Discover Spain And The Creator Economy Through The Smith's Eyes!.

all right so welcome um we're here today with the Smiths in Spain so I'm going to get him to uh quickly introduce himself so welcome guys hello thank you for having us on um pleasure to meet you I know pleasure to meet you likewise us the Smiths in Spain um we are an American family from Kansas living in Spain we're living in Spain at the moment and we're just sharing our unique experiences As Americans living here and all the differences and the culture shocks and learning a different language when you're an adult and having a baby and having a baby born in Spain and yeah all the things Adventures that go along yeah absolutely and um so I wanted to we're obviously jumping on this

call because you guys reached out obviously talk a lot about talent management brain management and working with brand deals and stuff like that so you're obviously looking to how can you better monetize that audience that you got but before we jump into that stuff because I'll we'll dig into that for sure I'd love to just know a little bit about like what how did this start like where did you come from how did you get to Spain from Kansas and all this sort of stuff yeah yeah absolutely so when we were living in Kansas we were both born and raised there um I met there got married we've moved around the us a little bit but right before our move I was working as a

chef in a restaurant I was working you know 60 hours a week doing the traditional a job just owned a business there as well so we were both working all the time and you know owning a business there's no clock in clock out if you don't force yourself you work all the time yes exactly and and we wanted to have a family and we've been trying for a while and it just wasn't working and so um you know we finally decided uh after the pandemic that kind of caused us to shift kind of our Outlook and and what we wanted to do and you know we just realized that if we do want to have a family we want to be able to spend time

with our family and not just be working all the time so we actually decided um to apply to this teaching English program in Spain and then about four months after we got accepted we found out that we were pregnant so you know how that goes and when we say we tried a while we've we tried three years yeah we had a family and so when we decided okay we're just gonna take a break and we're gonna move to Spain and then we'll come back to maybe trying it was so crazy deciding to change our lives and move and sell the cars of the house sell all the things and then oh the universe is like oh and you're also going to have a baby abroad

and we're like oh great oh you you want to go on this adventure well here you go and then of course most of our family um just assumed that we were going to stay home and stay in the U.S because we are pregnant now like that that was just the Assumption and of course we said uh you know what they have babies all over the world they have babies so we can figure it out and so so yeah so we moved here um in 2021 yes and Jess was seven months pregnant so we literally hopped on a plane two dogs four big suitcases her seven months pregnant and we just started our new life here in Spain yeah that's how we got here we've been

able to stay for these next two years we will probably continue for the next year as well but we're also really trying to look at different ways to make money online and to do other things so that we can build a life here kind of long term yes which is why we're really like seeing this social media whatever you want to call this because we feel old and like we still don't know what this is about and we're trying to figure this all out but um with this missed in Spain we're we're in the unique position where we might be able to really make it a long-term thing that we can do and allow us to be here in Spain at the same time I

love that so you so now with this building of like you're Tick Tock and your social media profiles and things like that and sharing your stories um so it's the ultimate goal obviously to build that to a point where you no longer have to you purely make money from this audience that you have built with right is that the long-term goal yes um and we feel as though we're on the right path because we're really listening we're really in love with our audience we're really engaging them it's like half her from Spain half are from the United States and that's kind of how our hearts are so it's like it aligns really well um and we're just trying to find the best ways listening to

them on how we can help them and so it's just I think our channel is a little bit unique in the sense that it's not like one certain demographic or like person we kind of have half and half um so it's just trying to figure out what's the best tools to like serve both from just comments like I I realized that when you go through the comments people kind of tell you what they need which is crazy and we're also we didn't really start thinking about turning this into more of like an actual business or an actual long-term solution until pretty recently because we're actually in a very unique position with um with where we live so there's not a lot of expats or or

Americans that really live in the city that we live in in Spain and so for that reason we've had I think it's one of many reasons but I think we've had quite a bit of success especially recently with our Tick Tock and with our Instagrams um because we're I guess unique or or almost where we chose to live yeah most people choose Barcelona on Madrid because you know that's where most of the jobs are and and us being from Kansas we kind of didn't want a huge massive City like that um we wanted a 15-minute City like you did a yeah we're like we definitely live in a 15-minute City I don't drive a car here yeah yeah I loved it those 15 minute City

thing is it is so much more popular in Europe yeah like Europe I mean that's their whole so that whole thing is built around these 50-minute cities and town squares and things like that brilliant it's just so much smarter like and I don't know if you've seen the comments online thing but like there's a whole bunch of people like oh only rich people can do this like blah blah it's like it's not it's not about wealth it's about how do you design your life like just don't eat for an hour every day in the car like here in Auckland it's crazy like people sit in traffic for two hours I mean my staff do come in they have the big they're they're sitting there super

early because like often they're like travel early to miss all the traffic that's crazy anyway yeah so it's the same way it's the same way yeah in the US too it's the same way you drive to if the grocery store is a five minute walk you're still probably gonna get in your car to drive to the grocery store instead of just walking but yeah it's crazy yeah we've got it all wrong um yeah we're the same here in New Zealand same in Australia it's the same thing when I used to live there anyway um so okay so that's the goal the goal is to obviously monetize your audience in a way that both serves them but also serves your purpose which is to be able

to live and keep doing the things that you want to do um when you think about you said that you talked your audience has told you things already and what they need um what are some of those things that you've seen so far that people are asking for what's some of the common occurrences um one of the ones for people that lived in the United States is like how'd you do it Where'd you start yeah where do how do I do it how do I start what legally like how do you build a long-term solution um I mean it's the big Grand question right um and for us every person's situation is different so it's just trying to create something that will serve as you

know most as many people as possible without being too specific to every single person's needs because like moving two dogs pregnant and a family like it's different than like if you're single and you're in your 20s you know like our budget might seem outrageous for someone that's in their 20s um yeah we put that our grocery budget was what 500 euro and everyone's like do you have alligators at your house like what's happening and I'm like no I live with a chef he needs every Spice in the world absolutely so I guess that's an alligator but we eat a lot from home yeah yeah um so if that's one major question um another one that we've gotten from Spaniards is obviously like helped me learn

English you guys sound like you're from Netflix when you speak we've got that quite a few times too and then also yeah recently um we had basically our biggest viral video that we've ever had we were on national news here in Spain we actually got on the news and spoke Spanish which was terrifying it's also pretty exciting um but from from that video too we have kind of been thrust into this Spotlight if you will because we we basically highlighted the city that we live in we highlighted the region that we live in because we love where we are and this area doesn't get nearly as much attention or as much praise or as much Focus as a lot of the other cities in Spain

so we've had hundreds of comments hundreds of people um you know saying thank you and saying how much they appreciate us talking good about the community that we live in and basically they've started calling us ambassadors for the region and like all these things and so we've had so that's a new need that we're trying to figure out how to service because we know that later deserves people to know about it it's amazing and so we're just trying to figure out the best way for two people from Kansas don't speak Spanish yes yes yes promote this amazing amazing region yeah because we've had so long yeah a lot of businesses we've had 10 different bodegas you know we've had wineries reaching out we've had a

lot of different people reaching out and so you know it's just trying to navigate that and how we can serve them you know and just yeah yeah nice and so have you had have you monetized anything so far from the audience has there been any um like deals that you've actually been paid for or anything like that so far so we have done a couple amazing intimate calls with I would say five people wanting to move to Spain and we quickly realized that um that's not something that we can't um scale scale very easily um when you take down the amount of time that it took I think we were getting paid like a dollar every three hours or something like it needs to serve

both right um and um we have also been able to do like three or four brand deals so far too um two from the United States and we're in the works of doing two from Spain business from Spain so we have but we've quickly realized through this process we have no idea what we're doing yes so um because we both I come from Corporate America I mean I I have the structure I you know I have the um I guess you can say professionalism when it comes to like Email exchange but this whole creative con like there's no there's no like Solid Ground to be able to make anything from and all of the information is like just not not streamlined yeah and everyone values

things differently and this type of business and when I messaged you on your on your um Tick Tock I'm telling you you were the only person and I have searched for hours trying to find any sort of like dive into this subject yeah yeah it's crazy yeah it's it's such a crazy thing and so like we as a business uh a year ago weren't even really focusing on this stuff at all um and it wasn't until we hired Joni and you know she's half a million followers and we're listening to her brand deals that she was getting and you know like um I probably shouldn't say too many numbers on a public forum but like she was telling me like what she was getting paid

for a certain deal and I was and you know she had to uh strategize come up with the content producer post-produce it distribute it through her audience and she got paid like not a lot of money um you know four figures and and low end of that four figures uh and I was saying you know like if a big advertising agency was given this deal by the same company they would have charged him a million dollars minimum and then they would have paid you thirty thousand dollars to be the talent in it you know like it's just backwards when they're dealing with creators and and it's hard because like it's that there's so many influencers and creators in the world that uh and not all

of them understand their audience well enough and what the audience wants and how to really get people in behind and so um there became this influencer marketing sort of world where people are just like look just get all these influencers pay them a little bit of money just push it all out and see what happens and that's kind of been the approach it's like shotgun it yeah but then what it's really weird because that was happening but then on YouTube something else was happening and YouTubers were going well actually you know I would rather partner with you long term you pay us a certain amount of money per video and we'll be partners with you like audible or you know skillshare or whatever these things

are maybe they create punishes with them like skillshare is a real good example because they would go to um YouTubers and be like hey create courses on a platform promote skillshare we'll give you a certain amount of people for everyone who signs up even if it's only a free trial plus will give you more money when people watch your course and you know those sorts of long-term partnership deals became the norm on YouTube but which is why YouTube's always the end goal for most creators because there's just so much money to be made there not just on the AdSense but also the way brand deals are done um you know build that up like yeah like you guys are like like in your world on

uh YouTube You're competing with heaps of people who haven't been doing it for ages like you know like you guys like the first people that you come into me is like Cara and Nate is like do you know those guys on YouTube characters yes that's like you know like you're a very different family to them or people to them but like I said Americans are bored like because they they built Their audience because people like Americans were like wow I can't believe you're just backpacking the world your whole life that's amazing like how do we do it you know so similar questions except you've got different circumstances for how you do it um but there's heaps of those people so it's like a real hard

world to break into yeah and it takes years but the prize is so big so I mean I know you've got your YouTube channel at least and you put in the shorts there and stuff but like yeah it's like it's nothing and that's okay because YouTube is like proper hard like it's real hard to build like we struggle with it and we have a whole team of stuff my my only advice here is like if you really want YouTube to be there you've got to start like you've got to start because it's about just putting the rips in and that um but in saying that so so to get back on track that those ideas around brand deals have been something that like the industry

itself it's not that they're necessarily malicious about it they just don't really know any better um it's about making money for them so they've got something that works so why not keep doing it um creators are a product that they sell you know so like they don't really look at it as like full-term Partnerships there and they're of course good people in those Industries who are saying actually we want to do the right thing by these creators we're going to go out and do it but then the big companies get involved in like yeah but I've only been paying this much for creators in the past why would I start working with you now you're smaller than the agency you left like why am I

going to plan with you and pay more money that just doesn't seem like it thinks it's like vicious cycle that you get into and so it really does have to take like it's gonna have to take agencies and brand managers and um creators to start and drove saying to people well actually we're just going to keep tuning down all your offers that hard thing with that is that there's always someone who's willing to take the smaller check and so um what I what we do because it's not a core part of our business this part of this we we're able to say like well we can just say no to things and we can start to educate the clients that we're working with on bigger

deals and the pricing structure that I took about the CPM and things like that which you talked about that model like you've got to start to figure out how to speak to these Brands the way they understand yeah because just saying to a brand now I don't want two grand I want 20 grand I mean they're just no like why would I give you 200 you can't prove any more value to me but if you can prove them on like a sliding metric where actually you only pay for what I deliver then now the conversation is a lot different because then they can they're more likely to take a punt with you because of that absolutely but it's cool that you've got brand deals already

um is it weird to like can I ask a question if like okay if we take like the low number to begin with because we did I'm just gonna tell you we used your CPM we went out we asked for the big number we're like well I feel so good about myself I look at my engagement rate I know my CPM I know it's starting rate like we felt like excellent and then exactly what you happen the brain says no we're good and then we this is a brand that we love like we go to almost daily so we really wanted to work with them and so we kind of we can't got a middle ground which was nowhere near the beginning number that we

started with and we're thinking well maybe if we start the partnership with this they might be possibly like able to like increase it moving forward to build a partnership is that like a smart way or is that not like they're just gonna be like this is what we're gonna pay you regardless yeah do you see I guess do you see what I'm trying to ask no I 100 get it and look it's the same in business like once you you're anchoring them at that price point so like to move the maps really hard like you'll have to restructure the deal to get them higher um if the only the only other way to restructure some deals depending on the product and the service is to

do on a like a per sale per sign like affiliate Style sales um because affiliate sales is you think about it if you're if you're in the business's shoes and you guys are actually providing thousands of customers or hundreds of customers and they're getting a real benefit from us and you can track that because that's something you really need to be able to track yeah yeah I'm just saying we'll talk about now it's like how many people are clicking through how many people are actually going to purchase it yeah one of the deals we did we basically gave us the tracking link which was a proper tracking link which we could see purchases like how many people are actually signing up so we had quantitative

data we could talk about afterwards that's another way that's a way you can get more money later on because you could run the first campaign go yeah look we're going to do this as a one month trial this is it um we'll sit down and we'll go through results at the end of that moving forward we want to talk about um how how it looks from like an incentive perspective like if it's x amount do I get there if you're not delivering for the client then you probably shouldn't get paid more and that's the simple truth that a lot of people are like yeah but I got you all this brand experience like this in the day that it really cute like it's not at

the end date it's business like they need to make money and so when you're doing the CPM calculation method which is one way to do it is when you want a brand who purely wants reach like if that brand is if you can see on their profile that they are pushing ads and you can usually see an ad on Tick Tock because it's got the view Count's really high it's about one percent or less engagement rate on a really high view count and you know on your Tick Tock day if you've got one percent engagement you're not getting a million views so if you've got a million views and one percent engagement rate they've definitely paid for those views and if you run that number

for that so like a million views that's about 15 grand worth of AD spin that they probably have to put behind that now you can start to go well look you've you've just spent fifteen thousand dollars with tech talk to push that out you know our audience is the Right audience we could you can spend the same CPM with us and we'll only charge you for what we get in terms of viewership is this this brand only wants pure visibility yeah this one's pure exposure and what we did is you're going to be so proud of us we talked about usage rights thanks to you and we did two weeks of usage rights so like moving it up would be if this does successful like

they're able to use it for a longer and on different platforms because we're only letting them do one platform so that's kind of like my we're contracted for two videos and so that was two kind of going in was our thought process of you know maybe we could do that every month yeah like once a quarter yeah if these videos are you know very successful based on engagement and Views and everything else that they would be more inclined to basically continue the relationship and continue the partnership because it is a very big brand here in in Spain we're obsessed with it we love it yeah cool we give them our money already as well yeah I love that you're posting it more of them than

they're paying you um I love that but look so that that is it so you probably can't the deal you currently have it's probably really hard to shift fine up substantially like you probably get besieged low improvements yeah but not you really have to restructure the deal yeah you have to restructure it so in there then they're thinking they're getting something different and even as a business owner if people restructure deals with me I get what they're doing to me but it feels better and for me that I'm not getting just shafted for extra money for something they're doing before I really do understand that okay well yeah you might be wanting to pay more like you might be wanting me to pay more but

at least I understand why like at least that's really important I think like creators don't I mean it's not natural for most creators um to think business-wise because it's like people people often forget that like business is a proper profession like being a business person is a proper profession it's not just like something you do on the side right it's like a proper profession that just like being the chef is and a lot of creators get into it being creators or creatives not business people and honestly that's I think why we know that long term we are going to be successful well because it's already happened we've thought about it but also we're determined that's also why we enjoy doing this so much is because

we're a really good team when it comes to like I'm the creative person 100 like I come up with all the ideas like all the creative stuff like I love that and not that I don't come up with ideas but this brain insistence I just might be yeah mine just thinks it definitely when it comes to everything I mean I'm like oh my God I love our engagement rate went up point three percent because I did the calculation all day she's the organization foreign but in terms of like building a business which is great and you've got that sort of balance I think um when there's something I wanted to go back to you talked about like um all these people asking you for questions

about what you're doing and the way to do it and how to monetize that sort of area um yeah and in terms of like how do I go to Spain and how do I live there or blah blah blah there's always like a real danger of this approach to monetizing that which has low sustainability and that is that you know it's the old saying like the only people who made money in the Gold Rush are the ones selling the pants yeah right and so the tools you turn into a pan seller and so you're you're not really like you go it's like those guys are like this is how you make money on email marketing and what you're doing is selling teaching people like you're

making all your money from telling other people how to do things that you don't do anymore and it's like it's one that's pretty spammy um but two it doesn't sustain very long because it's it's it just gets seen as this like cash grab sort of approach really early and it tarnishes a brand when all you're doing is selling the way you did the thing you did and then now you're not even doing that thing you're now selling the the knowledge and so a better approach to that is that's where the you your YouTube channel comes in because and that's where you start to do that because you give all that knowledge away for free and you build an audience who loves you for all the

things that you teach and on YouTube and Instagram because you're already talking about that stuff yeah that there is your what's called fan acquisition right that's how you're getting everyone to love you and come in and you find any people who are searching for these different things and then your fan service stuff is where you getting a bit more in depth and you're talking about you guys in your life and things that is a little bit different is about like the challenges that you're going through so people really feel connected to the story yeah but then when you go into selling stuff to these people um you've got to be really careful here on what you sell so I would it's not that you can't

sell the knowledge it's just that like it's a real hard thing to do the right way I agree we've been very tarnished about it because not that we don't have we're all about like what gives us energy and what takes away and we're just past the we've grown past our uncomfortability of moving to Spain and now we're in the midst of like how do we grow our lives here so it's really kind of hard to like work on the projects to help people that want to move to Spain because we kind of have to switch gears and so this is a perfect conversation because we know we want to help them but it's not something that we want to exchange necessarily time for money yeah

like you said maybe put informational content put things out what about YouTube That's boiling in but yeah it's it's definitely not something that yeah we can sustain long term like you're saying or or really grow to monetize but it's also not something that fuels and energizes us every single you know so would like a resource guy like an ultimate resource guide be to Selly like I I don't know what to like no I think it would be I think it would be too easy I think I personally wouldn't do it and I think it it puts you in a different bracket time frame I guess not 100 yeah yeah so like when you start to sell that sort of stuff you are those micro influencers

who are just doing this as a little bit of a side hustle thing yeah because you guys aren't trying to do that you're trying to build a long-term career here and and business and so I think when you do that I think when you're trying to go after 40 here and there like it just it's just not the right method until like it doesn't start again until you're multi-million followers because now you can now you're Mr Beast and you can sell chocolates right so yeah and then go and but you're selling a million at a time and that's a whole different story so like there's like a bracket between like being really low and then being really big and in the middle got it you

want to sort of work with like you want to do brand establishment stuff that really sets you up as a brand and so you want to partner with the right Brands long term that the brand Association is both powerful is powerful for both of you not just them but also you you know like like imagine getting a sponsorship by Nike even if Nike paid me five dollars a month I would take it tomorrow because the brand Association like I'm Jordan like yeah okay I'm Michael Jordan I've Got a Brand deal with Nike right like you take it straight away that brand association means hey I'm a sponsored Nike athlete yeah you can take that anywhere you want and it adds value to your brand so

there's sometimes there's brand deals that are just purely brand Association and it builds long term that's way more valuable than selling an ultimate guide for forty dollars 100 people right so you got to think about like for you guys it's like long-term brand Association to build your brand like who are you guys what value do you add for the world and how do you associate yourself but you know the guy if you get his name the guy the train spotting guy the real cool kid who like wears the camera up here and he like um these are Yuki's from Britain from London I think he's got like that is incredible yeah right so brain Association now he's not just this cool kid he does like

he's like super nerdy in the whatever but that's awesome that's his brand it's great he's really lovable but then like Gucci was like you know what this is like it's almost an oxymoron first sponsoring this kid but like it makes its work so well as well because people love this kid they want to see them too well so it's so smart but that then made his value even more even if they paid him nothing just putting his clothes their clothes on him just elevated him to another level which made him go oh my God this guy's serious like this guy's a legit creator and so you can see sometimes it's not always monitoring and there's a lot of word out there of people going oh

you've got to get paid like if you're going to do brand deals you've got to get paid don't do things for free but like there's usually people like 10 million followers or like people who are making all this money I was like yeah you can say that but like we all came from somewhere like we all have to build it the amount of free Keynotes I've given the amount of like you know work I've done for people to be associated with them and things like that but what it does every time I'm just making sure can I document it can I get content out of it you know get some brand Association what can I get out of it that still helps me long term

yeah that helps you regret so that's honestly yeah and honestly without very glad you brought that up because since our our huge viral video we've been dealing with that quite a bit is that we've had a lot of people reach out to us um and we're you know still kind of in that space where we want to to do as many things as we can and grow our brand and help because a lot of the people that are reaching out to us are people within our community within our region that we absolutely want to help they're great for our brand growing as you know as us being ambassadors for the region um and they're big brands that are like International wine wineries Wineries and things

like that and so but they want a free yeah they want to basically offer you know free tastings well it is but it's like we get to experience or have a date night or you know exactly in exchange for you know doing videos or doing content and and we're just in a position like we we love doing that and we want to do that but we're still trying to grow and look for you know how we can essentially stay here long term so it's kind of yeah we want to do stuff for free but if we do everything for free we're gonna have to go back to the States yeah I understand yeah exactly and you know when you're doing stuff for free you've got

to think about it like is is this going to get what's the benefit long term because of this partnership so like sales or Winery and you're gonna get you to have a free date then whatever like how does that tie into the long-term brand of Smith and Spain and how would you do that like are you gonna be the couple that's constantly doing all these Wineries and foods and you have this cool sort of luxurious lifestyle and if that is then maybe it is a good thing because it helps start to build that without you guys having to pay for it and you can start to build it interesting if that's not what you want to do then it doesn't really that free dinner or

free wine tasting doesn't really help with that long-term goal yeah it might be a big brand but you're not necessarily wanting that brand Association so yeah then I would be you know I wouldn't be as included interesting but that but that doesn't mean you should it just depends does it work towards your long-term goals like I mean sponsored by Nike does yeah yeah yeah and see being sponsored by Nike doesn't for me but being sponsored by wine and listening for my entire life yeah there you go and then also yeah but also after you know this experience the last month we do really want to continue promoting this region and we I think we do want to build a big portion of our brand around

us being experts on larioja and logaronio and whenever you know companies or brands or or tourism agencies or whatever whenever they think about this region or want to do something in the region or anything like that like that we're top of Mind in terms of of being experts and being ambassadors for this area so it's definitely that's kind of the direction at least right now where we see us wanting to take our brand and take you know whatever long-term goal is to be in Spain forever so yeah and we love it makes sense so then it makes sense to do these things right because this is like you know how expensive it is to make content not just what you're doing but actually good time

and things going into it and if people are giving you opportunities to make content and they're giving you the experiences for free that you would have done anyway and what and it does work too content then those brand deals there's nothing wrong with taking those for free especially when you're still early because like you know not to discredit your audience size but you're still early on that Journey right still building into that into that world so using these opportunities and actually your current like audience and fans watching you now I mean they're going to get real excited by now to see you guys doing all this cool stuff they're going to be they're going to love their success and if you sell it the right

way and be like oh look at this cool opportunity that we've been able to have and people will follow and love that so it helps build that brand long term you'll be able to you'll be able to go to the same people and say look okay cool we really want to still partner can we sit down and chat about this because our audience is growing 10 times in the last year um you know we had 200 000 followers let's say maybe and that's possible with the way you guys are your trajectory so far so then yeah absolutely um uh and like we went from like we when you get a video that goes viral like 5 10 million viral like there's no reason you can't

get 50 to 100 000 followers in that one video like one of our videos responsible for 125 000 of that follows wow exactly like when you get the right video it yeah oh it goes so there's no reason you couldn't be 270 000 followers by the end of the easier we took to get to 27 000 followers sort of six months on ounce and so I mean we got we had some pretty good viral players that pushed towards that but like there's no reason why you couldn't over time if you stayed consistent with you guys are yeah and then you go back to miss and then you can start to negotiate but you can restructure right and so you can have that conversation with the

same mind okay look how do we make this different like how like this is the audience interaction we've got um one thing I would do is like because you're you're really at the beginning of this process with your stuff so like more data you can get right now the better like if you can get you know you've got your standstill Link in your Tick Tock or your Instagram and there's nothing on it but it doesn't so what you need is you need a link that more data and it shows you where people are going so like like what do we do because I don't know what to put on there like what so like just cross promote platforms so you know like if you're gonna

really try to start doing like small YouTube videos even if you just start off small just hit the YouTube link um you could like I can see any other link to this podcast you can actually put the link in like will you sure be um you'll see it on our link we just recently changed over to it because we were doing other things but we changed over to this thing called sure but you'll see it on else and then um it's quite cool because what you can do is like YouTube clips that put some little stuff like it puts a little thumbnail in the card like because you know link tree looks terrible right like yeah I mean it sucks sorry yeah it doesn't matter

um have a look at our one because we finally found one that we're like this is actually really good um so look at our link and you'll see what I mean by it so you could put like this podcast clip in um I can give you this podcast clip too to put it up on your own YouTube as well and then it looks like they're coming to your YouTube channel rather now so and that's more unborn happy for that to happen and so you have this like tree of like where people are going um and then if you do a brand deal you can put the brands and Link in it and then you can start to track how many people are clicking that link

and even if you're doing it for free um you know the deal but what you're saying to get is like you can go to the next brand and say look this last deal we did we had 100 000 views ten thousand people clicked our link and then 4 000 of those people clicked onto the sponsored link and went to their website do you want like what would you pay for 4 000 clicks yeah that's a whole different story to 100 000 views because now if you start pricing cost per click like in some like in America at least in Spain I couldn't tell you the numbers but like in the US are you paying 100 bucks minimum for most keywords on Google click through to

your website like it's not cheap to get a click um in New Zealand that's probably not it's definitely not as expensive in New Zealand but you're still paying 20 to 50 for a click easily and so if you're saying to sign I got 4 000 clerks like you may me per click if you see the price and even if you just go I back myself we're just gonna charge you for total clicks the post you know posting if it's a big enough brand you can probably be okay with knowing that they'll pay um if not just call them out um but they'll probably pay the big Brands the smaller Brands I'd be more worried about small local Brands I would probably want to pay up

front a portion of it yeah we've learned that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it's normal it happens even in business like the big Brands you're pretty safe and knowing they're going to pay you because their reputation is still important but like the accountancy down the road like they can just walk out on a contract and what are you going to do about it like yeah and we can't really chase them they've got no money left anyway like the legal bills it's not worth it so yeah um but yeah so you see what I'm saying say like the brand deals the CPM one is just like one model and the best way to talk to business owners and people and marketing people is to

talk on the language that they like and they like all these acronyms that they've learned over the years CPM and CPC so your cost per click and all this other stuff and cost per conversion too so um if you can realistically show like we did with one of our um brand deals recently and so you had this many signups you track that data not us you have this many sign ups you gave us the report that's and you told us the lifetime value of your clients this and that's it so you just made that much money there's a no-brainer for you to do this next month as well or we didn't quite get it sorry and like there's there's one deal that we did recently

which we haven't quite got what we wanted we delivered out we got all our videos that we did we did on the CPM but we were like now we can we know we can do really here and so we're going to do two more videos for them for absolutely free even though we head out what we said we're doing and because we know we can do better and so we're going to do those two videos because for us the long-term partnership with this people is so much more important that we said to them like don't continue with us until it makes sense for you and so we will do that so I guess what I'm saying is like well you're starting in this position like

think of it like there's lots of ways to price stuff not everything has to be paid for but the most important thing at every deal you do is learning from what you've got out of that what the brand got out of that what your audience said about it as well what are the comments are you getting called out for being a sellout are you doing things out because people like oh that's so cool I love that brand too like what's the sentiment around it and you keep all that data and you put that together and each time you do it and you start to track you've got now case studies to take to your next client and say look we can't guarantee anything because it's

social media but based on past performance this is what we can show you and if even better if you can get testimonials from the brands that you're working with um and some of those you know some of those big brand deals that they said wineries International wine brand what I would be doing here if this if you actually had this opportunity I would say yep we're in we're going to do a series of videos we're going to come up for storyline where this will happens like you know maybe it's like I'm never getting taken out on dates like I'm trying to convince them apart I'll take me out of date and yeah he's going to do this you know we run a big story line

like yeah yeah the surprise you you know you're gonna be a little big storyline and you do a whole series and then you have links everything and everyone goes to it and anyway you track all that stuff and so you've just got this National Global brand who you've now done this whole series for you've got a whole bunch of data and now you've got this real good case study the next brand doesn't need to know you didn't get paid for that they'll never know yeah there's no way they're not gonna you can't disclose that information anyway and you can just say I can't tell you like it's confidential in it and they get there because they don't want you telling everyone what you've been paid

and now you've got this like that's brilliant because we're on the brick of having a deal that we will actually be able to do the exact same thing with that's a company that's in the United States but also in Spain and they're wanting to launch something in Spain and so we think it's like a perfect like mesh between both cultures but I guess I loved your series idea because what's also crazy is they come to us and they say hey we found you but are you interested and I'm trying we're trying to figure out how to like what's the best way to respond do we say oh great great what's your marketing budget or do we say okay great this is our idea this is

what thinking we're thinking a series or do we wait for them to tell us what they're thinking like it's we're so new that it's like it's definitely like a threat of dating I feel like I'm dating again I'm like going on it it was like I don't want to push it too much and have like have them walk out or I it's so think about it and it's going to be different for each person but sorry I cut you off if you still want to go sorry so like so the next stage what I'd say is think about it like a um like a normal business deal right because every time you're doing a brand deal it's a sale right you're going into a sales

pitch and where a lot of people go wrong in sales is that they're out there giving advice to everyone right they're out there trying to say like hey this is what we can do for you or or they're trying to pitch their finger and this is what we can do this is where we're at we're going to do the series we're going to charge you this much money and all that stuff and look at some point you have to have those conversations but if a brand reaches out to you and they're like hey we'd love to work with you like what can we do my my first every time someone does that to us my first thing is like yeah cool let's jump on a

call here's my link let's talk about it and then okay so I don't go I definitely don't email anything in that point um there's been a couple Brands where I might have I might have just sent them I actually the the last brand deal we did that I just looked at I literally just like LinkedIn message the guy that's founder it's like hey this is my pitch 18 and he's like yep done let's go and it was like the silliest transaction it was just so easy yeah it was like eight thousand dollars I was like okay all right it will never happen again like it was amazing but that won't that won't happen again yeah I love that I didn't think about it just chatting

about it just just chat about it and then talk to them and then when you're in that thing do nothing but ask questions okay just nothing but ask questions just sit there just ask questions right just keep asking what are they trying to get out of this like what okay what's your goals like who have you worked with in the past like how did that perform what did they do um what were your learnings from that like what are you really hoping to achieve what's your goals and every time they ask you something answer and pivot right like like it's normal sales technique so they might be like oh tell us about your viewership go oh yeah cool we get this many views and so

what about the other influences you've worked with what are their viewership to like aren't so quickly pivot back and what you want them to do is just continue talking until they get to the root cause of their issue of what they're trying to do and why they struggle to work with influencers or why they're nervous about working with you guys like what's and then so you find out all the potential objections they're going to have about working with you and now you have all the information to to um answer properly to be able to ensure that you have catered to all those objections that they may have and it doesn't mean you're necessarily going to get more money it just means that you're able to

have a better foundation for this relationship to build off because that's what these are and I would not then answer there I would not then go okay I've got all your objections cool this is what we'll do I would say okay great so like I think we can help you support this are you okay for us to schedule another call we'll come back with a bit of a pitch on what we think we could do to help you guys and then you booked it in you have it booked and then you go away you develop out that series or whatever it is that you think of or this Pro and then you think of your pricing strategy and maybe you have two or three up

your sleeves often discredit the CPU monster where you go okay cool well some Brands we work with on this method blah blah blah so you have a couple methods and then you go into that pitch and then you say and then you go back and you reaffirm all the objections that they had to you so like you know cool so last time you know you told us these these these these are all concerns is that correct and they're answering you yep yep yep that's all things we're worried about okay cool well we're gonna run into this picture and we think we've been able to cater for all of those needs and would like to get your opinion and then you take them through like what

you're going to do and at each stage you're trying to essentially overcome their objections that they had within the method of what you're trying to do and you're getting them to confirm that yeah that would actually satisfy that need that I have so they've told you yes all along the way and then when you get into price it's like well and when they say no to your price you're like oh but I like was this something I didn't get right above yeah yeah like was there something that didn't misalign that why are you not saying no oh we're just not used to playing that much okay well you know that wasn't you know because it wasn't the subject that they brought up before right so

it's they're less likely to start to say those things they're still going to negotiate price because it's business and if they don't they're probably not good at what they do but it gives you more leverage to be like people will act consistently with the way they've acted in the past right there's commitment and consistency principle where what you've said yes to in the past you're more likely to continue to do the same thing so if that's in use this whole way like yeah you're right yeah you're right that's what we need when it gets to the final piece they're in a better position to say use as well so if you wrap that all up what we're saying is like you get reached out by

brains before you go oh how should we approach this band we really want to work with them or we're not sure should we charge them stop trying to think of the answers that they already have you know just go in a conversation with them and ask them the question and get all the information that you need so you don't have to think you know what they need so much easier and then you go back with your page it's no different to how I would pitch with a normal client rather than a printing right someone comes to me that I fast down I'd love for you to your team to run out Tick Tock profile and we'd say and I'd be cool no worries let's jump

on a call let's chat about see what you need to okay and then we'll jump on that call we'd unpack everything with them and what their issues are and sometimes it might not be Tick Tock that they need I'm like guys this is yeah it's a fancy shiny new product actually you need to be on LinkedIn you guys are an accountancy firm like that's where you need to be and so you're able to then go find all the stuff out and go okay cool now here's the solution you really need and and I'm really big on telling people we don't assume we know what you need until we've met you but I always say it's a deal and it's actually a real good reassurance to

people that they feel like they've gonna be a stand quote oh so that's the same with you guys right because that was the only way like even if you guys like when you're like oh what advice on I'm like I don't know like I don't know your particular situation like let's jump on a call let's just chat through it um and we're still on podcast because it might help other people as well and also you're over recording of it but then now but I know so one question I do have about that I love everything you're saying with like you just need to listen to what these people have to say what their what their needs are what their objections are why they contacted you

in the first place um One Challenge or hurdle that we will definitely encounter um would would it be okay to do some of these questions and some of what you're talking about um through email because we are not yet fluent in Spanish and some of these companies that are reaching out may not have someone that's completely fluent in English um and I know they speak English or understand English because they consume our content and they know about us and all of our content is in English but I guess I guess the question is it do you think it's okay to do some of that um via email if if there is that kind of language barrier of actually being able to have a full conversation

of course like if you can't get everything out like if the language is a barrier and there's other ways to do it through email things like that of course is it as effective of course not people are much better when they're talking to each other because of the nuances of the way people speak you can't especially translated into email especially through translation exactly so being able to talk to people is always easier and Mike in your case if they were located anywhere near you and language is a problem I try to go see them in person because in person you can at least speak with your body as well yeah and that's so much easier when you're trying to translate those people right like I've

traveled the world plenty and if you're in front of someone and you speak two different languages you can communicate 100 you can communicate just using body language and so if they've got some English and you've got some Spanish and you've got Google Translate in front of you you can probably get to it to enough right and like Google Translates like crazy these days but you can just like full-on hip conversations right like images it's amazing it's like the one thing I use daily yeah yeah and this they don't have an affiliate program yeah these um there are tools online for like video calls that does the same thing right like plugins to zoom that do like um like text translate um I've seen it before

I've never used one but like it could be something I don't know absolutely um but that is definitely a challenge and like you know I thought we'd face it as we like we've had people like literally like I said before like Albania like Egypt like everywhere come through our channels and what you usually find is that like they they can speak English enough like they can speak it enough to understand what this conversation is going on yeah like I just spoke with a girl a few weeks ago from Argentina and she was like oh I'm so sorry about my English I'm like you said that perfectly so I'm not sure why you're saying sorry right let's just go and she was fine like we we

had the conversation yeah look is she is her English perfect no but like is mine not really younger like so we're fine like it was you can get enough across and with video calling you can still get somebody language in it which is great um so I don't I don't see it as a huge challenge because I see it as these like Technologies allowed us and given us a few ways to overcome it yeah perfect now all of that like we're coming towards the end of the hour but like all of what we've just talked about is just brand deals and I just think that that long term is like such a small part of where your Brand's gonna go um and it should always

be like a 30 Max um if you're a slave to brands long term you don't have a business not at all right even like when you think of like movie stars or athletes and things who are sponsored by brains um they still have a real career they're still an athlete they're still movies that whatever but then they have that that produces them real income and then they have these brand deals as supplementary income so if you guys are just getting brand deals like that's puts you at a lot of risk right there's a lot of risk there um and you can see that with all the big Traders on YouTube where even they YouTube's paying the Mad Revenue they get brand deals that revenue is

becomes less than 50 for a lot of them and they're building real businesses on top and so that's the thing long term you have to figure out it's like what is the thing we can sell and what's the real business we're going to talk about and now we sort of already talked about potentially selling like the knowledge that you have around what you're doing is maybe a bad one and a lot of people default to that because they're like oh people are asking for this all right there are other things that you can do and you'll be able to find like like for instance like this is stupidly pie in the sky but like imagine if you were able to partner with the winery to

make your own wine for that vintage for that year and with them in partner for that and you sold that through it and you've got an actual percentage of sales through there and you pushed it like now you probably don't bring big enough for them to yeah we're doing it just yet but that's just it so you say like next year like or the year after like you know you start to think about this real brand like real opportunities where you you've got proper ownership in a product yeah or service and it and it ties into the thing that you're doing um I watched a guy called Linus tick tips on YouTube and I don't know if you've ever seen him but like he he

sells these screwdrivers and I obviously bought one they're like 70 US dollars he sold 120 000 units oh wow 120 000. what do you always say if you have the right tool you can do anything yeah this thing is this is a fidget toys and I love I love what you said too because one we've we've kind of realized that too especially with brand deals unless you have 15 different partners that are consistent that are months month you know it's you could have five brand deals one month and none the next month and so the idea with that that we've kind of been discussing and and talking about is actually um English or having like a teaching English membership or doing something with that to

where we had let's say if we had 100 members or 200 members yeah and we're doing these different things for teaching English because we there is a big section of our audience that is asking us for English content asking us to help them with English and so we've kind of thought about pursuing that as like our core like yeah we know we're getting around this much every month for this business of teaching English and then the brand deals and everything else is just you know more of on top of that and ancillary to what we're doing no I love it I love it I think it's great I think like a teaching English course is a proper product that adds a lot of value to

people and it isn't just something that you know it's not the other one of like how do I move to Spain right yes I mean I would love to do it like around Spain so like people are taking English classes from us like in these small village is like in these like like kind of like a we've had a lot of ideas around that but one of them is kind of not necessarily spell you know using time for money in terms of like we're teaching online group classes but like coming up with a way to to give people like daily English lessons that are you know things that they aren't necessarily going to learn in the classroom and just that kind of like daily content

and kind of yeah all that okay awesome that's so good so I'll tell you I'll tell you the strategy so first of all knock study have you watched Knox study okay you know it's like Fort Knox study yeah he is a British guy he does English as a secret language calls it like he's got a school um channel is awesome I've been watching since 2020 like I've learned so much from them about English like I know so much more about the language because of her um but he does all that content but then he has a school where he teaches people right so bye you might you may even need that channel to be separate is it like a fully focused Channel yeah yeah it

might be it might just work better for the algorithm because it's more niched and it knows where to send it so that doesn't mean you can't use your main channel to talk about the Journey of building that business on the side right and you're getting everyone excited by like Hey we're building this thing like this is what it is and then you'll have two Brands you'll have the brand of you guys as the creators and entrepreneurs and then you have this like for one one so that is something that is one way you can incorporate into your main one the channel would start to change so I'd be a little bit nervous around that because it sort of limits you then I guess in that

business fails or doesn't work quite right but then there's like the course selling is um there's like plenty of methods to do it but like what you got to be careful with some of them like they're just terrible like that people don't know how to structure a course right um they don't actually really teach anyone they're not really any structure the platforms are pretty terrible like they're they're real like I don't know they were like core pretty sort of like you know when you're in like corporate job and you're like you have to do like e-learning module they're like those sorts of things right and it's like this is the worst thing and how I don't want to do this yeah because our whole brand

is fun and our whole thing is like we want to have fun we're ready to have fun watching learn how to go like in the couch and on the couch like Eric get actually in there yeah I literally got inside the couch and like in versus yeah yeah exactly and so we didn't want to do a course either because we wanted to be like we didn't want to start in an end we wanted like a membership so we could evolve it and Advance we're not opposed to courses it's just yeah yeah well we have a like fun enough we have a client who's called vidzing and like they're one option but I'll tell you about like so you understand the services that people have out

there but fitzing is like a self-service build your own Netflix vid videos yeah um the point of it is is that they have a self-service build during Netflix right so you can build your own Netflix Channel essentially is what it is which usually costs people a million dollars to do right minimum what it's like 22 200 a month depending on it like it's not that um not that expensive right so you get that we get the stand French it's 100 I will introduce you today or look up but you know like they will they were 100 like they all work out like a three month deal with you to say hey this is the greatest journey of you building your channel on our platform then

we'll 100 come to the party here like they're not opposed to they understand the value so you could like build like a full-on Netflix channel that has different series underneath it and like so we've got a I don't know if you saw my Vlog from the other day but I took Judy girl one of the girls over to meet them and have a look at it like this I think it was two days ago um it was Monday this one so two days ago um I took Judy out there Judy Judy's crazy Judy has like 1.8 million followers here um yeah yeah and so we're helping her produce something there with with zing and the model that we're going to go with is like so

she's a dressmaker and so we're going to do every series is a different dress so make this dress with me and then people will pay a certain amount of money to buy that whole series so I'm gonna buy this like bundle of courses or videos which tells me how to make this exact dress that I want and it tells me all the materials I need and all the techniques but then there's like a video library that's just like techniques like basic techniques you need to know to be able to do juice making and that there you get free every time you buy a course or you can just subscribe to that one thing and the reason why we went with the bundle idea as opposed

to ongoing subscription was actually because of vidzing from Kim who owns it she said from all our market research we found that people if you're doing ten dollars a month or twenty dollars a month people are now comparing that to Netflix or comparing that to Disney because that's what they pay for that and they get the whole MCU Universe yeah Pixar movies and all this and what what I get for 20 a month from you I just get these videos from One Creator which is silly but it's but you can understand their perspective yeah but people are used to paying a hundred to three hundred dollars for a one to two hour Collective course as a bundle of information centrally located for them to go

through it in one linear fashion right yeah and so if you guys did like a different series for each thing like maybe different levels or whatever and you had like 10 or 12 series or you know you can charge them in bundles and so you're going to need like a hundred people paying you a hundred dollars it's 10 grand you know which is 100 people was in a lot of people to get pushed through one of these things and so and that's an ongoing thing so you just need to do it once and you can have all these series but then for you guys what you're talking about is like how do we keep it evolving well I would do two ways I would have

one as content involved so you still give all your information for free on content like so many of the creators that use vidzing have like some of them literally just grab the YouTube videos bundle them up in a way and then sell it and people who love the ability to be able to just go I know this is everything I need for this particular thing I want to learn so you can still push out content to go to Villages and do all the things that you wanted to do but then you have like people going I love this this is so educational I want to learn more okay cool but I can go to this and and go watch all their videos and the reason

for things so cool is just it looks cool like it looks like you're on Netflix Channel which which is so much better right so much better than like thinkific and all those guys which are just like yeah I don't know corporate the other good thing is is the way you can monetize it so different like you can do live streams that people pay for so you could do a live stream one hour thing where people will pay 20 bucks to come speak to you or you do live courses once a week which is like an hour course um that starts on this date and it goes on or you can jump in a movie time or you can book A series amount a series of

courses or you can do like yeah subscription models um you can put up PDFs and stuff that people can download and things like that you can geoblocks locations so you can charge Spanish people less than what you're charging Americans because they're all rich over there so you have to charge different things absolutely you know but like you know from out from our perspective in New Zealand that's true like we judge Americans way more you just have much like especially once you translate the currencies and stuff it's just like you can we can literally judge our American clients double what we type in new New Zealand clients but in US Dollars yeah and they will be happy to pay it and we're still more affordable than

what U.S us firms are charging so like so there's like a real thing there if your U.S clientele I probably have deeper Pockets than what the Spanish clients have and that's not because Spanish necessary poor but it's just Europe it's just different and you know it's just different priority is there yeah it's just different there yeah you know us is a piece like I mean it's the largest economy in the world for a reason like it's a big set of people over there on average you know yeah well that's it right very productive two weeks of vacation I know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's pretty crazy over there with like someone else I love seeing from the states it's so wonderful because you know

what is at like 10 of Americans have a passport or something it's like yeah so it's just really nice to like be able to not just go on a two-week vacation like actually live somewhere else in Seattle I love this idea this is brilliant please send this to us afterwards because we've really been trying to find something to do that with and um but like as we wrote this up because my team's probably looking at me going oh seriously um but no no that's all good um we I think there's definitely like part two to this because I think like we only just got started but I think like initially what we should do is um you guys start to figure out how you're going

to collect data how are you going to go for this next deal how you're going to broker it the right way get a bunch of data and then it'll be really cool to then like unpack that you know maybe not tell people who thinks that I don't think it relate too much but like yeah at least on packets he earnings from that and then talk about like evolve this idea a bit more so if I introduce you guys how did that play out like what are you gonna do like yeah look it's cool making of course but you know how much production goes into making a course like it's not you're actually asking to do fake undertaking yeah but hey that's business and that's what

it takes to to get there and I'm sure you guys have to drive anyway but I think it'd be quite cool if we like waited a few months things play out and then do like part two to go okay that Stan you listen to what you said you're full of [ __ ] this happened before hey we did this and actually something came out about it and in the meantime questions and anything you've got like just ask us like just email me like um okay we don't sell knowledge here we we sell execution so we always give our knowledge away for free all the time um so anything you have just hit me up an email and I'll answer it as you go along um and otherwise

you know you see my Tick Tock I just put it all on there anyway I might even just answer you through a video we seriously appreciate this so much uh we're just so grateful that you know to just pick your brain and and for you sharing your knowledge with us we really really appreciate it we knew yeah and social that you are kind of our person our type of all right type of person we just really appreciate you and I would be really excited in two months to do yeah sorry I cut you off again no but it's just gonna be really exciting to have I guess a little bit more clarity um we think that we were feeling weren't right it was really wonderful

to talk to you okay they actually weren't the best direction to go so yeah yay yeah yeah not awesome guys hey uh meet you both in person well this person is um is it and uh let's look at the next one so thank you very much absolutely thank you so much for your time