Podcasting Secrets

Where the Story Begins

Moviegoers tend to love great origin stories. We want to know how beloved or hated characters became the hero or villain. We want details and stories to help us make sense of their decisions and motivations. Some great movies telling origin stories include Batman Begins, Guardians of the Galaxy, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Iron Man, Monsters University, and Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

My much less exciting origin story begins as an entrepreneurship student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I was 18 years old, a freshman in college, and I knew nothing about the internet. 

Mission in Brazil

After my first year in college, I left to go on a 2-year mission to Brazil where I helped people transform their lives and families by coming to Jesus Christ. While I was in Brazil I fell in love with the children on the streets in the northern part of Brazil where I served. These children were very poor. As these children approached me and asked for money, I would give them change from my pocket, but because I was a volunteer missionary, and did not receive any salary, that money quickly ran out. I vowed to do something to make a lasting difference for these children when I returned to the United States. 

The Internet was the Wild West

Before I left for Brazil, I had not even heard of the internet. While I was in Brazil the internet took off. When I returned home, the internet felt like the days of the Wild West, where you could stake your claim on a piece of land, and if you worked the land for a period of time, the people became the owners of that homestead. It was a new frontier where people could pick which area they wanted, and if they worked it well, become the "owner” or category king of that niche.

Brazilian Adoption Program and the Pivot

During my sophomore year in college, I tried to start a Brazilian adoption program with my father, who was an adoption attorney. However, thanks to some very strict and ridiculous Brazilian adoption laws that are not in the best interest of children (I’m very passionate about this topic if you can’t tell…) we were not able to make it work. Some entrepreneurs would look at that as a failure, but I don’t see it that way. It was a necessary stepping stone or pivot to discover the Adoption.com business model. 

I have learned that essentially every successful entrepreneur has had to learn what didn’t work and then pivot to a business model that was much more successful. Pivoting is almost a rite of passage of successful entrepreneurs. Consider as an example Instagram, which began as a location-based check-in service, and then turned into the social media giant it is today thanks to a great pivot. 

The Fateful Phone Call

During the first week of school my junior year, I answered a call from someone who wanted to speak with one of my roommates. The caller left a message about a new HTML class for creating internet sites. The caller wanted my roommate to take the class with him. Neither the caller nor my roommate ended up taking the class, but I did. Before I even signed up for the second class, I was hooked on the idea of creating internet businesses.

To read the rest of the blog post visit: https://www.monetizationnation.com/4-5-secrets-from-my-entrepreneurial-origin-story/

My name is Nathan Gwilliam, the host of Monetization Nation. I will be your guide through your journey to become a better digital monetizer. Let’s imagine that you and I were going on a safari to observe African wild animals together (I’ve always wanted to do that). If we were choosing between different safari guides, would we rather hire one who has never done it before or one with a lot of experience? We would probably want a guide with many years of experience successfully helping tourists quickly navigate to the best wildlife while keeping them safe from the dangerous animals. This is similar to my role with this show; to help you navigate the most effective digital monetization strategies that can transform your profitability while helping keep you safe.

I feel so arrogant when I talk about myself, but I need to start off by telling you a little bit about me and my story so you can trust me as your guide to becoming a better digital monetizer.

I am a Creator

I am an incurable creator. For some reason, I always have to be creating and growing something. For example, I have a 5,000 square foot garden where I grow plants vertically, plus an orchard with 3 dozen trees. I have more than a dozen fruit trees growing inside my house. 

I am also a serial entrepreneur and I am passionate about creating my own businesses. I have been building digital ventures for 24 years, ever since I won the university business plan competition my junior year in college and started my first business, Adoption.com, in a college computer lab. With a talented team, we grew Adoption.com to be the world’s most-used adoption site. I’ve created and sold three digital ventures, including two that the Walt Disney Internet Group tried to buy. 

I’m also passionate about helping grow other businesses, and over the years, I’ve helped many other companies grow. For example, I worked as a part-time consultant Chief Revenue Officer for one digital company and helped them add $5 million of new revenue in 12 months. The Walt Disney Internet group also tried to buy that company. As another example, I helped a local media company in a small market to grow their social follows from less than 100,000 to more than 110 million. According to Unmetric, that local media company reached more than 40 million monthly comments, likes, and shares, which I have been told made them the most engaging social channels of any publisher for a period of time. I also created a network of sites in multiple languages which reached more 280 million monthly uniques.

Not everything I’ve done has been successful. For example, in my first episode, I shared the story of being a 25-year-old CEO of a publicly-traded software company in the year 2000 when the dotcom bubble burst and losing $11 million in a day.

What is the show about?

This Monetization Nation show is about digital monetization, which is the process of converting assets into revenue and profit. Many entrepreneurs, CEOs, and other business leaders already have great assets, such as website traffic, social following, great products, technology, a book they’ve written, customer lists, data, expertise, a talented team, capital, and/or content. In this show, we will explore how to identify and more effectively monetize these assets.  

Through the Monetization Nation blog, podcast, YouTube channel, eMagazine, and social channels I will be posting stories and secrets I’ve learned from my successes and failures over decades on my journey to become a digital monetizer. My goal is to help accelerate your success as a digital monetizer. 

I will also be posting interviews with highly successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, marketers, and other digital monetizers who will share their monetization stories and secrets. I’ve already filmed 35 of these interviews. The interviews were originally about an hour each, but we’re editing them down to about 30 minutes with the best parts of the interviews to save you time. 

Read the rest of the article at https://www.monetizationnation.com/want-to-be-a-better-digital-monetizer/

A few years ago Russell Brunson was mentoring a group of entrepreneurs and he promised them that if they published something every day for a year on their blog, YouTube channel or podcast, they would become financially free. Some of those entrepreneurs took Russell up on that challenge, began publishing every day, and became incredibly successful. One of those amazingly successful entrepreneurs was Stephen J. Larsen. 

Stephen tells his story of attending Russell Brunson’s Funnel Hacking Live event in San Diego. Stephen couldn’t afford a taxi. So, when his flight arrived he rented a bicycle, held his luggage over his shoulder, and peddled to Funnel Hacking Live through downtown San Diego. Stephen didn’t have enough money for a hotel room, so he slept on a couch in the hotel.  

I have heard Stephen tell the story of when Russell challenged him to publish every day, the challenge that changed everything for him. Before the event, Stephen had told his wife that was the one thing Russell might ask him to do that he wasn’t going to do. However, there at the event, Stephen chose to trust Russell and accept the challenge and begin to publish every day. 

As a result, Stephen has become one of the leading experts in the world on digital offer creation. In 2018 Stephen left his job to start his business from scratch, with no revenue or product. He reached $1 million in revenue in only 13 months.  I attended Stephen’s packed Offer Mind event before COVID-19 hit. I have paid Stephen to teach me how to create effective digital offers and I’ve witnessed firsthand some of the success Stephen has had because he accepted this daily publishing challenge. 

365-Everyday Music Tour

I recently listened to a podcast from Russell Brunson talking about a newlywed couple named Jim and Sam who had been unsuccessfully trying to break into the music industry for almost 10 years. This couple decided on a whim that they were going to do a concert every day for a year, and to create a documentary of their journey. At the beginning, the couple was performing for anyone who would listen, such as a group of tree trimmers. By the end, the couple was performing to tens of thousands of people. 

The documentary is called After So Many Days, and it was named the winner of the Best Music Documentary Feature at the Nashville Film Festival 2020. It has been an official selection at more than 30 film festivals.

In the trailer, Jim says: “So here we go, making something happen every single day.” This is profound. There is a power in doing something small every single day, and the cumulative effect of that consistency creates amazing transformation.

Read the rest of this blog at: https://www.monetizationnation.com/2-how-to-gamify-goals-to-radically-increase-our-chance-of-success/.

How much money have you lost in a day? In this episode, I’m going to tell you how I lost $11 million in one day, and some secrets that I learned that helped me become a digital monetizer.

How I Lost $11 Million in 1 Day

In the spring of 2000 I was a 25-year-old CEO of a publicly-traded SAAS (software as a service) company. My beautiful wife Crystal and I had been married for about 16 months, we had bought our first home, and she was pregnant with our first daughter. 

In just 5 years between 1995 and 2000 the Nasdaq had skyrocketed more than 500% from under 1,000 to more than 5,000. The Nasdaq peaked at 5,048 on March 10, 2000, and by October 4, 2002, had plummeted by 76% to only 1,139. By the end of 2001, most dotcom stocks had gone bust.

The Collateral Damage

When the dotcom bubble burst my company had not yet reached profitability and was dependent on investors who were funding our software development and marketing. I painfully remember losing $11 million in a single day on the stock market, all from my ownership in my company. When the dotcom bubble burst, investors stopped almost all of their investments in Internet companies. After all of our investment dried up, our investors and I lost the company. I feel horrible for the investors who trusted me and lost their investments, the great team members who lost their jobs, and the hardships that resulted for their families.

The next year, as I focused on growing a horribly unprofitable Internet business, I only earned about $11,000 total for the entire year, or about 1% of what I had lost in a single day the previous year. My family survived in part because of the generosity of others, such as my sweet mother-in-law, Laree Ullery, who regularly brought us groceries and diapers for our new baby girl.

When our daughter was only a couple of weeks old, a key employee quit. This was understandable because of our tenuous financial situation, but we didn’t have the funds to hire a replacement. My wife Crystal stepped into that role and then another, and did an amazing job at everything she touched. She worked more than 2 years, bringing our daughter with her to work each day, without being paid anything, to help us get back up on our feet. 

Our oldest daughter spent the first two years of her life coming into the office. As soon as she learned to walk she began going from office to office, pushing the “off” buttons on everyone’s tower computers. She was delighted at how quickly this got our attention. We finally got smart and started taping business cards over the buttons.

Heat Seeking Missile Aimed at Monetization

The first secret that I learned from this catastrophic experience was to be insanely focused on monetization. During the time leading up to the dotcom bubble I was doing a lot of “good” things that an entrepreneur should do, such as working with press releases and the media, raising money and managing relationships with investors, finding and operating an office space, dealing with HR issues, etc. These are all important things. However, our unprofitable business was like an airplane on a runway. We were trying to get the acceleration we needed to take off but the sudden dotcom bubble burst instantly shortened our runway. I had been so focused on “good” things, that I didn’t spend enough time focused on the most important thing: Monetization… getting us to profitability as fast as humanly possible. 

This experience seared into my soul the lesson that as an entrepreneur my top priority is to be a heat-seeking missile aimed at monetization. When a business reaches sustainable profitability it is no longer dependent on investors and to a great degree becomes the master of its own destiny. When my business was not profitable I did not have the luxury of being distracted by anything other than the top priority of monetization. If I had it to do over again, I would have locked myself in a room with my developers and would not have come out until we had a software product that was completed, working great and that our customers loved. 

This doesn’t mean that other things like HR issues are not important. However, the best thing that entrepreneurs can do to provide stability for their team members is to focus on monetization and get their business to sustainable profitability. 

Read the rest of the blog post at https://www.monetizationnation.com/3-secrets-i-learned-from-losing-11-million-in-a-day/.