Streamlined Solopreneur: Optimize your systems, reclaim your time.

Just how important is writing? According to YouTuber Mark Ellis, your career depends on it. And as someone who’s grown his audience to 1 million monthly views in just a couple of years, he knows a thing or two. That’s why he’s going to take us through his process for creating content, repurposing, and how you can start! In How I Built It Pro, we talk specifically about growing his YouTube channel and podcasting on YouTube.

Top Takeaways
  • Most videos Mark publishes start out as blog posts, highlighting the incredible importance of repurposing.
  • His team has been crucial because they can do the things he doesn’t have to do. That way he can focus on writing, recording, and growing his audience.
  • Mark also makes $2,000/mo from Medium, which is free to get started on. He’s leveraging the reach on other platforms to grow his own business.
Show Notes
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What is Streamlined Solopreneur: Optimize your systems, reclaim your time.?

What if you could save 12+ hours per week in your business? Being a solopreneur sometimes focuses too much on the “solo” part: doing all the jobs, figuring things out yourself, and spending too much time in your business. But we didn’t start out own solo business to spend all of our time at our desk.

We did it because we want freedom: to travel; to spend time with our family; to watch a movie in the middle of a week day. That’s why Streamlined Solopreneur exists.

Each week, host Joe Casabona talks about how you can build a better business through smarter systems and automated processes. He does this by bringing on expert guests, and sharing his own experience from years as a busy solopreneur parent — so that being a solopreneur feels…less solo.

With every episode, you'll get insights, great stories, and 1-3 actions you can take today to improve your business processes and spend your time the way you want.

Joe Casabona: Just how important is writing? According to YouTuber Mark Ellis, your career depends on it. And as someone who’s grown his audience to 1 million monthly views in just a couple of years, he knows a thing or two. That’s why he’s going to take us through his process for creating content, repurposing, and how you can start.

Look for these top takeaways. The fact that Mark starts his videos with a blog post highlighting the incredible importance of repurposing. The fact that his team has been crucial because they can do the things he doesn’t have to do so he can focus on writing, recording, and growing his audience.

And listen for Mark’s story about Medium and how he makes $2,000 a month from that platform, which is free to get started on. He’s leveraging the reach on other platforms to grow his business. In How I Built It Pro, we talk specifically about growing his YouTube channel, and about podcasting on YouTube.

I am so excited for you to hear this episode. So let’s get into it. Let’s do the intro, and then the interview.

[00:01:11]

Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast where you get free coaching calls from successful creators. Each week you get actionable advice on how you can build a better content business to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

[00:01:34]

Joe Casabona: All right, I am here with Mark Ellis of Mark Ellis Reviews. Mark, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Mark Ellis: Hi, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe Casabona: I’m really excited. In the pre-show, we talked about a lot of things. I feel like we’re like… not kindred spirits. That’s a really weird thing to say to somebody you just met. But I feel like we have very similar journeys and outlooks and things like that.

The first question I want to ask you. You have a combined audience of about a million people per month viewing your content across YouTube and your blog and Medium. How crucial is repurposing? Let’s take a step back how. How crucial is writing to that process?

Mark Ellis: It’s massively important. And I think that surprises a lot of people because people know me as the guy on YouTube who reviews MacBooks and smartphones and that sort of stuff. And that is me, and the majority of that audience, that number that you’ve just quoted, which to me, Joe, as I was saying, just before we started recording, is nuts. I can’t get my head around it at all.

But that number is mainly made up probably 85% of YouTube views. Whereas the rest comes from my blog and from Medium and few other places. Even TikTok, believe it or not.

Again, going back to the question about the writing, if I didn’t write, then I wouldn’t have anywhere near that volume of an audience. Again, that might seem strange, because the majority of my content that’s being consumed is video. It’s not written stuff at all. But actually, inside baseball, behind the scenes, is written stuff, because that’s where it all starts, basically.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. This is, I think, a crucial point because this is something I talk about a lot. I think the best YouTube videos are the ones that look effortless, right? So you’re a tech reviewer, right? We were talking about like MKBHD and Sara Dietschy. They’re two of my favorites. And it just kind of seems like, you know, Mark Ellis like sits down and talks about the phone or Sara just kind of like sits at her desk and has a couple camera and just like riffs.

That’s probably not the case. It’s the writing and the maybe storyboarding or whatever that makes it look effortless. And then the editing of course. The editing is really important. But when it comes to your videos, tech reviewing… You know, I’ve reviewed mics. I don’t really know what I’m talking about with mics, even though I’m a podcaster. I’m not an audio engineer. I’m like, “Yeah, this sounds good for podcasting.” But like there’s a lot of stuff to cover. You know, when you’re doing a MacBook you want to… I’m sure Apple probably gives you… I don’t know if Apple gives you the stuff or if you buy your own.

Mark Ellis: I have to wait in line like everyone else.

Joe Casabona: All right. I was talking to somebody who gets the embargoed stuff and I’m like, “Oh, that’s so cool and probably nerve-wracking.” Like, what if you mess it up, like mess up the time zone or something? Are you blacklisted?” But there’s probably a lot of stuff to cover. So do you script your videos?

Mark Ellis: I do, but not in the traditional sense. I think, again, people probably think that… I think using the example of Marques, MKBHD, that’s a really good example. Because I was like you actually. I’m a huge fan of his. I’ve watched him for years and years.

And I used to assume, before I started doing this myself, that He did like you said: just sit down and start, in the nicest possible way, waffling off all of this really impressive stuff. And he doesn’t. And we know he doesn’t because he’s done videos in the past where he’s kind of gone behind the scenes.

When he gets a phone to review, he basically spends a week or two weeks using it, and notes down all this stuff, puts it into a Google Doc. He has writers for him. Now, that’s one important thing. He does have a writer. And he sits down in front of a camera and he just very naturally does it. I’m not at his league at all but that’s a very good example of how videos are scripted.

Mine’s a little bit different to his approach. Because I’m a writer first, I always have been, you know, I’ve written for much longer throughout my life than I have made videos, most, nine times out of ten, most of my videos start life as a blog post. So I write the blog post, sometimes a week before, sometimes a month before it could be. It might be a day before. It might be on the day actually.

And then I turn that blog post into not really a script, but it’s just kind of broken down into bullet points. And I don’t read it verbatim. I have tried that. I’ve done the whole using a teleprompter, which I did that for quite a few videos, and looking back, I don’t want to watch them, they’re embarrassing because it’s very robotic. And that’s a real skill to be able to do that. I didn’t quite realize. So I’ve kind of got away from that, just riffing off these bullet points from the blog post.

So in answer to your question, they are scripted, but not in the sense that probably people think they are, if that makes sense.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah. I think that’s a really good point and approach. I’ve tried using a teleprompter too and it’s just not my favorite thing, right? Like if you’re delivering a commencement address or whatever, like the State of the Union… I don’t know if your Prime Minister does something similar whenever they get on stage.

Mark Ellis: They do. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: So maybe that’s the appropriate medium for a teleprompter. But I just said medium. Spoiler alert, we’re gonna talk about medium.com soon. But when you’re trying to create a dynamic video and engaging, you know, the teleprompter is just not great, I don’t think.

Mark Ellis: I mean, I went into it really naively. I thought, fairly, I was kind of, you know, brushed it off and thought that’d be easy. Just put your iPad in front of you basically and read it. And you start doing it and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to do. And then you go back and watch people who do it and they’ve been doing it for years. Like you say, whether it be government people or news readers, or other YouTubers who do use teleprompters, they’re so skilled at what they do. And I just can’t do it that way. It didn’t work for me at all.

Joe Casabona: This is another thing that looks effortless or the better they are, the more effortless it looks. You know, you think about like… Okay, I was watching… I don’t know if you watch The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

Mark Ellis: I don’t watch it but I’m aware of it.

Joe Casabona: So he does the rehearsal but there’s somebody with cue cards, which is also wild to me that it’s like 2023 and there’s still a guy holding cue cards. I mean, I guess that makes sense, right? Because if it’s auto-scrolling, and you got to pause for laughs and stuff like that. But usually, you would have no idea he’s reading cue cards. And then like he got ahead of himself a little bit and made a joke on the cue card that wasn’t showing. And it was just like a reminder of how good he and other late night hosts are at reading off of this these cards or a teleprompter.

But, you know, like you said, I tried it, I was like, “Oh, I’m a good public speaker. I speak for a living.” And then if you’re not reading… You need to dial the auto-scroll at your exact speaking pace. Otherwise, I get totally messed up.

Mark Ellis: You do. Completely. There’s a small bunch of YouTubers who can just sit down and not have anything in front of them at all. I can’t name any because you don’t really know who they are but I know that I know they exist. I’ve even tried it myself and failed miserably. But the people who can do that are even more talented and they’ve just got that natural charisma and ability just to not even think about the camera and just go for it. But most of us can’t do that. That’s a very unique skill.

But again, that comes back to why the writing is so important. You have to have something there in front of you. However you do it, whether it be a teleprompter or bullet points, like I have. But there has to be something definitely.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I’ll just add one more thing to this, right, is I create LinkedIn learning courses and they asked me to create scripts for all the videos. And they’re like, don’t read the scripts, though. The scripts are just so you know roughly what you’re going to say.

And I feel like blog posts are the same exact way. Like you write the blog posts… The writing lets you organize your thoughts, so you’re not just going like, “Oh, yeah, oh yeah, and the GPU, oh, and the fans kind of loud in the MAC studio, or whatever.

Mark Ellis: Yeah. And the other thing it does, it keeps it fresh in your mind. So if I have written a blog post the day before I start filming the video for that, it’s there. I can remember it. You’ve made a really good point actually about covering tech stuff, particularly on Apple.

So most of my channel, and most of my content actually is about Apple stuff. And love them or hate them, one thing they do really make very hard work for people like me is the number of acronyms and letters and numbers. You know, if you want to buy an M2 Pro 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 Max Pro… I’ve got that wrong already. You know, there’s so many different letters and numbers and things.

I can guarantee, Joe, most of my videos, I’ll freely admit, hold up my hands have got one or two errors in there. I’ve misquoted the processor or the memory, whatever it might be. And people always pick up on that, as you can imagine.

Joe Casabona: Of course.

Mark Ellis: But again, that’s again why you’ve got to spend a bit of time, like you said, organizing your thoughts, getting it down onto paper. Unless you’re really confident in a topic, if there’s something that you’ve… there are certain products actually that I’ve reviewed where I’ve reviewed them several times.

So if it’s a pair of AirPods Max, for instance, I’ve made lots of videos about the AirPods Max. I could probably just about sit down without a script and talk about them in relation to a different pair of headphones, relatively confidently. But that’s only because I’ve done it again and again and again. Again, it comes back to the consistency and the repurposing of the content about those particular headphones. But generally speaking, yeah, you’ve got to spend time getting your thoughts out and working out what you want to say.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I mean, if anybody has tried to record a YouTube video just like off the cuff, right? I think I’m good at speaking off the cuff. Like I’ve done like 400 podcast episodes and I’m generally good conversationally. But sitting in front of a camera and trying to craft a narrative on the fly is hard. So usually the first A roll that I record for a video is just garbage.

Mark Ellis: Mine too.

Joe Casabona: I’m like, This is where I should have written it down. So now what I’ve been doing is, and this is going to kind of lead perfectly into our conversation about repurposing. Now, I’ll scour old newsletters and blog posts because now I have like years’ worth of those.

But if I create something from scratch, I will make it as a LinkedIn post first, because those are pretty punchy, pretty short to the point. And then I take that and I turn that into an outline for a podcast episode. And then I take that and I turn that into the skeleton of a blog post.

So my ideas are organized, my podcast is a mini podcasts, not this one, the other one. So I’m getting the thoughts out on paper. So if I ever lose track of where I’m going, I know I can first of all easily edit that out, but also like find the thread. Tom Webster calls it the red thread. What are you trying to talk about this whole time?

So you mentioned repurposing. Let’s talk about that. First of all, like give me the elevator pitch for anybody who’s not sold on repurposing, and then tell me your process.

Mark Ellis: Yeah, definitely. So I saw something recently on Twitter and I wish I could remember the two films, but it doesn’t really matter because the same thing applies. So someone posted a… one of the films was The Jungle Book, and it was the original Jungle Book. This is related, I promise. It doesn’t sound like it is. But it showed a sequence where the character was walking across the screen, like animated video. I don’t if you’ve seen this, Joe, but it’s really-

Joe Casabona: I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Mark Ellis: Yeah, the character is walking across and they then show another Disney film where the-

Joe Casabona: This is Robin Hood.

Mark Ellis: That’s it, Robin Hood. Completely different film, completely different character but they’re doing the exact same animation. And I think the tweet… I won’t name the person who tweeted because it is not fair, but the person who tweeted it said, “My entire childhood is a lie. They’ve just taken this exact same animation and copy and paste it into a completely different film.”

And I replied to that tweet and said, “If you think this is the only example of content repurposing, a very big level, a very high, very famous level, then your entire life is a lie because it happens all the time.”

My eyes were open to this when I started my career as a marketing person several years ago. It became very clear very quickly that to do any kind of content production, you have to repurpose stuff. If you don’t, you’ll be sitting around for weeks, years, making things and you’ll never get anywhere.

So pretty much everything that arrives on the screen for my brand, Mark Ellis Reviews, whether it be a blog post or a video or a link, I’m doing stuff on LinkedIn as well and certainly things like TikTok and all of my YouTube shorts, all that content has started life elsewhere. It’s something else.

It’s that classic thing about Disney has only seven notes. My mum’s always said, there’s only seven songs and there’s seven types of food that you can eat. And it’s true actually. Everything else is just a remix of that little small bunch of things.

And when you get into content, when you get into creating content, you have to accept that. It’s not cheating. You know, that Disney example is not Disney cheating. It’s them being a business and having to get this content out. No one’s going to notice that unless you have the same video playing side by side. No one does. The kids don’t do that and that’s what that stuff’s for, right?

Joe Casabona: Not to mention, Jungle Book came out in 1971. Yeah, I’m a Disney buff, so [inaudible 00:15:46] unlocked. ’71. Robin Hood came out in, I think, the early 8s. That era was lovingly called the Disney Bronze Era because it was not a good time in Disney’s history, and they did reuse a lot. But Robin Hood was one of my favorite animated films growing up. And I don’t care today that they use the same stills from The Jungle Book or that Little John is Baloo-

Mark Ellis: It doesn’t matter, does it?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, it doesn’t matter if you’re telling an interesting story, right?

Mark Ellis: Exactly. Yeah. And that’s what this is all about. What I do is telling stories. It’s not quite as interesting as a Jungle Book or exciting as a Jungle book, but it is telling stories about tech. Again, that comes back to repurposing the content.

You asked about my kind of process for this one, my technique for this. So it is very simple. It’s a case of planning. I don’t plan out too far because I can’t because I work in the tech industry where things change very quickly. I don’t always know all of the releases that are coming up, so I have to leave a bit of space.

I typically plan, at the very most, a month ahead, but that’s quite far ahead for me. So probably two weeks. And I’ll start by putting out my weekly blog posts. So for every week, Monday to Friday, I write on both, and we’ll come on to this later, I think, but I write in both my own website and Medium. And then I do two, sometimes three videos a week on YouTube.

And as I mentioned earlier, the writing is a starting point. So I wake up fairly early. I tend to write quite early in the morning cause that’s when I somehow manage to get the words out and then do that each day.

I do have people that help with this. I’ve recently invested in some help externally from a publishing perspective. So everything is still created by me but the publishing of the blog post is done by someone else now because it’s a very similar procedure each time. They do that, they upload into Medium, and do that as well for me.

So it arrives on fully formatted and published. It then gets shared onto Twitter. It get shared as an Instagram story. Like you said, I might then turn the blog post into a tweet thread possibly, or a LinkedIn article. I occasionally use ChatGPT for that, which shock horror. But this is one of the ways that you can use it creatively. Now you’re taking your own work, you’re getting it to break it up quickly for you into a bunch of individual tweets.

Joe Casabona: Oh, that’s so smart.

Mark Ellis: But that’s not my idea, by the way. But I had that same reaction when I saw someone else doing it and thought, “Oh God, that makes sense.” Because before that I was getting the blogpost, copying it into something else, pressing enter and-

Joe Casabona: Like Typefully or whatever.

Mark Ellis: Oh dear. It takes forever.

Joe Casabona: That’s terrible.

Mark Ellis: Yeah. And the whole point of content repurposing is to make it simple and quick. It’s got to be quick. Otherwise, again, you’re wasting time. So yes, it goes onto the social sites and then it gets turned into the video.

But I don’t stop there. The video for YouTube gets created. That’ll be a 10 minutes, whatever standard YouTube length, gets uploaded, published, great stuff. But then I get someone to break up the video into normally three or four shorts. So he takes the original video, chops them up and gives me, like I said, three or four shorts back. They get then uploaded to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts, those three platforms. So from one video you suddenly got God knows how much more content on these shorter form content.

Joe Casabona: So much content.

Mark Ellis: And consequently an awful lot of views. So you’ve got the YouTube views, but then you’ve got the TikTok views and you’ve got the Instagram views. And just very quickly, kind for a slight tangent, with TikTok, this is a really good example of where I’ve used content repurposing to build an audience very quickly on a platform that I haven’t done much with.

So back in August last year, I didn’t have a TikTok account at all because, you know, I’m 41 and don’t understand it at all, but I knew that I had to get back on it and do something with it. So I started the TikTok account and thought all I’m going to do is repurpose, chop things up, put it on it, and not think anything about it. I’ve now got 9,000 followers on there, which is crazy.

Joe Casabona: Just from repurposing?

Mark Ellis: Most of it is repurposed. Some of it is me walking around with the phone talking. If an idea strikes me… The great thing about vertical content is you can just shoot very quickly and upload it. But 90% of what’s on there is just chopped off from YouTube videos, which some people say is not a good idea.

Joe Casabona: But I want to key in on this. Because I had a couple of TikTok experts on… probably like a year or so ago on the show and they were great. Rebecca Simon is one of them. And I forgive me, the gentleman guest who came on who was also really good. They kind of prescribe the same thing. Pick a day, pick five shirts, record a bunch of things, and then schedule it all out. And I’m like, “I don’t want to do that.”

Mark Ellis: That’s a lot of work.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I’ll record like TikTok video… I don’t use… TikTok is one of those other things that I don’t use because United States-China relationship. You know, let’s say reels. Like I’ll get a thought on my cigar walks… Every afternoon and I take a walk with a cigar. Very healthy person. But usually, I recorded them. Like I’m walking or I’m sitting at this point smoking a cigar and I’ll give some podcast advice. That’s the kind of content that works for me.

So the fact that you’re like 9,000 followers on TikTok, mostly repurposing some of these like quick vertical videos, I think it shows that like as long as your content is good and resonates with people, you don’t have to follow the formula.

Mark Ellis: You really don’t. That idea of doing those kind of, you know, bringing in loads of different shirts, that can work, but it’s just a lot of work. You don’t need to do it.

Joe Casabona: And maybe if TikTok is your primary platform.

Mark Ellis: True.

Joe Casabona: I’m sure the people who are on TikTok are listening to your process going like, “Jeez like writing a blog post, then recording an eight minute video? That’s so long. I’m just gonna upload my TikTok videos to YouTube.”

Mark Ellis: And they probably look at what I’m doing with TikTok and Reels and think, “That’s a bit cheap because it’s just chopped up videos.” And to a degree it probably is. It’s a very quick way of building an audience but I don’t really care if it brings in the numbers. I get a lot of terrible comments, but I get a lot of nice comments.

I’ve got 120,000 likes on TikTok. I didn’t have those back in August. It’s been very easy to get them really. I say easy. All this comes from content that I put a lot of work. I should kind of confirm this, that I spent a lot of time on my YouTube videos. I’m a videographer by trade. I was before this. And the sort of person who does lots of little things that people probably don’t ever notice, but I’ve done it. So I take great pride in the work I do.

But that pride, it doesn’t disappear, but it does kind of evaporate a little bit by the time it gets to TikTok. Because it’s just a case of these people like this, it is getting them talking, I’ve got people arguing between themselves and comments between Samsung and Apple fans. Great. That’s brilliant for the brand. Let’s make it simple.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, I love that. I’ll also say like… you know, I mean, maybe the podcast community is a bit more polite unless you talk about the Blue Yeti. But 9to5Mac just redesigned their site and I’m pretty sure I know the agency who did it from my experience in the WordPress space because the CEO of that company shared the site. And I’m like, “Why do you care if they redesign? Unless you did it.”

And then I’m reading the comments and they’re like, “The old site was better. This all sucks.” And I’m like, “If I ran 9to5Mac, I would shut it down and never go on the internet again.” Mean Apple fanboy comments are like some of the worst comments.

Mark Ellis: They’re not as bad as headphone people. If you want to get really roasted, review a pair of headphones and say something nice about them. Because the people that don’t like those headphones will come after you with, not literally, but with digital pitchforks.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Mark Ellis: They are brutal. I don’t know why because they’re just headphones, who cares? But they are absolutely lethal, those people.

Joe Casabona: That’s wild. And that’s like, you know, most people probably won’t be able to tell the difference. I consider myself an audio file a little bit and if I did like a blind test between the AirPods Max and, you know… I can probably tell the difference between these two because the AirPods Max are always on my head but like the new Bose QuietComfort, whatever, the ones that don’t suck. There was the ones that sucked in the middle of-

Mark Ellis: Yeah, the 700.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Or maybe, if I was listening to Apple Music, maybe because they do that. But if I’m listening to Spotify on both of them, I’m probably not going to be able to tell you which switch.

Mark Ellis: That sums it up completely. It’s the same thing with a lot of smartphone comparisons and laptop comparisons. But yeah, definitely.

Joe Casabona: Amazing. So this has been great. Your process is very cool. It’s, again, very similar to my podcasting process. Well, first of all, I want to touch on going back to The Jungle Book versus Robin Hood. First of all, neither of those movies were original ideas. Like those were books.

Mark Ellis: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: And if those people are really worried about their childhood, just blow their mind and be like, “Also, well, The Lion King is Othello, the Lion King is Hamlet.

Mark Ellis: It’s one of the two, isn’t it?

Joe Casabona: It’s one of them. And they’ll be like, what?

Mark Ellis: They guarantee Shakespeare stole it from somewhere else.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, right, exactly. Like you said, there’s like seven ideas. There’s a great video by The Axis of Awesome. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them. They have a song called Four Chords, and they just play these four chords and then just start singing a bunch of popular songs. They’re all the same song and they’re all the same chords. But it’s the story that you tell that’s the important part, right?

So writing is super important to your process. You’re repurposing your content creating these videos. I love that you’re sharing clips. I think something that I don’t want to get lost in this is that you do have a team of people, a small team. I have the same. I have a podcast editor and a VA. So my VA will add everything, like upload these podcasts for the members and for general consumption and things like that. I mean, how crucial is your team to your process?

Mark Ellis: Really crucial. And to be honest, I’ve only really invested in the team, Joe, this year. So up until probably December last year, the only thing I had really externally was an account and a bookkeeper and a PR, a couple of PR people.

Joe Casabona: Oh, interesting.

Mark Ellis: Yeah, they’ve been fantastic. They’ve been very, very valuable.

Joe Casabona: Oh, gosh. I’m sorry. This is how you got booked on this show, I think, right?

Mark Ellis: It was. I wouldn’t be sitting here now, actually, if you hadn’t spoken to Kate, who’s my PR.

Joe Casabona: Well, I’ll tell you, Kate’s pitch was good because I’m really selective when I get reached out to-

Mark Ellis: She’s doing the job, man.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Like when podcast bookers reach out to me, they’re usually crappy.

Mark Ellis: No, that’s why I employ her really. I don’t employ her. But that’s why I use her services. That’s pretty much all I had up until the start of this year really. I got towards the end of last year and looked at my kind of review of 2022 and thought, I’m spending way too much time doing things I shouldn’t be doing. I made 2023 the year that I was going to get the help that I needed really with this.

Same as you, I’ve got a VA now. I’ve only had the VA running for about a month and has made me, you’ll know this, has made such a difference. All the things that I did every single day, whether it be publishing blog posts or some of the things I mentioned earlier, actually, they are done by the VA.

I had that kind of horrible thing where you think, “I’ve got to let go of this stuff.” I wrote these massive procedures for them, which I can guarantee they looked and thought, “We don’t need to know what step 36 is.” And they’ve done it and they’ve done it better than me, much better than I could do it, they do it quicker. It doesn’t cost me very much. And I certainly got this time back to invest in content.

So I’ve got those guys doing that. And then, like I mentioned earlier, I’ve got two people who do the podcast edits. I’ve got a podcast as well that’s edited by someone now. And the other guy does the chopping up of the short-form content for TikTok and an Instagram reels etc..

Joe Casabona: Nice. So are you editing YouTube videos yourself?

Mark Ellis: I am. That’s one thing I haven’t given up and it’s one thing I don’t really want to give up at the moment. Again, going back to Marquez, I am a big fan of him, as you can tell, I keep referencing him. He only very recently has got his own editor and he’s still doing quite a bit. From my understanding, he’s still doing quite a bit of editing Himself.

And this is a guy with, you know, 11, 12 years’ experience on YouTube and 15 million subscribers and he didn’t want to let go of it because he enjoys the process. He’s created it. I’m nowhere near as big as him but that is the way that I approach the editing as well. It’s where I build the story for the YouTube videos really.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, and that’s exactly right. You know, one of my favorite stories is how Star Wars was saved in the edit. Like the edit is the place where you get to… If you shot things differently or you want to add the specific [inaudible 00:29:02], that is the place where you get to tell the story. I think that’s really important. If it’s something that you like to do, then you should do it, right?

I hate editing my podcast and I hate editing videos. I’ve used ScreenFlow for over a decade and I just recently learned about what’s it called the Smash, Delete, or whatever it’s called.

Mark Ellis: I don’t use ScreenFlow I’m not sure. But-

Joe Casabona: Oh man, it’s like you delete a clip and then it brings the other two pieces together automatically.

Mark Ellis: So it’s like a magnetic timeline and you get that in Final Cut Pro. Very similar.

Joe Casabona: Right? And I’m like, surely ScreenFlow has this, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. So I would delete a clip and then just like a drag. And I’m like, This is doubling my process. And then like I was watching David Sparks use ScreenFlow and he like… I think it’s called Smash Delete or whatever. And I’m like, “Where has this been?”

Mark Ellis: For ten years you’ve been doing it.

Joe Casabona: In ScreenFlow the whole time.

Mark Ellis: Yeah, yeah. Crazy.

Joe Casabona: It’s now my favorite thing. I think this is super important. My VA, like she proves her worth. Every time I’m late on an episode and I’m uploading it over the weekend and I’m like, “God, what do I have to do?” I go back to our documentation now.

Mark Ellis: The thing that you used to do, you have to teach yourself again.

Joe Casabona: And like the documentation was created because I recorded myself doing it and narrated what I was doing and then had her transcribe and write out the steps. And now I barely remember that I need to do these things now and it takes me so long and my God, “She’s totally worth the money I pay her. She’s worth more than the money I pay her probably. So I think that’s super interesting.

We’ve been talking for about a half hour. I want to get to what I think… I don’t know. I can’t say this is the most interesting, especially because in the Pro show, we’re going to talk about growing your YouTube channel in a very competitive space. I would also love to get your thoughts on YouTube entering podcasting because this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot.

But you mentioned medium.com in our pre-show and you’ve been posting about that on LinkedIn. I was just recently encouraged to start writing on Medium again. Medium.com. I’ll say Medium.com since I use medium the other way before.

I’d love to get your thoughts on that. Because you have your own website, you have YouTube and you’re publishing to these other platforms. And coming from the WordPress space, we’ve always viewed Medium as the enemy, like the hosted platform who could just take our content and paywalled if they want. So give me a little rundown of how Medium works for you.

Mark Ellis: Yeah. Well, firstly Medium itself, I mean a lot of people don’t seem to know what Medium is. But whenever I kind of speak to someone and they say, “What is Medium?” my response to that is generally you’ve probably read something on Medium because it’s got such high search authority on Google. If you search for something, you’ll see a medium article somewhere on that first page.

But you wouldn’t know you’re reading on Medium unless you knew what to look for. But it’s just a blogging platform. Like you say, it’s very similar to WordPress, but only to a point. WordPress is this much bigger thing that you can, you know, kind of turn into whatever you want it to be. It can be a full website, it can be just a blog, it can be all sorts of things. Whereas Medium is specifically a blogging platform.

But the difference between Medium and something like WordPress is that Medium has a… I think it’s around about 700,000 members that pay to use Medium. So they pay annually about $50 or something to read it. And you know, without subscription you can read a certain number of articles each day, but it runs after a while.

So it’s got this ready-made audience and it’s huge. It’s a massive audience. And on top of that, because it has such good search authority, you have 700,000 members, but you also have a huge number of kind of inbound people coming in from Google searches. So it’s a huge website.

For writers, it’s a massive opportunity and it’s a bigger opportunity than most people realize. I think that’s the thing which when you start talking to journalists, I’ve done this quite a bit recently, journalists and students and people who do what I used to do for quite a while, which is write blogs for commercial reasons, you know, for other businesses and that sort of stuff, when they hear what you can do on Medium, excuse me, which is basically writing about stuff that you enjoy and potentially getting paid for it, which will come on to in a minute, it’s amazing, it’s really freeing.

And going back to what you’re saying about WordPress, I know we talked about this a bit in the pre-show, which surprised you, but this is a very common misconception that something like WordPress and Medium kind of have this warring factions, that they’re kind of competitors.

I use Medium and WordPress together. And without both of them, I wouldn’t have got anywhere near as a bigger audience as I have done. And the reason for that is that my publishing process starts on my website, which is hosted on… I forgot for a moment. Hosted on WordPress. Sorry, it’s been a long day. Hosted on WordPress. But basically I start the blog and process there. It gets published on my WordPress site.

When that’s done and it’s published and I’ve shared it and all the stuff with it, I take the URL from the WordPress blog post and then Medium has an import. So you basically go into Medium, click on “import,” pop in that WordPress URL, click import. You have to do a bit of formatting because it misses a few things out but not too much. And then you hit publish. And then basically you’ve got the same blog post on your website WordPress and as you have on Medium. Identical.

I mean, occasionally I’ll change the title just to… sometimes certain titles work a bit better on Medium than they do on my website, but it’s the exact same content, pretty much. Same images, same text. And the first thing you think and I thought this before I started doing it is, I’m going to duplicate content, Google’s not going to like this. They can look at this and think, “His website is going to be pushed down search rankings because he’s got duplicate content, will favor Medium because Medium is just massive. Mark Ellis Reviews is tiny.

It doesn’t work that way at all. And the reason it doesn’t work that way, and being a web developer, you’ll be aware of this, when you import into Medium, Medium automatically inserts a canonical link. Is that how you pronounce it?

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Mark Ellis: …back to your site. So it basically tells Google that the original attribution for this work is the website that it came from. Leave in peace. Let it do its thing. And to date, basically that’s meant that I’ve been able to build two separate audiences, one on my website, one on Medium with the same content. And crucially, if you’re running a business like I am, I’m earning revenue from both of those sources.

So I don’t mind talking about the numbers at all. On Medium, I don’t earn below $2,000 a month on that part of the program, and on my website, it averages between $1,500 to about $2,000 per month on AdSense revenue. My website is full of ads. I’m not embarrassed about it, but it does work at the moment. So I’m leaving it as it is. I don’t mind admitting that. But you certainly got there, you know, three and a half, four grams worth of revenue. It’s a classic example of repurposing content in a way that most people aren’t aware of.

Joe Casabona: Wow. That’s incredible. And like you said, the canonical marketing is really important, right? Because, again, like you said, you can… because there are people who will share content or republish content and repurpose content, but telling Google like, “Hey, this is like… I call it the one true source. This is the one true source for this content. Send it here.” Then like, yeah, Google’s fine with it. “Oh, all right. Well, at least you’re recognizing that you’re not just wholesale copying this.” That’s really interesting.

I wonder if there is a way for me… I’m like a big automation nerd. I wonder if there’s a way to do the import via Make or Zapier.

Mark Ellis: There probably is. I mean, if there is, let me know. But again, that’s something I’m getting my VA to do. They’re doing that at the moment. I’m not doing that anymore. But that would be great. I mean, that be amazing if you could do that.

And also, just very quickly, I’ve heard a few people say that if you do it in the method that I’ve just described in some way that will harm your rankings on Medium. But in my experience, that hasn’t been the case unless I am leaving lots of views on the table. But the way it performs at the moment, I’m happy with it. I don’t think that’s the case. It seems to work very well. I’ve established this consistent revenue and consistent views.

Joe Casabona: I mean, it doesn’t sound like… $2,000 a month is more than most people make on their writing.

Mark Ellis: Oh, it’s amazing.

Joe Casabona: That’s like more than I earned on my LinkedIn Learning royalty right now, which is wild.

Mark Ellis: Again, I mean, to put into perspective, in 2021, when I first started making that kind of revenue on Medium for that year, the top month that year was $4,700-

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Mark Ellis: …which is crazy. And that’s some fairly big. I mean, it’s dropped a bit. I’ve not had another month like that. And that was only due to one or two articles really going viral. But it kind of demonstrates what is possible with a platform like Medium. Again, linking it back to your own website, if you’ve got a strategy for doing a bit of content repurposing between the two, it works, it’s legal and everyone’s happy, then it’s there to be had really.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. And I think this is really important to point out, right, is you have the content repurposing strategy, you’re using Medium as a platform and they’re bringing the audience. I think of Medium as like a mall versus like having your own standalone shop. Like, people are going to go to the mall for one thing and they’re going to see a bunch of other stories that they’re going to go into. For our Gen Z listeners, a mall is a place with a lot of stores in one spot.

Mark Ellis: Used to be quite a big thing.

Joe Casabona: Used to be quite a big thing. I mean, it’s great. You know, I would do this with Facebook too, right? People are like, “Oh, why are you building a Facebook group when you can like build your own community on Circle?” And it’s almost like saying like, Why would you live in a town when you can live off the grid? People are going to come visit you if you live off the grid, it’s harder to get to you that way. Whereas if you live in a town in an apartment building, it’s easy for people to come visit you there. They’re there already.

Mark Ellis: It depends what you do. If you’re doing it for touristic reasons, fine. But I’m doing this for a business. I’m always very honest about that. You know, you get a bit of flak for this in the comments, and it makes me laugh because, you know, people say, “Oh, you’re doing this for the clicks.” Well, yes, because that is my business. I literally make content to be clicked.

And if you’re doing it for other reasons, fair enough, you want to build it on your own platform, but I haven’t got time for that. I’ll take you forever and it would cost me a fortune and I wouldn’t make any money. I wouldn’t enjoy it either. That’s the key thing. I genuinely enjoy this.

Going back to what we said a moment ago about Medium and your own website, obviously, you’re free to write about whatever you want. If there’s no audience for it, then you’ll find them. There’ll be lots of those people and you’ll be rewarded for writing about stuff that you enjoy.

That’s very rare having spent quite a few years myself, you know, writing for the businesses, writing things I had no interest in whatsoever. I’ve got four friends who have been journalists and have worked really, really hard in that field. And that is a tough, tough industry that you don’t particularly always enjoy writing about and you don’t get paid very well for. This is completely different to that. You know, you’re not being chased by editors, you’re not having to chase invoices or pitch for work. You’re your own publisher, basically.

Joe Casabona: I hear from a lot of people, like when you start a podcast, don’t even think about how you’re going to make money, just launch it. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s like the opposite of what you should do.” Like, think about how you’re going to make money even if you’re not making money. You don’t have to make money on day one. But like, think about how it’s going to make money. Unless you just like setting money on fire, right? Then, fine, do whatever you want. Buy Twitter for $44 billion.

But doing it for a business and understanding that… It’s almost like when people say, “Oh, that band sold out, they’re on the radio now.” That’s the ultimate goal for bands. Like, be on the Radio.

Mark Ellis: I always think about Calvin Harris with that. He’s obviously a Scottish guy. I’ve always admired him because I’ve always been a bit of a kind of bedroom music producer myself. But he’s done it. He used to work at Morrisons, which is, again, for Gen Z who probably don’t know, this is a shopping place in the UK.

But he used to stack shelves in Morrison’s and now he headlines… and he has residencies in Las Vegas and he’s living his best life, isn’t he? He is a classic example of someone who you can look at and think, Well, he’s actually sold himself out there a bit because he’s gone from creating these kind of little niche albums to working with Rihanna… Hang on a minute. He’s now working with Rihanna. Fair play, he’s won in that case, hasn’t he?

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Yeah, right. I had a friend in high school who loved AFI. They got radio play for silver and gold and I’m like, dude, “AFI is on the radio.” It’s like, “I hate them now, they sold out.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t want my favorite band to be successful.” I was like, “I don’t want the Yankees to win the World Series. That’s selling out.”

Mark Ellis: What do people want?

Joe Casabona: Yeah. So you want them to just be underground, like nobody knows about them, then they’ll stop doing what they’re doing.

Mark Ellis: Exactly. Exactly.

Joe Casabona: And that soapbox. So much great stuff here, Mark. I really appreciate you coming on the show. I’m going to ask you this question. So actually, I’m going to phrase it like this. You and I both said the pre-show that writing comes pretty easily to us, right? At least getting that first draft out comes pretty easily to us.

I had Dickie Bush on the show last year, Ship 30 for 30, which I personally feel is like a bunch of poppycock. Like, I don’t think you need to hustle, that hustle culture, and write every day or whatever. But I find it easy. Maybe there are people who need to build that habit first. What is your recommendation for someone who wants to start writing more regularly?

Mark Ellis: It’s a bit of a cliché, to be honest, but it’s the best thing I think that works. It’s just write. And when I say just write, I don’t mean publish a blog post every day like I do because that is hard work. I should kind of clarify really that I didn’t start doing this in 2020. Like, I mentioned before, I’ve been writing a lot for many, many years.

But if you’re not in that position, if you don’t find it that easy to write, just start writing for yourself really, because that’s what most of… I don’t if you did this, but that’s what most of us did to begin with, whether it be writing your own novels as a kid like you think is going to be published or whatever, and [inaudible 00:44:06] read. Maybe you give it to your mom to read or whatever. Or writing your own…

You know, journaling is a great example of… That is what I’d recommend doing it. If you want to get into the habit of writing, it’s building the habit that is the hardest thing but also the point of success is when you’ve made it a habit. Like going to the gym. If you can make a habit of the gym, you’ll be fitter, no question about it. So start journaling just every day. You don’t have to do it a certain time. People say, “Make sure you do it the same time every day.”

Joe Casabona: First thing in the morning or whatever.

Mark Ellis: All that sort of stuff. You won’t do it because it becomes a burden. Whereas if you just do it when you feel like doing it, even if you miss a few days, it doesn’t matter. Just make sure you write as often as possible. And you will start to fall into it. Like I said, it become a habit, you’ll start to fall in love with the process and then you’ll probably feel comfortable enough to start putting your work out there.

Because that’s quite a big thing, you know. We do this. This is what we do for our livings, and we’re used to putting ourselves out there. But what you’ll notice, when you first do it, it’s nerve-racking. And when you first start getting a few negative comments back, it’s always a bit cutting, isn’t it? It takes time to build up that confidence to do it. So just do it. Just write for yourself. Don’t write for anyone else. That’s the key thing really.

Joe Casabona: I love that. And it makes perfect sense. I have a health coach, a friend who’s into health and we meet once a week. And I always think like, “Oh, you know, I heard you’re supposed to work out in the morning or whatever, like that gets your metabolism going or whatever.” And she’s like, “The best time to work out is when you work out.” So the same thing. The best time to write is when you write.

When I feel like a lull or like I’m not feeling motivated, sometimes I’ll open the text editor and write. Sometimes I’ll go play the drums because that’s energy. But if you’re not sure what to do, just open a text editor and write what you’re feeling at that time. It could just be that in the beginning, and you’re getting into that habit. I love that.

Now, one thing we didn’t talk about that was in your pitch and that maybe I want to touch on quickly, but this is probably like a whole other episode, is… Did you do any SEO or paid advertising to build your audience or anything like that?

Mark Ellis: No, no. For this business, I’ve never spent money on PPC or SEO. I wrote about this recently on LinkedIn, actually. I kind of said that the SEO is a waste of money sometimes. I’ve got great respect for people who know how to do SEO. I don’t. I know the very basics of it, which I’ve learned over a few years, you know, working with other people who know far more than me.

But I think when you’re looking at the sort of thing that I do, it would have been a waste of money, it would’ve been a very silly marketing spend basically putting that money into SEO because, Okay, I might have ended up with a nice site with lots of search rankings and stuff, but the content would have been missing because I’d have been investing too much time and effort and expense in the CEO side of things.

So literally all I’ve done with my website, I mentioned the revenue it’s making from AdSense, that comes from… I think it averages about between four to four and a half thousand unique hits a day. It’s built that traffic purely for me, one, publishing regularly, two adding things like meta descriptions to image, alt tags and things, and making sure there’s a keyword in the title and a couple of keywords.

Joe Casabona: Some of that technical SEO. Like organic SEO stuff.

Mark Ellis: But it’s common sense, to be honest, Joe. SEO is common sense, apart from the real technical stuff, which I don’t understand. The stuff I do is just common sense. So it’s literally been that. I’ve not done anything else. I’ve not paid for ads either, like you say, I’ve not boosted.

I think I did try boosting posts on Facebook when I very first started. And what you realize is that when you do that, it brings in lots of traffic, but 99% of that traffic is completely useless because they’ve got no interest in you at all. You’ve kind of reeled them in for something. You’ve got your audience targeting wrong and they’ve come in and they’re like, “Well, what’s this?’ And then disappeared completely. So you’ve wasted $50 doing that. You know, it’s a complete waste.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. You’ve paid for them to basically scoff at your content and leave.

Mark Ellis: Exactly. Which is not good.

Joe Casabona: Right. I love that. That’s great. Definitely a lot of food for thought for me. I got a ton of content in a bunch of places. I think maybe after this, the first thing I’ll do is create a new publication on Medium called The Profitable Podcaster and then import. I will do a couple and then I will have my VA do the rest. I think that’s probably a good move for me.

And then like I said, I told you in the pre-show, I was publishing to Medium, copying it back to my WordPress site using a make automation and it sounds like I’ll do it the opposite way now where probably based on the source, I’ll have it go into different publications. Again, if you’re unfamiliar with Medium.com, you can have multiple publications under a single user and publish to them or just publish in no place. Like that was the confusing bit for me.

Mark Ellis: Yeah. Basically, how it works, you have one profile on Medium so you’re the writer on Medium. So for me, it’s just Mark Ellis is the writer on there. But you can publish to different publications. That’s probably what you’re thinking of. So you can publish to your own profile. That’s fine. Although unless you’ve got a huge audience that isn’t particularly effective.

The best thing you can do is publish to established publications, which are a bit like magazines within Medium. I publish on Mac O’Clock, which is a, you know, a kind of Mac Apple based publication on Medium. There’s thousands of these things. You can create yours-

Joe Casabona: Is that yours?

Mark Ellis: No. I’m a co-editor on it but it’s not. I didn’t start it. It’s a guy in Athens who started it.

Joe Casabona: Nice.

Mark Ellis: But you can basically publish to as many of those publications as you want them. It makes sense to stick within one niche is one thing to keep in mind, but cool.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. I assume it’s Athens, Greece, and not Athens, Georgia.

Mark Ellis: No, it’s Athens, Greece.

Joe Casabona: That’s cool. I guess one more follow-up question on this. Do you find that being a co-editor on a publication has helped build your audience, or was I just kind of like a residual from you already building your audience?

Mark Ellis: No, it’s really helped. I’ve got 16,000 followers on Medium now, which it’s taken a long time to build. It’s quite a slow growth on that compared to things like YouTube. I think one of the key components of that has been my regular publishing through Mac O’Clock because that has an established audience. So if a story goes through Mac O’Clock, it gets put in front of lots of people versus putting it through my own profile basically.

Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting. I write for the podcasthost.com. It’s been great. I really enjoy having that as an outlet for timely articles and it’s a paid gig, which is nice but I don’t know how much audience-building it’s done for me now. I did speak at their summit and that was huge for building my mailing list, but maybe I have some homework to do. Find a couple of podcast-related publications on Medium, start my own, and get my content out there more.

Now I will say, as we record this, it hasn’t happened yet, but as it comes out, you’re probably about a month in. You have a medium.com cohort that you’re hosting, right?

Mark Ellis: Yes. I’m not sure when this had been published, but say, maybe after the first cohort has gone live.

Joe Casabona: So this will be people who are listening in early May, if they’re listening.

Mark Ellis: Yeah. That’s quite a good time to talk about this because it will have happened. Hopefully, it was a massive success.

Joe Casabona: We’ll do that. Well, a few future us has come back and it was a massive success.

Mark Ellis: Let’s assume it was amazing, which I’m sure it will be. But yeah, basically to cut a very long story short, I wrote an e-book last year about how to make money on Medium, and again, playing on that whole, you know, $2,000 a month thing that I’ve managed to do. Because clearly, I’ve found something that works. I found a process. I’ve done it for long enough now that I know it works.

So I built that process kind of condensed into an e-book and then started doing some free webinars about it, which were really well attended. I still do those actually, and perhaps we could put a link to them because they’re completely free and people can join, and they were really popular.

And then I thought, “Well, why don’t I just go the full hog and start a proper academy for this and do a proper cohort based live, you know, not prerecorded, not really evergreen, full-on live cohort-based course? Which I created. And like I said, by the time this has gone live, the first cohort will have been gone.

And it’s an eight-week course. It’s me presenting it. I’ve tried to keep the pricing fairly realistic because I think a lot of cohort-based courses there was a boom, wasn’t there, through 2020 to 20… very recently really.

Joe Casabona: $799 to like $2,000 or whatever for a cohort-based.

Mark Ellis: Huge. Huge fees. And to be fair to the people that were running them, people like Ali Abdul, they worked. They made an awful lot of money from these courses. But I think as we’re recording this, that is starting to wane a bit.

So I very much kept that in mind. The other reason I’ve kept that in mind is because I know that what I’m doing here isn’t particularly well-known, you know, people don’t know what Medium is, they probably put a lot of faith in me being able to show them how to use it properly and become effective online writers and what have you.

But yeah, so I just wanted to share my learnings really. That’s the other part of my business. I’m a tech reviewer, but also I want to impart my knowledge and do it through these kind of cohorts and through free webinars and things. I enjoy doing it really, Joe. It is obviously a revenue maker for the business, again, not being shy about that at all, but I genuinely enjoy it. It’s very different to talking about laptops and iPhones all the time.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I mean that’s the beauty of the creator economy. I mean, this show started off as me interviewing other WordPress developers on how they built their WordPress plug-ins, but it’s evolved to talking to creators about the creator economy. And that’s the beauty of it, right? I get to talk about and teach you this thing I love that I do well, and I also get to make money doing it, which is super cool.

Mark Ellis: Yeah, it’s amazing, isn’t it?

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Mark Ellis: I think I’ll listen to one of your accounts… Forgive me, I can’t remember who was in your interview but it’s a fairly recent one over the last couple of weeks where you quoted… the guest might have quoted the number, the projected revenue for this creator economy per day. And it was in the billions, you know, by 2028 or something. It’s huge. It’s just a massive industry.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Well, you’re making me dig back into my memory.

Mark Ellis: I wish I could remember who it was.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. If it’s more recently, I could probably find it. I’m pretty far ahead, you know. I mean, we’re recording this and it’s coming out in two months, so I’m pretty-

Mark Ellis: It’s impressive.

Joe Casabona: …excited about that. Especially Jake Thomas. I’m going to guess it was Jake.

Mark Ellis: Possibly, Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Or maybe Drew Dillon. Those are the two guys who probably it was. But anyway, check both of those out. All the show notes will be over at howibuilt.it/312. Mark, if people want to learn more about you and what you’re doing, where can they find you?

Mark Ellis: There’s a couple of places just to be greedy. The first one is markellisreviews.com. That’s my main website really. So that’s where all of the blog posts I’ve just mentioned are. That’s where they live. You can find my YouTube channel from there. You can search for me on YouTube obviously.

The other thing I would like to very quickly plug is Solo Club. That’s my brand that I’ve built around the academy. So it’s my kind of the educational part of my business. I’m helping other creators. So Solo Club is a bit of a play on the solopreneur phrase, which I didn’t use to like, but I like it now because it kind of very neatly describes what I do.

Joe Casabona: It’s like webinar. I used to hate webinar. I’m like, yeah, now I do a webinar every month.

Mark Ellis: You have to accept it, don’t you? But yes, soloclub.online. That is where the academy lives and that is where the free webinars you can join and you can check out my e-book and that stuff. From both of those websites, you can get in touch with me directly as well if you want to.

Joe Casabona: Fantastic. Well, like I said, all of that will be in the show notes over at howibuilt.it/312. In the pro show, we’re going to talk about growing the YouTube channel, thoughts on YouTube podcasting and then I’m going to ask you your webinar stack because I’m very curious about this right now. And yeah, probably the e-book. We’ll see how much time there is. I want to be cognizant of your time, obviously, but thank you, Mark, so much for coming on the show and spending some time with us today.

Mark Ellis: Thanks, Joe. Loved it. It’s been brilliant.

Joe Casabona: Thank you for listening. Thanks to our sponsors. Again, you can find all of the show notes over at howibuilt.it/312. You can also join the newsletter over there. I send tips and tricks, as all podcasters do, weekly, maybe multiple times a week if you identify yourself as a podcaster. You’ll get a bunch of emails and it’ll be great. So again, that’s over at howibuilt.it/312. Thank so much for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.