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Home-Made Content to Monetize and Sell! – 258

Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine and is owned by Google? That’s why most of our internet searches produce a number of YouTube videos at the top of the page. It’s no wonder then that skilled content creators have gravitated to the video platform as a way to gain a social following AND make serious money.

Today on the AM/PM Podcast, Tim Jordan walked two doors down the hallway in order to connect with one of the sharpest guys in the YouTube channel-creating business. Eric Fullerton spent the last four years working with Tim’s Private Label Legion. All the while he’s been “experimenting” with his YouTube channel “Cash Cows” as a way to revisit favorite 80’s music and generate a nice chunk of income on the side.

User-generated and low-budget content has steadily become a way that entrepreneurs of all kinds have gained attention from an increasingly video-focused audience. Want to know how to build your own channel but are worried that you don’t have the sophisticated recording equipment to make it happen? Eric says that “equipment doesn’t matter, and it never has, content is what matters.”

What’s holding you back? Sounds like it’s time to put yourself in front of your computer or smartphone and get to work. YouTube fame, or a nice advertising funnel for your business, awaits!

In episode 258 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim and Eric discuss:

• 04:30 – A Podcast Guest from the Office Next Door
• 05:15 – “If It’s on a Computer, I Can Do It”
• 07:20 – Dumpster Diving Leads to YouTube Video Fame
• 09:00 – Experimenting with 80 YouTube Channels
• 11:15 – Why is YouTube Still Relevant Today?
• 13:10 – Evergreen Channels Help You Gain More Followers
• 15:30 – How to Get Paid by YouTube  
• 19:15 – Is the YouTube of 2021 Still the Same?   
• 22:40 – Funding Both Sides of the Media “War”
• 24:30 – Equipment Doesn’t Matter, Content Does
• 28:00 – What’s Trending on YouTube?  
• 31:00 – Jarvis is Writing Content for Eric’s Videos  
• 34:00 – Too Difficult for Beginners? Not So, Says Eric

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

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Transcript

Tim Jordan: From filming home videos in North Alabama in the eighties to having the likes of a twisted sister reach out to you because of one of your 80 YouTube channels that you’re now monetizing, today’s guest is going to talk about user generated and low budget content and how effective it can be to drive traffic to a monetizable source or to an e-commerce product. It’s going to be a great episode, make sure to listen to the end. Here we go.

Tim Jordan: Hi. I’m Tim Jordan and in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. Join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans. We all have a dream of living a life and fulfilling our passions. We want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Bradley Sutton: Hey guys, Bradley Sutton from Helium 10 here. Quick message. If you’re an FBA business owner, you’ve maybe put thousands of hours of hard work into growing your business, but what happens when you’ve grown it as much as you can and you don’t have the time or resources to take it to that next level? Well, that’s where Thrasio comes in. They acquire category leading FBA brands from small business owners, just like you. They’ve got the experience of acquiring over 125 Amazon businesses, and they’ve seen it all when it comes to managing and growing an Amazon brand. So, if you’re thinking about selling your FBA business, visit thrasio.com/helium10 to connect with Thrasio’s deals team that’s tthrasio.com/helium10, for more information on if your brand is a good fit for Thrasio.

Tim Jordan: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. Today, we are talking about content. No matter how you are related to e-commerce or digital marketing or online sales, content is king. You have to have content. If you don’t have content, people don’t want your stuff. Even the best commercials during the super bowl are all about something witty, funny, or emotional. It all has to be about content, but not all of us, actually, probably none of us can afford to create super bowl commercials, right? We are always staring at content. It’s typically our cellphones we are looking at, whether it’s social media or blogging, there’s a lot of really high-end professionally done, expensive content out there. If you’re a fledgling solopreneur, if you’re getting started in digital marketing or e-commerce, you might not have the budget for these really, really polished pieces of information. The good news is you don’t always need that. There is a really big push right now for user generated content and very low budget content and like homemade content, right? Because people see that as authentic and they see it as intriguing, and they want to watch that. So there’s a lot of really good evidence to support that. Today’s guest is a very interesting one because I’ve known this guy for four years now, maybe close to five. His name is Eric Fullerton. Eric actually works for me with the Private Label Legion business. He has been one of the employees that I think I’ve had around the longest, just because one, we can’t afford to get rid of them, but two, maybe he’s a sucker for punishment, right? He likes taking on all these big projects, but he is typically in the office here with me, actually two doors or two walls down from the studio that we’re sitting in right now. For this episode, he’s actually back at his house in his dungeon, in his basement, in his studio. Because aside from working with me and the team, he has been creating content for darn near 30 years now. So I want to talk about that. It’s a crazy story. There’s some really cool stuff here. And then, because he’s been creating content for 30 years and he has somewhat of an expertise in a lot of formats, a lot of platforms, we’re going to talk about some really relatable, but very useful and current, and up-to-date advice for putting out, especially video content. So, welcome Eric to the AM/PM Podcast.

Eric: Hi, awesome to be here.

Tim Jordan: Is it weird that you’re here?

Eric: Yeah, it is weird.

Tim Jordan: I think for the past year, year and a half, every week I walk into his office, I’m like, “Hey man, go easy on the bandwidth. I’m filming the podcast.” He’s like, “Alright.” And then I walk into the office. I’m like, “Hey man, can you be on the podcast?” He’s like, “I don’t know, this is super, super bizarre.” But anyways, glad you’re here. Now, aside from working with me. I told everybody, Eric, that you do a lot of other stuff. Can you give us a really high level of some of the stuff you’re currently working on now with different projects?

Eric: Yeah, I guess, mostly video, of course that’s my passion of 30 plus years, but also graphic design, and some programming and anything that has to do with computers. I’m not a physical guy at all. I’ve never been into sports. I can’t even fix a broken door, but if it’s on the computer, I can do it. So that’s first and foremost, but anything creative, as a kid, I’d got into video and graphics kind of at the same time.

Tim Jordan: Right now you’re currently operating a different podcast. You’re doing a bunch of freelance work for different people, right? You’ve got a bunch of cool stuff going on. You produce music for Spotify?

Eric: Right, yeah. I’m also a musician. My mother was a piano teacher growing up and she taught me early on. So on the side of all my computer-based things, I started playing piano and then guitar and then lots of instruments. I started composing my own music and selling it on Spotify and iTunes. Then I started getting some gigs doing sound effects and composing for video games. So, I still do that on the side too.

Tim Jordan: You’ve done everything from major, major name, video game, soundtrack production to you’ve helped work with places like Pixar, right?

Eric: I worked with Disney once.

Tim Jordan: With Disney, not Pixar. Let’s talk a little about your story. I think that that’s really a good place to get started with how this kind of hobby turned so valuable now and where I want to actually start off with is your music videos. For those of you listening, Eric came into my office like a year ago and he’s like, “Hey, something cool happened.” I said, “Well, okay, what happened?” He’s like, “This famous rock star just mentioned me.” I’m like, “Well, why is that?” And he’s like, “Because back in like 1988, I was making music videos when I was 13 years old or something with my buddy with one of those like 300 pound video cameras that you run on your shoulder and I’m releasing them on YouTube.” Let’s get to that in a second. Talk about when you first got started into videos and then we’ll work all the way up to that can kind of into that story.

Eric: Right. So, in the mid-eighties, I got a black and white surveillance camera from my dad. He had found it in the back of a closed K-mart and the dumpster, and they were getting rid of all of their security cameras. And he was like, oh, that’s kind of cool. So he grabbed one, maybe the kids would like it. So he got home, he’s an electrical engineer. So he figured out how to power it up and get it hooked up to the TV. And that I would just– that was it for me. I lost it. I was like, this is what I want to do forever. And just kind of recorded onto the VHS and recorded little videos and little things like that, and just got better and better at it. Now, what Tim was talking about with the music videos is like, I’m starting to finally put my old eighties videos on YouTube and then people will notice them like Metallica, twisted sister, lots of different bands because when I was a kid, me and my best friend Daryl, we used to like head bang and do like metal videos and stuff. And of course you can put this stuff on YouTube, you get a copyright warning, but you can’t make any money at it, but we just do it for fun. And these videos went viral. And now we have a really big channel with just home movies and stories of old.

Tim Jordan: These are videos that you recorded back in the eighties, and you literally had like on tape, still in a box somewhere, I’m going to strip this out, I’m going to digitally edit this and I’m going to make a YouTube channel.

Eric: Yeah. And a lot of the videos can be monetized. So, we’re actually making pretty decent with our childhood videos.

Tim Jordan: And this is just one of your YouTube channels, right?

Eric: Yes.

Tim Jordan: So how many YouTube channels in the past have you owned or currently own?

Eric: So, I think I’ve had around 80 or so. And I know that because I keep a list of all of the old defunct ones that I don’t check on anymore. And then I have lists of current ones and I have lists of all types of different topics. So, some are learning, some are just strictly scripted, some are automated. We can talk about that in a bit. And some are music-based and just all types of different things. Most of them I would say are experiments of course. And then I’ll have one that I’m really focused on, which is my eighties channel right now. But one thing that’s kind of fun to experiment with is batching where you record a bunch of content, edit it all up and then just schedule it to be released. So you can get a whole year’s content over, I don’t know, just work on getting, say 50 videos. Let’s say how many weeks are in a year, 55, 52. So, make 52 videos. And then when you’re done with that, schedule them to release once a week and then just walk away and you have a YouTube channel that appears to be pretty active, but it’s not.

Tim Jordan: Let’s talk about this for a second. You started off with a black and white surveillance camera, right? And now you’ve migrated up to having 80 YouTube channels, which are obviously all videos and videos what you’re doing. You now understand what’s going on in the e-comm world, right? I know that you have a little bit of experience before we got started together, but now you have a much better idea of what’s actually happening here. So, what I would like to do in the rest of this episode is let’s talk to the e-commerce sellers. Like you know who the members of our groups are, you know who the followers are, you know who the audience is, right. Let’s talk about how we can use low budget, easy to produce media or assets to reach the masses. All right. That’s what I want to start tackling. So, I’m going to ask you just a bunch of random questions. We’ll see where it goes from there, right? YouTube 80 channels. Why YouTube? Because there’s TikTok. There’s Instagram reels. There’s all these other formats. YouTube is one of the older media platforms with the internet. Why is YouTube still relevant today?

Eric: YouTube is the second largest search engine. So, the exposure on YouTube is unparalleled. So, if you want to be exposed to the most of the people, you go to YouTube. That would be probably the number one reason for me above monetization, because you can make money on Facebook or TikTok.

Tim Jordan: So you say it’s a search engine, essentially a place, you can enter something and it produces a result. So this is why if I go to Google and type the best trolling motor from my boat, my top six results are probably YouTube reviews of trolling motors, right? Because YouTube is now owned by Google. So search engine, keyword relevancy, all that stuff’s popping up. So because people are going there, you said we can monetize. And the reason you like to monetize on YouTube, correct me if I’m wrong is because it has much more traffic than anywhere else. Right. And it’s kind of organic traffic. So, a lot of people talk about YouTube being evergreen, like explaining what an evergreen channel or evergreen platform is.

Eric: I guess something that holds relevance forever, or doesn’t have such the ability to go out of style so quickly. So something that is like learning how to repair your house. Excellent. I mean, you’ll always have a house, you’ll always have broken stuff. As opposed to something else, like say, okay. I had one of these, a Minecraft channel, right. Minecraft is a hugely popular game and of course it’ll die out because it’s one topic. It’s one consumable thing, right. Just like doing a TV or a movie show channel. So, an evergreen is good, unless you can transition from something that’s not evergreen onto something else that’s not evergreen, but then you’re always chasing the trends. And there’s a lot of channels like that, that just chase the trends and hope that you’re always relevant. And that’s not a good thing.

Tim Jordan: So, in e-commerce we see a lot of YouTube relevant to affiliate marketing, right, and influencer marketing. If I have a product that I want to sell, and I want to use it a YouTube marketer or YouTube influencer to push that, what you’re telling me is instead of targeting a trend, like if I’m selling cabinet hardware, I don’t want to target videos related to the best whatever the color is, stainless steel cabinet poles. I want to target channels that focus on how to upgrade your kitchen. Is that what you’re saying?

Tim Jordan: Right, yeah. More of a broad topic that, and that gets into more of a subscribable channel too, because a channel that has a broad evergreen subject will more likely have content that will relate to you because of that big thing. So if it’s only about repairing cabinets, once you’re done with the project you’re done with, you move on, you don’t need to subscribe. But if it’s about repairing everything, and of course it has a good personality, the guy seems passionate about what he’s doing. That’s all pluses too. So yeah, he would always want to be more broad with your evergreen type things.

Tim Jordan: I just mentioned, of course we can monetize by pushing product sales through influencer marketing and through affiliates, but what are the primary ways of monetizing on YouTube? And I ask you this because so many of our listeners are not dead set on only doing e-commerce products. Like we’re just trying to make money. Right. We’re trying to run businesses. We’re trying to have some fun, we’re trying to create some income. And a lot of times we’re creating content for a Facebook ad or for Instagram reels an ad for a product. We already have the capabilities to create content that may generate revenue in another way, like YouTube. So, can you explain how a typical content creator like yourself with 80 channels actually gets paid from YouTube?

Eric: YouTube didn’t always let you monetize. They launched in 2005 and in 2009 that had their first monetization that popped up called the YouTube partner program. You had to sign up for it and you had to do a lot of paperwork. It was pretty complicated, but they allowed you to put approved ads on your channel, on your videos. And then you get paid per click or pay per view of the commercials that are placed on your videos. It’s still done like that. Although now it’s a lot smarter because you can– you know what the CPM is the cost per milli for each topic. So if you want more money than you’re going to do channels about finances and how to make money channels, because the CPM is literally hired for that. And they tell you that. YouTube lets you know that. If you would like to have more money, and you know what you’re talking about, then do a channel like that. Also real estate is good too. So, kind of know the industry before you step in, but really that’s the one way that you make money is you allow them to place ads on your content and, but you don’t have control over that. You just say, put ads on there. I trust you YouTube. Hopefully it’s not going to be too bad, but just put them on my videos.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. I’ve seen people that have like a coaching program and their competitors commercials pop up on their videos, right? So what we’re talking about folks is if you create a video and you meet some certain metrics and you can turn on monetization and YouTube, then your video gets interrupted in the middle or it has an ad at the front. And what’s interesting about this is you don’t, if I’m running an ad, I don’t always have to pay for that ad, right, Eric, because don’t, you have to like to watch a certain percentage of that ad to explain what that is.

Eric: Right, yeah. There’s a certain time limit that just it’s free for the advertiser. So, if an audience doesn’t watch it beyond 10 seconds or 15 seconds or whatever the threshold that it literally changes every week, they change it a lot. Then no one gets paid, no one spends any money. But if they watch past the threshold, then you’re rewarded some money. If someone clicks on it which is usually like a CTA style, the advertiser puts in what the link is, that’s going to be clickable. Then even more money is exchanged.

Tim Jordan: Which is interesting from both sides. Because if you’re creating content, you can get paid for having people watch your content. But also I believe, and I think Eric believes that YouTube is one of the best places to advertise products now, because you can focus on niches, you can focus on specific keywords that you want to advertise to, but also you can start running an ad. And if somebody clicks off the ad before it’s at threshold, you don’t get charged. So, talk to me about trends on YouTube. All right. Right now there’s so many things to study. There’s so many things to learn. Like we have to learn all the social media platforms and all the digital marketing platforms, but YouTube kind of seems like it’s the same now as it was 10 years ago. Do you think that looking at the most recent updates to YouTube and the trends, is it continuing to stay fairly standard? Like if we learn YouTube and invest the time to do it, is it going to stick around and be relevant for us in the next five years? Or do you think it’s starting to change a lot faster and we’re going to have to stay up with the education?

Eric: It does seem to change a lot. There’s a channel called the creators workshop, I believe. And that’s where YouTube just comes up with updates. They tell you what they’re changing exactly. So, if you want to optimize, then you want to hear it straight from YouTube and not just some other guy, but things that they change, are very much for the creator to kind of tweak what he’s doing. So, one example would be, I started automating a few YouTube channels back in 2015. And by that, I mean, there’s different levels of automation, but this one was, what I was doing was I was, I would download other people’s videos and reupload them to mine. But these were news station type things. These were news like I would choose a city and then get all of the local news station videos. And I wrote some software to do this by the way, so I wouldn’t have to manually do this. So, I would pick a topic in a city. And then I would put that in there. It would scrape all of the relevant videos and it would re-upload them into my channel separately. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Ads on them all. And everybody was okay with that until a certain time, right. So, YouTube changed their algorithm at one point, not the search algorithm, but the algorithm that approves your content for monetization. So, they started looking at the actual content of all the videos and deciding whether this exists on the platform still, or not. Basically just looking for duplications and then letting the owners know, Hey, your stuff has just been re-uploaded. Do you want this to happen? Yes or no. And then of course they’d say no. But for my channel, they didn’t say no. They just said, nah, that’s cool. I don’t care. It’s just news. Literally, all the news stations didn’t mind my channel. So, it kept growing and growing and growing. And then finally my news channel had more views than all of the actual legitimate stations did. Like they were looking at my content instead of their originators content. And that’s when I got an email from YouTube saying, well, we’ve reviewed your content. And it looks like we don’t want to pay for ads basically. You can keep your stuff up, but you’re not going to be allowed to monetize anymore. So, okay. Well that was an experiment that lasted a long time and it paid out a lot. And it didn’t seem to hurt anyone.

Tim Jordan: That’s amazing. And that was 2015, you said?

Eric: Yeah. So, that was 2015 and I automated about four channels, four or five channels. Two in which were political channels, one for the right side, one for the left side, it’s like funding both sides of the war. So, I ran those for a good long time and they were so profitable. They bought me a car. It bought me a lot of– it was a full-time type thing. And then that got cut off too when they changed that duplication algorithm thing. So, I just wiped a bunch of this stuff off the internet. And now when you automate, it needs to be original. You cannot just take someone’s content, mix it up and then put it back online. It has to be completely yours.

Tim Jordan: Which is very different than like TikTok, where you can do the duets and all that, like half of TikTok is now other people’s stuff with weird face reaction. So, it’s interesting that what YouTube was allowing 10 years ago, TikTok’s allowing right now. It seems to be working. So, all right. You had an interesting history here, right? Like really interesting history and got started almost on YouTube, just from a passion of creating videos, right. But I suspect that most of our listeners don’t necessarily have a passion for videos. They want to figure out how to make money, whether it’s monetizing through content, whether that’s selling a product through different channels, but where you come from a passion of wanting to create content, someone like me, that struggles with that needs simple advice. So, knowing what you know now from 30 years of creating and let me backup for a second, you have created some very high quality content. I know that you owned a studio that used to do movies. You’ve owned professional podcast studios that you know did full blown production for big podcasts. So you’ve done really expensive content. You’ve done homemade, very low budget content. So, the listeners probably need to focus on the low budget content. If you were standing on a stage speaking to tens of thousands of people, which technically I think you are right now, and you wanted to give some advice on how to make good digestible and interesting content on low budget. What are some of the pieces of advice that you’d give for people to get started?

Eric: Right. So, first off equipment doesn’t matter. It never did. It never will. As long as people can see and hear you, that’s all that needs to be done. So, what is important of course, is the content, what’s the driving force behind someone clicking on your stuff? What are they going to get out of it? Because you are taking up someone’s time. So what are they going to get? So, the first thing I think is if you’re knowledgeable and excited about a subject, that’s you got to get in and that has to happen first. And then the second one is that audiences want to see passion and authenticity. So, nobody has time for reading lists and texts on the screen or not seeing someone’s face. I mean, just seeing another person’s face tells you that it is important psychologically. And then, say you’re not knowledgeable on a subject. You’re not an expert on anything. You’re just a cool dude, right? So, there’s something for you to let research be your topic. And there’s plenty of sites like that. If you don’t know something, look into it, make videos as you get smarter and tell the audience what it is that you’re finding through your research, literally learn the craft right in front of people, watching you learn that craft. It happens all the time. It’s a really awesome group, uh, learning kind of experience because you know that you’re learning along with them and everybody wins. So, really, really it comes down to those things, know something or learn something.

Tim Jordan: That’s pretty easy because that pretty much covers a hundred percent of all of us. We know it, or we’re willing to learn it. And I like what you said about it, it’s not the equipment that matters. It’s the content. One of my favorite YouTube channels out there. And I wish I could get, I’ve tried to get this guy on this podcast and the joker will not respond to emails or messages because I guess he’s just missing the boat, which is when I tell you it is. But for a really interesting YouTube channel, all of you go look at this YouTube channel. It’s called Richard Gen, the fishing machine. It is this old redneck from North Alabama. He probably lives 15 miles from me. And he was a construction worker and he loved to go fishing. So he would go down the riverbank and fish, and he started making these just cheesy YouTube videos, telling people what kind of fishing pole he had, how it tied a knot, what he’s using for bait and sucker went viral. Right now, the guy’s a full-time YouTuber. And all he does is he gets in his little aluminum green dingy John boat, and goes down to local rivers around here and fishes and records 15 minute videos. And this guy will release a video and have a hundred thousand views in two days, right. It’s insane, but low quality there, ain’t nothing fancy. There’s no good lighting. You can barely hear the guy or the sound of his boat motor engine. It’s just really good content, which I think is empowering. Because sometimes I think that we overthink things, at least I do, and think we have to have all the camera and all the gear and all the editing ability. Now, we can be creating basic content that gets views as long as it’s just good content. So Eric, what are some of the trends that are happening specifically on YouTube? Like what’s happening when you’re managing your 80 channels, everything that you’re doing that’s just interesting?

Eric: Okay. So, I think everybody’s fallen into this trap, this rabbit hole, where you’re on YouTube and you’re looking up something that you came there to look up and then you click on something completely different because it’s compelling. It’s interesting. It’s click baity, right? It’s like, it’s grabbed your attention and then you watch it and it could be like five reasons why Will Smith hasn’t made a movie in five years. You’re like, oh, I wonder. And you click it and you’re watching it doesn’t matter. But you thought it was interesting. And then at the very end, you see related videos. And then it’s like, I don’t know, 10 new species of human found in Antarctica, whoa, really? Click. And it’s the same channel, you’ll find all these fact channels and these listicle type topic channels.

Tim Jordan: Listicle, you just did the quote sign. If you guys aren’t saying this video. Listicle, is that like a YouTube specific word?

Tim Jordan: It’d be an article containing a list of facts. So, it’s basically a video form of a list article, or a blog or something. And so anyway, this has been an old trend for a long time, but now people have figured out really fascinating ways to automate these types of clickbait, fact-based, short nugget type things on YouTube. And they have a name now they’re called YouTube cash cows. So, it’s literally a cash cow, right? So you set this up. The main point of setting up one of these is to gain money, is to get royalty or not royalty, but to automate the videos, get some fun facts out there and then make money and discontinue, rinse, and repeat. And you can stack these. You can have, you can own five cash cows. How rich do you want to be? I don’t know. But the way that people are automating things that they couldn’t do 10 years ago is with artificial intelligence. And as AI gets better, these automated videos get better. And so I’ve jumped on here. I have one in the meditation, mystic guru space and which I don’t know a lot about, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s how smart the writer is. The writer is an AI. He’s very smart. And he picks out very, very interesting facts that he knows for sure, a hundred percent that a human being will be enthralled with this, right? So, you can do things like you can sign up for, do a search for Jarvis. Jarvis is a really easy to use AI. It’s like 30 bucks a month, so it’s not super cheap, but if it’s riding your YouTube videos, it is very cheap. Anyway, the way that automation works now is that everything has to be original. So the video has to be original. You have to have an editor putting in a B roll. You need a voiceover to read the script. The AI writes the script. That’s really all that is. So, you need to get some VAs or something to kind of put together these videos. But essentially that is a business model that is automated. And absolutely people do this. If you go to Fiverr and type in YouTube cash cow, you will find people that will completely manage your entire channel from writing to content creation.

Tim Jordan: Why are they doing your channel when they could do their own?

Eric: That’s a good question. I keep wondering about that too. I have no idea. But anyway, you can look at a lot more about this. If you’re curious, just get on YouTube and do a search for a cash cow, or it has to be YouTube Cash Cow because there’s other types of cash cows in the world.

Tim Jordan: Do you think that this same AI is valuable for e-comm sellers in other content, right? If I’m selling yoga mats or yoga accessories, is there a way to use this AI intelligence to create content from anything from blogs to social media posts, to YouTube videos related to the topic, and then using that traffic to affiliate back or to push traffic back to my products?

Eric: Yeah, with these AI type things, they’re broken down into categories. You can have it right for a product listing. You can have it come up with bullet points. You describe your product to the AI, and it will have, it will spit out all kinds of things. It’ll give you a blog. It’ll give you a YouTube video complete with the introduction where you say, hi, my name’s Eric and blah, blah, blah. It comes up with all that stuff. It also does rewrites too. Imagine taking a really popular viral video, taking the script, giving it to the AI and just saying, rewrite this, but in a funny way, or you can tell it, be serious or be witty. You can describe how to rewrite it. It rewrites it. You make a video, no plagiarism there. It’s totally legal. And you just upload your video.

Tim Jordan: I’m blown away. I’m making notes here. I have . Tomorrow, when you’re back in the office, we’re going to talk about this. Because I have some ideas now. So, going back to the basics, you’ve been doing this for a long time. Do you think that the algorithm and the strategy is too difficult for brand newbies to get started creating this content right now?

Eric: No, I don’t think so at all. Use your phone, prop it up, get a tripod. Film yourself, talking about anything as long as you just have to get started. That’s the first thing people get scared of because I don’t want to show my face or I don’t know. I don’t have a good camera or maybe my background sucks. It’s just do the first one and let it suck. So, you can do a better one next time and keep it up, keep it up. And you don’t have to know the inner workings. Just make the videos, put them online. People will find it. People will find it. I mean, there’s no doubt about that. It’s just, you gotta make this stuff.

Tim Jordan: Absolutely agree. Awesome. Well, Eric, thank you so much. Moral of the story here, folks is there are so many ways to make money online and whether you’re just looking for something completely random, there’s a ton of ways to create content that you can monetize on. YouTube is definitely a good channel to do that. But also if you’re a product seller, you need to understand where people are seeing ads, how people are digesting information and how to use content to drive traffic to your brands. And I think Eric’s given us like a ton to think about here. As far as creating something, it doesn’t have to be super professional, super high quality. You can think outside the box and drive a lot of traffic. I’m sitting here thinking about these cash cow channels. Man, why are they not putting links in their descriptions for products? Why Eric are you and I not doing a cash cow channel right now that focuses on the best gifts for Christmas 2021, and creating all of these videos that are pushing directly to Amazon affiliate links. Yeah, dude, we could do a video. I should stop recording. Eric. We could do videos talking about Amazon’s top trending products in different categories with affiliate links to all these different categories. And we could use all the Amazon stuff we do right now to pull that so we can monetize on the channel and on the products.

Tim Jordan: All of you listening, just pretend you didn’t hear that. Just completely delete that out of your mind. Eric, we’ll talk tomorrow. Thank you all for listening to another episode. Look, I know that this was a little different episode because we’re not directly talking about maybe the thing we talked about last week or the thing we talked about the week before, but that’s why I love this. Like this channel is about entrepreneurship. It’s about getting started. It’s about e-commerce digital marketing, whatever it is that can be done. Right? And all of this is related. If you’re not interested in digital marketing, but you’re selling an e-commerce product, you need to be interested in digital marketing. If you’re interested in digital marketing, but not content creation, you better figure out how to create content. So, we’re trying to think big outside the box here. And folks like Eric are always interesting because I learned stuff on this episode about Eric that I had no clue about. And he’s been sitting beside me in the office for five years. So, that’s pretty awesome. If you all liked the episode, please make sure to leave a review on whatever podcast platform you’re listening to. And we’ll see you guys in the next episode.