#61 Toby Younis on The Way Business Should Be Done in 2022

Dr. Ty  00:05

Hello, everybody, and welcome to episode number 61 of the Easy SEO and More podcast. I today have Toby Younis of the Messages and Methods podcast, they actually do a live cast every week. Now you probably know, I don’t do a live cast, I record these. But they do a live cast every week on YouTube. And they turn that into a podcast. But not only that, they teach people how to do that themselves, which is pretty awesome, I think. Hey, Toby, welcome to Easy SEO and More. How are you doing today?

Toby Younis  00:39

I’m doing great. And thanks for the invitation. I look forward to being here with you, Ty.

Dr. Ty  00:43

I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks, ever since I was on your podcast, what about a month ago, I’d say. That was a great time. In fact, if I’m not mistaken in another week we’re recording a kind of a round table as well. So I guess I’ll be joining you again in another week or so.

Toby Younis  01:01

January 19, we are having a panel that we’ve invited six guests to we divided it up since Shelley and I are male and female partners. We divided out between three males, three females and they’re all experts in various areas. You of course, we rely for your expertise we rely upon for your expertise in SEO. And we’re going to talk about digital marketing in 2022. Because none of us expected to be in this position in this year. And distance; conversations distance, selling distance, producing, it’s really an amazing time in that sense. And we want to see what they think about it. That’s January 19. And we look forward to you being on the panel.

Dr. Ty  01:45

I definitely agree with you about what’s going on in 2022. We did this two week lockdown in March of 2020. That extended almost through half of 2021. Coming back, it’s almost a wild west again, especially the internet. The internet seems to be redefining itself every couple of months right now, which is I agree with you is very exciting. For some people, it’s very stressful. I love it. I love change like that.

Toby Younis  02:15

We have always been very good at pivoting and adopting whatever the changes are to our benefit. And we’ve been live streaming since 2014. So conceptually speaking, the idea of interacting with people and now our guests, our customers, etc, via this medium is something that that we’re completely comfortable with. And we’ve built a studio around that, that was the expectation when we built the studio.

Dr. Ty  02:47

That’s fantastic. And before we started recording, we were talking about a couple of things. But as you know, on the Easy SEO and More podcast we’re trying to give my listeners one really good actionable thing to go away with, what would you like to tell them about?

Toby Younis  03:06

Wow, I suppose there’s two angles that I can take on it because they both produce revenue for us.

So the first, of course, these are messages and methods.
We have a strategy that starts with a live stream.
Then we leverage that live stream into podcast.
That podcast is distributed to 10 Different podcasting platforms, including anchor, Spotify, Apple, Google, etc, all the big ones.
In addition to that, we transcribe every one of our live streams, and we turn that into a blog post
Then we turn it into short form products that are called Video grams and audio grams, messages that are under 60 seconds that are posted to things like Instagram and Tik Tok. And now Twitter, we’re now live streaming to Twitter. So Twitter is accepting a live stream now.
So what we’re doing is leveraging that one live stream into a broad variety of content types so that we can, my partner calls it “have a social media storm.” It’s an increase in your presence on social media that generates activity. And we always follow up with some sort of freebie, as you recommend, that collects email information.

And the email is our way of staying interactive with our clients. And what we’re trying to do is create as much activity, as much distributed content, as much leveraged content as we possibly can without spending 80 hours a week doing it, and we think we’ve mastered that.

So that’s one stream of revenue because that results in clients that either go to one of our classes or boot camps, or we actually end up producing their shows for them.

And we produce for other people’s shows every week. And they pay us for that.

And then the second one is residual income that comes from a relationship with Amazon. And, like everyone, I started with an Amazon account that was just a personal account.

Eventually, like everyone, I started paying for the prime because I was ordering enough things, especially in the past three years, that the Amazon Prime freedom from shipping expenses was an investment, and it’s repaid itself dozens of times.

But along the way, Amazon started paying me and said, What about a shop, you do a lot of shopping, why don’t you have a shop. So we were able to start a shop that has not only some of the items we use and recommend.

Part of the shop is called Toby’s favorites, things that I buy that I like, and then there’s one called Shelley’s favorites, things that she buys that she likes. And then there’s the podcasting shop, the live streaming shop, the photography shop, the video production shop, and a video shooting shop.

That produces revenue that doesn’t cost anyone anything extra to buy from our store, they pay the same price.

We were talking about you buying another chair before we started recording. If you buy it from our store, you pay exactly the same price and we get a small commission from Amazon. Every month, we get a little check from Amazon that shows up in our business account from things that people have bought from our store.

About two weeks ago, Amazon invited us to Amazon live. That means you can do a live stream that they support on their own channel. It’s at amazon.com/live, though visited, and it’s people like us that are selling products that they’re familiar with.

And while you’re talking about the product, down at the bottom of the screen, you can see all the things that they’re selling. Well, you pick that list of things that are being sold at the bottom.

For instance, if you’re talking about some of the photo equipment you bought recently, that’s down at the bottom. If somebody clicks on that, it takes them to the shop, and you get a commission on that sale. And you get a commission every time that video is replayed and somebody buys from it.

We waited a long time for the invitation. We’re not even sure what the criteria is because we’ve been applying for about a year and we weren’t getting any response, then suddenly, we get an email from them that says, how’d you like to start an Amazon live? And we thought, Yeah, another way to generate again, revenue not related to our business.

Dr. Ty  07:44

That’s going to be interesting to see how that unfolds, because Amazon live really is not very old itself. It’s only been around what, maybe two, three years, I think,

Toby Younis  07:54

I don’t know, if it’s even been that long, maybe I would have said more like a year, a year and a half.

Dr. Ty  07:58

I was going say, I think I first heard about it about a year ago. I’ve always loved the idea of residual income. And you and I were talking before the show about how we both feel that it’s important for any business to figure out some way of doing residual income just as a part of their business. And I like how Amazon is doing that. Because you can live stream, you can talk about your business and your stuff. And you could be getting paid getting paid basically from Amazon to do that. Because you’re talking about Amazon products at the same time. That’s kind of cool.

Toby Younis  08:35

Especially because you’re talking about products, not only that you’ve purchased, but you have an interest in. I can bore you to death, about the Godox 860 Flash. I’ve owned them for years, I love them, I use them in all of my photographic work.

And like I said, I can talk your ear off about it. Now I get to do that in front of a lens, in front of my camera to people who are listening and going, Okay, well, he’s convinced of this. Let me order one. And I get a commission for that sale. And right now, just our shop has produced between $100-$200 every month in residual income, and it’s a nice little unexpected check. We hope that now it’ll produce more because the shop will be supported by the Amazon live stream.

And we’re hoping it generates a little more interest now. I was watching one user on Amazon live stream just the other day and she had 1100 viewers watching. You know that’s got to be producing some sort of revenue as they buy things.

As she was talking, her thumbnail image looked very oriented towards makeup. But she was selling Canon cameras and Canon lenses and big dollar items that if somebody buys is a big commission for you as well.

We’ll have to see, our first show is Monday at 1pm. Mountain Standard Time. And we’ll just have to see how it works. We have a very specific niche when it comes to video, audio, photographic technologies, so we’ll have to see how it works out for us.

Dr. Ty  10:39

It seems that Amazon live seems to be geared towards a slightly more advanced, I’ll say podcast, or people that are more comfortable with video, what would you say would be the best thing for the average business person? What do you think could be a good thing in your wheelhouse that an average businessperson could use in their business?

Toby Younis  11:04

So you mean in terms of communicating with the outside world with their perspective? I think I think any business has to get used to the idea that the new normal, whether you can blame it on the pandemic or not, is going to be communications over the internet.

And the sooner you can get comfortable with an iPhone or any other smartphone as your camera, and your means of communications through one of these streaming applications, the better.

You and I right now, although we’re only recording audio, we’re looking at each other on Zoom The sooner you can get comfortable with the idea of sitting in front of a camera and communicating, inviting your clients, your prospective customers to talk with you, the sooner you can get comfortable with that the better, the more likely it is that you’re going to survive through this period.

I have a friend and he is so good a friend that I don’t charge him for any of this. But he owns a used photo equipment supply store. And it’s a little dusty store in the center of Albuquerque that he’s had for 30 years. I told him. you need to move on, you need to move this. And I helped him set up his little office in the back, I helped him set up a way to communicate, had him set up a YouTube channel to show the products that have just come in.

People still buy these cameras that use film. He still sells film and processing equipment. So it’s a cool little niche that he needs to get comfortable with. And he kept saying oh Toby, I’m just not that technical. And I said the technology issues have been taken away. All you have to do is click a couple of buttons..

Dr. Ty  12:44

And that’s one advantage to me of this pandemic is that so many of the issues that used to be so difficult are becoming easier and easier.

Toby Younis  12:52

Yeah. And we teach a course called the creative campaign framework boot camp. And we commit to you that in one week, with about two to three hours a day worth of effort, you will have a live stream channel, a podcasting channel, a blog, and you will have your first product, your first piece of content on each of those. Your YouTube channel, your anchor FM podcast, and your WordPress blog.

Our ideal client is what we refer to as an encore entrepreneur, a senior citizen who’s moving on to the second career in their life.

They’re not the most adapted to this kind of technology. But they learn in a week, and they get comfortable with it. And even our most challenging clients that we’ve had, we’re able to do it in a week. And we also in addition offer 60 days’ worth of free follow up consulting to make sure that if they have any problems, they can check in with us and we can walk them through.

Dr. Ty  13:58

Hey, Toby, you have to tell me, how do I get more information about that boot camp, I may want to go through it.

Toby Younis  14:03

The best way to do it is of course, you can go to our website at AGK Media Studio. And there are several buttons on there that will enable you to either sign up to become a guest on one of our podcasts or live casts, or to enter a page that explains what the bootcamp is all about. And then you can make a decision from there.