that’s what he does, too, from my understanding.
Andrew: I didn’t realize that people all did that, trade interviews and require almost a post of the interview on the site.
Matt: Yeah, well, I don’t do it out of some, well, “You give me this, I’ll give you that”, but we’re all running a business here, right? So you’re really helping me out by having me on your program. So, of course, I want to help you out and return the favor by showing my audience this interview and your website. Plus, I want my audience to see me talk, hear me talk, see what I’m doing all around the web. I don’t want to just live in this little silo.
Andrew: Here’s the thing, though. I don’t want to do a favor for you. I’m happy to do one for Ryan to an extent, like I will show up on a day that I don’t want to do an interview, or at a time that I don’t want to do an interview for Ryan, but I don’t want to do an interview that makes you feel so grateful to me that, I don’t want that or anything, because that’s not my goal. I want to almost hang you upside down, by your ankles, and shake every bit of knowledge from you, almost to the point where you go “Should I have even said that?” Remember we talked before we started?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: That whatever you say, I’m going to keep in there? I want you to feel a little bit like you revealed more than you’re comfortable with, and I wonder if that’s… maybe that’s compatible with your interests. Maybe you’re okay with that and you don’t feel like you shared more than you’re comfortable with, and you’re still grateful, and I should take advantage of that. I don’t mean with you, but with some guests. So what’s a big one for you? What are you hoping will happen from this?
Matt: Well, you know, I hope your audience will be intrigued by my site, my book, and come over and, you know, read my website and become new subscribers. This interview introduces me to a new audience, and that’s what the goal of networking outside your industry is all about. Getting new readers. How do you grow? Well, you have to find places where nobody knows you. Nobody knows me. Maybe some people know me through your website, but not a lot, and vice versa.
Andrew: See, it’s not even a clear funnel that’s measurable. You’re not saying “I would like to get 2,000 new hits from Mixergy and 70 books sold in this hour that I spent.” It’s more like, “People don’t know me in this world; I’m going to enter the world and just have some people get to know me, and if I keep blanketing the worlds that are surrounding mine, then my name will get out there, and at some point, I’ll be like Mr. Money Mustache, and people are hoping to get to know me and I’m making a killing with my site.”
Matt: Isn’t that what all advertising really is? I mean, what’s the return on that Coke billboard ad? Nobody knows, but you do it anyway. You shouldn’t do it out of some gratitude; you should do it because you want to do it. If you came to me and said “Matt, I really want to do an article about how I backpacked Europe with my wife.” And I was like “Okay, could be interested in that.” And maybe you send it to me, and it’s not very good, and I decline it, but maybe it’s really great, and I know my audience would really appreciate advice on “how do you travel with your spouse without killing them?” So it’s beneficial to you, it’s also beneficial to me. You want to shake me for knowledge? Well that’s good for your audience, so, everybody sort of wins in this situation.
Andrew: I think so too. I think that the more you leave them with ideas that they hadn’t heard before, the more you leave them ideas that are really helpful for you, the more turtle stories that you reveal, the more they feel connected to you, curious and grateful. All right, so I see now what you were doing in the early days to get some traffic. Let’s talk about the first product that wasn’t an affiliate sale because it’s kind of a cycle, you grow your audience, you grow your revenue, you grow audience, grow your revenue. So what’s the first product?
Matt: The first product I had was how to make money with your travel blog. And it was geared to other travel bloggers who kept constantly asking me, “What are you doing that allows you to keep travelling without a ‘real job?'” I said, okay, well I’m going to put all of this information in a book and put it out there. And I sold it. I had a couple of levels, you could buy just the book, then you could buy the book and call me up and I’ll give you some one-on-one advice. So those were really the first year, year and a half of revenue as I was building the audience and growing the affiliates, these were the two big products that I had.
Andrew: Is that the book you started writing in the summer of 2010 when you met Ramit?
Matt: No, that was the book that just came out.
Andrew: This current book?
Matt: This current book.
Andrew: What’s the first one? What’s the one where Ramit Sethi helped shaped your thinking on it?
Matt: Yeah, How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, was originally a PDF that I had put together before Penguin bought it to publish it.
Andrew: I see. So how did meeting him help you?
Matt: Have you met Ramit?
Andrew: Yeah.
Matt: Ramit is a really smart guy who just lays it out there and is very direct. And I was asking for a guest post on a site, because at the time he was still talking to me about personal finance. So I said, “Well I got this book. It will help people travel a lot cheaper. It’d be great.” He goes, “Okay, tell me about your book. Who is the audience? How are you going to market it? What’s your subset? What’s the funnel? How’s it going to help my readers? What are they going to get out of it? What’s your angle?” I just didn’t have answers to really any of the questions.
Andrew: People inspired you to write the book because they said “How do you do it?” They were forcing you to think about what you do. He was forcing you to think outside of yourself to the person who is eventually going to read what you create.
Matt: Right. He was thinking of the marketing of it.
Andrew: Okay. How do you figure out who that audience is? How do you say, I’m not going to go after everyone who is travelling. I’m going to find this specific niche. How do you figure that out?
Matt: I came home from our meeting over a couple of years and thought, wow, I really know nothing because I had only really been in it at that point for a year, year and a half and had never thought of the business aspect of it. I was just a guy who liked travelling. After that I thought, okay, well, who am I and what do I want to do? I want to help people travel more. So what age range am I looking for, what income level am I looking for? So I really thought about who my target audience was. People who wanted to travel on cheap, who wanted to travel for an extended period of time, and are typically 18 to 35.
Andrew: When you finally figured out what that avatar is, were there posts that you look back on and said, “Clearly now that I know who I’m going after, that post doesn’t fit that person.”
Matt: Yeah. I mean there are a lot of general… in the early days I was throwing spaghetti at the wall. And there were a lot of posts just about hotels and expensive tours that didn’t really fit into the audience that I was looking for. And I was going more after the backpacker set. So I had to sort of take it down a notch to really focus on the bare-bones travel; hostels and [inaudible 00:04:22] and really hitting all that really hard.
Andrew: Was that hard to do?
Matt: No. I mean I was in that, that’s what I really like to do anyway. Nowadays as I’m older, I like Airbnb’s and hotels and all that. So I’ve moved up the value chain so to speak. So I don’t really blog so much about bare-bones travel. As I’ve gotten older I’ve shifted my demographic to be 25-50 range where people just want a cheap vacation.
Andrew: So it’s no longer hostels where 30 people are sleeping in the same room on bunk beds. It’s now Airbnb.
Matt: Yeah. There’s still a small aspect of the backpacking budget travel. But it’s not as… Well it’s all budget travel. But that sort of bare-bones backpacking… You’re going to eat pasta in the hostel kitchen. Not so predominant in my sight. If you look at some of my suggested restaurants some of those meals in itself can cost $30 to $50.
Andrew: Hey. I was about to Google you to see a couple of the posts that you wrote back when we’re talking about right now. Why do you not use your full name often? Why is it Nomadic Matt instead of your full name? Matt Kepnes. I want to make sure I got that right.
Matt: Yeah. It just started… You did. It just started as Nomadic Matt and it just grew into this moniker that everybody knows and recognizes. So I just stick with it. It makes it easier.
Andrew: Is Kepnes a hard name? Is that one of the issues?
Matt: No. It’s really just I’m a creature of habit.
Andrew: Okay.
Matt: I just became this Nomadic Matt guy so that’s sort of my travel persona. It was my pen name.
Andrew: All right. I think I see one of the posts that you wrote on Ramit’s site. This was “How to use airlines miles to fly business class without even stepping foot on an airplane.”
Matt: Yeah. Wow. When was that? June 2010? July? Somewhere around there.
Andrew: Is that a headline that you wrote or is it a headline that he wrote?
Matt: I think mine was, “How to Fly Business Class for Free” and then he tweaked that.
Andrew: I see. One of the benefits of doing these kinds of articles on other peoples’ sites is that you get their editorial experience. Is that right?
Matt: Yeah. So from guest-posting on other websites I’ve learned a lot about writing itself. How to draft better headlines, how to create better sub-headings and headings, and especially going back to what we talked about earlier. The detail. As an expert you can sometimes overlook the details that your mind makes assumptions about. So when I’m on all of these sites I was like, “But the detail, but the detail.” What about this resource? What do I need to include for all of that? So it’s really just made me take that back into my site so I now write a lot. Most of my posts are really long, really detailed, and very heavily linked to resources, companies, case studies, and older posts linking back. Because I create these 3000-4000 word posts on what to do and it’s pretty much the definitive thing.
Andrew: So let me ask you this. Here’s something that most people just… Most writers don’t appreciate this question. I remember even asking Alexa from Tech Crunch. I don’t feel she got it. It’s not easy to write long posts like this. Right? We say to bloggers, “Write epic posts. Write great things that people will remember. Go long and deep.” How do you do that?
Matt: It takes hours upon hours to write a blog post like that. Say I’m going to write an update post on Ramit’s site. So I would take that post and I would probably look at it, I would sketch out an outline, and make this very general article. Then I would send it to a friend and have them read it for them to fill in the holes. I think not a lot of bloggers do that. They write their article, they put some links in to resources, but if you really want to make it epic, detailed, and go deep have somebody who has no idea about what you do read it. Because they’re new so they’re going to…
Andrew: I get how that improves. First of all that’s the kind of tip I’m looking for. That’s a way to improve it. What about where you come up with the ideas? How you structure the content. How do you put together something like this?
Matt: I get the idea based on a lot of questions or new things I discover. So if I start sailing around… Recently I sailed around the British Virgin Islands. I learned how to do that on cheap. So you kind of have to go in with that journalist mentality. There’s a question. You need an answer. Then you want to structure it by saying, “Here is my experience, here are the details of that experience, and here’s how you can do it, too.” That’s usually how typically I structure these posts.
Andrew: Okay.
Matt: Right? I talk about why I wanted to do it. What I learned, how I did it because people want to know like how did you do it, too. I’d say, “Okay, here’s how you can replicate that process.
Andrew: Okay and then do you start to reuse some of your content on other sites? You can’t keep coming up with these great ideas on command for all the sites that you write for. You wrote for Huffington Post also. I saw, I’m looking at my notes here to see if I can come up with others, featured in CNN. How do you do that?
Matt: There is very few travel ideas that are “original.”
Andrew: Okay
Matt: There are certain tips that are good for years and years but it’s a story on how you tell that and taking new information that changes because travelers are constantly changing in the industry. And I want kind of surveys, rules change, how do you become a hot spot. Lot’s of things are always influx, which is good because then that means that there is always a new spin on an old idea. But yeah, I’ll take tips I write on my site and put it on the other sites.
Andrew: You package it.
Matt: Yeah. I might take the puzzle and move it around a little bit.
Andrew: What about how we said that some of the content actually goes out of date? For example, I am looking at one of the post which is, “If you rent movies on Netflix you can get 1500 advantage miles, from American Airlines. That I don’t think exists anymore. Do you do back in reedit your post?
Matt: Yeah. I’ll either the reedit or I’ll write a whole new version of that article. And redirect the old links and the old posts to the new one.
Andrew: Oh I see really. So someone who tries to go to the old post will now be brought to the more current post?
Matt: Yeah. All right and I have a series of articles that every couple of years I take a Euro rail train pass and I go through Europe and see does the pass save you money?
Andrew: I see.
Matt: So there are three. So if you start at the old one, there is actually a big thing on the top that says, “This post is out of date. Click here to see the newest version.” And that bumps you to the newest one.
Andrew: Every year you do that?
Matt: Every other.
Andrew: Every other year.
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: Do you ever feel like this is just too much, I am done travelling. I just want to be able to buy, the big package of toilet paper and the big everything, the toothbrush, the toothpaste and so on. Do you feel like, I’m done. But now I am locked into this because I am Nomadic Matt. It’s not nomadic website for people who are nomads, nomads unite. It’s me, my name on it.
Matt: So behind me is this apartment I have that I am kind of in once in a while. I love being on the road.
Andrew: You still do? You don’t get burned out? You don’t feel like that’s it, I’m done?
Matt: No. I have to clean and domesticate and I now have a wardrobe that lasts a couple of seasons and it’s also foreigner and weird to me, you know I love being on the road. I go on the road every couple of months. I come back for a couple of weeks, I am back on the road. I have a gypsy soul. And I am perfectly happy.
Andrew: Me too. I am like fidgeting and itching I can’t sit still today. I don’t know what it is.
Matt: See, it’s all this talk on travel.
Andrew: I think you might be because before you called I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to sit. It is contagious. Hey, how do you figure out the products that you could create. I understand that the first one was people said that you are good at this thing. How do you know what to do next?
Matt: I use my email list. So I look at basically what are common questions. What are people really asking me about? And then I say okay let’s put a product into that. So you know last year I treated guy on travel hacking which is The Art of Visa and Points and Miles to get Free Flights and Hotels, because a lot of people really want to know about that. But it’s such a complicated, in-depth thing that you can’t write one blog post on it. That thing I wrote on Ramit’s site is kind of similar. But there is so much going on. Their website is just dedicated to this one aspect.
Andrew: Do nothing but how to get more miles.
Matt: Right. So I couldn’t just do a blog post. I did a book. So that was my product.
Andrew: What do you sell yours for?
Matt: $24.99.
Andrew: $24.99. I am looking now at Chris Guillebeau. He has something called Frequent Flyer Master.
Matt: Yeah. He’s got a new thing called Upgrade Unlocked.
Andrew: Yeah. Oh he is smart with the upsell. I see an upsell. His shopping cart is little out of date. He sells his for more expensive, for twice as much as you. And the other one is even more. It has three tiers from what I remember, right?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: Why are you selling yourself for so cheap? Why do you have anything for under 30 bucks?
Matt: It goes back to who’s your demographic. Everyone in my people are cheap budget travelers. So for them… I don’t know the demos of Chris’s audience but maybe they’re people like you who have a home, who maybe have more disposable income. Start with 50 bucks [inaudible 00:00:15].
Andrew: Okay.
Matt: I have people who think $50 is one day in Thailand. So its part my audience but also I sort of make it up on a volume base. So having 50 bucks means I’ll sell a hundred a month and if I drop it down to 25 and I sell 300 a month I’d rather sell it at 25.
Andrew: I see.
Matt: So that’s my thinking on it. So I tried to have higher priced products. When that book came out it was originally $50 and…
Andrew: And it didn’t… How did it do?
Matt: It did pretty well. I mean I sold a lot of copies. I sold about a thousand. But then I sort of tapped the audience who would do that. Right? Now what happens? What about the people at the lower price point? So I reduced it until I sort of found that equilibrium where it should have made everybody happy.
Andrew: We just…
Matt: I’m sorry.
Andrew: We just recorded a course with Ryan Delk of Gumroad. I know you use their software to sell your books. He does growth and business development for Gumroad. I asked him, I said, “Just tell me about pricing. Nothing but pricing. Spend an hour. Teach us how to price things right. How to create tiers. What’s the advantage of creating tiers? Look through all of Gumroad’s data and tell us specifically. People who created tiers, how much extra money did they make, what’s the advantage of doing it, where is it a problem, and so on.” I should say that that’s available to anyone who goes to Mixergypremium.com. That course is fan-freaking-tastic because he is.
While I’m talking about it I should also say that if you’re interested in guest-blogging I had Annabelle Candy on and she taught guest-blogging. You should do a search on Mixergy for her name. Annabelle Candy or guest-blogging and you’ll see. She is fantastic at teaching you how to do this. We’re telling a story here. If you want to know more of the how-to, get those two courses. They’re Mixergy Premium courses and they’re available to you right now. Should you have gone after a higher, more expensive audience like instead of the backpacker audience the business traveler audience?
Matt: Should I have? If I wanted to make more money sure. But that’s not where my passion lies. I have friends who love luxury resorts. I have friends who are the business travelers and like the amenities of hotels and the concierge service. I enjoy backpacking, budget travel, and hanging out eating food in tiny street stalls around the world. So I can make more money but wouldn’t really be passionate about it.
Andrew: Have you ever been disgusted by my emphasis on money in this interview? Like one of my first questions had to do with money. The first thing I did before we got into the story was talk about Toptal and bring in some revenue.
Matt: No. Money makes the world go around.
Andrew: All right.
Matt: But you know I always say, “If I had $50 million what am I going to do with it all?” I mean there is a limit to how much I can spend. I’m not really a consumer. There’s only so much I can spend on my type of travel. At the end of the day you want to have enough money to do everything you want to do. After that you’re just being greedy.
Andrew: I like to be a little greedy. I think its okay.
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: But I’m glad that you’re not disgusted by it.
Matt: Nope.
Andrew: You are a really smart marketer, though. I’m looking at your site and you have email subscription forms. Not excessive, but they’re on there. The site is beautifully designed and one of the smart things that it does is if I scroll past the images and the links on the right margin it brings them back and holds them steady so I have an opportunity to see the step-by-step guide to planning a trip, the guides to knowing where you’re going, the companies that you use to stay on the road. Those companies are affiliate links. Right?
Matt: Yep.
Andrew: Right. So you are smart. Where did you pick this stuff up? Where do you learn how to do it?
Matt: I read a lot. I listen to a lot of podcasts, such as yourself.
Andrew: What are some of the places that you listen to?
Matt: I like Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income. Tim Ferriss’ podcast is really good. I like James [inaudible 0:04:34] and Lewis Howes. Actually a really good one that’s not really directly business related is The Alpha Male Club by James Swanwick.
Andrew: I don’t know that one.
Matt: A friend of mine. An Aussie guy. He’s actually had the Art of Charm guy on it. His is about being a better man but he has a lot of podcasts on there.
Andrew: Oh. I know him. Of course I know the guy. I met him in Argentina. He does travel. Alpha Male Club. I’m checking him out right now.
Matt: Yeah a lot of his podcasts deal with how do you have influence, do you network, how do you write better copy, and be a more personal person and a lot of that can be moved over into business pretty easily so you can apply that to business.
Andrew: But these guys aren’t teaching you how to have the image on the right, how to get people to convert into your travel hacking guide and buy this and create a drip campaign which we will talk about. Where do you learn that?
Matt: I go to business conferences; I’ve hired business experts to teach me.
Andrew: Okay
Matt: One of the reasons why I have hired Ryan. I think I always [inaudible 00:00:48] a smart CEO is not someone who is necessarily smart; he’s someone who hires smarter people then him.
Andrew: I see. So who have you hired for marketing?
Matt: Ryan I’ve worked with, I’ve hired a team to help cast conversions last year, I hired a friend to help with crowdfunding. I did a Kickstarter for an app.
Andrew: Who’s the team that you hired for conversions?
Matt: I don’t want to say that one.
Andrew: You don’t? Why not?
Matt: Because they work for somebody who doesn’t like it when they take on side projects.
Andrew: Oh I think I know who you took on. I can’t believe you were able to hire them.
Matt: So I’m going to keep that keep that [inaudible 00:01:33].
Andrew: And you still use them?
Matt: No I mean I hired them on a contract bases so if I [inaudible 00:01:38].
Andrew: Can I put a name here and just promise I will not tell anyone?
Matt: Okay
Andrew: Okay I just a put one name right there.
Matt: Yep
Andrew: Wow that’s really good people and I was going to say would you at least tell someone in private who it is and I don’t think you’re going to want to do that if they contact you. Maybe if they’re a friend of yours.
Matt: Yeah, I ask their permission before I give them a referral.
Andrew: Yeah I get it. All right so you’re really good at this. Now take me through what you have built. Before we started you told me a little about the drip campaign. Talk about that here. What happens? Somebody gives you their email address, what’s the first thing that happens?
Matt: They get a welcome email from me thanking them, basically tells them “If there’s anything I can help you with, let me know,” and I learned this trick from Derek Halpern from Social Triggers. There’s a great way for people because they’re always going to ask you questions. So I get ideas for blog posts and products because I kind of see what questions are being asked the most. But travel is an interesting industry. If you’re running a marketing company or fitness or finance, everyday people deal with their business, their health and their money. You’re not really concerned with backpacking in Europe until you’re going to backpack Europe. So there’s a lot of turnover in travel because there is a constant stream of people but you don’t need me everyday.
So I look at how people plan there trips. They get really excited, they kind of want to buy every book, they buy the guidebook, they might get zealous and book their flight right away and then they forget about their trip and then they are like, “Oh, I’m going to Europe in the next month. I have to go buy my backpack, get the travel insurance, buy the gear.” So the campaign is sort of built along that. It’s very heavy on product and practical advice right away. Then it moves into inspirational emails, then goes back into the products reminding people that “Hey if you want to help support the site, if you have found the information useful, please use my affiliate links. Here are some books that can help you. Be sure to get travel insurance before you go.”
Andrew: And that is an affiliate link too.
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: So wait, so you email them and you say first thing is “Welcome to my mailing list. If you have any questions hit reply.” That is how you get the questions that help you come up with guides and come up with blog posts. Do you respond to all of them?
Matt: I respond to all my email.
Andrew: So if somebody goes into Nomadic Matt right now and has a question like “How do I find a hostel for Eastern Europe or for Russia or for Cuba?” Cuba might be more interesting.
Matt: Yeah
Andrew: What do you say about Cuba for example? You probably don’t have one yet, a post about that.
Matt: No, go through Canada and Mexico and don’t get a stamp on your passport.
Andrew: I see. You just know what you know, but you wouldn’t do extra research just for that email?
Matt: No. Occasionally someone will say to me “I really want to use this company, have you heard of them?” And I will say no and I will go look them up, but not to often. A lot of people will ask me stuff that is really out of my purview; luxury travel stuff, river cruises. I have to tell him, “That’s not something I really focus on, but I know someone who does” and I’ll just refer them off to this other writer or blogger.
Andrew: All right, okay so, I can see how that keeps you from being overwhelmed. You don’t have to know everything, a lot of what you’ve already written is applicable and people ask you questions, the rest you can do a little bit of research on or you can say, “It just not part of my focus.” Terrific. That’s the first email. The next thing you do is, sorry?
Matt: Right, well going back that, you can’t know everything about travel. It’s like saying, “I know everything about science.” People specialize for a reason. The next email, they get my top blog post, my favorite ones, to help them long their way. Then they get a list of the 25 companies I think they should use, then they get my book, “How to Travel the World on $50 a Day.” And then they get cheap flights, they get my travel hacking book; I have like a 24 email series.
Andrew: Okay.
Matt: And there are credit cards.
Andrew: How much experimentation goes into that?
Matt: A lot.
Andrew: A lot.
Matt: Yes, I mean that has been refined over a couple of years.
Andrew: How do you experiment with it here, wait, you use Infusionsoft, right?
Matt: I use AWeber.
Andrew: You use AWeber?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: That’s even harder and so, do you do broadcast of people who are part of the onboarding drip email?
Matt: You get two emails from me, you get that email sequence and then you get a weekly email from me featuring travel deals as well as this week’s blog post and about what I am doing in my life.
Andrew: I see and so you kind of got it and you’re okay with someone who is on the third email of your drip, getting whatever happens to be the weekly email too. If it happens to be on the same day, you just accept it.
Matt: I know, I have it set up so you get the drip Friday through Monday and then I send out the weekly email usually on Thursday.
Andrew: So, that’s how you avoid double emailing.
Matt: Yeah, [inaudible 00:02:12] email.
Andrew: Here is a problem I have had with testing drip emails, I know the power of them but suppose you think, “You know what, I would like to try, I have four emails, I would like to try a different email as number two and then have five emails.” You start pushing those up? Do you start just rearranging it but you can’t because that means that people who are already on email number, what I just lost track of the numbers that I got. But you know what I am talking about?
Matt: Yeah, that was really hard in the beginning because I would constantly shift things around but I am pretty happy with the order I have now because I know the consumer lifestyle, life cycle so much.
Andrew: What did you do back then when you couldn’t, when somebody already got number three and you’re adding number two and you didn’t want them to accidentally get number three again?
Matt: If they would get number three again and I would just say, “Oops. Sorry for the double email.”
Andrew: You’re just accepting that, that’s what it is.
Matt: Yeah, I just accept it that’s what it was.
Andrew: I see, and when you test, it’s just what increases the most revenue and at times may be its most engagement.
Matt: Yeah, and what I found with my audience, people don’t leave. My open rate is usually steady, between depending on the season 25-35%. Of course the new drip emails are obvious like 50%. But my unsubscribed rate, 0.1.
Andrew: So, even when they’re not traveling, they just stay in the mailing.
Matt: They stay there. I’ll get emails from people to say, “Matt, I used your website last year, it was super helpful. We’re planning a trip again. Can I get some more advice?” So, I don’t really want to be [inaudible 00:03:58] because I know I have people, once my advice helps them, they’re going to use me again. So, I don’t really want to inundate them, drive them away in the short term.
Andrew: You know what, I know one of your goals is to get people come to the site and check out the book but I just want them to go to the site and check out this subtle marketing that’s still really effective like, I am now on your travel guides to Costa Rica travel tips.
Matt: Right
Andrew: I scroll down and that tab bar that asked me for my email address, stays up so elegantly, so simply. It doesn’t feel aggressive but it’s there, its present. Speaking of Costa Rica, you ran a contest to try to grow your mailing list and it involved Costa Rica. What was that contest?
Matt: I gave away a free trip to Costa Rica. So, you would have had to create video as to why you want to go to Costa Rica. And I picked my favorites and then I had the audience pick a top three and then me and a friend picked the top one.
Andrew: Okay.
Matt: So that was pretty fun, that was the first big contest that I ever did.
Andrew: And how did it go?
Matt: Well you know, It went really well except I was in Australia at the time…
Andrew: That’s what I’m getting at.
Matt: Travelling. I was on a boat in the Whitsunday Islands and my site crashed. So for a couple of days my site was down in the middle of this contest.
Andrew: While you were trying to grow your mailing list, trying to look professional, trying to keep people engaged. Suddenly you disappeared for two days.
Matt: Yep
Andrew: And there was nothing you could do because you were on the other side of the planet and that’s tough anyway.
Matt: Yeah, I didn’t have Internet. The only reason I knew it was down was because we went passed a cell tower and my phone lit up like a Christmas tree. And “Your site is down, I can’t vote. What’s going on?” It worked itself out. I think it was just a server overload from all of the traffic. I definitely upgraded my server after that.
Andrew: How do you grow your mailing list when the contest is to create a video?
Matt: So at the time, when was this, this was early 2010. Sorry, I take so many trips it is often hard to place them in dates. I think it was 2011. I actually did not really have a mailing list at this point.
Andrew: So it was just about engagement then? Just create videos, show that you’re alive, show that people care.
Matt: I think I had people sign up for my Facebook page or follow me on Twitter. Something really easy and cheap. I was working with a tour company at the time so they just wanted the brand awareness of it. As most marketers always say, “The greatest mistake I ever made was not collecting emails from day one.”
Andrew: I see that, we asked you, April on the team asked you “What’s the big mistake?” You said it’s that. What advice do you have? “Start your email list right away. Plaster that email sign up all over the place.” Why is email so important?
Matt: Because RSS is kind of dead and everybody checks their email multiple times a day. We are, as a society, email addicted. It’s the new mail. You don’t get letters in the mail, you get emails. You don’t get a lot of discount offers. Yeah you still get all of that junk mail. But now you get all of the junk email too. We live by our email. So people always check it. You can miss a Facebook update because their algorithm will change and suddenly five people see it. Whether or not you respond to me email, you see it. Whenever somebody says “Oh I didn’t see it.” They saw it.
Andrew: Here’s another thing I noticed when I was on your site. There is a tab for forums. It takes me to forums.nomadicmatt.com. How helpful is it to have a forum on a site like yours?
Matt: It has been really helpful. We just started it earlier this year and it has taken some time to grow and build but it has been really helpful and the community has really liked it. It allows an outlet for me to sort of deflect some of the travel questions from the community. Going back to what we talked about before. If I don’t know the answer, well maybe somebody in the community does. So I encourage people to post there and share their travel stories there and just make friends.
Andrew: Why did you do it on your own platform? Actually what is this? What software are you using?
Matt: IP Forums
Andrew: Oh I know this. Oh there I see it, IP board.
Matt: IP Board.
Andrew: Why do it there as opposed to on Facebook?
Matt: Well you get the traffic boost. You know Google will eventually index all of these forums and so people will search through the site. Things can get lost on Facebook pretty easily. You know here content can live and be searchable and accessible in a way that I don’t think you can have on a Facebook group or just on my fan page.
Andrew: All right, suppose somebody is listening to us. They’ve followed a lot of the advice and one thing that they are shaky about is forums. They say “All right fine, this guy Matt got some results; I’m going to try forums too.” What is the best advice that you could give them about getting forums done right.
Matt: The best advice I got was from my friend Steve Kamb, who runs website Nerd Fitness, because he’s got this gigantic forum community.
Andrew: Yeah, really active.
Matt: Really active. So I said “What’s your secret,” and he said “Run a lot of community contests and giveaways. Challenges as he calls them. So get a way to get people to compete against themselves and against each other and give away prizes.
Andrew: What are some of the competitions?
Matt: That I’ve had?
Andrew: Yeah.
Matt: I’ve had people, so I’ve done two so far. I do one a quarter. I mean, I’ve only had this for six months. So the first one did well, the second one, not so well. But I’ve had people just, the first one was do one thing that got you closer to a trip. It could be anything, from buying a guide book to booking a flight to researching a destination, to going somewhere and buying a train ticket, whatever and then just upload a photo of proof of it. So that, everyone was really jazzed about that because people say, “I don’t know, should I do that?” You would come on and say, “No, no, you can do it. Look, I did this too,” and nobody wants to be left out of the crowd.
Andrew: So one thing that they did that got them closer to a trip, it might be getting a job, it might be going on a website and checking something out or registering for something?
Matt: Yes. Getting a travel credit card, opening a bank account that they are going to save money in, we were very loose with the rules.
Andrew: So you email the audience and you encouraged them to enter this contest and everyone who is entering is commenting on the forums and encouraging more people to talk?
Matt: Right. So to win, you had to be a forum member. You couldn’t just email me and say you did it. You had to be posted on the forms, you had to be a forum member. So that was one of the ways to drive engagement and drive my audience to the forums. It also, let the people know the forums exist. So I think that’s my greatest challenge, is how do I integrate the forums more into the site itself?
Andrew: Where can I see this? What’s the search term that I can use to search the forums and find it?
Matt: I haven’t looked at its analytics in awhile, so I don’t know what’s popping up in search.
Andrew: Okay. When I try contest, what’s the other one that didn’t do so well?
Matt: I wanted people to go out and explore their cities, so I said, “Come up with a list of five things that you always wanted to do in your city and go do it over the course of two weeks and show picture proof.” We had about 10 or 12 people actually do it.
Andrew: Why do you think that one didn’t do so well?
Matt: It requires more effort. You have to get up and go do five activities.
Andrew: I see, as opposed to, I do see that the forum thread right now,
Travel, action, challenge, one step closer to your next adventure” and here, the first big response that caught my eye was in response was from someone who took a screenshot of, verify his email address to complete, let me see what it is. He signed up for Bluebird by American Express and put a screenshot in the forum.
Matt: Right.
Andrew: And this is the newest member, only has four posts. So this encouraged him to get started.
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: What’s the prize that you gave?
Matt: I give away copies of my books and consulting time with me and t-shirts I had.
Andrew: So it doesn’t have to be an elaborate, expensive thing, you don’t even have to fly them to Costa Rica?
Matt: No, though I’m sure if I did that one, I’d get a lot more responses.
Andrew: If you, what do you mean, because of the prize?
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: The prize would have gotten more people? Yeah, I get it. How much would it cost to fly people to Costa Rica that time?
Matt: I used my mileage, so $2.50 in taxes. This year, I did an annual survey of all my [inaudible 00:03:34] to figure out what I’m doing right and what I’m doing wrong. And I think this is really important for people to do because so often, we can get casual feedback throughout the year, but I think we should also take stock at some point in the year and say, “Who is my audience? Have they changed? What do they like? What was really successful and what do they say, Matt, you really need to fix this, because I’m about to walk out the door.”
And actually, one thing I’ve noticed is, throughout the years, my audience has shifted older and the average travel [inaudible 00:04:14] is between zero to four week per year. So I didn’t even have a big audience of backpackers and long-term travelers. But for this contest, I emailed my list and said, “Okay, everybody who goes will be entered into, get a free flight.” I got over 6,000 responses.
I was like, well, normally, I get 700 or 800 and I had to go through 6,000, great data, great data. But it took me weeks to go through that, weeks.
Andrew: It’s interesting that a thousand bucks would get you such a response and it’s the chance to win a thousand bucks. I still don’t understand why people are so drawn to contests, especially if it’s not a contest of skill. A skill contest I get. But I guess it gets attention.
Matt: Yeah. So we got some great reader feedback.
Andrew: All right. This has been a fantastic conversation, let’s go back to your goal here. I’ve already shaken you upside down by the ankles. I’ve learned as much as possible and you’ve been really considerate and thoughtful and organized in the way that you built up your site so I got a lot of value out of it myself. One of the things you told me is, you were going to create a trip, you were going to do a book tour, using the techniques that you teach in the book. How do people find out about the book tour?
Matt: So if you go to my site, it’s the second blog post but as of tomorrow, there will be a dedicated page on the navigation bar that says, Book Tour.
Andrew: Okay. So you just have to go to NomadicMatt.com and somewhere on there, there will be a book tour.
Matt: Right. So it’s on the homepage right now but there will be a more dedicated…
Andrew: By the time this is out. So let’s see, what I’ll be doing, where I’ll be going… oh, dude, you’re going a ton of places, how many places is this?
Matt: Right. So I’m going to over 40 cities over the course of four and a half months, all around the States, a big road trip, also an excuse for me to go travel the States and visit places I’ve never been.
Andrew: Oh, in New York, you’re going to be at the Strand Book Store. That’s fantastic.
Matt: Yeah.
Andrew: Love that place.
Matt: And it’s a great book store.
Andrew: What do you do? You sit there and you read your book?
Matt: I usually give a talk, so this time I will give a talk about how I got into travel for people who don’t know me and then I’ll talk about how travel has changed over the last couple of years, became even cheaper, then I get Q&As and then there is a book signing.
Andrew: Who organized all these places for you?
Matt: The PR person for Penguin Books.
Andrew: I see.
Matt: I picked the cities and they’re calling up the book stores along the way.
Andrew: Okay. All right. Nomadic Matt, thank you so much for doing this interview. How do you feel it went for you?
Matt: I think it was really good. I hope your audience gets something out of it and I like talking about the businessy side of travel blogging and that’s not something I get to do a lot, so…
Andrew: That’s my favorite part of it. All right. So before you go, let’s negotiate, where is this going to go on your site? How do we get traffic for Mixergy from this interview?
Matt: So this will go on my Facebook, it will go on my Twitter and I will, I’m going to do a dedicated post that says, “Here’s where I’ve been on the web talking about the book,” so you’ll get a nice link.
Andrew: How about the top of that? I hate when people put me third or fifth and then I link it, I link it from my Twitter account to it and basically what I’m doing, is promoting the people who are up above me because who’s going to scroll down to mine? I want to be at the top of the list.
Matt: I was going to ask but since you put it that way, I’ll put you up top.
Andrew: All right. Done deal then. I will tweet that out. So now, we’ve got this little circle of support going.
Matt: We will virtual hand shake right here.
Andrew: All right Matt, thank you so much for doing this. Everyone out there, go see Matt in person and ask him some personal questions the way that I got to ask him here. I think the way that you built this business is really, it’s inspiring. I think it’s something that other people can duplicate. You may not be as impressive an entrepreneur, as the founders of Airbnb, who were on here. Those guys are fantastic. They’ve built something that is out of reach for most people but what you built Matt, anyone should be able to do it.
So if someone’s out there listening, if I have one holdout there who says, “I still haven’t started a business because I can’t,” for one reason or another, they should freaking listen to this interview and then they should slap themselves and wake up and realize that they could do something, that they could build a business. What do you think of that?
Matt: If I can do it, while dividing my time between posting on the website and traveling, somebody who actually spends some time focusing could do it.
Andrew: That’s a really good point. You know what, if your hobby was anything else, it would be so much easier. If your hobby was going and working at a luxury hotel, the internet would be fantastic, the photos would be out of this world and people would be aspiring to get there. But when you go to places and you’re living on 50 bucks a day, it’s easy to get distracted by all the people who are in your hostel. It’s easy to have bad internet, you’re right, yes.
Matt: Yeah. I mean, you can be, on a boat in Australia and your website can go down and there is nothing you can do about it. Right. And so, I only really put 100% into this, starting about 2010. So years, rather. Build a website, go hang out with those hot Swedish girls that just invited me to the beach.
Andrew: Are you dating anyone now?
Matt: No, I’m currently single.
Andrew: Do you date, do you have a move that you use when you go out in a hostel and meet people? Do you ask them, “Hey, what’s your book? Do you want to steal my line?” What’s your book you’re reading?
Matt: Yeah. “Hey, what’s your book?” Yeah. I think I’ll say that.
Andrew: What’s your book? It’s like, “Here’s mine.”
Matt: “Is that my book you’re reading, wow? What do you think of that book?” “It’s good.” “I wrote it.”
Andrew: I see. Are you looking for someone or are you just traveling around?
Matt: My only goal right now is the book tour. I’m recently single so I try to focus my energy on by doing the book tour, spreading the message and just that.
Andrew: All right. Well, it’s fantastic to have you on here. I see that you’re going to be here in April. I hope I get to meet you in person.
Matt: Great.
Andrew: Thank you all for being a part of it. Go see Matt. Bye everyone.
