Modern Marketing For Creatives | How Matt Ramsey Built A Vocal Coaching Empire

156. Master_EDIT

Brian: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of the six figure creative podcast. I am Brian Hood and I'm here with my big bold beautiful co-host Christopher J. Graham. Hi.

[00:00:10]Chris: [00:00:10] I'm fantastic. I'm having a wonderful, wonderful day, but I don't want to talk about it. Brian. I want to talk about your day.

[00:00:16]Brian: [00:00:16] Honestly, it's super being fully transparent, both our days where we got on this, we got on this call today and we're like, this sucks. Everything sucks today. I hate today. And then we started going through our like pre-show checklist and like going through our systems and like brought us back on track.

[00:00:27] And now we're energized. And we started playing with this new toy online, this like vocal thing that we're going to talk about later in this, in this interview where we literally had a, competition to see who had a higher Volcker range. You had, how many octaves Chris? Three, three Octa's, three measly octaves on your vocal range.

[00:00:44] Meanwhile, the incredible Brian Hood, they, they call me for active Brian because I can hit four octaves with my voice. So actually not even that the toy we were trying it on, couldn't even register my highest note. That's how high it was. It was like, we don't even know what note this is. And that's, that's

[00:00:59] Chris: [00:00:59] It's probably cause that tool had some artistic taste and

[00:01:02]Brian: [00:01:02] It sounded, no, we're not talking about tone. We're talking about pitch and that's what I want on today. Not we're not talking about tone. So let's talk about this, right? This is a, we've got a guest on the show today. His name is Matt Ramsey. He is a, I don't know how to explain him other than a vocal coach, YouTube sensation superstar with over a hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube, millions over 9 million views on YouTube, which is like, I can't even comprehend that.

[00:01:26] Like I don't, we're not that popular, Chris. We just get like, we have our little piddly podcast He's when really helped thousands of people around the world as a vocal coach. And we want to pick his brain on a few things around his business. So Matt, welcome to the show. My dude.

[00:01:40] Matt: [00:01:40] Thank you guys so much for having me excited to be here.

[00:01:42] Chris: [00:01:42] yeah.

[00:01:43] Brian: [00:01:43] Yes. Yes. We're excited to have you on here as well. So that one of the, one of the fun things about shifting to the six-figure creative podcast, and now that we've kind of gotten to the rhythm, the things a little bit and interviewed some different guests is getting people from a wide variety of different backgrounds that we weren't really we'd never could have interviewed.

[00:01:57] If we just stuck to the six figure home studio, which was our old podcast or the old season, what do we want to call it? And so it's fun to get someone like you on because I've never really ever talked to a vocal coach. I clearly am not a singer or else. My, we would have been talking about tonality instead of pitch on this little war that Chris and I had, Claire never had vocal lessons don't need them.

[00:02:14] Cause I, I would be awful to be a waste of time, but

[00:02:16] Chris: [00:02:16] need them either, but only because I was born with raw talent.

[00:02:19] Matt: [00:02:19] That's

[00:02:19] Brian: [00:02:19] God. Get out of here. Incorrect. No incorrect. No, but you have a really cool business. You have a cool business model. And we wanted to, to, to bring on the podcast to highlight some of the cool things that you're doing on here

[00:02:29] Chris: [00:02:29] Yeah. Well, another thing too, that I think is so interesting about this episode is because your business is so hyper-focused on, like, because you are selling customer service. It's Hey, come hang out with me and we'll talk. And I relate with that. Like, I'm a, I'm a business coach. That's my main, my main gig right now.

[00:02:46]More on that later folks, but because you focus on customer service as a job, you're going to inherently understand things about being a creative freelance entrepreneur who provides a service to a client that other people won't have as much as you do. And I think the beautiful thing we've talked about this before is that there's a fellowship of creatives that create is as a whole, we all work in these weird little niches and it's a really spread out fellowship because creative people are creative and they come up with weird business ideas of like these people had to sing for a living.

[00:03:21] I did master music for a living. I could make a tall pickups for, you know, there's so many mean different, random, creative paths that you could take, but there were still a fellowship of creatives. And when you listen to another creative story about how they grew the crap out of their business, It's inspiring for us as creatives.

[00:03:39] And it also helps us learn some tips and tricks along.

[00:03:41]Brian: [00:03:41] So on that note Matt, I'd actually like to chat about what led you to becoming a vocal coach because so many people have these creative skills, something they're great at that they have maybe thought about monetizing, but yeah, I haven't really taken that leap of faith to do it. So what even got you into vocal coaching in the first.

[00:03:57]Matt: [00:03:57] Yeah, dude, it's a crazy story. So just a little background on me. So I actually went to school for advertising. I went to Virginia Commonwealth university for advertising because you know, talking to my parents I'd always played music, but I was like talking to my parents. I was like, okay. So I want to find this career.

[00:04:14] That's like going to pay me well, but where I can be creative. And so, you know, talk to my parents and my teachers. And they're like, maybe you should try this advertising thing. That might be interesting. Well, I somehow managed to do four years of advertising school and without the realization that I would absolutely hate it once I started doing it.

[00:04:31] Chris: [00:04:31] what good advertising does.

[00:04:34] Matt: [00:04:34] The real, yeah, I was the real client there. There, they were really just selling the advertising school to me, actually, VCU has a great advertising school and it really taught me to think in terms of concepts and to think, and tr like it taught me to be a much better writer as well. So I went to school for, for copywriting.

[00:04:51] Graduated had no, no big plans. I actually wanted to go to graduate school for, for advertising because they had this, a graduate program there that they pretty much guaranteed that you would get a job. So it was 2008, 2009. So.

[00:05:05] Brian: [00:05:05] Which was a great time

[00:05:06] Matt: [00:05:06] great time to be a graduate. so I ended up waiting tables for that summer in between graduation and everything.

[00:05:13] And I was waiting tables at the Jefferson hotel. I had this, this little breakfast shift that I was doing. And one of my tables, they had all of these charts and graphs and everything and, and some creative work that they were talking about. And I was like, oh, what do you guys do? And they're like, we're in advertising.

[00:05:29] And I was like, well, I don't know if you guys accept interns, but I'm your next guy? And they were from San Francisco, long story short, we followed back up and I was very persistent. They brought me out there to be their first ever intern. And that began the three worst months of my life because it was, you know when you're a creative person, as you guys are, and as all of your listeners.

[00:05:55]It's difficult sometimes to always be creative on demand for other people and not get it, not get to put your name on anything. You know, if you're a producer, you do get to put your name in the credits on, on the album or, or whatever, or maybe you get listed you know, on the, on the Spotify information.

[00:06:13] But when you're an advertising, literally everything belongs to first. It belongs to the creative director who you're reporting to then it eventually belongs to the client. And so I was like putting in these 12 to 14 hour days. And at the end of it, I was not hired decidedly, not hired by them because I was a terrible intern.

[00:06:31]my director was basically like, you know, I feel like you're this guy that likes to talk a lot about doing stuff, but I didn't actually see you do a whole lot of stuff. And.

[00:06:42] Chris: [00:06:42] What what'd you say do

[00:06:44] Matt: [00:06:44] Yeah, exactly. It's like, we're going to need you to come in on Saturday. And so it really got the wheels turning cause I was like, okay, here's this thing that I thought that I was absolutely absolutely going to love.

[00:06:56] And here's this guy who knows better, who tells me, oh, you know what, this thing that you like talking about, you're not so good at it. And I, I really thought about like, well, why am I not? Because I'm a very self-driven person. Why am I not doing this? And so that began this little period of Unimin employment that I had when I was living in San Francisco.

[00:07:15] And so for the first time I was like, well, if I can do anything, what do I want to do? Like, I know what the worst case scenario is. I mean, there's way, worst case scenarios. As a creative person, you know, being creative for other people, not feeling appreciated or validated or making the money that you want or whatever it is that is, you know, for a lot of people, a worst case scenario.

[00:07:34] And so it was like, well, I've always been playing music and I've always wanted to be a performer. And so I was like, I'm going to do that. So I started playing in the train stations and all the coffee shops and taking every, in all the open mics, every, every gig that I could. And after about like an hour of playing in the train stations, my voice would be totally blown out, just like gone.

[00:07:56] And it's because I didn't really know how to use my voice correctly. And so I started asking around about a vocal coach and I got put in touch with one long story short. I ended up moving to Austin, Texas because I found a great voice teacher here. Now there are so many other reasons I went into that decision.

[00:08:14]But part of it was like, I found this great vocal coach here. And I was like, well, at least that settled. Like I love this guy. I'm going to, I'm going to do it. So I started taking voice lessons with him. And after about a year, he was like, you know, you figured out what I was doing with all these, you know, crazy exercises.

[00:08:30] Why don't you just start teaching this? And I was like, no way, man, I'm going to be on a tour, bus selling gold records. I'm going to be doing the whole rock and roll thing. I was like, no, I hadn't so no desire to teach, but I decided to just give it a try. And so I started teaching a couple of my friends for free and I absolutely loved it.

[00:08:48] And I think that this is the crazy thing for creatives too, is that, you know, you can think through all of these decisions, but you don't know until you actually start doing something, how. Feel about it. And once I started doing it, I mean, it was like all of the creative energy that I had just really, really went into that.

[00:09:07] And I just wanted to be the best possible teacher that I could. So in the very beginning, it was about, you know, trying to figure out how to be the best possible teacher, what all of the pedagogy and what, what exercises do what and what kind of voice types people are and what songs fit people's voices.

[00:09:24] And then very quickly, I started to kind of get a hang for the marketing part of it too. And that was really, really transformational.

[00:09:30]Chris: [00:09:30] That's awesome. one of the things you said really jumped out to me because Brian and I have talked a lot about the angle for this new podcast season. You know, whether we should focus on how soul-sucking a bad job can be or whether we should focus on the upside of like, do you have any idea how fun it is to own your own business and get to do whatever you want whenever you want and build whatever you want with whoever you want. But what I would say to, to your previous intern employer that struck me, that he told you, you know, it seems like you like to talk a lot, but I've never seen you really do anything you want to be like,

[00:10:02] Matt: [00:10:02] He didn't say never seen you do anything. He's like, you don't seem to be doing this a whole lot.

[00:10:06] Chris: [00:10:06] Well, what I would say to him is like, sir, what is it that you believe an advertising agency does? That's the, that's the whole point of the advertising agency is to talky talky, talky and not do the Dewey. I'm not personally a huge fan of advertising agencies though. I probably will change my mind someday on that.

[00:10:25] But yeah, that's, that's a great story, man.

[00:10:28] Matt: [00:10:28] world, the world has changed so much. And so, and we're talking, we're talking about creatives and marketing and promotion in the world has changed. When I went to college, it was all about, okay. Thinking in terms of like one single ad, you've got an image, you've got a headline, you've got a tagline and you've got the logo.

[00:10:44] That's the entire space with which you can create. And of course there's radio and TV and all this other stuff. And interactive was just getting started and was becoming a big. But even still like the education at that time was like very, very focused on this one thing. And now it's like, well, you guys know, you know, you have a fantastic website, I'm sure you guys know your way around SEO.

[00:11:05] And maybe even some paid digital advertising. It's like, there's not a whole lot of spaces where you just see that one kind of generic image headline kind of ad anymore. It is fantastic to start thinking in that way, in terms of like, what is my service? What makes it unique? How can I position it in a way that, that people will find interesting?

[00:11:25] There's so much value in that as a creative person, but the execution has changed so much since, since those days now it's like, it could be a Facebook ad. It could be we're going to talk about it in a second. I'm sure it could be, you know, a range finder app. It could be an app that you create or something like that that really connects with.

[00:11:45]Brian: [00:11:45] Our audience can kind of resonate with the story you told at . Least to some degree or a lot of our audience where they're stuck in a day job, they may or may not love. They may hate they may or may not agree with the fact that it's poisoned their creativity, which I think if it's a soul sucking day job, I don't know how you can be creative in a job like that.

[00:12:02] But some people persist and they thrive despite that.

[00:12:05] Chris: [00:12:05] Well, submission and creativity are not great bedfellows, you know?

[00:12:10] Brian: [00:12:10] Yeah. So what I want to, what I want to chat about now, though, is you talked about the transition to you were working for some of your friends for free teaching them vocal coaching. You would discover this kind of new newfound passion for, for teaching this, this skill that you have. And from there, there has to be a lot of steps, a lot of challenges to actually turning it into a full-time income.

[00:12:32] Like how did you transition from like, I can dabble in this, oh, work with some friends. This is fun. I have a good, a good passion. I was, I'm pretty good at it. Now, how do I actually monetize this? What was that? What was that transition like?

[00:12:42]Matt: [00:12:42] Man, that's a such a great question. Just to touch on one thing that you mentioned earlier, that, that the hatred that you feel for your soul. If you can in any way, turn that into fuel that you use to pursue this new thing. That is just such an amazingly powerful thing to do if you can, but it doesn't, it doesn't mean that you can just talk about it.

[00:13:07] You actually have to start doing this. You actually have to start seeing what it's going to be like, or else you could be, you know, abandoning the old you might in the future, be like, oh, wow, that was such a cushy job. I had a great salary and benefits. What am I doing here now? Which happens to a lot of people as well.

[00:13:24] Brian: [00:13:24] Golden handcuff is what we call

[00:13:25] Matt: [00:13:25] golden

[00:13:26] Brian: [00:13:26] handcuffs in prison. Many, many people.

[00:13:28]Matt: [00:13:28] Absolutely. Absolutely. But to actually start to make an income from it was very, very slow. At first, at least it seemed slow for me because I actually went back to waiting tables. So I had this nice advertising internship that promised to turn into a career. And then I went right back to waiting tables almost like completely ignoring the fact that I had a degree and all this stuff, which doesn't mean anything.

[00:13:51] Of course. You know, I started teaching my friends at the same time as I was waiting tables. And it took another like four years to build up to the point and build my studio to the point that I was like, okay, I'm finally supporting myself enough from this other thing that I can completely leave this thing.

[00:14:08] And even at that point, by the way, it was still a risk. I still only had like, you know, a thousand or $1,500 in my bank account. And I was like, well, that'll buy me like two months of rent. You know, you're doing these calculations of like, if the worst happens, how long do I have before by landlord kicks me out.

[00:14:25] Chris: [00:14:25] dude, yet taking off those golden handcuffs, man, it feels so rusty when you're doing it.

[00:14:32] Brian: [00:14:32] That's that's a pun for those who are as mad at Chris as I am, he's our pun, our pun daddy here.

[00:14:38] Chris: [00:14:38] I've been working on that for like four minutes.

[00:14:41] Brian: [00:14:41] God.

[00:14:41]I'm going to cut off our guests to insert myself under this punt opportunity here. That's that's Chris. All right. So let's, let's talk about this. You said it was four years of struggle pain. Like what were some of the things that you learned in that four year period of transitioning from this is essentially a hobby that I'm doing for friends.

[00:14:57] Cause I'm doing it for free to getting my first client or clients to actually scaling it up to full-time. What were the things that helped you in that.

[00:15:05]Matt: [00:15:05] Yeah. So at first I did something really stupid, which was that I, I actually contacted, I'm not going to say the name of the service, but I contacted an digital coupons service and said, Hey, you know, I'm a vocal coach. I would love to put together some sort of a package where people can buy my services and we can come up with some sort of a deal.

[00:15:23] And they're like, great. Well, okay, so you're charging, you know, let's, I think at that time I was like $40 an hour or something they're like, great. Okay. We need to do is we make a deal where you charge $15 hour and we sell these packages up for up to like three months or something like that. It was incredible.

[00:15:38] It was an incredible. And thank you to all the people that took lessons with me at that point. So I sold, I think there were like 200 of them sold. So all of a sudden I had like 200 students and I was making like this like less or the same amount of money that I was, I waiting tables job, but I'll tell you something, you get really, really good at your job really quickly with that level of volume.

[00:16:02] So I think that if I'm, if I can consider myself a quality coach, it's probably those early, those early days where I was teaching a ton of people for next to nothing. And it was, they were some of the most fun people because you've got all these folks that had no desire to be a singer whatsoever. And they're like, well, that's fine.

[00:16:21] And I see that I've got my credit card right here. Why not? So that was early mistake. That was a big mistake.

[00:16:27] Chris: [00:16:27] would you call

[00:16:27] It a group C

[00:16:29]Matt: [00:16:29] yeah, yeah, exactly. Almost like a coupon for groups.

[00:16:33]Chris: [00:16:33] and the word oopsie combined into one

[00:16:35] word

[00:16:36] Brian: [00:16:36] Oh my God, that's the worst one you've ever had. And we're the guests too. It's one thing when it's just me and you, Chris, and you can do a pond and I can cut it out later, but we have a guest here. If you just killed his vice, like I'm never coming on.

[00:16:48] Chris: [00:16:48] For like four people. That was the best part of the podcast we've had yet. So it's

[00:16:52] Brian: [00:16:52] cool. And everyone else cut it off. So let's, let's get back on track here with, with our wonderful

[00:16:57] Matt: [00:16:57] us your thoughts at six bigger creative DACA up. Yeah, no, no. So, so that was an early mistake, but then what was really, really, I think a big thing for me, and I know that this is, this is going to sound really awful. But SEO, SEO is a huge, huge deal for my business. And I actually had a couple of students that were like, they had a background in marketing and they were like, Hey, you know, let me start working on some SEO for you.

[00:17:21] We'll trade for lessons. And that was one of the best decisions that I ever made. And, you know, if there's, if there's something that you can take from this, certainly with, uh, with a service like voice lessons or even production or mixing or recording studios, you know, having a good search engine optimization so that as soon as someone searches, you know, mixing studio Austin or voice lessons, Austin singing lessons, Austin, that you're the first thing that pops up, or you're at least quite high.

[00:17:48] That was an absolute turning point night and day for my business. And I regret all the time that I spent chasing down. I mean, I did the Facebook ads thing. It was like, nothing was panning out, but SEO was the first, really big money move that I made for my business.

[00:18:04] Brian: [00:18:04] let's talk about the SEO thing. Cause I, I, we have a large YouTube presence and that seems to be a very large factor to your success as well. So the whole content marketing thing, that's the kind of the direction I had in my mind for this interview in my notes here. But I wasn't aware that SEL was such a large driver in, in your business.

[00:18:20] And I'm sure mean a lot of these things go hand in hand because Google is the second biggest search engine in the world. I'm sorry. YouTube is the second biggest search engine, the world. And then first is obviously Google, but what were some of those early things that you were doing in SEO to help get your business, have that, you know, get the night and day difference in your marketing efforts?

[00:18:36] Matt: [00:18:36] Sure. Sure. Sure. Well, just to, touch on what you said, the YouTube thing is big now. But there's also like six plus years of work that went into growing that to where it is. And now it's kind of just, you know, self-fulfilling thing where

[00:18:49] Brian: [00:18:49] mean you weren't just an overnight YouTube sensation.

[00:18:51] Matt: [00:18:51] You know, I, I look at other creators like Karich Beato, and I'm like his, his first video ever has like over a million views.

[00:18:59] And like, I that's like the only person that I know of that, like, he did the YouTube thing and it was like immediate and you know, I don't have a child with perfect pitch. Which w I don't know if you guys have seen the video,

[00:19:10] but his

[00:19:10] son, Dylan, his son,

[00:19:11] Chris: [00:19:11] I, my kids were about the same age as his kids, when that video came out and I

[00:19:15] Matt: [00:19:15] And your kids can do the same thing.

[00:19:16] Right?

[00:19:17] Chris: [00:19:17] oh, of course they

[00:19:18] Brian: [00:19:18] Results. Not typical.

[00:19:19]

[00:19:19] Matt: [00:19:19] so Rick is, is an inspiration to us all, but also you got to look at how much he posts and the, the quality of his posts

[00:19:26] are just insane. But to go back to the SEO thing. So you know, having an expert there who has a history and a background in doing some of the really. Nitpicky plugin oriented stuff, because I use a WordPress site.

[00:19:40] Other people who are listening to this use Wix or Squarespace, what have you? There's a little less optimization. Yeah, exactly.

[00:19:46]But yeah, so having, having someone with a background in sort of the more kind of like a, you know, ones and zeros stuff on the backend of your site is really, really helpful in just simple things like optimizing your images. Like, you know, I think my original homepage had like a video pop up is the very first thing is when you went there.

[00:20:07] And I think I even saw that on, on one of your all sites and that's a fantastic thing. If you have a really, really good host and all that stuff, but it was slowing my site. My site would take like 15 seconds to load 15 to 20 seconds to load on the first one. And, and Google does not like that.

[00:20:22] Google likes her results fast. Yep,

[00:20:25] exactly. But she likes her results fast. She likes them now and she likes them pretty. So if you can find somebody that has those skill sets, if this is a situation that you're in, where you're a creative and you're trying to, trying to grow your business and SEO, you think is going to help.

[00:20:39]And that is definitely a good thing to do is find somebody who has some experience doing it, look out because there's a lot of shysters

[00:20:46] out

[00:20:46] Brian: [00:20:46] to ask, how do you avoid the shysters? Because if I look up SEO experts, there's like 50 that I can find right this second. And.

[00:20:55] Chris: [00:20:55] the good ones rank high.

[00:20:56] Matt: [00:20:56] Yeah, exactly. You know,

[00:20:59] Brian: [00:20:59] it's not ironic. You're just going to pay a ton of money for SEO expert, whoever ranks, top of SEO expert on Google. I just mean like, I'm assuming the person you work with Matt was somebody in your local area, somebody who had connections with either a referral from a friend or someone that you coached with your vocals yourself.

[00:21:15] Like how did you find this person and how do you actually qualify them to make sure they're not going to ruin your site or rip you off or do something even worse than, than what you had before.

[00:21:24] Matt: [00:21:24] Yeah. So it's ironic. So. I was at that point where I was like, I have $1,500 in my bank account is now the time to quit my waiting tables job. And I decided, yes, this is the time I'm going to do this. And I had all that horrible experience with that, the coupon site. And I started actually working at a local music school or an embarrassingly low hourly rate.

[00:21:46]But the studio owner it's called east side music school, by the way. And I'm forever grateful to Alex. Who's the owner there because he was like, you know, you're trying to grow your business. I'm, I'm doing pretty good with mine. And you can see that my site ranks, right. Hi, when you search for voice lessons.

[00:22:00] So in other words, we were kind of competitors. You took pity on me and he was like, you know, what I did was I just took this online SEO course. And it's how I hit number one on Google. In like 30 days, I think was the title of it. And it's like the most

[00:22:15] Brian: [00:22:15] Very clear of the promise there in that course.

[00:22:18] Matt: [00:22:18] Very, very click baity, but it worked.

[00:22:20] And so I started doing this course and I actually posted a comment in the learning dashboard and said, Hey, you know, what would you do if this was a situation? And the author of the course actually responded to me and just on a Lark, I was like, well, Hey, I don't know if you're in Austin, Texas, but if you ever are, I'd love to give you some voice lessons.

[00:22:40] If you can kind of help me out with that stuff. It just so happened that he was in Austin and he was interested in singing. And so he actually started T he never once paid for a lesson. He just came in one day. And for the next two and a half years, I basically sweat blood while he worked on the backend of my site.

[00:22:57] And I was busy creating content for the front end.

[00:22:59]I got real

[00:23:00] lucky.

[00:23:01]Chris: [00:23:01] I want to encourage people listening trading your services for the services of somebody else that you need to grow your business is I think one of the most rewarding things you can do as an entrepreneur, I've done it so many times. I had when I first got into photography, I traded a camera for business coaching and man,

[00:23:21] Brian: [00:23:21] got the camera in this instance,

[00:23:22] Chris: [00:23:22] got

[00:23:23] Brian: [00:23:23] you provided business coaching.

[00:23:24] Chris: [00:23:24] yeah. And it, it was such a great move and it's so it's so interesting to be able to trade for stuff. That's what I do with my my personal trainer. I do business coaching with him. He does personal training with me. That's awesome. And it's, it's a fun relationship when there is a non-monetary exchange going on

[00:23:42] Matt: [00:23:42] Yes. Yeah. I think that there's like a genuine Goodwill that kind of happens on both sides. Like, I mean, I T I mean, typically I teach half hour, one hour. I think that guy was getting like two hour lessons every week. And it was just like, you know, I was so grateful to him and I think that he was grateful to me for the help there.

[00:24:01]But one thing that, that you said that I think is really interesting is that in the beginning, when you're first getting started off, you really don't have. That many bargaining chips, you know, and you don't, you don't have the income necessarily to be like, okay, so I'm going to pay the $6,000 or whatever it is in order to get training with this person.

[00:24:19] So there's kind of an interesting shift that happens, you know, however, X, X number of years down the road, where you're finally making an income and you're like, I'll just pay the darn money. Like I'll just pay. It's like, I need the help. These guys are the people to do it. I'm actually going through that right now.

[00:24:35] I'm finishing up one coaching program that was exorbitantly expensive from my perspective. But it was a, a huge transformation in my own business, but could I have gotten there without the help that I received for free and teaching for free for a couple of years now?

[00:24:51]Brian: [00:24:51] Yeah. So there's a, there's a fine line between when to wait around and try to get free slash traded services with someone versus just paying the damn money and getting the results sooner. There is a, there is a balance there that I'm glad you kind of mentioned Matt, just because like, it can be awesome to trade for services, but if you're on the receiving end of the inferior service, that can be a bit of a, of a pain,

[00:25:12] Matt: [00:25:12] Oh yeah,

[00:25:13] Brian: [00:25:13] but, you know, in your, in your instance where you got free SEO services, that essentially in your own words, changed the trajectory of your business.

[00:25:20] Totally worth it to do two hour lessons a week for somebody for that long of a time, because it's essentially major business. So I would like to shift a little bit to the content marketing side of things. Cause you, you mentioned, I I'm surprised. I was surprised about the SEO thing. Took me off guard. I love it.

[00:25:33] That's that was a huge part of the transition to full-time, but I, I can't help, but at least see the fruit of the, the content marketing side of things. So when did you start to shift towards content market?

[00:25:44] Matt: [00:25:44] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So think the SEO thing is really good for your location. And I think that if you're just getting started off, that's a great place to get started and make sure that you're getting local business. But when you're trying to reach people outside of your immediate area, or maybe you have maybe a digital product or a digital service or a digital you know, coaching that you do then getting outside of your immediate area is absolutely crucial.

[00:26:09] And I can't tell you how grateful I am that I'd been doing that work for five years before. COVID because once that hit, I was still getting students from way outside of Austin, people in China and people in Australia and people all over the world that had found my stuff via content marketing. So to answer your question, I started doing.

[00:26:26]I started writing blogs the most thorough helpful, and hopefully interesting blogs that I could possibly do about five years ago. And I probably did that for about two and a half straight years. I was just writing I was doing YouTube stuff at that time as well. Um, But the blog was really, really my a hundred percent focus.

[00:26:48]Brian: [00:26:48] Yeah. So I do want to clarify two things really quick. Cause I, I, I, I have the curse of knowledge where I forget that people don't know everything in the world. SEO stands for search engine optimize. That's when someone Googles your business name and they find you as the first search result. That's what we talk about when we're saying SEO and content marketing for anyone who's not familiar, is this when you're creating content, that's valuable to people like Matt just said there, and then they're reading it, getting familiar with you, learning about your business, diving deeper with you.

[00:27:13] It starts the relationship and nurtures them versus just selling to them nonstop. So that's what we're talking about here in the content marketing conversation. So I just wanted to clarify that for anyone who might be confused or not familiar with the phrasing here, but you were creating blog articles.

[00:27:25] You said you did this for how many of you said five years, something like that. You did it

[00:27:28] Matt: [00:27:28] started about five years ago and I wrote for about two and a half straight years.

[00:27:32] Brian: [00:27:32] Great. How often were you posting a blog articles at that? During that two year time?

[00:27:37] Matt: [00:27:37] So that's the interesting thing. It, Google does not care how often you're posting. They care that you're posting the best possible stuff. That is the most helpful to people that is keeping people on your site. To answer your question, I was probably releasing like a 5,000 word posts around a high traffic keyword.

[00:27:54]Probably once every two weeks I was going pretty crazy with it.

[00:27:59] Brian: [00:27:59] I mean, th that's a long article for anyone who's not familiar with it. Like my longest article is probably around five or 6,000 words and the generally it will be around 2000 words and I have plugged out a cloud in forever. Cause I hate writing, but I do want to ask one thing there. You mentioned around a high volume keyword.

[00:28:15] How do you know what's a keyword worth writing a topic about and how do you spread that around the article in a way that makes sense for Google too.

[00:28:22] Matt: [00:28:22] Oh man. We could talk about this for hours, but there's, there's so many creative ways, Brian, so. The simple answer is you could use a tool like Google keyword, analyzer. That's created by Google for the people that are planning on running ads. So in order to sign up for that, you actually do need a credit card, but if you don't actually start running ads, they don't charge you anything and you can use their keyword research tool for free.

[00:28:46] So you put in your credit card number, you have this little Google account, and then you can start looking for different ideas. You know, for me, singing lessons, singing lessons, Austin, voice lessons, vocal, coach, voice teacher, singing it all the time. You plug all of those in, and then it'll actually start suggesting different terms that you can, and right there in a beautiful little spreadsheet, it'll say, okay, so this is, you know, you can expect 10,000 people a month to search for this.

[00:29:11]Vibrato for instance, is something that lots of singers want to learn about, but broad is a high traffic keyword. I'm going to make this up. But I think it had like 5,000 to 10,000 monthly searches. And I just plugged that into Google keyword research tool. And it just popped that out. And then it'll even tell you what the competition is like for that keyword.

[00:29:30] Although I wouldn't recommend really trusting that rating because I fought like hell to get some of those blogs ranked highly. So don't necessarily take that as, as gospel, but that's a great.

[00:29:42]Brian: [00:29:42] So let's talk about actually now interweaving those keywords. Let's just use the vibrato thing that you talked about. What are you doing? Like what are some just bullet points on things that you're doing to, to interweave that in, through the article so that it is readable helpful and like is liked by Google.

[00:29:58] Matt: [00:29:58] Yeah, well, Google's really smart. And, and, and she knows, I call her, she, I don't know why, but I, I, I feel like it's a goddess that

[00:30:06] we

[00:30:06] Chris: [00:30:06] the smartest ones are.

[00:30:07] Matt: [00:30:07] yeah. Right, exactly. I think that that's safe. Right. It's pretty woke. So in my experience Google's really smart. And when you actually are trying to rank for a term, like, you're like, oh, everyone wants to sing with vibrato, but Broadway was one of those helpful Dakota vibrato.

[00:30:24] But if you put that in too many times, they'll actually penalize you. So you want to make sure that you're

[00:30:30] Brian: [00:30:30] That's called keyword stuffing or is that, is that a T word stuffing, a different thing.

[00:30:33] Matt: [00:30:33] No that's keyword stuffing. There was also a more extreme version of this in earlier internet days when you would literally have like a white HTML page and somebody would put in like vibrato vibrato, all in white text.

[00:30:45] So you couldn't actually see it.

[00:30:47] But Google would read it and be like, oh, this is about vibrato. Let's shoot that up to the top. Anyway, that's a bunch of clowns did that.

[00:30:53] Chris: [00:30:53] Black hat SEO.

[00:30:55] Matt: [00:30:55] that's it right there. That's it. And there's, there's far more or black hat stuff. I mean, I've heard about this guy that like, he runs like individual servers that are all like, he has servers in his house that are all like pointing back to his website and like keeping crawlers on his website, like 24 7.

[00:31:10] So it always right. Highly.

[00:31:11] Brian: [00:31:11] That's too nerdy for creatives like me,

[00:31:12] man. I can't.

[00:31:14] Matt: [00:31:14] it's crazy. Now. I'm not going to say it was easy. It definitely wasn't. It took a lot of work. But all I could say to answer your question, it's just right. The most helpful natural. Article that you possibly can around this given subject matter, make sure that it's the best look at the other ones that are ranking highly for it and make sure that yours is better.

[00:31:31] Make sure that yours is more helpful and it doesn't have to be longer. It just has to keep people engaged and on the page for longer

[00:31:39] Brian: [00:31:39] Do you trust a tools that give you like SEO scores tools? Like what's the big one on WordPress? I have

[00:31:45] Matt: [00:31:45] as SCM rush,

[00:31:47] Brian: [00:31:47] SEM rush is a big one and there's one other one that has a weirder name, but I can't remember it.

[00:31:50]Chris: [00:31:50] Yoast or something like

[00:31:51]Matt: [00:31:51]

[00:31:51] Yoast. Yeah. I trust Yoast. Yoast does a pretty good job. And it'll even tell you if like you have, they call it keyword density. Like if you have too many keywords within a given, you know space of time, it will be like your keyword density is 2.3%. We only recommend a 0.5%. So you can, it might even help you sometimes to take out a few vibratos.

[00:32:12]But Brado is one of those weird words because you can't actually. Talk about it without saying the word. So like I probably have a bad Yoast score on that one. But for other

[00:32:21] things

[00:32:22] Chris: [00:32:22] to be pitch. Perfect. On V on virbrato

[00:32:24] Matt: [00:32:24] is, it is

[00:32:25] Chris: [00:32:25] Brian comment, just Jake he's shaking his head. Everybody

[00:32:29] Matt: [00:32:29] keep going, Chris, what else

[00:32:30] Brian: [00:32:30] I like the, I like the dead silence. The worst part about this. I I've said this a million times on the podcast before, but the look Chris has on his face as he's trying to interrupt the guests to fit his stupid pun in, and then finding a gap in Matt's wonderful education to, to just force the pun in.

[00:32:47] And then the look on Matt's face of trying to be polite is priceless.

[00:32:52] Matt: [00:32:52] He's working on his, on his tight five,

[00:32:54] you

[00:32:54] Brian: [00:32:54] There you go.

[00:32:55] Chris: [00:32:55] I did have a question related to this, so I wanted to build up to this, Matt. I'm wondering. So from my perspective,

[00:33:03] Brian: [00:33:03] now laughing at you cause he can't

[00:33:05] Matt: [00:33:05] I'm already

[00:33:05] bracing.

[00:33:06]Brian: [00:33:06] are you gonna throw another pun in or is this a real question?

[00:33:08] Matt: [00:33:08] I feel my, my back getting tight, just worried about I'm like, oh God, what's he going to say? Now,

[00:33:15] Chris: [00:33:15] God. Well, no, I have a really nice compliment slash quit wristy.

[00:33:19] I won't take any risks on this next comment.

[00:33:22] Matt: [00:33:22] Do you get it out of your system?

[00:33:23]Chris: [00:33:23] No. Um, But I'll keep going anyways. So Matt, here's my question for you from my perspective. And I think Brian's going to agree with me wholeheartedly here.

[00:33:31]you know, all the things and I'm wondering how much more valuable that skill is than than what you're actually selling as a, as a coach.

[00:33:43] Matt: [00:33:43] Oh, wow. That's such a good question. So to be honest with you, I have at different times been. So I think what you're alluding to is like, why don't I just like, become like a digital marketer or something, or

[00:33:55] Like or, or, or start going into that

[00:33:57] Chris: [00:33:57] kidding.

[00:33:58] Matt: [00:33:58] but but to be totally honest, and I really do I admire the people that know what they're talking about in that niche, but it's so darn competitive that it's like, actually vocal coaching is very competitive too.

[00:34:09] There's a lot of really, really great channels and good, good blogs out there, but I kind of wanted to just really plant my flag and the whole singing thing and really feel like that's really wrapped up in, you know, I've got my courses and I've got, you know, my apps and all this, you know, my eBooks and all that stuff.

[00:34:27] So I really wanted to feel like that was going to wrap it up before I transitioned to something that was like a little more uh, BDB, like business to business. But I think it's invaluable to know this, no matter what profession you're doing.

[00:34:40]Chris: [00:34:40] Totally agreed. And that's really the point of our podcast is to teach these things that people can use to grow their smaller businesses. But I think what gets interesting and we've seen this with many of our listeners is they develop these business skills.

[00:34:51] Brian and I did that, We developed our business skills and then realize that our business skills were more valuable than our business.

[00:34:57]Matt: [00:34:57] Right,

[00:34:58] Chris: [00:34:58] And it was like, oh crap. That's so cool. But also not what I wanted to do.

[00:35:05] Brian: [00:35:05] Well, you just do like me and just run a million businesses at the same time, which has also has its own flaws.

[00:35:10] So I want to get us back on track here with the SEO discussion and the content marketing discussion

[00:35:15] Matt: [00:35:15] Yeah. We haven't even talked about YouTube yet.

[00:35:17] That's a whole other ball of wax.

[00:35:19] Brian: [00:35:19] I'm working my way up to it, Matt, but you have too much damn good content to share along the way.

[00:35:23] So this is going to run like a longer

[00:35:24] episode my bed.

[00:35:25] Matt: [00:35:25] Thanks guys.

[00:35:26] Brian: [00:35:26] So before we actually get to the YouTube side of things, I just want to point out one important thing. How, how much SEO is tied into your content marketing strategy. At least with the blog articles. I'm assuming the same thing with YouTube. We'll get to that, but SEO search engine optimization and content marketing go hand in hand with each other.

[00:35:42] So when you're creating content, if you can, it is helpful to keep it around specific keywords and topics so that you're not just getting that initial burst of traffic. When you've released, released a new piece of content, you're getting what they call the long tail that traffic from Google over the long period of time of people finding your website through searching for certain things that they're trying to learn about or trying to look up and finding your website, and then ultimately hopefully hiring Matt for his virtual vocal coaching services.

[00:36:08] So can you talk about some of the, some of the results you found as you built your, your blog catalog through the years? What that led to.

[00:36:16]Matt: [00:36:16] Yeah. Listen. I mean, anytime that you can connect with people. On a human level and try to help them before they even give you a dollar. You're usually in a really good place. blogs certainly, but YouTube as well. And maybe we can segue into this, but it's like, think about how valuable it is.

[00:36:36] Like if you're like searching for like, you know, a new tire, you need a new tire or something like that. And you're trying to fix it yourself. And you're like doing terribly and you can't even take the wheel off. And so you just YouTube a video and then you're like, oh, how to change a tire? And so you find the video helpful, and then you just see that it happens to be at like a shop around you or a national chain or something like that.

[00:36:57] How much more likely are you to go to that chain versus some other generic chain that's never helped you in the least, no. You trust that you trust that original brand that helped you out when you weren't, when they, and they didn't ask for anything. And so in terms of results, certainly from. the SEO stuff and a search engine viewpoint.

[00:37:20]It absolutely revolutionize how many singers I was getting each week to my studio. And on top of that, it also absolutely made a huge difference in how many people all over the world were finding my website and could potentially one day book a lesson with me. Cause now, you know, everything's online and I'm teaching online.

[00:37:40] And you know, I could tomorrow, if I decided to just say, I don't want to teach in person lessons anymore, I'm just going to do everything virtually and I'm going to live in Wyoming. It'd be fine. That big love to Wyoming, by the way. beautiful state, beautiful state you

[00:37:54] Chris: [00:37:54] John Mayer lives there.

[00:37:55] Matt: [00:37:55] does he really see, I didn't even know that.

[00:37:57]Brian: [00:37:57] I don't think we needed to know that

[00:37:59] Chris.

[00:37:59] Matt: [00:37:59] well, thank you, Chris.

[00:38:01] Brian: [00:38:01] Thanks Chris. And value.

[00:38:03]Matt: [00:38:03] but you could, you could do that. And having that flexibility as an entrepreneur is like absolutely priceless. I mean, I love living in Austin, Texas, and it happens to be a music city, which all plays in my favor as well. But it's so cool to be able to have a product or service that is finding people all over the world regardless of where you are, but the first step is getting your local people first.

[00:38:24] Brian: [00:38:24] So you were putting blog articles out consistently for a couple of years, you were ranking for certain high traffic . Keywords, which is driving traffic to your website at that time. Were you smart enough to have some sort of lead magnet or something to, to build a mailing list yet? Or did you not start doing that until you had a YouTube channel?

[00:38:39] Where did the mailing list come into play?

[00:38:40]Matt: [00:38:40] I actually had a lead magnet and all of the pop-ups and all that stuff before I actually started getting more traffic. And I, I don't know whether that was the right answer or not,

[00:38:51] Brian: [00:38:51] No, it was always the right answer.

[00:38:53] Matt: [00:38:53] I had like 30 people on my site a month. And I was like, you know, shoving my offers in their face and nobody wanted it yet.

[00:39:00]If

[00:39:00] Brian: [00:39:00] I'll tell you right now, it is much better to be that person who has who's, who's willing to promote what they have and put it in their face before you have the all hands than it is for someone who has the massive audience and is too timid to put it out there. And so they, those are the people that have the smaller, tiny businesses, even though the people that have the smaller traffic flow and the bigger they're more willing to push their own, you know, basically sell themselves.

[00:39:21] They typically always have the bigger business. So at . What point did you start to see the email list grow?

[00:39:25] Chris: [00:39:25] yeah.

[00:39:26]Matt: [00:39:26] Look, Chris, you add something, go for it.

[00:39:28] Chris: [00:39:28] Okay. Yeah. So what Brian, what Brian said there about putting yourself out there with your business? There's a caveat that I run into this all the time with people that are like, oh, I don't want, I want my business to grow, but I don't want to tell anyone about my

[00:39:40] Matt: [00:39:40] Mm. Yeah.

[00:39:41] Chris: [00:39:41] And I think for a lot of people, yeah, you can put yourself out there and talk about yourself and be a self-promoter and all that stuff.

[00:39:47]But what you can do as well is you can create value. That is a lead magnet. And I think this is a great place to segue back to your web. You have a vocal coaching website. And when you go on the vocal coaching website Ramsey, voice.com at the very top of that. There's a question that says

[00:40:05] Matt: [00:40:05] It's very insulting. And we can talk about this too, but it's like, do you want it, do you want to find her vocal range and stop sounding like. Now I tested that headline with like five other, very much, much nicer variations in the idiot. One just really converted way better

[00:40:25] Chris: [00:40:25] Fascinating.

[00:40:26] Brian: [00:40:26] who's not familiar with what he's talking about. So on his website, he has a awesome tool that you can into it, your lowest note and your highest note, and it tells you what range you should be in. And like, it helps you kind of pick your range. So you're not singing in a range that make you sound stupid.

[00:40:40] And so in the copy of the lead magnet he's and the smart thing is he asks for your email before it gives you the result. So he's building an email. It's like how many people would you say you've got on your email list from this one lead magnet, by the way,

[00:40:52] Matt: [00:40:52] in the, in the last couple of years, probably about 25,000.

[00:40:56] Brian: [00:40:56] that see, that is insane to me. So you have this one lead magnet bring in 25,000 people. And the headline of it says something to the effect of, do you want to know your vocal range and stop sounding like an idiot or so you don't sound like an idiot. These sorts of things, like most people will never even test, but these polarizing sort of headlines are the ones that actually work really well.

[00:41:14] And you split tested this, which means you've tested it against a nice kind. Get your vocal range now, like super generic copy. And this one, beat it out.

[00:41:22]Matt: [00:41:22] I tested that against what I would even consider like really interesting value proposition kind of statements. Like, do you want to find your vocal range so you can find the right song for your voice? Or do you want to, like, do you want to find what your voice type is? Like bass baritone, tenor or something like that?

[00:41:37] And the, the idiot one just really, it just smoked everything else. And you know, not, not trying to be disrespectful of anyone out there, because I think that singing is a very vulnerable thing in the first place. But you also have to. What's that phrase, you have to sell people what they want and give them what they need.

[00:41:54] Brian: [00:41:54] And nobody wants to sound like an idiot. That's a universal truth.

[00:41:58]Matt: [00:41:58] So hitting on that pain point was, was important to get people, to, to actually, you know, engage with and, and stuff. And if you want to test it out on your own, by the way, it's just range, finder dot Ramsey, voice.com. It's just a simple app that I paid a couple hundred dollars to have it designed.

[00:42:13] You sing your lowest notes, you enable your mic, you sing your highest note and you enable your mic and then it will be like calculating and then touch tells you to put in your email address and you can even share it socially. So I wanted to build in some, some virality that way too is like, I wanted to, I envisioned like, you know, kids or young adults, you know, testing out the range and sharing it on Facebook and be like, oh, you test out your range.

[00:42:33]don't have enough analytics to know whether that actually happens, but I believe that it probably does, based on the results that I've

[00:42:41] gotten.

[00:42:41] Chris: [00:42:41] let's talk about, there's so many different reasons that what you did is genius. So the idiot thing appeals to a really base part of our psychology, where we don't want to look stupid, because if we look stupid, we'll get kicked out of the tribe and might not be able to find a mate there's old, old stuff that, you know, even rodents have that psychology going on.

[00:43:02] So that's really, really powerful. The other thing is that find your range is a competitive topic for singers.

[00:43:09] Brian: [00:43:09] Yeah, we literally can just naturally Chris and I competed the second we found it.

[00:43:13] Chris: [00:43:13] Yeah.

[00:43:14] W and we should have recorded. It was hilarious, but, you know, we both live on our call, like Sanger, highest and lowest note, and wanted to see who had the wider range.

[00:43:22]Brian: [00:43:22] And

[00:43:22] I destroyed you by an entire octave

[00:43:24] Chris: [00:43:24] the,

[00:43:25] Brian: [00:43:25] well,

[00:43:25]Matt: [00:43:25] who's the real winner here. Cause cause the vocal

[00:43:28] Brian: [00:43:28] Oh, you are, you got both of our email addresses and you were smart. I even tried to fake, I even tried to fake email address and it's like, Nope, not that one. So

[00:43:38]Chris: [00:43:38] Yeah, well, so you've got, you're appealing to people so that they look good socially you're appealing to people's ego. They can use this tool to gauge where they're at, which, you know, gives you some sort of inherent excitement about that. It's right in the website, you let them do play with this fun toy.

[00:43:56] And then you ask for the email address, which I'm sure that your, like your click-through rate, the number of people that actually put their email address in after using your tool is probably 90%, 95%. I mean, obnoxiously high

[00:44:11] Brian: [00:44:11] I would have bet it's not, but I'd bet it's much higher than most people who do a

[00:44:14] Chris: [00:44:14] yeah.

[00:44:15] Brian: [00:44:15] kind of thing.

[00:44:16] Matt: [00:44:16] Yeah,

[00:44:16] If you consider that opt-in rates across the board are like at one or 2%, I mean, anything higher than that is pretty good,

[00:44:23]Brian: [00:44:23] I'm going to actually pause there for a second, cause I want to actually kind of bring our audience. Along on this journey. I haven't done this yet. This interview, usually I do a better job at this sort of stuff, but I just want to kind of sum up what Matt's strategy has been thus far in the interview so far, because as creatives, we do not run our businesses this way.

[00:44:40] This is the way this is the way, you know, online course, people in bloggers. And this is the way, you know, all the gurus online kind of run their business. Not us creatives, not photographers, not videographers, not graphic designers, not audio engineers, not producers. We don't do it that way, but you can.

[00:44:55] I see people who do it that way.

[00:44:57] Matt: [00:44:57] What you said exactly. Brian is, is so true in that. And one thing that you said in your last podcast before you guys have made the switch over to the six-figure creative podcast is that some of the most creative people that you know, are not other music people necessarily. so sometimes they're graphic designers and sometimes they're, you know, a massage therapist, whatever it is.

[00:45:17]But we actually, I think and I can just speak for myself here and you guys can chime in, but I've actually learned so much more from marketing people in terms of like, this is the way to run a business. And I think that there's this part of it. Us inside. It's like, Ooh, I don't want to do, you know, this is my art.

[00:45:34] And I don't want to like, do all these seemingly shady tactics. They're not, there's nothing shady about making money from your passion or making money from your creativity, as long as you're not like, you know, filling lots of false promises and stuff like that. And doing anything like outwardly scammy, which I think that all of us know what that looks like and all of us will we'll avoid, but there are so many people that are just afraid to even put together, you know, like a free course to add on their site or something like that.

[00:46:03]That's something that, you know, those digital marketer guys that I always skip their Facebook ads do. There's a reason that those guys do those ads. There's a reason that those guys have those free courses because they work.

[00:46:15]Brian: [00:46:15] So Matt strategy so far just kind of sum it up so that I'm hoping all creatives can kind of fall along with this. Matt has a service that he offers, which is vocal coaching, no different than pretty much any other service. You are helping someone through a transformation.

[00:46:29] If it's a, if you're a music producer, you're helping someone take a song idea and turn it into a full production. If you're a photographer you're taking someone's look and making them look awesome, you're making your people look awesome. If you're a, if you're a designer, you're going someone with just an idea and helping them actually flesh it out on paper.

[00:46:42] So you have a transformational outcome. You're giving your client, which is what Matt is doing. And then he is like, okay, I have this thing that I'm good at that I love to do. Am I going to actually get people to find me how I'm going to fill the top of the funnel? Like the caught on here with your marketing funnels.

[00:46:56] And so he's, he invest in SEO by giving free services to somebody, somebody who can help him show up on Google on the top results. And then he also invest time effort. Writing blog articles that are high quality, 5,000 word posts that have done the work and putting research into the keywords so that you're actually writing stuff.

[00:47:15] That's going to be found it's long and interesting and helpful, which is the most important thing because these blog articles are mini services. You're helping someone with a transformational outcome on every single article that they read that Matt puts out. So he's genuinely helping somebody on these articles, which is building something called the reciprocity effect.

[00:47:31] The reciprocity effect is when you do something for me, I inherently want to do something for you that could be hiring. So if some people, these people are hiring that some are just joining his mailing list and falling along the journey and eventually maybe hiring him. I, I would, I would bet a thousand dollars right now that there's somebody unmatched mailing list that has recently hired him or bought something from him that joined years ago.

[00:47:51] And didn't pay a dime until recently. Like that is the stuff that happens, build a mailing list. And so all along the way, he is smartly building his mailing list. And I don't know what he's doing in the mailing list yet. Maybe we'll get to it maybe well, but he's using that mailing list to build his business further.

[00:48:04] So he has SEO. He has helpful blog articles that are building the relationship with the potential clients. He has a mailing list that is capturing the leads long-term so he can mark them long-term and he has a transformational outcome that he's providing. And these things alone are enough to build a significant business.

[00:48:21] And from what I know, it's over six figures. We don't have to get into the specifics of the income, but it's a significant income. And you're doing things in a way that most service professionals, most coaches, most people are not doing. And I just want to make sure that we're highlighting this because this can be replicated by pretty much any creative field, any creative.

[00:48:36]Chris: [00:48:36] Yeah, what you're doing, Matt, that I think is so important for creatives that have some hesitancy to market themselves, we needed some snappy word to refer to that fear. But what you're doing is you're, you're marketing that you'll help people for free.

[00:48:53] Matt: [00:48:53] Right,

[00:48:54] Chris: [00:48:54] And then after you've helped them for free you offer to help them more for money.

[00:48:58]That's the business model. Right? Am

[00:49:00] Matt: [00:49:00] Yeah, exactly.

[00:49:02] Chris: [00:49:02] Amazing.

[00:49:03] Brian: [00:49:03] so any creative has their, their ideal customer has problems that need to be solved and you can solve some of those problems for free, and you can help them even further through paid services. But there is, it's essentially a baby step from stranger to customer, and that's what Matt has done really well.

[00:49:18] So if we have time, we're past the time, a lot that we had here, but you know, like if you're willing to go a little further and go into the YouTube side of things, I would love to get a feel for when YouTube came into this. And if this placed your entire blog strategy, cause you said you, you did blogs for a couple of years.

[00:49:35] Now you seem to be big on YouTube and doing that a lot. Where did YouTube come into the mix?

[00:49:39]Matt: [00:49:39] Well, I actually had a student who was. You know, you're, you're really good at this. It would be awesome for you to actually like start a channel so that people can actually see know, what it would be like to, you know, learn from you and they can practice along and stuff like that. And I really, really appreciated that insight because up until then, I was kind of like, oh, you know, you just have to come in person.

[00:50:00] Well, if, again, if any, if there's any way for people to connect with you on a personal level before they spend a single dollar with you, there's so much more likely to become a loyal customer. And so. Even in those early days, I mean, I had a terrible camera. I had terrible sound. I was actually operating under a different business name.

[00:50:18]my original voice teacher was occupier and he was like, Hey, you can use the name Octa higher east two years later, he changed his mind. So all of a sudden I had like 50 videos that like all said octave higher east, rather than Ramsey voice studio lesson learned on that creatives.

[00:50:33] Make sure that you're good with the name that you have of you're going to spend so much effort into branding into it. That's a story for another time, but yeah, so I had all of these videos and I was actually putting out a video. Well, here's the problem with that? YouTube doesn't care how often you're posting Google doesn't care, how often you're posting, they care about, sorry, let me walk that back for just a second.

[00:50:54] They care that you're posting somewhat consistently. You can't just post once a year. But don't feel like in a YouTube kind of viewpoint that you have to post something every single day. It's way more way more important to shoot something really high quality that people watch for long periods of time to make sure that actually going to rank for stuff appropriately.

[00:51:14]It was kind of interesting what you said earlier was like, well, I'm sure the keyword stuff from that you learn from SEO applies completely to YouTube as well. That's what I thought, but YouTube doesn't care about keywords. They care about the video quality and that people are watching it that people are engaged for the entire amount of the video.

[00:51:34] And that was

[00:51:35] Chris: [00:51:35] what you call a knowledge bomb right there. You're that blue moon.

[00:51:39]Matt: [00:51:39] I'll tell you I was chasing that dragon for like a couple of years. I was like, well, I put together this video on virbrato and you know, how to hit a high notes and you know, belting and all these high traffic keywords that worked really well for my blog. Right. Again, YouTube doesn't care.

[00:51:55]Brian: [00:51:55] the key metric on YouTube is watch time. Is that what you're saying? Essentially?

[00:51:58] Matt: [00:51:58] A hundred percent. So just to give you an example I did a little sprint where I shot like 10 videos around high traffic keywords. Cause I was still thinking from SEO land. I was like, this is what I need to do. I need to rank for how to sing. I need to rank for how to hit high notes.

[00:52:12] I need to rank for vibrato for, you know, belting, whatever it happens to be. And I did, I did rank for those things, but the amount of people that are actually searching for those terms on YouTube is really, really small compared to the number of videos that YouTube just shows to people that they think might be interested in something.

[00:52:33] So here's the counterexample to that. Amongst that sprint of 10 videos, I shot one called how to find your natural voice And at the time I was like, no, one's going to watch this. No, one's searching on YouTube, how to find my voice. There are certainly people that do, but I was like, there's not going to be as many people, those that search how to sing.

[00:52:51]Well, now that video has a million views and my, how to sing video only has like 40,000 or something. Because YouTube saw and it started recommending that video to people that were searching and interested in singing. And they started clicking on that video and they watched the whole darn thing. And all of a sudden YouTube is like, okay, that's the one it's going straight to the top.

[00:53:11]So the search term doesn't really matter. Did I explain that clearly?

[00:53:16]Brian: [00:53:16] I'm lurking or YouTube, which is why I'm not talking. I'm looking at all this stuff that you're talking about right now. And one thing that does stand out to me, when I look at this video, it's your second most viewed video. Your first being called 10 singing techniques to improve your voice.

[00:53:28]Both of these thumbnails have the same look, same vibe, but they stand out. So where does the thumbnail come into play? When it comes to actually getting viewed on you?

[00:53:37] Matt: [00:53:37] the, the thumbnail is, is the gateway. If people don't click on it and it's, then it's not going to get viewed. And so you can't get those metrics that I'm talking about about watch time, if nobody's actually clicking on it. So thumbnail and headline are absolutely crucial just to get people watching the darn thing.

[00:53:54] And then actually once they're watching it, making sure that they're, they're watching through the whole thing and you're kind of keeping things interesting. You're using lots of interesting cuts. it sounds like I'm rambling, that's because it's a mystery, even to the people that are experts at YouTube.

[00:54:10]they use this AI that like predicts, like what's going to be a successful thing and no one could actually say, this is the thing. All you can just speak in is generalities and say that, yeah, you wanna have a high watch time? You want to have a high click-through rate on your thumbnail, et cetera.

[00:54:25]Brian: [00:54:25] So with that, YouTube gives you pretty good analytics though, to give you an idea of where your new viewers and subscribers are coming from, is that correct? Do you have a pretty good grasp on the, just of like, are they coming from search search results? Are they coming from recommended videos? Are they w where is your viewership coming from for the most.

[00:54:43] Matt: [00:54:43] Yeah. That was kind of my point from earlier is like search is like the bottom. Like nobody, nobody really cares about search. Like there's just not that many people that are are doing it. So if you just try and experiment, this is something that your listeners can do too. If you just go to youtube.com.

[00:54:58]And let's say that you hadn't, you had a specific thing that you wanted to search for by the time you actually go to the homepage on youtube.com. You've totally forgotten about what that thing that you were going to search for was, and by then you've clicked on one of the things that YouTube gave you on your homepage.

[00:55:13] That's what you really want you

[00:55:15] Brian: [00:55:15] All the time. I even have a plugin on my computer that blocks those

[00:55:19] Matt: [00:55:19] Oh, that's

[00:55:19] Brian: [00:55:19] I don't get distracted.

[00:55:20] Matt: [00:55:20] Yeah. So like you, you actually really, the golden, the holy grail is hitting that recommended videos. So if you actually looked at the analytics for that, find your voice video, I would say like maybe 10 or 15% of the people that find that are just searching for it, which is there's nothing to sneeze out

[00:55:37] Brian: [00:55:37] It's still a hundred thousand, 150,000 views. So it's not, there's no small amount for sure.

[00:55:41]Matt: [00:55:41] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Out of a million for sure. But. Really quickly, once you have a video that starts to hit, you'll see that proportion shift at, at first it will be like, people are seeing it cause they're subscribed to you and then you'll actually start in maybe some search and then you'll see it start to go to suggested.

[00:55:57] And once it hits, suggested like 80% of people, are you finding, finding you through suggested you've got to hit pretty much. And I've only hit that like two or three times out of 200 videos. So just to show you my track record.

[00:56:12] Brian: [00:56:12] Well, that's what actually leads to the next point, I think is probably where we'll kind of wrap this conversation up just for the sake of time is, is consistency. You, you said something that caught my ear and I think you, you meant it, but it didn't. I mean, it was YouTube. Doesn't care how often you post, but they do care that you are consistent in some way, shape or form, or at the very least people care that you're consistent because the more consistent you are, the better you are.

[00:56:33] I want to talk about content. How do you actually plan out content so that you always have fresh ideas? You're never running out. You don't have to scramble week to week, or maybe you are scrambling week to week. I don't know. I don't know you very well. What's your, what's your strategy around planning?

[00:56:46]Matt: [00:56:46] Wow. there is a plan and sometimes there isn't a plan. So I, like I mentioned earlier you know, I can plan to shoot like 10 videos around these high traffic keywords that I think are going to do well. And maybe only one of them does well, and maybe it's not the one that I thought was going to do well.

[00:57:00] And so what I've actually kind of pivoted towards is doing videos that I think people will find interesting rather than trying to write a video or write a script for the bots. Like I'm kind of doing with Google. Let's be honest, on YouTube. I'm trying to make it interesting, as interesting as possible or the people that are actually interested in singing.

[00:57:23] Maybe they're not even subscribers of my channel, but I want to make it so that as soon as they see that thumbnail or what have you, that they click.

[00:57:31]Chris: [00:57:31] I think the way you could explain that is to say that Google search algorithm is predictive. They're looking at signals to decide whether, you know, it's primarily predictive. I think YouTube is algorithm is primarily reactive. They want to see how human beings will react to the video and they can very easily see like, well, did they click on it?

[00:57:52] And then finish the video? What percentage of people that clicked on the video finished at the video percentage of people click on the video. These are really simple metrics to give YouTube a loud and clear signal that, oh my gosh, we showed this thumbnail to a hundred people, a hundred people clicked it and a hundred people finished it.

[00:58:08]Matt: [00:58:08] here's the way that you can really generalize about it. Google wants to give you an answer as soon as possible. YouTube wants to keep you watching videos for the rest of your life.

[00:58:18] Brian: [00:58:18] That's so

[00:58:19] Matt: [00:58:19] it never wants you to leave. Once you get trapped, they want you to stay in there, which is why we can go down YouTube rabbit hole for five or six hours.

[00:58:27] And I make this comparison with singing coaches all the time is like, you know, people will just search one thing related to singing before know it. They've watched 10 videos, 10 different teachers. They're so confused, which is why it's such a great idea to get personal feedback from a real vocal coach.

[00:58:42]Something that I sell through my programs and my own personal coach, of course. But Google is actually trying to try to help you trying to get you some real answers. Right now, because that's what you need. You need to, you've got the nail in the tire. Okay. Let's get you to a tire shop. If I start searching mail entire on YouTube, pretty soon, I'm going to be watching a, what is it?

[00:59:00] Uh,

[00:59:00] Chris: [00:59:00] Chris fix that's the YouTube channel that you're going to find that's the most popular for that topic?

[00:59:05] Brian: [00:59:05] Is that your own YouTube channel,

[00:59:06] Chris: [00:59:06] No, it's not. It's a different guy, but he's fantastic. And he taught

[00:59:09] me how to fix my Jeep before I

[00:59:10] broke my Jeep.

[00:59:11]He's without a doubt, the number one guy fraud.

[00:59:14]Matt: [00:59:14] look at that. See, boom. There you are. And your three, your three videos in, and you're just like an hour has gone by you're sweating in the car. You still got the nail in the tire and you're like, how am I going to get home?

[00:59:24] Chris: [00:59:24] Yeah,

[00:59:25]Brian: [00:59:25] Yeah. Somehow I'm now watching Everest videos. If somebody is summiting Everest, and I want to climb a mountain, I don't know why I don't even do this. That's that's it feels like when I'm on Facebook, it's like when you have millions or billions of dollars of, of venture capitalist funds sunk into a piece of software, whose job is to keep you on the platform.

[00:59:43] As long as possible, you will wake up an hour later, not realizing what just happened. You're just an hour later in the day, you haven't been productive at all, which is why I have that plug in the blocks. Google recommended videos

[00:59:54] Chris: [00:59:54] what's the documentary about this? They get so up this social

[00:59:57] Matt: [00:59:57] The social dilemma. Yeah.

[00:59:59] Chris: [00:59:59] you guys haven't watched that on Netflix. It's worth.

[01:00:02]Matt: [01:00:02] but just to bring it back to your, to your listeners for a second, like I know all of this sounds really like kind of high level and it's like, oh, how, how am I supposed to do that? You know, what's what would be interesting for my audience and like, how do I get my titles and thumbnails and stuff like that.

[01:00:18] If you're just getting started off, just start off by trying to be helpful, just try to. Really as good of production as he can, high production quality videos that are just helping people solve their problems. So if you're a graphic designer, then maybe you can do some screen grabs of how you, you know, eliminate red eye.

[01:00:37] I'm making this up as I go. But you know, just trying to answer these simple questions first, you'll naturally start to grow some subscribers and a following to your channel because again, you're being helpful and you're trying to give people the best answers possible. And then naturally over time, you're going to start to see what kind of content is successful.

[01:00:57] And that's what you can start writing. Whereas with Google and writing for Google, it's like, you already have a pretty good idea about what's going to work before you do it. And so you're kind of writing for Google horses with YouTube, just start off trying to be helpful. And I think that goes across the board,

[01:01:12] Brian: [01:01:12] Yeah, I think, I think any creative can understand that, like you may have a, you may be allergic to marketing. You may not want to sell, sell yourself online and feel icky about it because you're trying to charge money for something you love to do, but you can resonate with helping people. Cause I feel like most creatives, they want to help people.

[01:01:28] That's that's part of the reason why they're doing what they're doing. So that makes total sense. When it comes to actually creating content for you to just, just be helpful, just try to help somebody. If you can help somebody. 90% of it.

[01:01:38] Chris: [01:01:38] and Brian, I think that you accidentally stumbled across the word I was looking for earlier. you talked about marketing and re in regards to allergy. I think us referring to this hesitation of creatives to market themselves as being allergic to marketing. It's a marketing

[01:01:53] Brian: [01:01:53] Yep. I use that all the time and I love that phrasing because it's, it's, it sums up an element a lot of creatives have. And so I'm hoping that interviews like this, people will start to have an inoculation against marketing

[01:02:04] Chris: [01:02:04] Well, but not just that, to help them change their definition, say marketing isn't, isn't pitching yourself. Marketing is helping people

[01:02:12] and then you don't have to pitch yourself.

[01:02:14] Brian: [01:02:14] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what.

[01:02:15] Chris: [01:02:15] Literally, Brian and I are doing this right now to

[01:02:17] Brian: [01:02:17] I was about to say, what do you think this podcast episode is? This is a form of content marketing, and we're hoping that we've genuinely help people. so Matt I think a good place to end here with, just to kind of be tell people where could they go if they want to find out more about you or take your vocal thing, or just, where do you want to set our audience for, for your services or for what you're doing?

[01:02:34] Matt: [01:02:34] Yeah, for sure. I think, I think a good place to start is just going to my homepage at Ramsey, voice.com. That's R a M S E Y. Voice spelled the normal way. Right there. There's a place to put in your email address and get 10 free singing techniques to improve. Your voice gets sent right to your, to your inbox.

[01:02:49]Brian: [01:02:49] No, You forgot to, to improve your voice. So you don't sound like an

[01:02:52] Matt: [01:02:52] That's right. Yeah. Well, we, you know, we experimented with that language and then that language was different. So yeah, so, so many different things we could talk about this, this could go for, for eight hours, but that's a great place to get started, but if you're a competitive, if you're the competitive sword and you think that you've got a good range or a range, that's at least bigger than your closest friends, then you can go to rangefinder dot Ramsey, voice.com.

[01:03:15]And you just put in your email and tells you what range you've got and you can even measure it over time and see if it gets better as you do vocal training.

[01:03:22]Brian: [01:03:22] And just to tell people right now, the thing to beat is four octaves. I'm pulling up my screenshot here from

[01:03:31] Matt: [01:03:31] Nice.

[01:03:32] Nice.

[01:03:33]Brian: [01:03:33] So that is it for this interview of the six-figure creative podcast. Chris, what did you think?

[01:03:37] Muddied? Were you a surprise?

[01:03:39]Chris: [01:03:39] I was Matt is the total package. He, there was so much stuff where I was like, he started to talk about like the keyword finder and Google ad words and all this like really nuanced stuff. And it was amazing to be like, whoa, he did the work. He knows about all this random stuff. He must be as like traumatized as I am to have

[01:04:01]Brian: [01:04:01] not everyone uses knowledge learning and systems as a coping mechanism.

[01:04:05] I think Matt, I think Matt was just trying to build a, a good long-term sustainable business. Well, so like he, we came up, we got him on the podcast cause I was like, he's got a Ute, large YouTube presence.

[01:04:13] And I think content marketing is an important strategy as we move forward as creatives, just because it is a way to add value. And with so many creatives is allergic to marketing, kind of like we talked about earlier. I think content marketing is a really good I guess I don't know what we are going to call that, but it's a really good thing to combat.

[01:04:28]Allergy, because all you're doing is helping people. And so I, I wanted to bring them on for that. And what we got out of him was completely unexpected. Cause we didn't even get to the YouTube stuff till the very end here. So we had so much that he brought to the table with SEO and with trading services.

[01:04:42] And I just think that was cool to hear. His creative journey and how unique it was compared to, you know, Alex facility we have on the podcast, you know, a few episodes back where she was actually doing this through all through Fiverr. Like her journey was completely different, but similar results, as far as monetary income and success, like completely different paths, but.

[01:05:00]A similar result. I just love that that that's an option. It's like not only do some of the things that we do as creatives not exist 10 years ago as a career option, but the paths to success are as various as the options we have to do as for money. I worded that terribly, but you know what I'm trying to say, like our paths are endless.

[01:05:18] And so hearing his path to success is so cool to you.

[01:05:21]Chris: [01:05:21] Well, and that's such a great proof for us, that our concept for this podcast is so valid that if you have a creative business and you're offering a service and you want to grow your business, you need to learn from creatives outside of your niche.

[01:05:38] Brian: [01:05:38] The whole interview, I'm thinking through it. So I have this, like, I have this weird thing I do when I'm listening to guests. I always try to put myself in the shoe of the guests, listening to the podcast, which is why I kind of went back eventually and described what SEL meant and what content marketing

[01:05:49] meant. Because I want to make sure like people are following along. And if someone says something that doesn't make sense for me as the listener's viewpoint, I want to try to either dig in more or point that out or try to, or try to translate it into something that makes sense. But everything that he said makes sense from my perspective, as audio engineer, from the perspective of other avatars that I have in my head as I'm listening creatives that are in like other fields, like photography, videography graphic design, Freelance writing a lot of what Matt does is one-to-one applicable.

[01:06:18] You're just, all you're doing is writing about different kinds of content, creating different kinds of content on YouTube, and you would have different lead magnets essentially is what he's doing on your website. That's literally it, you just change some of the things out, but the template really matches for any creative.

[01:06:32] Chris: [01:06:33] Well, and what makes this conversation with Matt so relevant? Is that in your creative niche? You know, let's say you're photographing babies, like you're a baby portrait photographer. There might not be anyone like Matt, who's doing such a great job at content marketing. There's no one to look at and say, okay, well I want to be like them.

[01:06:54] It's so much more powerful to be. I want to be like the mat of baby photog.

[01:07:00]Brian: [01:07:00] Yeah. So he mentioned about how, how competitive it is in the general like marketing space, like in the grand scheme of things. I don't think Matt would argue with me. He wouldn't be a big fish in the overall like marketing pond. If he were to go head-to-head against the best marketers, but in the vocal coaching.

[01:07:16]He could stand toe to toe with some of the top people in that world. Yep. And so think about that from our perspective as created, like we're in our own little worlds in our own little niches and we can take things that we learned from people like Matt, people like Alex, people like you know, any of our guests that we have on the podcast and people like us, me and Chris who have our own unique journeys, you can take those things and apply it to your own little.

[01:07:36]Pint, I guess you could say not the big, the big red ocean, but the little blue pond. And I think if we, if we take those things and apply them to what we're doing and find what parts can we pick out, I can choose and, and apply those. I think we're all gonna be better off. So I already picked up a few things from Matt that I'm going to push forward with in some of my businesses.

[01:07:53] And I'm looking forward to, to some of the other guests we're going to interview on this.

[01:07:56] Chris: [01:07:56] same. I learned a lot from Matt and that's probably one of my favorite parts about this next version of the podcast. This next season. I'm learning way faster than I did last time.

[01:08:06]Brian: [01:08:06] Yeah, we don't because we were like two, two wet sticks coming together and turning to mush.

[01:08:13] Chris: [01:08:13] What are you sticks coming together and throwing the mush? What

[01:08:17]Brian: [01:08:17] it's like the iron sharpens iron thing. Like we were not sharpening each other to podcasts.

[01:08:20] We were

[01:08:20] Chris: [01:08:20] my, what are you? Are you on drugs?

[01:08:23]Brian: [01:08:23] Clearly not Chris. We were definitely not getting any smarter with it. Just being me and you on the

[01:08:28] podcast every week.

[01:08:29] Chris: [01:08:29] apparently, well, we just got a lot dumber and it feels good for me to be able to make fun of you a little bit in this

[01:08:35] Brian: [01:08:35] Yep. And now we're getting smarter, gradually, gradually smarter. So stay tuned for next week. Bright and early 6:00 AM Tuesday morning for our next episode of the six-figure creative bike.