In this episode, Joe and Mike Brusca share how they make millions using organic traffic and search-engine optimization and how anyone can employ the same techniques to succeed in their business, how affiliate marketing helped them learn how to market their own products online, and how they profit from Kindle Publishing and the secret to publishing success.
Resources mentioned
Passive Publishing Profits Program
Books Business Abundance Facebook Group
30-Minute Bestseller Breakthrough Consultation
3 Key Points
SEO Blogging is about identifying problems and targeting key phrases your audience would look up to find them (A great way for beginners to get started.)
Affiliate Marketing is a great way to get started learning marketing because a lot of it is done for you.
Looking at book trends and writing the books your potential customers are hot to buy is a powerful way to make money with books. (Works in fiction and non-fiction.)
Transcript
[0:50] Ellen: Hi everybody, and welcome to Episode 46. Today my guests are Joe Brusca and Mike Brusca and they’re brothers who have been working together online since 2014. Since then, they’ve succeeded at multiple different business models, including Amazon FBA, Kindle Publishing, and eCommerce websites. They own a sellable online portfolio, which consists of over ten different businesses, and they’re still expanding their current holdings along with buying and selling new businesses online.
So welcome to the call. You guys here.
Joe & Mike: Hello, Ellen. Thank you.
[1:33] Ellen: This is really cool because we actually met just about a week ago, and I asked Joe how they found me, and they said they were just going through the entrepreneurial section in iTunes. So, I’m really happy to hear that. So, why don’t you start by telling us what you do. Part of what I wanted to talk about today definitely was blogging and definitely how you’re automating and creating multiple streams of income. So, what’s your story?
[02:04] Joe: Yeah, so like you said, we got started kind of having businesses online in 2014, and it started very simple. It started just me flipping stuff on Amazon and eBay from like garage sales and stuff like that. But it quickly evolved into us making websites, and driving traffic to those websites and selling things on those websites, and then making blogs and driving traffic to blogs and showing ads on the blogs and you know, kind of all the different ways that you see stuff monetized online. We’ve done it, we’ve tried it. So, doing all that really helped us to identify, you could say the proper place for everything online.
So, say, for example, you had a book about knitting or something, just as a random example, there might be some channels that are like way better than others to for knitting whereas if you have, maybe you’re talking about business, then there are things that are better for that. So, we’ve sold all sorts of products. We sell a lot on our eCommerce; we sell stuff that’s really expensive sometimes, over $10,000, but we also have smaller sites.
Ellen: Like what do you sell that’s over $10,000?
Joe: Well, an example of something that we might sell would be like a kitchen Island.
Ellen: Oh uh-huh.
Joe: Yeah, like high end, like home stuff. So yeah, in order to sell something like that, you have to figure out like what’s the proper traffic channel. And in that instance, we found that the profit, the proper traffic channel, was Google shopping.
But for example,
Ellen: How interesting, yeah.
Joe: In our own business, our personal brand business, you could say, build assets online, it’s not really possible to buy Google ads profitably or at least, we haven’t figured out a way to; it’s very difficult.
[04:01]: So, we found that doing stuff like podcasting and YouTube is a far better way to reach our audience. And so, because we’ve dealt with so many audiences, we’d like to think we have a really good concept of how to go after any given audience.
Ellen: Oh, that’s great, cause that’s a very important thing to know. Well, let’s get right into it. Okay. How’s that?
Joe: Sounds good.
[4:24] Ellen: Okay. So how can you use SEO based blogging to grow your business?
Joe: Well, SEO-based blogging is all about identifying problems, and you have to get into really the headspace of where your customer is at. And it doesn’t really matter what kind of business you have. Your customer is going to have problems, and that’s why they’re seeking you out. They’re seeking you out as a cure for their problems.
[04:52]: So, let’s say, I’ll think of the kind of a really straightforward example here. Say you spilled something on your carpet, and you’re trying to figure out like how to get that stain out. Like you spilled some red wine on your nice white carpet. So, you might go to Google and you might type in “best way to remove red wine stain from carpet”. And if you happen to have a cleaning product that can solve that problem, then hey! And you should have an article about that. You should try and be ranking your blog for queries like that where you know your customer might buy your product. So yeah.
[5:28] Ellen: Yeah. Well, how do people know what the best terms are to look up?
[05:33] Mike: Well, I think starting out, for most people that don’t have expert-level knowledge in SEO or following already, it’s going to be the easiest to go after really specific terms. And so, we can talk about how to identify those, but most of the time, longer queries like that, like “how to remove red wine stains on your carpet”. For most people, that’s going to be easier to rank for it because there’s going to be less big sites trying to go after something so specific, and you can start picking up search volume like that. And even if you don’t really understand customer intent and you’re new to online marketing, these long queries, the intent is obvious because they’re so specific. You can’t really mess it up.
[06:16] Ellen: Right? So, you think it’s just like, “Well if I were looking for this, this is what I would look up?” And so, you just assume that’s what everyone else is looking up. Is that kind of how you start or…?
[06:24] Mike: Well, it’s more so about just finding these long-tail queries, that people are searching for that may not seem like they have a lot of search volume, but they’re so specific that,
[06:36] Ellen: Oh, I see. So, if you just go to like a keyword search tool, is it like that?
[06:41] Joe: Well the Google autocomplete is really your best friend here over the keyword search tool.
Ellen: Oh, what is that? I’m not sure I’ve heard of that one.
Joe: When you go into Google and you start typing something.
Ellen: Oh yeah.
Joe: “Red wine, carpet” and start type it. You go to the beginning of that and you start typing “how”, you’re going to see all sorts of different phrases come up.
Ellen: Oh, I see.
Joe: And then, you just simply type, you let Google handle those phrases. You put those in. So, say you’re searching for, like I said, “How to remove red wine from your carpet” and you see all the top pages are, you know, maybe they’re about similar topics, but they’re not specific to red wine. You even as a new and a non-established site, if you make an article specific to red wine, in that instance, you have a very good chance of outranking even very powerful sites. So, we always think that’s the best place to start for beginners doing SEO, trying to promote their business.
[07:34] Ellen: Yeah, it’s similar to Amazon. If you’re looking for a book and you put in a title, it’ll bring up a whole slew of related ones too. So, it’s nice to have that. In the old days, we didn’t have any of that.
[07:48] Mike: I think something that’s newer, but yeah, even if someone wants Facebook ad clients or something like that, like you’re never going to be able to run Google ads to try and get Facebook clients because you have all the big agencies spending tens of dollars per click or more just to get a customer. But if you can find these really specific things that people who are running Facebook ads and have problems that they’re searching for, then it will be easy to show up. It’d be easier and if you’re doing it in bulk, you’ll surely rank for a few things, and then that will be a good way to really pick up customers, especially in the beginning.
[08:29] Ellen: Right. And if people want to learn more about the intent, I did a really good podcast with Susan Lassiter-Lyons and I’ll put that in the, on the podcast page as a resource too, because I do that every with every podcast; there’s a recommended-resource section, so they can listen to that. So, how can you use it to do things like get more people to buy your books and generate more leads beyond what you just said, which is just getting started lower, but is there anything else that people can do?
[09:02] Joe: Well, when someone lands on your site from Google, you can’t just say, “Hey go buy my book,” obviously.
Ellen: Right.
Joe: Because they might get a little annoyed. It has to kind of be a gradual thing if you will. So, if someone is searching for that example that we gave, “removing red wine from your carpet,” and they land on your site, and you give them a good solution, you have to think about like, okay like, “ Who is this person? And what else can I offer them?” And if your book is relevant, then you can say, “Hey,” like say your book is about, 101 ways to get any stain out of anything.
Ellen: That’s a good one.
Joe: Yeah.
Ellen: Yeah.
Joe: That’s a great spot to talk about your book after you’ve already given them some helpful insight about their specific problem cause then they’re going to trust you. You know, they’re going to like,”Oh this person is great. They helped me fix my carpet, maybe I will go buy their book.”
[9:58]bEllen: Yeah, absolutely. It’s so important how you say it when you approach people, I know sometimes like somebody will ask me for a resource, this just happened yesterday actually on Facebook, and I was trying to tell her that she could go and get this free checklist. But I also knew that there was an offer behind that and I didn’t want her to feel like I was necessarily trying to get her to buy something.
I was trying to give her the information that she needed at that moment. And that checklist did do that. But I also had some articles that were on Medium that would also help her. And so, I really had to stop and think about, “Okay, well, how am I going to word this? What am I going to say?” Cause I don’t want them to feel like that, cause it like we didn’t know each other. It was just a comment that was made on a post in Facebook. So, that is really important. So, I love what you said cause that’s a great segue., Joe
[10:55] Mike: We’ve found that people really don’t want to be sold…
Ellen: Right.
Mike: …unless there’s value first.
Ellen: Right, absolutely.
Mike: Once you can kind of establish a good connection with the information that you provide, maybe they’ll be open to it. But you know, I saw on your bio, and Amazon, and your website, you do talk about how to do things on the backend, so you make more money off of say your book or whatever.
Ellen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Cause a lot of people do come to me and they go, as a matter of fact, this happened last month, this woman comes to me and she was like, “I got to make a lot of money, and I got to make money fast, and I wrote this book, and how can I make a lot of money with this book? And I’m like “No.” This woman didn’t even want to coach or consult on what was in the book. She just wanted to make money from books. But I’m always saying that to people.
As a matter of fact, that’s how I got started. I just wanted to write a book. And when I was coming up, Alex Mandossian had created this course is really dates me but called Teleseminar Secrets and that was the big deal. And one of the first things that he said was, “You don’t make a lot of money from the book. You make the money from coaching.” And so, I thought, “Okay, well, I better try this coaching thing and see, see how it goes.” And as it turned out, I really enjoyed it. And it’s been very good to me, you know, and I’ve helped a lot of people over the years. But I think a lot of authors start out that way. Yeah. They’re not thinking about the backend.
[12:18] Mike: Yeah, and so the point I’m trying to make is that, you know, you should have some idea of what kind of lifetime customer value you can get out of, say someone who buys a book, right. You know, 100 people that buy the book, X amount are going to sign up for the coaching. And so, you can say with some certainty, every book sale is going to yield me this much money, right? So, when you’re starting to get this SEO traffic, what you’re actually doing, cause a visitor may come onto your site, and then leave. And they may never come back because they’re just going to forget about you. It’s just one touchpoint.
But what you’re doing with that SEO is you’re actually creating your own unique audience. So, that would be a good time, if you have the margin on the back end, you can start doing things like retargeting ads to bring them into more content or bring them into some sort of opt in, say for a checklist, because that audience is going to be warmer because they were already engaged with you and the traffic costs, the clicks are going to be cheaper because it’s your own unique audience that you’ve gathered from being on your website.
[13:24] Ellen: You know, retargeting is so important. I don’t think a lot of authors understand this. Why don’t you explain to them more about what retargeting is?
[13:34] Ellen: So, retargeting is when you have your own website, essentially you can put what’s called like a pixel. And so, if you ever go into like your search history, you say “Clear cookies” and stuff like that, what that’s doing is it’s clearing all of the pixels that have been put on you through going to various websites.
And so, someone goes onto your website, and you have say a Google pixel or a Facebook pixel on there, it tags that person. And now, when they go throughout the Internet, either Google or Facebook or whoever can begin serving them different things. And so, say a hundred people go onto your website and you have that pixel code on there. Now you have a hundred different uses. It’s almost like collecting an email but a little bit less interaction.
Ellen: Invasive, would you say?
Mike: Yeah. A little less invasive. So, you can go, say onto the Google ads platform, input that audience, and now you can begin to target them with a specific ad based on the website that they visited, or even down to the page, or down to the action that they took. So, you can get really targeted with this. And again, it’s going to be cheaper, it’s going to be more effective. And we do this really in all of our businesses.
[14:44] Ellen: Yeah. And you know, what people have to realize is that most people are going to say no to whatever you offer. So, retargeting is really to get to all those other people that didn’t take it. But one thing I want to say about this, and I know this was true for me, I really want to encourage people to learn this stuff because I didn’t learn it for a long time, and I sort of prided myself on not learning it because I was making so much money. It didn’t really matter for a lot of years, and that it did.
But also, a lot of people who are creative, they don’t want to deal with the technical stuff, and they don’t want to deal with numbers and they don’t want to learn this stuff. And if you’re going to do this, you have to learn this stuff. You really do have to learn it.
[15:25] Mike: And you know, even the book, what is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. People talk about how big of a book that is, but no one talks about how that book, when it was out, it was meant to be almost like, that wasn’t the main product; the main product was Napoleon Hill’s seminars.
Ellen: Right.
Mike: And so, even with that, people want to go on, they just want to create this book that’s going to create all this success. It’s never usually about the book, even for the biggest people. And so, you can’t think that you’re special and your book is going to be that one in a million.
[15:57]: Right. Yeah. Thanks for making that point. And I mean Think and Grow Rich is so huge. God, I was talking to this guy yesterday, and he was saying how he met this billionaire, and how he (the billionaire) asked him if he’d read, Think and Grow Rich. And he said, “Yeah.” And he (the billionaire) said, “Well, based on the conversation,” he said, “you clearly didn’t get the lesson and you need to read it again and again and again.” And he said that now he’s read it like a hundred times.
Mike: And is he a billionaire now?
Ellen: Not yet, but he’s working on it. But yeah, that book is the absolute Bible, and that wasn’t even his main thing. You know, you just never know. Yeah,
Mike: Yeah. You really don’t.
Ellen: Yeah. So, I want to talk a little bit about affiliate marketing. I haven’t really talked about that on the podcast. And I love affiliate marketing; affiliate marketing is free money, and somebody else does all the work. So, how can you use it to create a business out of thin air using affiliate marketing if you don’t have a product, a book or an offer?
[16:57] Joe: Well, before I talk about the nitty-gritty of the tactical way to go about it, I want to talk about why you might want to do that. If, say you’re someone that wrote a book, and you’re thinking about promoting your book and you’ve got this great thing out into the universe, and you have no idea how to promote it or where to start.
Affiliate marketing is actually like really great practice to learn how to market stuff online without being so like mentally committed to it, if that makes sense. So, allow me to explain.
Ellen: “Okay.”
Joe: Say, again, you’re really passionate about knitting, and you created this book about knitting, and you have no idea like how to market it. So, but then, say you bought a course on how to do like Amazon affiliate marketing where you’re going to create blog posts that rank in Google, and you’re going to direct people over to Amazon, and they’re going to buy something.
[17:54]: So, the practice that you get from being able to just execute on a business model online without being passionate about it, I think that’s one thing that, believe it or not, has actually taught us so much because we’ve just done so many different business models. And then, when it came time to promote our personal brand, we were already aware of all of the marketing tools out there at our disposal.
So yeah, when it comes to affiliate marketing, it often helps to get the marketing experience in something that’s a low hanging fruit, if that makes sense.
Ellen: Yeah.
Joe: So, if you’re going to get into like marketing, say you write a book about business or something, or marketing, like anything money related, anything money related is going to be super competitive. And you can’t expect to get into a niche like that, like on your first go-around; it’s going to be very, very difficult. So, I think it helps to practice marketing things that are much less glamorous, like, I said, like stain removal from a carpet, you know?
[18:59] Ellen: Well, or the other way to go is it’s just like you’ve got your product, and if you’ve created relationships, you can ask people to be joint venture partners. But if it’s, a product, it’s going to really be an affiliate link…
[19:13] Joe: Yeah.
Ellen: For most of them anyway.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. That’s kind of the other approach. And again,…
[19:21] Ellen: But the great thing about affiliate marketing is, like I was saying, you don’t have to create all of the, all of the pieces; you don’t have to worry about the website; you don’t have to worry about the copy; you don’t have to worry about any of that. So, what you’re saying if you don’t have any of those skills, yeah, it’s a really great place. But I think it’s also a really great place just for an extra stream of income. Like to always think about what else could you promote that maybe you didn’t create?
[19:46] Mike: Yeah. For sure. The content creation part is, you know, probably one of the hardest parts of the entire thing.
Ellen: Which cracks me up cause, for me, that’s the easiest. Yeah.
Mike: I think for a lot of people it’s not so easy because it’s like, you know, it’s one thing to just go in like record some videos, but a lot of people, it’s daunting because they have to figure out how to edit things, how to do all this work and so it can kind of allows them ways to execute and make money and sort of get their feet wet without having to go into creating their own product.
Ellen: You don’t have to do everything all at once.
Mike: Yeah. We were talking about the lifetime customer-value thing, how that woman had a book, and she just wanted to sell the book. Well, you know, instead of selling just a book, you can go and find other relevant offers that you can now promote along with the book. And now you have a more fleshed out back in.
[20:37] Ellen: So, can people make a lot of money with affiliate marketing if they’re not doing anything else in your opinions?
[20:43] Mike: Yeah, I think the sky’s the limit. If you can make money with your own stuff, then you can make money with affiliate marketing. It’s just like Joe was saying at the beginning, you have to get the right traffic and just have the right offer. So yeah.
[20:57] Joe: The reason why I kind of brought up the practice thing, I guess just cause from our perspective is that we were doing affiliate marketing for other things, so now we have affiliates for our own course that we sell. But before that, we were affiliates for many, many things. So, being on both sides of the relationship I guess is good practice to have it.
Ellen: Yeah.
Joe: And I guess that’s what I was trying to say.
[21:25] Ellen: Yeah, no, that’s great. One of the things I’ve really learned over time, but especially this year, cause I’ve done a lot of studying this year, just cause being at home, even more than usual. And I work at home anyway. But I’ve discovered that people have their own bias based on what their own experience is and what they think works best. And what I found is, is you can go into somebody’s space and try it out, and then see if it works for you.
And so by doing that I found like certain things people are making a lot of money doing and I would say, “Well that’s not going to work for me,” just cause I’m not going to do that; I’m not going to do what they’re doing. I know myself, I’m not going to do it. You know?
And to me affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ones again, cause of what you guys were saying, it’s, it’s a great place to get your feet wet. You don’t have to deal with everything all at once; it’s not overwhelming. But everybody really has to find whatever it is that resonates with them. That’s my bottom line. It’s whatever works for you.
Mike: Definitely.
[22:29] Ellen: Huh?
Mike: I was going to say people have, like you said, people have different things that are, they’re kind of drawn to when it comes to doing Internet marketing in general. Maybe they want to be the ones that like to learn how to do the traffic or they want to be the ones that learn how to do the actual content creation.
Ellen: Right.
Mike: Either is fine. Affiliate marketing is just a way to essentially plug those holes that they don’t feel like doing themselves.
[22:51] Ellen: So, what’s a trend-based marketing strategy on Amazon Kindle, and how do you use it to grow your publishing business?
[22:58] Joe: Well, I’ll let you answer that. We publish fiction books, just, FYI as you know. But what we really do in that is we like to go after trends in fiction. And I believe that there are trends in everything, and if you can correctly learn to combine identifying trends with marketplaces where there’s a lot of organic, natural traffic like Amazon, and you can put out content in relation to those trends, whether it’s fiction, nonfiction, whatever, you’ve got some, some customers in the door. And as long as you’ve got that backend, where your lifetime customer value is going to be high enough to justify what you’re doing, then it’s a great thing. But I wanted Mike to get into some of the more nitty-gritty details of how we do it.
And it’s funny because we’re not a big advocate of trends outside of publishing. We go for more evergreen-type things because you could just keep hammering away on it. But, with Kindle, it is important because the market does change. Like every time there’s a big bestseller, in whatever category, it usually shifts the market because now people want to read more books that are similar to that.
Even something like time management or, you know there’s like all these topics that come up because there’s one big book about it, and now everyone’s going to try and do it. Things like ultra-learning, stuff like that. So, what you need to do if you want to try and get your name out there is find these trends. And you can do that, really, through any particular category’s Top 100 books. And so, if you go into Amazon Kindle, and you go into the marketplace, you can look at the Top 100 for various amounts of things.
[24:42] Ellen: There also are trend lists that you can look up through Google.
Mike: Yeah, sure. Yeah, you can definitely do that as well. But on Amazon, you know, you can see what is actually selling, and you can notice the patterns of these bestselling books, even just in the way that like the covers are done. Something like that. Like getting a cover that properly matches the space can be a game-changer for the amount of click-through rate you get to your book in general, and so that can boost your sales just off of having a good cover and understanding the types of covers you need. People want to kind of throw their personality into things too many times and not just purely focus on what the reader wants.
[25:25] Ellen: Right. Yeah, yeah. I come up against that a lot. It’s like, “Well, I don’t love that title,” or “I don’t love that cover.” or whatever you’re going, but it works. Or, this is how a title should be, or this is what your market wants. So yeah. That makes me think of Fifty Shades of Grey. After that came out, everybody wanted that kind of a fiction book.
[25:55] Mike: Yeah. You see it all the time. And going back to what Joe was saying earlier, that’s why almost doing something that’s faceless sometimes can be better or doing something that’s not a passionate project can be better because it’s like you don’t really care that the title that you want is, you know, that whether that’s a good title or not, there’s going to go purely with what you think the market wants. And it almost trains you when you go and do things for your own personal brand or for your own passion to do it in a way that is a lot more empathetic with your audience.
[26:31] Ellen: You know, I really can’t stress that enough. So many people get into this, and we want to be passionate about what we do, especially for creatives like me, and the people who come to me and work with me and everything. They’re passionate about what they’re doing, but you really have to keep what you guys are saying in mind as well. If you’re going to be a business person with this, if you’re going to make money with this stuff, you have to understand both sides and balance those things. And sometimes, the passion can get in the way of making a rational decision, you know?
Joe & Mike: Yeah.
Ellen: Well, are there any other tips that you want to give people before we say goodbye?
[27:07] Joe: I think we said a lot of the important things. I guess the thing that I think we should probably stress the most to your audience is, you know, really understand the backend of your business and don’t think of it as just selling a book or just selling one inexpensive thing. Think about how you can make thousands from one customer. Because once you can do that, everything changes because now you have the margin to go do paid advertising.
Now you have the willpower to go and write this blog post because, especially for like a long-tail keyword, right? Because it’s easy to rank. It may not get a huge amount of traffic but one customer to you can be a total game-changer because of how much money you can make off of that customer. It’s not about squeezing every last penny out of a person, but it is about at least having something valuable to offer and just making an offer that can be of significant value also to your bank account.
[28:03] Ellen: That’s awesome. So, why don’t you tell people a little bit about your passive publishing course, and then I have a link for them if people want to learn more.
[28:13] Mike: So, if people are interested in learning how to do things like build mailing lists, publish, publish fiction or just learning how to optimize their Amazon listing in general, we know we do have a course called Passive Publishing Profits and it is mainly focused fiction, but there are a lot of decent tidbits in there for anyone who is doing Kindle publishing and, so yeah, they can certainly check that out.
[28:35] Ellen: Okay, great. Well, that is at http://ellenlikes.com/passive- publishing. So, I really want to thank you guys for coming on. This has been really great, and it’s really nice to meet you.
Joe: Thank you.
Ellen: And yeah, I look forward to learning more over time and you know, seeing where you guys go from here. So, keep us posted.
Joe: Thank you. It’s been fun.
Ellen: Okay, so that’s it for today. To get the transcripts, go to www.booksbusinessabundance.com/podcast You’re also welcome to join our Facebook group and the link is on the podcast page there@booksbusinessabundance.com/podcast.
And if you are interested in taking the next step and writing your own book and you would like a 30-minute Bestseller Breakthrough Consultation to help you clarify your topic and create your personal book writing or marketing plan. There is no obligation. And you can go to www.booksopendoors.com/questionnaire. Fill that out and someone will get back to you in 24 hours. So, that’s it for now. Till next time, Bye-bye and be safe.
Joe: Bye
Mike: Bye
Joe: Bye. Thank you.
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