In this episode of the podcast, I’m joined by online marketing maven, Nathalie Lussier to discuss how she started with a single authority site and eventually grew her online business well into the six figures.
When you listen to this podcast, you are doing to learn which niche she started out in, how SEO played a role in getting her site’s traffic to 60,000 unique visitors a month, and then how all this success led her to start an entirely new business that ended up dwarfing the original one.
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About Nathalie
Born in Canada, Nathalie grew up helping her Dad run his hair salon. In watching her Dad work endless hours, she quickly realized that that was a lifestyle that she didn’t want to have, and so at the age of eleven, she unleashed her first entrepreneurial venture in the publishing business.
Years later, after graduating with a bachelor in software engineering, Nathalie took several internships. One was on Wall St, one in Silicon Valley, and the last one was in London. Despite the huge opportunities that awaited her as a software developer, Nathalie could not resist the urge to start her own business in an area that was so much more meaningful to her…and so Raw Foods Witch was born.
You can read more about Nathalie here.
In This Episode, Nathalie and I Discuss
her content development strategy for her authority site
why she chose the niche
how SEO played a role in getting traffic
how she monetized the site initially
how she automated the site so she could focus on her next project
the details of her next (and much more profitable) project
the book she wrote and how it impacted her business
how much money her business is earning this year (and its 2x last year!)
Links
Get coaching from Nathalie on how to start your own online business in 60 days or less
Get coaching from Nathalie on how to cure your cravings for bad food
Transcript
Click Here to Read the Transcript
OIL 026: An Interview with Nathalie Lussier
Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! What’s up? It’s Trent here with session no. 26 of the Online Income Lab podcast. And in this podcast you are in a super special treat especially the ladies in the audience who’s like to hear from another woman who is absolutely with her online business. On the show today I have a guest by the name of Nathalie Lussier who is like myself a fellow Canadian up there in Toronto and I don’t even remember now how I originally run across Nathalie. When I did I thought to myself “wow! This girl has a lot of stuff going on.” She written a book, she’s got a raw foods blog, she’s got her own marketing blogs, she’s got a consulting business, she’s got information products and I was just inspired when I saw everything that she was doing and I thought I gotta get her on the show. I just had, you see, and there’s a lot of lessons I’m sure that she’ll be able to pass on to the audience. I think you’re really, really gonna enjoy this episode. We’re gonna talk about the things in her childhood that happened that caused her to develop the mindset to become an entrepreneur.
Then we’re gonna talk about how some internship on Wall Street, rather Silicon Valley, and in London actually made her do a complete pivot in her career and now she has a wonderful life that she does as a result of that pivot. And we’re also going to talk about how she has built a blog that gets 60,000 monthly visitors using SEO and not any of the artificial link building that so many people associate with SEO. She’s also got information products and like I say she’s doing really, really well. So I hope you enjoy this episode so now we’ll go over to the interview.
So on the show with me today I have a fellow Canac from up in Toronto, Ontario by the name of Nathalie Lussier. Nathalie, welcome to the show.
Nathalie Lussier: Thanks Trent. It’s awesome to be here.
T: It’s a real treat to have you on the show. I don’t even remember how I run across Nathalie. I think I was surfing the internet or something like that and I came across this girl and I thought “wow! She got a lot of stuff going on, books and sites and info products and consulting and outside of the internet marketing. To me she just embodied what would be a terrific guest on the show because of all the success that she’s having and the fact that I think the things she’s doing that most anyone can do. And so Nathalie I really appreciate you making the time to come here to the Online Income Lab podcast.
So let’s start off with your childhold. I read in my research on you that you’re very first thing was you helped your dad in the hair salon. And the reason I’m asking this is they psychology that goes into being successful is so incredibly important and I think that’s something that not enough people understand. They’re so focused on tactics and strategies but if you don’t have the right mindset the tactics and strategies don’t amount to anything.
So I’m curious what happened to you when you were a kid that made you think, well tell us a little bit of when you’re with your dad in the hair salon.
N: Yeah so I think what was really cool about watching my dad kind of grow his hair salon was that and also help clean up and sweep the floor, that kind of thing, was just realizing that there is another option than just working at a company. So it just showed me what was possible. How you can start your own business and kind of do your own thing. And then I’d learned all kinds of other lessons, you know, in customer service and the customer is always right and just kind of people pleasing in a way but in a way that kind of made sense in a business. And then also understanding hiring, firing and like growing a business, choosing to scale it or not. So for my dad like now in hindsight I could kind of see how he did his business through the book the E-Myth Revisited, I don’t know if anyone’s read that but it’s a great book. So there’s kind of the analogy for pie maker versus the permanent business owner. So as I was growing up I was like ok so my dad is kind of like the pie maker so he has kind of job that he created for himself. And so when I looked back at that I’m like ok so that’s awesome but that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do and people always said “oh you should go to hair dressing coz you have all these experience, right, from your dad.” And I was like hhmmm, not really what I wanna do. It was a great kind of thought starting point just to figure out what I did wanna do. And that helped me really kind of try different things on mine.
T: So as interesting as you say that because that’s exactly the opposite to the answer I thought we were gonna get. So you, if I understand what you said correctly, you said your dad showed you almost what you didn’t wanna do as opposed to inspiring you to what you could do. And both of those lessons are equally valuable. I know in my family it was much the same thing. I saw things in my childhood that I had experiences that I did not wanna have as an adult. We were a very, very poor family and much like every family we had arguments over lack of, or should I say my parents have arguments over lack of money and that really turned out to be a huge motivator for me because I just thought I don’t want that turmoil or violence or whatever in my house or in my life so I became really obsessed actually with the fact of building some wealth so that I thought I wouldn’t be boxed in to that place. So it sounds like your dad being the guy who was the pie maker you kind of thought I don’t wanna be a pie maker. I wanna be writing operations manuals for other pie maker.
N: Right.
T: Then you got into publishing at 11, really?
N: Yeah well so I actually do have something else to say about kind of around that same age period.
T: Okay.
N: So I started doing taekwondo and my taekwondo teacher was like this kind of small lady who’s a blackbelt and she could like flip guys twice her size on to the mat and it was just kind of really inspiring. And just to see her kind of kick butt kind of on the mat she also had her own business. And I’ve kind of looked up to her a little bit more just coz she had a lot more freedom in her schedules so she would teach so many times a week but then the rest of her days were free. And I was like “oh that’s really cool.” And I kind of want something like that. So I kind of have that kind of contrast from like the full base that my dad was doing and then the kind of way she had setup her business. And it was a recurring monthly thing as well which was kinda cool.
T: Absolutely it is.
N: So that was like another eye opener for me. And then yeah so you mentioned around 11 I started doing kind of publishing so this was kind of my, you know, we got a computer at home and I really liked writing and I had a lot of friends who wrote stories that kind of thing so I collect everybody’s stories and my own. Clip them into like a little newsletter format, print them out and then sell them off to everybody. That was like my money making kind of idea.
T: Wait a minute. You would get your friends to contribute free content and you’d paste the click and pile it into one newsletter and then you would sell it back to them all and they would give you money for this?
N: Yeah like 25 cents or something like that.
T: That is awesome.
N: Yeah and this is family and other people.
T: Absolutely I love it. So again this brings me back to this question of the success or the psychology that goes into success and I really, I don’t want to skip past this too quickly because I was watching a video, the post is actually gonna be published tomorrow I think so if you’re listening to this the post will already be published, it was titled 5 Benefits of Masterminding I think and in that post I put a video with Tony Robbins and Frank Kern and John Reese. Tony drew up this chart and there was 4 boxes and one of them was belief, one of them was ah shoot now I’m not gonna be able to remember it, crap. One of them was, ah darn. And then the next one was action and there was result and basically what it came down, oh possibility, belief, possibility, action and result. And it kind of becomes this self fulfilling loop. If you have a really strong belief that you can do something then you see a lot of possibility. And if you see a lot of possibility you take a lot of action. And if you take a lot of action you get a lot of results which reinforces the belief.
However, the opposite is also true. If you have weak belief systems and this is I think the challenge, the biggest challenge that a lot of people who are maybe listening to this podcast or people who wanna create their own business is they don’t believe that they can do it. And if they don’t have a strong belief and they’re filled with doubt the potential that they see is not very big so they don’t take many actions and they don’t get any results. That reinforces you know that well my belief was right. And basically it’s true. Whatever you believe you’re right whether it’s good or bad.
So what was it that at 11 made you believe that you should do this or that you could do this and obviously we’re gonna fast forward that into the success you’re having now because the belief system I’m guessing that you had at 11 is probably the same belief system that you’re operating on today?
N: Yeah, you know it’s funny because I think that it was just like I didn’t have the part that I couldn’t do it so even before that I had started taking piano lessons around like maybe I was 7, I’m not so sure exactly what age point. But the piano teacher gave everybody this blank music sheets and I didn’t realize that we were supposed to use them to like practice other people’s writing other people’s music. So I wrote my own music on those sheets. You know, I sat on the piano and wrote stuff and then I forward to her and I thought that’s what we’re supposed to do coz I was still like so naive. And she was like I’ve never had a student who wrote their own music like this.
And I think it’s the same thing for all these things in business where I never had the thought that I couldn’t do it or that I wasn’t supposed to or anything like that. It was just like yeah I wanna do it, I’m gonna try it, I wanna see what happens and so that’s kind of been how I’ve been growing all of my online businessess.
T: Terrific. Well that’s kind of the answer that I expected. Alright so at this point most of the people don’t know anything about you. They don’t know how much success you have or having online and we’re gonna get in to a lot of details. I wanna talk to you about your raw foods business. I’m gonna talk to you about your blog. I’m gonna talk to you about your consulting business and your information product business. But if you don’t mind my asking, when you wrap it all together how much revenue are you generating right now?
N: So last year I did 120,000. This year I’m going to double that. So I’m already at a 120 this year.
T: So you’re gonna do 240,000. Do you hear that folks, $240,000 online? And I’m assuming the vast majority of that is profit?
N: Well that’s an interesting question. This year I had to change model because it wasn’t super profitable just because of the way I had setup my business earlier on in the year. And I have hired a big team and I was outsourcing a bunch of stuff and I realized this isn’t quite the best way to do business so but now I’ve definitely kind of streamlined again and I”m back to being profitable.
T: Excellent. Okay alright so I asked that question, you know a lot of people don’t wanna dive right into the money but I know my blog is called the Online Income Lab and I know that a lot of people listen to my show and come to the blog coz they really and truly wanna see what’s possible. So I thank you for answering the question. And I really applaude you I mean from 120 to 240 in one year is pretty darn phenomenal. So let’s now kind of dive into more of your adult life. I noticed you did internships, one on Wall Street, one on Silicon Valley and one in London. Now we could talk for hours and I try to keep this to an hour and change, why did you do the internships and was there things that you learned in those internships? Coz you originally went down the path that everyone goes down, go to college, get a good degree which is in computer software engineering. So you’re all set up to write codes and make software programs and now you’re telling people how to eat raw foods. So what happened in those internships that made you pivot in the direction that you were headed in your life. I’m assuming that that’s a reasonable question I don’t know enough about either but you go ahead and tell me.
N: Yeah that’s exactly what happened. Though the internships were awesome because I got to figure out what I like and what I didn’t like and again it was almost so much experience in seeing my dad’s company where as working in these start ups and also on Wall Street which is a lot more structured than a bunch of few companies. And I always thought this was kind of the secure thing to do like get a job that’s stable, you’ll earn big bucks but you’ll have this long career whatever. And so the start up that I worked at they’re actually like in litigation so they actually had to fire half of their employees while I was there. So that was my first kind of wake up call. I was like oh wow this is Silicon Valley and all these people had been laid off.
T: No security.
N: No security. That was my first take like okay and we thought everything was fun because we were on like our little university bubble where we’re getting all these job offers and things seemed to be going great for us but we didn’t quite realized what was going on in the real world. And same for the Wall Street company.
So when I graduated in 2008 I had a job offer to move to New York City and work on Wall Street on the tech side. And you know it was a great offer and my parents were like “oh my god, you’ve been working so hard in University like 5 years doing all those internships, right?” And I just like I had seen 500 people from the company get laid off like a month or two before they gave me the offer. And I was like “you know what, it just doesn’t feel right to me” and it was like the market was really starting to crash during that summer. I was like I’m gonna just turn this down and take some time to figure out what I wanna do with my life. And I knew that if I were to take that job I would wake up like 40 or 50 years old and be like “where did my life go?”
So that was just my kind of intuitive notch. I was like I don’t wanna be on this kind of, I call it like the kind of hamburger stand or whatever. It’s like everyone’s the same. We’re just kind of created all little assembly line items so I was like “okay I’m gonna get off this assembly line and figure out what I want and then we could kinda get back going to wherever it is that would be.”
T: You know it’s funny that you, I think all of us that end up starting our own businesses have a similar experience. I know with my last business you know I looked at all these guys racing all this money from venture capitalist and then they would go public and they would get like super, super rich or very, very few of them would get super rich. It was usually the venture capitalist that got rich. And I compare that to what I do now coz I still pay a really close attention to the start up market place and you know so many people start a business and I suspect the large percentage of the audience here they start a business because there is a lifestyle that they are after and when you take investment dollars from somebody else you’re giving up your freedom, you’re giving up your independence, you’re giving up all the things that many of us became entrepreneurs in the first place.
And so it sounds to me like you saw or you got a small window through these internships into thinking about “well is this really going to allow me to take my life and create a lifestyle?” I guess that’s my point. It’s your ability to create lifestyle gets hampered the more people who you have to report to. And in your case it was reporting to forks in Wall Street and in my case it was reporting to shareholders. And that’s why when I started this business I thought long and hard what would be the business model that I could do where I didn’t need a lot of capital to get started so that I didn’t have other people to answer to so.
(A commercial interrupted the podcast)
I think my point was is that this is a business that you can start with very little capital. You don’t have to have other people to answer to. And you can really take it to any direction that you want to. So let’s dive a little bit more into where you’re at today. So what I understand of your business right now is you have this rawfoodswitch.com plus it looks like you have your blog which is the home of where you would capture leads for presumably your consulting business and some of your information products. Is that kinda your business in a nutshell? Am I missing any pieces?
N: Nope that’s pretty much it.
T: Alright so which one, what did you start first?
N: I started with the raw foods site first. So basically I could kinda continue the story so I took that, turned on that job and then I actually went to China for 4 months coz wanted to do that. And I had a little bit of cash so I figured “okay this is a great time.” And I thought I’d figure out what kind of business I want to start while I was in China but it turned that it’s so much easier to think about it when you’re not doing anything so when I came back I was like “okay I tend into a little bit of introspection and figured out what has been kind of the most life changing thing that I’ve done that I can share with other people and maybe do a business around and that was raw food.” So for me I had lost weight, my skin got clearer, I just experienced like such amazing results from eating more fresh fruits and vegetables and even though I didn’t have a degree in nutrition or anything like that I was like “okay well it’s help me and I didn’t need tons of training to start eating this way then I can definitely teach other people how to do it.”
And I also got my dad to eat raw food and he lost weight and his skin got better too and so that was kind of my, he was my test subject. So after I kind of got him on the bed where I can say “okay so I’m gonna start this website.” And it was originally called raw food switch because I thought that people wanted to switch their entire diets to raw food but the cool thing was that I started that site and then I quickly realized that that wasn’t exactly what people wanted. They just wanted to feel better and like, you know, just start getting some of the benefits of raw food. So that’s when my boyfriend proposed that I move the s from switch to food and became raw foods witch. So I got a little local and I was like a little hot and the witch flying out in carrots. From then on people just loved it because it was so different. There was nothing else out there like that in the raw food business and so it was a lot more playful. It wasn’t as like dogmatic, you know, you kinda have to change your diet. It was more “hey you just start adding more greens into your diet or whatever kind of stuffs you wanna start with.”
And so I started blogging at that site. Initially I didin’t really have a revenue model. I was like had some affiliate products. And then I’d kind of just that’s when I started really getting into online marketing and figuring out how to actually make money from it. Because I could definitely do the website coz I’m part of it. That was very natural for me. But the actual how to make money from it was what I had to kind of figure out.
T: And we’re gonna dive into that in detail definitely.
N: Yeah so I launched my first online product in October I think of 2009.
T: So when did you start the site? Let’s go back.
N: 2009 yeah.
T: What month of 2009?
N: February.
T: February. So basically for your first 6-8 months something like that zero revenue. You were concentrating on putting out as much good content as you could. And you’re building a list initially?
N: I was, yes.
T: You were. So you were building a list and you were building traffic. So by the time that you launched your product, how big was your list and how much traffic were you getting on an average month or day, whatever?
N: I didn’t know the traffic stats too much but I know I probably had 200 people on my email list something like that.
T: Okay so not a huge list by any stretch of the imagination?
N: No.
T: Okay so now you’re gonna create your first information product.
N: So it was called cure cravings forever. And so I had actually tried to do a product launch in the summer of that year but I didn’t really know what I was doing and I didn’t really have people on my list to really kind of get feedback from. So once I decided okay I’m gonna actually figure this out I hired a coach who helped me come up with kind of how to do all of these and put it together. And so at that time I actually had people that I called and talked to and asked them like what they need help with before going raw and cravings was the biggest thing that kept coming up. People wanted to stop eating pizza and potato chips and whatever it was but they had a hard time defeating their cravings. So I put together my cure cravings forever program and doing the actual launch helps I think grow my list by another 300 so by the end of the month I had around 500 people on my list.
T: And this is still before October?
N: Probably end of October.
T: Okay so this was the very first launch, the very first information product. Okay.
N: Exactly.
T: I don’t want to interrupt your story but there’s more points that I need to dive in on. Did you create, like what was the product? Was it an e-book?
N: It was online video trainings.
T: Okay. Roughly how many videos?
N: I think it was 4 hour long video and some Q & A calls.
T: Okay. So you created the product before you launched it?
N: No I did not.
T: Ah see if there is pc, if people will pay first and then create the product. And now folks if you are listening there is nothing wrong with doing it that way. As a matter of fact that’s the smart way to do it. Never like when I launched Niche Site Mastery I spent 6 weeks full time making videos, writing things and I never had a clue if anyone was gonna buy anything. Thankfully they did but what a dumb way to do it.
Whereas I’m just very near launching a 12 week long coaching program right now and I haven’t created a stick of a content yet. And I will but get the money first because you can send surveys out. You can say “would you buy blah blah blah?” and people’d say “oh yeah I’d buy that.” But no, that doesn’t count for anything.
Like I had a guest like 3 or 4 episodes ago by the name of Mike Cooch and Mike had done a product launch in the warrior forum and then he wanted to do a live event. So he took his list that he developed from his WSO which was about 2,000 people. Put up a video on the sales page that says I’m gonna do an event it’s gonna be this blah blah blah it’s $900 there’s the buy button and $10,000 of revenue came in and all he had to do was make the video and that paid for the entire event that he was gonna do and then he went to market it more and more and more.
So how did you know? Was it your coach that told you “hey, don’t do the product first. Do the launch first.”?
N: Yeah so I have been kind of more in the online world at that point so like I figured out “okay I don’t know if it’s gonna sell yet.” And especially from the first experience where I tried to do my frist product you know and nobody bought it because I really just didn’t even know how to market it so I didn’t have anybody who really wanted it so that kind of gave me the experience that “oh it’s possible that no one’s gonna buy this so don’t spend tons of time creating the content on it.” So yeah but I totally agree with you I think like I’ve done the same thing for all of my future products and I only create them after I have people who have paid for it.
T: But how do you do that? So I’m at your sales page, I’m hitting the buy button, I’m putting my credit card info in, where’s my video? I don’t get it. What happens? How do you manage the expectation of your customer?
N: Totally well you know especially if it has any live components you can let them know that the first video will be on the state and it’s just about giving them a timeline for when everything’s gonna be ready. So you know maybe you open the shopping cart on the certain day of the week and then you close it maybe same time next week and then you give yourself another week between that to actually create that first piece of content depending on how complicated it is. So maybe for an ebook I would necessarily do this depending on how long you want it to be. But I think for videos and for things that you can kinda create on a fly it’s totally doable.
T: I agree with you absolutely. And doing my next product it’s gonna be a 12 week long high end coaching series limited to just 20 people and it’s all gonna be delivered by webinar so if you think about that for a minute well I’m teaching stuff that I’ve been doing for a year and a half so how hard is it gonna be to create 12 webinars. Not very hard so it doesn’t take a lot of time. And I have a whole week to prepare for every single webinar. Plus I’m gonna record every webinar obviously.
And then when the series is done I’ll have an entire digital version of this project which can then be given to everyone that purchased the coaching program and participated in the webinars but you’ve also created another product that you can sell at a lower price point saying “hey, you didn’t make the live webinar. You didn’t get to get coaching from me directly. You didn’t get all the other stuff. This is like a weekend seminar, you didn’t get to the seminar but would you like all the videos and in doing so you’re actually the money comes in then you create a product and the product that you create ends up and turning into yet another product. And that’s one of the things that are just so incredibly awesome about information marketing.
N: Absolutely.
T: So you didn’t know about any of that stuff. Well you were 11 years old and you were publishing information for 25 cents a pop so I guess you learned that out early. Alright so you did this launch how much revenue did you do in that first launch?
N: I think I did like a little bit over $3,000 which was a big deal for compared to not much before that.
T: I would venture to guess that a lot of people listening to this podcast have never made $3,000 online before and they would take that’s a very, very big deal. So that’s just makes everyone understand what you did so you first of all you took action. You committed and you wrote a blog and you put up content. How many posts a week were you doing by the way in the first 6 or 8 months?
N: Hopefully about two.
T: Two. And you had a job during this period of time or where was money coming from?
N: Well no I actually didn’t have a job at that time. I was just focusing on this project. I think I did take some web design clients which is kind of funny because I ended up take like building a web design business down the line. But yeah and that was just something that people knew me and they were like “oh can you make my website?” and I was like “oh yeah I guess, I kinda need a lot of cash.”
T: Yeah you gotta keep the cash flowing. It’s hard to buy groceries and pay rent without money. So you did this effort. You built an audience. You did a pretty small launch in hindsight and what was the price point of the product, 97 or what?
N: $97 yeah.
T: You had a $97 information product and you sold 300 copies of it?
N: Right.
T: Is that right?
N: Yeah.
T: That’s $3,000, right?
N: Yeah right.
T: 300 time. No 30 copies excuse me. 300 sounds like a lot, isn’t it?
N: Yeah I only had 500 people on my list. But that would have been amazing.
T: Alright so you did 30 copies and you thought “wow this is the most money I’ve made online before.” Remember I said that when I talked about the Tony Robbins videos we talked about belief, possibility, action and results. So you had a belief that you could do something but you weren’t really sure. So you saw a reasonable amount of possibility. It took a lot of action. You decided to put up a sales page and so forth and do a product launch which you didn’t know anything about at the time, I’m assuming. I’m sure you’re much smarter about it now. Then you got results which were pretty awesome, better than you’ve ever achieved before. So what happens next?
N: So I was like “man, that worked so I’m gonna do it again.” So actually it was like maybe a month or two weeks after we have created all the content and everybody have gone through the program I just re-did the launch again. So I did all the kind of free contents I just released that again but it geared towards the holidays because the first time it was kind of the generic one and I said “okay if you are gonna have cravings during the holiday like the pie or whatever’s going on for the holidays or for thanksgiving.” So I did it again. I think I got like another 25 people but I raised the price. So I had raised the price I think by $50 or so. And yeah so I just got another kind of way with people and I was like “wow this is amazing.” Like it worked again. So that was my next step.
T: There is a big lesson to be learned there especially about pricing. There’s this analogy that I’d like to give. If you were going into a store to buy a toaster and there’s a $10 toaster, a $25 toaster and a $50 toaster. Most people are gonna assume that the $50 toaster is the best toaster and they’ll probably, most people are gonna, I don’t know maybe the toaster’s not the best example but they’re gonna buy the higher priced product because they perceive that it has the most value and the most quality. If you were to interject the sales person into that scenario where they’re trying to sell the toaster most of the sales will go to the $10 toaster because the sales person believes incorrectly that people are gonna have all these price objection and that they’re not gonna wanna buy the higher priced product. And I know in my experience and it sounds like for you each time I keep raising the price of the products that I launch I do bigger and bigger launches. Is that your experience?
N: Absolutely.
T: Which is awesome. But don’t worry if you haven’t done a launch yet. Launch something for $10 or $20. Launch something for $50. Just launch something. And the results, the belief systems, the persistence, the action get the spiral going in the right direction and not the wrong direction. I, myself, I’m launching this program this weekend and it’s an $800 program for 12 weeks of coaching. I have never launched anything at that price point before. And that’s only the first 10 people, the next 10 people are a $1,000 each. I might flop I honestly have no idea how well this is gonna go but I understand how to launch a product. I’ve got an early bird list. There’s been a lot of emails and blogs and psychological triggers and all these things that go into a launch and so far it looks like it’s gonna be really successful. By the time this podcast is published I’ll know if I fell on my face or not. But regardless.
N: And I think that’s such a good point because we never really know until we do it, right?
T: Correct.
N: And as business owners it’s so easy to be like “oh should I do this? Should I do that?” And you don’t know until you actually take action and then see what happens.
T: You know I’ve been meaning to write a blog post “are you waiting for perfect?” And my point and I haven’t written it yet but it’s in my head but my point is this. I’m a perfectionist. I want everything to be just perfect. I will tell you that is a detriment to your success as an entrepreneur because you’re so busy waiting to have just the right sales video or just the right blog post or just the right product that you end up doing nothing. And nothing does not build your business. It doesn’t generate any revenue. It doesn’t give greater beliefs in the huge opportunity which causes further actions so if you’re like me and you’re a recovering perfectionist alcoholic get over yourself and just take some action and do something. Because I look back at my first launch and my first this and that I look back and go “oohh they’re horrible” but I learn from them and I’m sure it has been the same for you?
N: Yeah totally. It’s definitely like an evolutionary process right? Like we kinda come back to the same things over and over like how to do a launch we’ve kind of come back to that. How to write better contents or whatever it is that you were kinda working on but every time you get back to it you’re on a much better place so you could do it better. You can’t kind of get to that better place without doing it the first time and the second time, right?
T: Absolutely practice does make perfect. Okay so you have a number of different revenue streams. So you’ve got raw foods witch and that if I understand it correctly, is that basically the top of your sales funnel? Is that really what the purpose of that site is to collect email addressess?
N: Yeah that’s right.
T: Okay so you blog and you produce valuable free content that people like and that they share. Let’s talk about how you get traffic to that site because you know especially now in this age with Penguin and Panda and link building, is it working, is it not working. All this fear, uncertainty and doubt which is preventing people from taking action and that’s what my coaching program is all about. What’s your traffic strategy? How are you getting eyeballs to go there?
N: So I’m actually really proud of this to say and how far it’s come so I don’t know exactly what my stats were back then but these days I’m getting about 60,000 unique viewers per month to my raw foods website.
T: That’s awesome.
N: Yeah it’s kind of amazing considering it’s for raw food. And the strategy was definitely SEO and that was something that I had kind of doubted in but I didn’t quite know exactly how it works so I really kind of build in when I started that site. And it was also about writing kind of really authoritative ever green content.
So in the very beginning of my raw foods site and this is kind of one of my stumbling blocks in the beginning was that I was writing content for other raw food authors and other raw food bloggers. So I was writing about kind of this the harder things about raw food or like kind of the more advanced topics.
And then when I finally learned that, and that’s when I did the switch to the witch thing, when I learned that people didn’t know that much in the first place I sort of talking about what is raw food. And what do you do with avocado? Or how do you pick a right watermelon? Or like just very, very basic stuff and it might even seem like dumb down information but it’s stuff that people actually search for. It’s stuff that people are actually curious about so if they’ve heard about raw food or they’re like what’s a good raw food recipe to start with then I have a blog for that, a whole other blog post for all of those topics.
T: So you picked a lot of long tail keywords that people were searching for. Was there a certain search volume that you would go after like I want this phrase to have how many searches per month?
N: I mean I wasn’t that strategic about it to be honest. It was like I would write an article and then I would figure out what search term related to it the most. So like for example green smoothies is one of my top articles and like what are green smoothies. And I have seen other, I check out the competition and I kind of knew what was out there in the space and I was like okay so I think I’ve learned the better ones and so I did and I just optimized for that and I used, I think you use it as well, which is SEOppressor, the plugin. But even in the beginning I didn’t have any of those plugins I just used the all in one SEO plugin for WordPress.
T: Okay so you do a lot of on page optimization for keywords after you wrote. So you wrote for humans first and then you thought alright how can I optimize for a search engine. Did you do any link building? Did you do any bookmarking?
N: No not so much social bookmarking but I did do a lot of guest post so I found other websites that were in the same niche and just wrote articles for them. I think the other thing that started happening especially after the launch. I have created this ebook called 28 deserts that you can eat everyday. And people just loved that so much that they just started linking to it. And that really built up my links and I didn’t have to do anything like people were just sharing it on their blogs, sharing it wherever and that was just kind of almost magical for me. It was great.
T: Yeah that’s called magnetic content. You create something which is packed stuff, looks good, is nice, gives lots of quality information and you may just put it out there and people are gonna link to it. So doesn’t sound like you’ve done a lot of manual link building in the old way that people did it. No article marketing or blog directories or any of that stuff.
N: No that’s right.
T: Coz when you said you did this all from SEO and I thought “oh really” and somehow I know what you mean.
N: It’s more on site.
T: On site SEO yes still super super important. What’s changed a bunch and what I’m trying to get people to not think about so much is all this what I call manufactured link building. It still serves a purpose I still use a tool called socialadr which I love because it does social sharing for me on sites on major social networks that are never gonna be shut down. I still wanna get those links, lots and lots of those links. And my social properties still make a huge contribution like 50% of my traffic comes from referral. Do you have a sense by the way of what percentage of your traffic now comes from SEO versus referral and referral by the way is just when another site is linking to you, versus direct which is when they go in and type rawfoodswitch.com. How does that split for you?
N: I think it’s about 85% search engines and that’s why I said it’s on SEO. It’s kind of crazy. And then maybe like 10%, well I definitely have a lot of social I think as well because my facebook fan page has I think 4,500 people and I have like share buttons everywhere. And it’s basically as soon as somebody opts in they also have the ability to share what they got for free with their friends so that’s also kind of like a built in social sharing as well.
T: And you use plugins to make all that stuff happen?
N: Exactly.
T: Which plugin are you using?
N: I was using I think either digg dig or Google, sorry, twit & like and plus one. And those are 2 wordpress plugins that I like.
T: Twit & like is the name of one plugin?
N: Yeah twit & like Google +1. It used to be twit & like and they just added the +1 so that’s why it’s a little bit longer.
T: So if someone’s searching for that plugin they need to type in twit & like google +1?
N: If they just type in twit & like they’ll see the new version which has the google +1.
T: Okay I’ll attempt to get a link to that in the show notes on this podcast. And you’ll be able to, if you’re listening to this somewhere other than my blog it’s onlineincomelab.com/session026 on that page I will attempt to put a link to that and I’m gonna link to a whole bunch of other stuff to your blog and to your cure craving forever site and so forth. Okay so let’s talk about, one last question before I go. How many blog posts do you have on your raw foods witch right now?
N: Probably about 250. I haven’t checked.
T: About 250 and over what period of time? How long has that blog been up?
N: 2 years. No maybe almost 3 now.
T: Almost 3 years. Okay. And earlier I remember we talked about security with jobs. Folks I gotta tell you there’s nothing more secure than what Nathalie has built for herself. She’s got a highly traffic site that’s building a list. No google update, no other person, no nothing is ever going to be able to take that away from her so that is true security. And what I’m trying is encourage everybody who’s listening to this is you all can do this. The key is that you just need to start. You need to pick a topic that you’re passionate about. You don’t need to pick a topic that you know the guys say that you need to pick to find a topic that has lots of searches and low SEO competition. Forget that crap.
You need to pick a topic that you’re interested in and health topics are of huge interest to people. Wealth topics are huge intereste to people. Relationship topics are of huge interest to people. Those are like the 3 big mega niches and within one of those you just pick something that is of interest to you and start. And it’s not gonna happen overnight. My blog took 10 months to get to the point where it made its first $5,000 in a month. But 10 months? 10 months come on. And all I was doing was 2 posts a week. So you can quit your job in a year if you’re willing to just start and do this on a consistent basis. Obviously I’m excited again on my soap box I’m sorry I had to keep asking.
N: No it’s well said. I’m enjoying it. Preaching to the choir, it’s great.
T: Okay so I ‘ve got so many things I wanna ask you about. So you’re using the blog, you get lots of traffic and that now we talked about the sales funnel earlier. So because one of your core information products and I think it’s $197 now is your cure cravings product, correct?
N: Right.
T: What percentage of your total $240,000 this year is gonna come from that information product?
N: I haven’t done that math but it’s fairly low these days. Probably not more than like 5% a month I’m not so sure where that comes out to but.
T: Okay. What is the biggest source of revenue for you right now?
N: I kind of need to tell you about how my business evolved so.
T: Yes please do.
N: So basically I think it was in end of 2010 or so, yeah, so I kind of had a lot of people to my raw food website and they were starting me how I kind of started online, like who made my website, how was I able to create these products and you know for a long time I was like “oh sorry, I’m a raw food coach. I don’t talk about online business stuff like just not my thing.” And people were just continuously coming to me, emailing me like I want a website like yours and I was like “alright”. And then finally I said okay I’m just gonna do a couple of websites maybe we’ll see what comes out of it.
So when I finally kind of opened that door I opened myself to a whole new business pretty much. And so what I did is I automated the raw food stuff even more so I didn’t have to be there to kind of do a launch or do online programs or do one on one coaching anymore. So now that’s kinda more automated. So I sell like plungers and kind of other products and books and stuff like that and that kind of took me out of the equation a little bit. So then I ended up building a web design business and I hired a web design team like a developer and a designer and then I found myself with this kind of huge kind of business that I didn’t quite realize I was gonna have. And that was like what I was talking about when I said it wasn’t necessarily the best way for me spending my time in terms of profitability and also just nudging. I found myself nudging a team more than I necessarily wanted to so that was all last year I was building that business. And it was amazing. I also started my online products about launching stuff and about building a list and basically SEO, all of those stuff that I had done for my raw foods site I started teaching it to other people coz that’s what they were asking me for. So I created those products and then I also had the web design clients.
And then this year I said “okay the web design stuff is great and it’s making me a whole lot of money but the same time I have a team to manage and it’s not quite where I wanna go. I wanna do more products and do more consulting.” So that’s why I recently kind of restructured things again and so now we’re no longer web design clients but we’re taking consulting clients and still selling more of my products. That’s to kind of catch you up to where we are today.
T: Okay so let’s talk about, so you now the other property is your blog which I believe is just at your name nathalielussier.com.
N: Exactly.
T: So you guys can all go there and check it out. And so you have I noticed in my research you’ve got consulting which I think you sell there’s a gig either for $1400 or $1300 and then you got one for $2500 so how does the model work? Does it show up and send you the money first and you don’t really wanna talk to people until they send you the money or you involve in the convincing them to send you the money?
N: Well it’s interesting because when I was still doing the web design client kind of intake with client I would end up selling up them the consulting so at that point I was definitely involved in talking to people before they sign up for that. But these days I have people sign up directly on the website but sometimes people ask me questions to before through email and I just answer those then we’re ready to go. Usually it’s about scheduling. They wanna know when they’ll actually get there in their appointment.
T: So that’s pretty awesome having lunch and all of a sudden your phone goes blip blip blip and you’ve got $25000 in your paypal or where you’re choosing to get paid. I know when that happened one day for me I had $3000 came in once and I was on my way to go dirt bike riding and I’m like “wow, that’s pretty cool. I like that.” I think that’s the most amount of money that anyone has sent me at that point in time. And it’s a thrill and you’re talking about reinforcing a positive belief system and really making you wanna go. And I almost wanted to turn around, turn the truck around, not quite, go back and do some more stuff so I can get someone else to send me $3000. Now how are they finding, coz you did a pretty decent job at building your brand, how are they finding your blog and coming where you get that traffic from?
N: So that traffic is way lower than 60,000.
T: I wouldn’t think so. How much are you getting?
N: Maybe like 6,000 or you know, orders not too different. And I think it’s also because I haven’t had the site up for as long I haven’t blog this much and also when I started that site I was focusing with my web design client. So I was working a lot more with their stuff. I think the people find me there because I have a newsletter and people share that. They like my weekly videos where I teach people like simple technology tips to get their online business going. And I also do book reviews and stuff like that. So those tend to be shared quite a bit within my community.
T: Yap.
N: And there’s also overlap between my raw food people and my business people because that’s kind of how it started. So they were curious about my online business so I had another responder series for my raw food people that teaches them kind of the basics of raw food for free when they sign up to my list. And then I also have an email in there about my new business. If they’re curious about that they can head over so that kind of helps keep people know what’s going on with me.
T: Absolutely. So now how does the revenue from the blog split between consulting and information products in percentage terms?
N: I would say probably half and half right now.
T: Okay.
N: Including like affiliate products and that kind of thing. And that’s kind of my goal is to kind of have it half and half as much as possible.
T: And how much revenue is the blog generating per month?
N: It’s hard to tell just because we’re still doing the web design plans but we’ve been doing if I look at it between 15 to 20,000 a month like for my whole business. But then it’s hard like I don’t quite have the breakdown without the web design stuff.
T: Yeah sure enough. Would it be safe to say though that if you only had the blog and you had nothing else off consulting and information products you could earn a nice living?
N: Absolutely.
T: Absolutely. Okay. And that was again the point that I wanted to convey to people is and here’s another thing to that I wanna point out coz this junk gets in people’s head and it stops it from taking action. Do you think before you started your raw foods site that the world needed another website devoted to raw food?
N: No.
T: Do you think that before you started your blog that the world needed another blog to teach them how to do online marketing?
N: No.
T: Not at all? Same for me. The world would have been very happy to continue had the online income lab never been invented. My point is do not let this junk limiting belief of somebody’s already doing that. You know what? The more people that are doing it the better because that validates the size of the fact that the market is really big and there’s a lot of demand.
For example in a webinar, months and months ago I used to give this example of if you go on amazon.com and you search for relationships there’s at a time it was like a 180,000 books on relationships. So the ill informed would be author would say oh well there’s already too many books. I shouldn’t write my books on relationship. I should write my book on getting worms to grow at the top of a palm tree because I’ll know I’ll have the only book and I’ll corner of the market. Sadly there is no market for that. Nobody wants to know how to do that. There is a lot of people who wanna know how to have a better relationship which is why there’s so many books. My point being is please please please do not let that get in your way. It should encourage you. It should actually fire you up.
I’m launching a new site very soon and I know although it’s a new authority site I think it’s another 7 figure business before. I built one of those before and I think it’s gonna really trump what I’ve done with Online Income Lab. It’ll take me a while but I think it has that possibility. But there’s already sites out there that are doing the same thing that I’m gonna do. So but I’m not gonna let that thinking get in my way because I realize that I am my unique selling proposition. The way that I interview people on my podcast I get lot of people who when they listen to this episode and they’re kind enough you write me and say “Trent, I like the way you ask questions and when they answer you dig in deeper and you do this and you do that.” You can get the information anywhere but some percentage of the people in the world are just gonna like listening to my stuff. Some people say oh you got a soothing voice like I should have been a lounge singer or something. And they just like listening to me so they come they’re gonna listen to my stuff. It doesn’t matter that I’m doing something that they could get from this side or that side or the other side because they want to hear me and my perspective, my point of view. And it will be the same.
Nathalie, it’s the same with you. The world didn’t need another site on eating raw food but they love your angle, they love your energy, they love the pictures, they love the way you do your video or your book or whatever it is that you’re doing that nobody else in the world can do just like you because there’s only one of you. And that’s why it doesn’t matter what the niche is. You can always carve out more than enough for yourself. And if you pick a topic that you’re really passionate about, that passion is gonna come through. I love business. I love creating businessess. I love marketing. Being a sales guy all my life and having to make cold calls to get customers. That sucks! And when I figured out how to get people to come to a website and give me their money without ever meeting me or talking to me in person I gotta fired up. I thought “man oh man oh man I wanna teach other people how to do this because now I can have that website and make money while I ride my dirt bike or I’m on vacation or I’m sleeping or I’m doing whatever it is that I’m doing.”
That makes me excited and so that’s why I picked that topic for my main kind of authority site. And this new site, same idea, it’s gonna be all about online marketing but not for internet marketers I’ll say that. Anyway, I’m stealing the interview I’m supposed to be asking you questions. I apologize for that. But this is so much fun and this is again why I love doing this podcast coz I love the energy of having people like you on my show.
So I know we’re coming up on the hour so I’m gonna start whining coz I wanna be respectful of the deadline. How much time more could we go do you think?
N: A couple more minutes.
T: A couple more minutes. The last thing you mentioned in an email to me I think something about a new book.
N: Yes.
T: Tell us about that.
N: I’m working on a book that’s actually about the 20 something women who are kind of getting into the online business world and I feel like especially with the economy there are so many graduating who don’t have a job or who are doing a job that’s not very fitting of the kind of education that they have. And so I really want to help educate women and I feel like there’s also a stigma where technology is kinda seen as too complicated or too hard to learn especially like we’re on oh yeah like I can use my cellphone and the internet and that’s about it. Like don’t ask me to create a website or anything like that so I really wanna help them and get on board. Kind of like what you’re saying like it is figuratable and it is possible to do this even without tons of technical skills and so that’s the way that that book is gonna be about.
T: And when is it coming out?
N: Probably not for another year at least.
T: Oh wow. So you got a ways to go yet.
N: Yes.
T: Okay ambitious side project. Now you have published a book already though. I think one or more than one?
N: Yeah so my first book I published is called, it’s kinda based on the first ebook that I created and it’s on Kindle and it’s 30 deserts you can eat everyday. It’s all raw food deserts, low sugar, low glycemic, awesome for anyone who has a sweet tooth like me but who doesn’t wanna put up the pounds because they’re eating too much desert.
T: Alright I saw on amazon and I will definitely put a link to that in the show notes as well. So hopefully there will be a couple of sweet tooth people in the audience who might wanna pick up a copy of your book. Alright again I could probably keep on going forever. Oh you know what? One last question. A lot of people get hang up on this creating content thing. Oohh you know I don’t know how to create all that content. What’s your content creation strategy? Do you just write it all by yourself? Do you get other people to write it for you? Do you have guest post to spark it out? What do you do?
N: So for my raw foods I definitely wrote all of them in the beginning but now I do have guest posters. Just because I’ve been focusing a lot on building other business and managing a team and all that. But for my own website I do prefer to do my own videos and write the content. And it’s funny that I think like I’ve been doing it for so long that I actually really enjoy it. It’s like a fun part of my day to write a blog post or come up with a cool topic. Like I’ll walk my dog and I’ll have an idea for a blog post and I have to run back and write it before it disappears. So yeah I think that my strategy also is to use a program called evernote and whenever I get a new idea I just jot it down and then so I’m never facing a blank page when it’s time to publish a new post or form a new video. And I also have a little evernote tutorial on my site if you wanna take a look at that.
T: Alright I’ll make sure that I put a link to that as well – evernote tutorial. Okay you’ve been an absolutely awesome guest. I really wanna thank you for coming on the show. It’s been a really good time. I’d like to be able to keep in touch with you. I hope that when I publish this I’ll let you know coz I know there’s gonna be some questions and some people are gonna want to interact with you. Folks, if you’re like I say if you’re listening to this on youtube or you’re listening to this on iTunes or anywhere else you can get to the post on my blog where all of the links and everything will be. It will be onlineincomelab.com/session026. There is an entire library of previous podcasts there that you can listen to. And I’d like to think that all of my guests are equally interesting to Nathalie.
And if you’re listening to this on iTunes and you like the episode, if you’d do me the favor of giving it a 4 or 5 star review I would really, really be grateful for that. And if you’re listening to this on my blog and you think that some people would be interested i