651: How YouTube Is Quietly Becoming An E-Commerce Platform

651: How YouTube Is Quietly Becoming An E-Commerce Platform Speaker 1: Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, Toni and I talk about something we've been watching closely for years, the moment when YouTube finally started giving small creators a real shot at building a product business. We get into the exact strategies our own clients and friends have used to turn a modest following into serious income, including one client who made $20,000 in product sales with fewer than 10,000 subs. So if you've ever felt like you needed a massive audience before you could sell anything, this episode might change your mind. Enjoy. But before we begin, I just wanted to take a second to mention that I have a free e-commerce community that I'm incredibly proud of and would love for you to be a part of. It is a place where real sellers come together to share wins, troubleshoot problems, and support each other through the ups and downs of building an online business. You can join completely free at MyWifeQuitHerJob.com slash community, and I would love to see you there. That's MyWifeQuitHerJob.com slash community. Now on to the show. Welcome back to The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about selling physical products via YouTube because there's been a lot of changes lately that have encouraged sellers to take advantage of this platform. Speaker 2: I'm actually really excited about this. I've been watching the YouTube affiliate program for a while now because it used to be that you had to have 10,000 subscribers to be an affiliate through YouTube, not an affiliate of YouTube. I guess we should clarify that. And also there wasn't really a good way, as someone with product, it was hard to find affiliates. Like there wasn't, like in TikTok you can like search the database and YouTube did not have that. So when I saw that the subscribers had fallen, that makes me excited. One, because I feel like finally platforms and channels are acknowledging what you and I have been talking about for years, which are these micro creators, right? These people with We have 5,000 fans, 10,000 fans, but their fans are all very loyal and very dedicated to whatever niche that the creator is in. Speaker 1: Yeah, so it dropped from 10,000 to just 500. Anyone can just list products on their videos or other people's videos, right? Speaker 2: I think that's exciting just in general, especially for people who are starting out. I want to say it's not that hard to get 500 subscribers on YouTube, but as we've seen with our class, a lot of people hit 500 pretty quickly. Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure. Speaker 2: I think that's really exciting for small creators, but I think there's a bigger story here and that's for people who want to sell physical products and use YouTube as the lever or one of the levers for it. Speaker 1: Here are some stats that I just pulled up. Viewers of a YouTube video are 13 times more likely to search that brand and 5 times more likely to buy. And so if you have a YouTube channel and for some reason, very few people I see are doing this. Like when I watch YouTube, I see very few products beneath the video, but you can literally add physical products, images and whatnot directly below where when someone clicks on it, they're taken to a site where they can actually buy that product. Speaker 2: I just want to give you another stat. Last year one of my clients started a YouTube channel and basically we put her products at the bottom of the videos. Now this channel is still pretty small, under 10,000 subscribers, but just last year she made $20,000 in product sales from her YouTube videos. Speaker 1: Who is this? Speaker 2: I'm a My Curriculum client. Speaker 1: Oh, okay. Crazy. Okay. I didn't realize that. Speaker 2: Yeah. Just the revenue from putting products. If you have a YouTube channel, you'll see this where you can tag a product and YouTube is integrated. You don't have to just put a bit.ly link or something like that. You can actually tag the product. So starting from like, let's just say January 1st, 2025 was zero subscribers to December 31st, right? I think she ended the year at about 8,000 subscribers. So just with 8,000 subscribers, she did $20,000 in product sales just on her videos. Speaker 1: That is nuts. There's a bunch of case studies that I jotted down here that we can talk about, but let's talk about the real case study that you're intimately familiar with. Someone's watching one of our videos. I know for my channel, most people are watching on a TV now. Speaker 2: Okay, could we just talk about that for a second? I think that is so crazy. I'm not a big TV person, but Brian likes to have the TV on at night, and so when you turn the TV on, you get all the app choices, right? Like whatever you've subscribed to, Hulu, Peacock, whatever. So I use YouTube TV as my TV provider, but the YouTube is literally right next to it, and as soon as you turn the TV on, I don't know how this happens but like it's showing like videos that I've watched on YouTube like on my computer or on my phone or like suggested videos. It like pops up when you turn the TV on. Speaker 1: Same here. Speaker 2: It's crazy. And then I was like, ooh, I need to make sure my browsing history is appropriate. Unknown Speaker: It's popping up on the TV. Speaker 1: All that trashy stuff that you watch. Speaker 2: All that trashy stuff I watch on YouTube. Speaker 1: No, but it's real. People are watching on TV. I think it's my top venue now. It used to be mobile, but I think it's now TV. Speaker 2: That's interesting now. I'm not seeing that for my client, but that doesn't mean she it's growing I think we started at like 3% and I just looked this week I'm trying to think because I was pulling stats for something else. I want to say it's at like 13% So we've gone up from 3 to 13, which is that's a pretty big jump really especially with a smaller channel, so It's definitely the trend. People are watching on their televisions. Speaker 1: I've always been curious because I know when I'm watching a YouTube video and an ad comes up, I click on it and then you can then shop for it on your mobile phone. Is that how they purchased from your client? Speaker 2: I don't know if they bought on TV. I mean, I know when you click on the product, it takes you, I think, to the product page and you can click and check out. Speaker 1: Correct. Speaker 2: But I don't know if they're doing that on the TV or on mobile. I haven't dug that far in. I think it's crazy. Speaker 1: I mean, Google has all your information. So, in theory, they could just take you over, right? Speaker 2: And I'm sure that if it's not happening like that now, that will be definitely the next step. What's crazy is, I'm sure you've seen this, is if it's an Amazon product, You can literally say, hey Alexa, order the dog brush or hey Alexa, order me the new light bulbs that I just saw. Have you seen that? That's crazy. Speaker 1: No, I haven't used that at all. Speaker 2: Yeah, you can literally, a box comes up and it's like, ask Alexa to add this to your next order. Speaker 1: Have you tried that? Speaker 2: Heck no. Are you kidding? Speaker 1: I don't know. Speaker 2: It makes me worried because I'm like, what if one of my grandkids is like watching something, they're like, Alexa, add this bluey, you know, whatever to my. Anyway, what I've seen with all of this is that the barrier to the checkout and the friction is just getting reduced and reduced to the point where it's so easy for people to purchase while they're watching on their TV, their phone, whatever. YouTube is doing a very good job of making this very easy for the consumer. Speaker 1: Let's say you don't have your own brand and you just want to be an affiliate. On your own videos, you can just start tagging your favorite products. Speaker 2: You can do the exact same thing as an affiliate, right? Yeah. You can literally pull the products that you want. My client can tag other people's products if she wanted to. We never would. Obviously, our goal is to sell her products. It's really simple. You just pull from the dropdown and tag the products you're talking about. Speaker 1: I haven't really taken advantage of this yet, but you can get brand deals where you just get offers directly in YouTube now if you already have a channel. None of the ones that have come in have been very appealing to me. The ones that email me are always way more appealing, but if you're a creator, you can easily get deals just directly within the interface now. And then recently, we're both good friends with Pat Flynn and he has this Pokemon channel. Recently, he just started listing his merch on his YouTube videos. And also, I don't know if you follow his channel, DeepPocketMonster, but he has this plush doll named Steve. It's a timer that he uses in all of his videos because he always does these challenges and Steve is the name of his timer. He sold out of 500 of these Steve plushie dolls in a couple of days and it's crazy. Plush dolls cost practically nothing to make. Speaker 2: But it's a timer but it's also plush? Speaker 1: No, he turned it into a stuffed animal. Speaker 2: Oh, gotcha, gotcha. He turned a timer into a stuffed animal. Speaker 1: Correct, correct. Like one of the characters in his videos, he turned it into a stuffed animal. Speaker 2: So it's interesting because just speaking of Pokemon, my son is very into Pokemon. He's a Pokemon card dealer on eBay. I don't know what the name of that is, but he has a couple card shops that he frequents to pick through the 10 cent bin to find the hidden gems. One of these card shops is working on their social media and YouTube presence and so they have this thing that they put out there called, I'm going to mess up the name of it, it's like Blind Binder Buy. Right, and so it's basically people come in with their binder full Pokemon cards, right, that they've been collecting since childhood and they're like, my wife says I have to get rid of it or whatever the, you know, thing. And they literally buy the binder without opening it and it's a whole thing that's filmed, right? And so they film it. The person obviously has to agree to be on camera or whatever, but like they, the guy comes in with the binder, they're like blind binder buy, you know, they do all this big thing and then they like, it's like the storage wars where you buy the storage unit. After they buy it, they open it up and they're like, this card's gonna go for $400 and this card's this, and then basically they do it all for show. They buy the binder for real. Speaker 1: They do this. Speaker 2: They pull out the cards, but then after they film it, they literally take everything in the binder and dump it in the 10 cent bin. They pull out the really good cards and then they put everything in the bin. If the card is worth $40 or $50, they don't care about it. They're looking for the really big cards. So that's how my son gets all his deals because he goes and picks through the 10 cent bin, but this has become like this kind of, I don't want to say viral because it's not that popular, but like this is how they're getting people into their card shop, right? Speaker 1: It's actually very popular. I mean, Pat does one where he opens the pack and he just talks about like the cards that he gets. Speaker 2: I don't understand this at all, but it's once again like taking, I mean, this is a brick and mortar card shop, right? Bringing it online and, you know, getting people interested in what's going on, leveraging that social content, you know, to then make money. So, it's crazy. Speaker 1: I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in e-commerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be obtained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I'll send you the course right away. Once again, that's mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show. I mean, to be honest, to be fair, like it's taken YouTube forever to do this because TikTok's been doing this for like years now, but they're finally catching up. I think there's like 3 million creators on the platform and the partners program right now. And if you already have a channel, It literally just takes a weekend to just throw up a merch site, right? Probably less time than that, right? Yeah. So you can just create merch with your brand and just tag it underneath. It's probably not going to make you life-changing money unless you're super popular, but make a couple hundred, a couple thousand dollars a month, not bad at all. Speaker 2: I think if you look at it as someone who's like, I want to start a business being on YouTube, right? This is what they invest their time and efforts into and they grow their following. Actually, let's just use Kevin because he's gotten a little bit too big for us now. Let's just talk about Kevin because he was like, hey, I want to make YouTube videos, started making YouTube videos, got monetized, so then he started pulling in the ads revenue from YouTube. He was making, I think in the beginning when he first got monetized, a couple hundred dollars a month and then it went to a couple thousand dollars a month as his channel grew. And then he did the merch thing, right? He had like I think a mug and a hat or something like that and he said basically that he didn't really make a lot of money from the merch. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: But then we were like, hey, I remember this. We had this conversation with him. We're like, hey, Black Friday is coming up. Why don't you list like all the really good deals on like the tech gear that he talks about, the routers or the modems or whatever it was. And he put that up and he immediately made money, right, with the affiliate play. And then this year, he created a bunch of courses and digital downloads and things like that for people, all based on what he talks about on his channel, right? And that's where he's making, right now, the most money, right, is selling the courses, selling the products and things like that. But he's basically building this whole YouTube ecosystem where he's got Affiliate revenue, he's got YouTube ads revenue. I don't know about his brand. I don't know what brand deals he's done or if he's done any. I know he's been contacted. Speaker 1: I don't think he's done any. At least, I mean, I still follow his channel. I don't think he's done any brand deals yet, but they're coming. Speaker 2: So that might be coming, yeah. And then now he's got his own products and in that, Like that is all together that does become life-changing money, right? That becomes quit your job money on a channel that I want to say he's up to like 70,000 maybe subscribers. Speaker 1: I think you just hit 80. Okay. Speaker 2: So like we're still talking about a relatively It's a medium-sized channel, right? He's definitely past the beginner slog for sure. His channel is large and growing, but he's also not like a Mr. Beast where you have 8 billion followers. Someone who has this mid-sized channel who's just being consistent, you can put together this ecosystem where it is enough to make it your full-time job. Speaker 1: Actually, the trend right now is for all these creators are now creating their own product lines. You just mentioned Mr. Beast. He's got Feastables and I think he's making a couple hundred million dollars. Speaker 2: Have you had a Feastable? Speaker 1: I have not. Are they good? Speaker 2: I don't know. I've seen them in the store and I'm clearly not Mr. Beast's target audience, but all I know about Mr. Beast is he lives in a coffin for a week. He makes people do weird things. I was like, I don't think I want to eat your stuff. Hopefully it's really good. Speaker 1: I don't know. We're not the target audience. Speaker 2: We are definitely not the target audience, but he, so I read this interesting thing about his product. So obviously, and this sort of reminds me too of, um, oh my gosh, just blank. Derek Halperin, right? Who, I didn't have the right audience himself but partnered with somebody who had the right audience with the health blogger when he launched Truvani. I think Mr. Beast and I think Derek was pretty smart with how he went about all that. I know you and I have heard him talk and heard his story and I think in general he had a really good launch strategy. I think Mr. Beast did too with launching. When you have as many followers as Mr. Beast does, the launch is not your problem. It's the sustainability, right? And how do you create a product that people are going to want to buy outside of you being Mr. Beast? Now, it's probably, you could argue that for him, it doesn't really matter because he's so huge, but I think if you want to build a brand, the brand has to be sustainable. And he caught a lot of flack because he changed the ingredients What do you mean, in chocolate? Yeah, so I guess initially it was kind of like low ingredient, like less, I don't want to say, I don't think it was healthy ever. Speaker 1: More pure chocolate, right? Less of the weird chemicals. Speaker 2: Yeah, and then he changed the formulation and now it has more weird chemicals. Speaker 1: I didn't know that. Speaker 2: I don't think it's that bad for you, honestly, but it's chocolate, so where are we going with the nutritional value here? But he caught a little flack for that, but he was trying to Take that initial launch momentum and then give it a broader appeal, right? Like let's make this taste a little better so that people buy it more often versus, you know, buy it once. Speaker 1: Just because you're huge doesn't mean it's going to succeed. Like Logan Paul and Prime. Yeah. Prime is huge for a little bit, but I think it's, is it still around? I don't, I don't think I've seen Prime at all. Speaker 2: I mean, I see him with Prime on every TikTok he makes. Speaker 1: Yeah. But it's a bust now. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's a good example of what happens when Like, you can, so, I mean, a great example of this is Kylie Jenner, right? Now, she didn't have a YouTube channel, right? She was, just had social media in general, but when she launched, like, the lip kit and, like, all of the Kylie products, like, whoever her E-Commerce team is, they did a really good job of, like, obviously she leveraged her personal brand to get the initial sales, but did you know you can buy her cosmetics in the airport? Speaker 1: I don't buy cosmetics, so no, I did not know that. Speaker 2: I know you're often looking at the lip kit vending machine going, hmm, what should I wear on my flight? No, but like they just did the distribution that she went with right afterwards to like just mass market her cosmetic products is pretty phenomenal. And so I think like when we talk about these massive People who launch products. One, I think it's smart to launch a product, right? I think that's definitely a far better bet than just relying on ad revenue, right? Speaker 1: Or brand deals. Speaker 2: Or brand deals, right? Plus, you don't want to always be beholden to another brand. But if you don't have a good team behind you, right, that can actually, because most of these people are not E-Commerce folks, right? They're not necessarily. Speaker 1: No, they're absolutely not. Speaker 2: Yeah. They're the face, right? They're the personality. And so to get that team and do it the right way, and I don't know the business behind Kylie Cosmetics, but I just see the distribution and the mass market appeal of it. I'm sure there's people that buy those cosmetics that actually are not really familiar with Kylie Jenner which is crazy to me because I feel like everyone knows who she is. Speaker 1: So one of my favorite YouTubers, Linus Tech Tips, do you know Linus Tech Tips? Speaker 2: Well, I know who that is because of you. Speaker 1: Okay. His revenue has drastically changed over the years and now E-Commerce I believe is a third of his revenue. Okay. And he basically sells screwdrivers. That's his product. Speaker 2: To get in computers? Speaker 1: Yeah. Screwdriver kits and what not. It's just nuts that that's a huge portion of his revenue. I don't know if you follow Emma Chamberlain. She released a coffee brand that's doing really well. These are all large creators though. We already talked about Kevin who's a small creator making decent money. But there's a bunch of smaller creators that are making a lot of money also. I did a little research and I hope I don't butcher her name because I don't follow these people but Alice Bugija, she's a runner basically and she built this following On YouTube and then she decided to launch a running line. Speaker 2: Yeah, which is crazy because if you think about like if someone is taking profitable online store and they want to do a fitness brand like oh, I want to sell yoga equipment. I would be like absolutely not like far too competitive. Speaker 1: Or apparel, yes. Speaker 2: Yeah, terrible idea. But, when you have, and she's a small creator, loyal audience, right? So, and I think that is, it's something that I feel like I've been yelling about for so many years. Like, you don't have to have 100,000 followers. You just need to have the right followers, even in a small number, because they will take action. And she's a perfect example of that. She was able to launch a running brand in a super competitive market. with her audience, right? Because they all like her, watch her, relate to her, and she had the whole, I mean this isn't like a gimmick, but like the female brand. People want to support, people want to support you, right? When they become your fans. Speaker 1: One million in 90 days, no paid advertising. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's crazy. Speaker 1: Pretty crazy. Yeah. So I think we talked about this on the pod before, about starting with content before, but I think most people just don't have the patience to do that. Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't. I was like, there's no real, they don't. Speaker 1: But I mean, now that, I mean, you could just be an affiliate for a while, right? Yeah. And start making money right away as a creator. Speaker 2: So in, I think it was 2017, it might have been 2018, Rachel Miller. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Spoke at Seller Summit and she was like, she's like a Facebook guru. I hate, I don't like that word, but like that's really the only way to describe her. She was like the Yoda of growing a Facebook page. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: And her and I have known each other since 2008, right? We started blogging together. And for so long I was out here yelling at bloggers like quit relying on ads. Quit relying on you know affiliates. You already know what people buy. Launch your own product. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: Especially back in like the mid like 2015 time period where like These bloggers and content creators could go in Amazon, look at their Amazon affiliate dashboard, Amazon associates dashboard, and see exactly what people were buying from them, right? And it's like, okay, well, if you're making 2% from Amazon, even if you had a margin of 15%, you'd be making a lot more money, right, with a physical product. Rachel started talking about this too. I was like, where have you been? I feel like I've been yelling about this forever, but I do think that if you already are an affiliate, if you're building your content up, you're building your audience, Put those affiliate links in there and see what people are interested in. I mean, that's how Kevin was able to figure out which course to launch first, right, is he looked at his metrics and analytics from video content and was like, okay, this is what makes the most sense for a product plus I already have the following that will buy it. Speaker 1: Yeah. No, totally. That strategy definitely still works. Another trend that I've been seeing lately is all these micro communities that have been popping up. There's this woman named Jessie Grossman. Do you follow her? Speaker 2: No, but I know who she is. I don't follow her. Speaker 1: Her newsletter was 6,000 subs, but she has 600 women paying $500 a year for her paid community. And that's similar to something that you're doing right now too. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this is what I'm building towards for sure. Speaker 1: It's the same model. Yeah. But you have a small following of rabid fans and then you put them in a community and you charge them a very small amount. I mean she's charging $500 a year. That's not much at all. Yeah. And then just over time that compounds and nobody can take that community away from you. Speaker 2: One of our friends actually just did this two years ago, Chanel, who has Growth in Reverse Newsletter. She was always on the paid advertising side of things and she worked a lot with Google, helping people get their Google Google righted, I don't know. And then a couple of years ago, she started Growth in Reverse. I think it was 2022 or 2023. And it's a newsletter that basically breaks down successful newsletter writers, right? And talks about how they built their newsletter, how they have monetizing it and does like a deep dive. And she started doing that. It grew pretty quickly, right? Because honestly, her content was just fantastic, right? So it was very shareable content. But I think when she got to 20,000 newsletter subscribers, I might be off on that number a little bit, she opened up a community, right? And I think it was $1,000 for the year. There might have been an introductory price. And she basically let a certain amount of people in it and then was like, I'm closing the community. And now she opens it in cycles. But once again, I think the community almost is like, That's the revenue driver, right, is the community and it's not a huge amount of people, right? A hundred people at $1,000 a year is $100,000. Oh, no, I know. Speaker 1: It's crazy. Speaker 2: I mean, that's most, I mean, not where you live, but most people can live on that. Speaker 1: So there's this guy I follow for like all the latest AI tips and whatnot. He runs a community of 220,000 people and then he charges, it's a free community, but then he charges and he has 2,000 people in his paid community, each paying I think around $500 a year. Speaker 2: It's funny because the paid, well you know who else did this was Nick Shackelford. Speaker 1: With Geek Out you mean? Speaker 2: He had a paid, I mean you can't technically have a paid Facebook community, but it was a paid Facebook community. I don't know if he still has it. This was probably, I don't know, five years ago. Okay. Basically, he had a business doing Facebook ads and doing other marketing for people. Now he has his own E-Commerce brand too, which is wildly successful. Yes. But that's what happens when you sell THC. When you sell drugs. Yeah, when you sell drugs. Speaker 1: He's a drug dealer. Speaker 2: He's a drug dealer. He's a classy drug dealer. Also a big time soccer player. That's true. Unknown Speaker: He's a goalie, I believe. Speaker 2: Yes, he is. But anyway, he had this paid Facebook community for people who ran ads for other people, but not like big agency. I think it was more like people who did this and more boutique type agency things. I think it was $200 a month or something like that or $300 a month. The community had a couple hundred people in it. This goes back to the thing that we talk about all the time. If you're teaching people how to make money, you can always charge more money. For this specific thing, Facebook ads, basically the deep dive of meta, people who own boutique agencies are going to pay $200 a month to have access to other brain dump people. Speaker 1: You mentioned Facebook communities. One of the most well-known Amazon groups, million-dollar sellers, is actually a Facebook community. I think he charges $5,000 a year. Speaker 2: That's a lot. Speaker 1: I think there's like 1,000 members. Actually, our good buddy Andrew Udarian, come to think of it, he's got... Speaker 2: He's a community shyster. Speaker 1: 1500 members. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: I don't know how much he charges now. Speaker 2: It's a lot. Speaker 1: Is it a lot? Yeah. Speaker 2: A couple hundred dollars a month. Speaker 1: Is it? Okay. Yeah. Exactly. But it's recurring revenue. He's got a very tightly knit community and it takes a ton of work to maintain a community. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: Something that I'm trying to rationalize myself to try doing. Speaker 2: So that is the thing about Okay, so let's just say you're a YouTube creator. We'll just use Kevin. He's a perfect example. Although, I don't think his audience necessarily lends itself to a community per se, but his whole ecosystem journey does. He's got 80,000 subscribers. If he opened up a community, he could absolutely get people in it at his subscriber level. The problem, or the good thing is, a community is, especially in the beginning, a lot of work. I don't care how much Claude code you use, there's no shortcut to the community building, right? Because you have to be in the community, you have to be interacting, you have to be answering people's questions. You need to give people that experience of like, oh, if I pay, I have access, right? Because that's what people are paying for. Now, once your community gets big, right? Let's use Kevin King. I don't think he's in there all the time yapping it up. His people are in there all the time yapping it up because the community itself has now become the thing. If you want to start this way, you have to tell yourself, I'm committing for six months to a year to show up every day in that community. Interact, answer questions, be the life of the party. If you can't be the life of the party online, then this is not probably a good direction for you to go. Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, you can always get someone to be like the community manager. Speaker 2: You can, but initially it's got to be you because that's how you're going to get people in. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Right? Another example of this is Ezra and Molly had a PayDads community, right? That was a couple hundred dollars a month. Speaker 1: I think it was more than that, actually. Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, it was pricey. Yeah. They stopped showing up and answering questions and they became kind of unresponsive and I don't think Ezra was really ever in there a lot. It was more Molly and this isn't a dig on either of them. This is just what happened, right? And people started to get disgruntled in the community because it was like if we're paying, especially when you're charging people a couple hundred dollars a month, They have to feel like they're getting the, you know, VIP treatment because basically what you're doing is you're creating a VIP atmosphere for them. Speaker 1: It's almost like being running an agency in a way. I mean, cause you have to be there to answer questions. You have to be responsive and make sure the community is responsive. Yeah. But in the beginning you're the one answering all the questions. So it's kind of like client work. Yes. Almost. It's almost like a job until the community builds up and then starts talking to each other. Speaker 2: Once the community builds up and becomes bigger than you or bigger than your brand, then having people in there to be responsive. Jennifer Garza did this with her keto community. That had over 100,000 people in it. She used it to launch a cookbook that she got a six-figure advance on, so very profitable. But for the first year, Jen Garza was answering the same three questions about butter I just think that it's definitely not the cruising to money option, but once you get it going, I feel like it takes a life of its own and definitely is a good monetization model. Speaker 1: I mean the recurring revenue is attractive. Speaker 2: Very, yeah. Speaker 1: Well, let's switch gears. There's this other person that came in my research. Her name is Jennifer Chou. Speaker 2: I've actually heard of her. Speaker 1: Have you really? Speaker 2: Yes, I have. Speaker 1: She's a vegan tech nomad, whatever the heck that is. Speaker 2: I don't know. Speaker 1: But she sells Notion templates. Speaker 2: Yes. I know about her because I was searching for something and came across her stuff. That's how I know who she is. Speaker 1: I'll have to research this woman. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. She just started selling Notion templates. Made like 16K in her first four months. I don't even use Notion. Do you use Notion? Speaker 2: No, and that's why I didn't like it. I was like, yeah, I was like, I don't want to have to learn how to do this to then buy it. Speaker 1: But it's similar to like what Kevin is doing. He was selling Windows Protection Guides. Yeah. Right. I mean, my mom could use this because she gets viruses all the time because she clicks on these links. One time my mom, did I tell you this story? So she got a virus pop-up and she calls me and she's like, I'm getting this virus pop-up. It tells me my computer is a virus. I'm like, do not click on it. Whatever you do, do not click on it. She's like, I'm not dumb. I'm not going to click on it. But I called the number on the pop-up. The guy got on the phone and he's like, oh, okay, don't worry. I'll take care of this for you. So they installed software on her computer. And then obviously installed some malware on it. And then she called me up. She's like, yeah, I'll take care of it. See, I didn't click on the link. And so I told her, I had to break it to her that she had a virus. And then what she ended up doing is she just threw the computer in the garbage can. Speaker 2: Yes, that I did know. Speaker 1: Anyway, sorry. Speaker 2: I love it. I love it. Yeah, Kevin, that's your new market. Speaker 1: Yeah, so what are the ways, I think the biggest thing though is this creator community that YouTube has created. It's kind of like TikTok now. Right now it's still like a poor man's TikTok in terms of size, but that's where it's all going, where creators and brands can all meet together. And then do deals without doing it outside. Doing anything outside is always a pain in the butt. I get probably hundreds of emails a week wanting to promote the products and I can never tell if it's legit or not. Recently there was this scam going on with brand deals where, I don't know if you heard about this, but this person who pretends to be a rep, who is an actual rep, goes in and arranges a brand deal within the brand and the creator and that person acts as a go-between. It turns out that she was making demands and then just pocketing the money. So for example, if the deal for the creator was like $10K, she would go up to the creator and say, hey, it's for $5K and then she would pocket the money. Or if the creator asked for like hotel, airfare and whatnot to get to a certain place, she would go and negotiate it for that person and another And then she would take the free ticket in the hotel. Speaker 2: Right? Speaker 1: And so that was the scheme. But when you're doing it through YouTube, it just feels a little bit more legit. Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, it's just like a high price commission, right? Speaker 1: Exactly, yes. Speaker 2: I mean, but when no one knows you're doing it, that's when it gets very shady. Speaker 1: Well, it all came apart when the brand and the creator started talking to each other. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: I mean, a lot of the big creators use agents, so I don't think there's anything wrong with an agent helping you negotiate if you're a huge creator, but this is definitely not that. Speaker 1: That's shady. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, so one of the things that when we talk to people and we look at like our friend group from the last 20 years, right, is that a lot of people will tell you when you say like, why did you get successful? Why did you build a successful content site? Why did you get successful on YouTube? Almost always one of the, it's almost always there's some luck, right? So let's not discount luck. But number two, one of the big things is they are an early adopter of something. Right. And so I would say if you're hearing this and you're like, I don't even know about this YouTube thing, like, let me figure it out. Like go and get involved in this today because like the early adopters of TikTok, right, are like retired now. Right. The people who got in early and started doing things with TikTok don't need to work anymore. The people who started on Pinterest day one are done. They are living on the beach somewhere in Hawaii. I would say this is a chance to be an early adopter of something that will be big because it's YouTube. Yes, they've been very slow things but also they're a big company. I feel like not that TikTok's not a big company, but YouTube is like a different level of big. And so we can't really expect them to move quickly on anything. I don't know. That's kind of my opinion of it. Speaker 1: Sure. They're part of this big, big company, right? Conglomerate. But I mean, they take a long time, but they do it right. Speaker 2: Yeah, and so I would say go explore this, see if you can be a part of it. I know that you definitely have to have a channel, obviously, so get started, which we've been telling you guys to do for two years now. If you haven't gotten started on YouTube, this is now your 15th kick in the butt to get going. But I would say yeah and just be prepared. It is a little bit of a slog in the beginning and we have lots of podcast episodes you can listen to about getting through the slog but it's definitely something that I think you should be doing. I don't want to say it should be on your radar. I think you should be doing it. Speaker 1: Here's the other benefit. Right now to rank in AI search, YouTube is the number one pull for Gemini. So if you even want to get your brand mentioned or anything, I feel like now you have to be on YouTube. Yeah. Even if you're an E-Commerce brand. Speaker 2: I agree. Speaker 1: Hope you enjoyed this episode. For more information and resources, go over to MyWifeQuitHerJob.com slash episode 651. And once again, if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuitHerJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and I'll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.