INTRO: Hello everybody and welcome to the Success Harbor podcast with George Meszaros, where it’s all about making success happen for you.

Success Harbor: Hi everyone. This is George Meszaros with Success Harbor and I have Matt Paulson with me. Matt publishes a daily investment newsletter to more than 92,000 subscribers. He co-founded GoGo Photo Contest, a company that helps animal shelters and humane societies raise funds. Matt also founded Lightning Releases, a press release writing and distribution service. Welcome.

Matthew Paulson: Thanks. Thanks for having me George and good to be here.

Success Harbor: Thank you for being here Matt. I appreciate it. Tell us, let’s talk about your daily investment newsletter. How did you start that business? How did you get into that and you have a 92,000 subscriber which is a very impressive number. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Matthew Paulson: Absolutely. So the story kind of starts off about 2010 I have an investing news website. It’s called American Banking and Market news and you know that site was really starting to take off in 2010.

Success Harbor: Why do you think it was that? Why do you think it was taking off in 2010 and how long had it been online by then?

Matthew Paulson: Sure, so I started that site in 2009 and it got picked up by Google news and Bing news and Yahoo finance and some of those more specialized kind of financial search engines and that’s what I contributed to a lot of the success to and I think we, we found you know some types of content that worked relay well and garnered a lot of traffic and are easy to write.

Success Harbor: Okay, and what was, so what was some of the content because I, you know I want to hear the whole story but this is very important. There are so many sites out there that never get any traffic and they have a lot of content and still nothing happens so what, what happened, what kind of content and how did you figure that out?

Matthew Paulson: Sure so I kind of figured out that the way to do well when you’re talking about public big traded companies is to mention their stock ticker in their article. So that way like an MSN Money and on Twitter and DotTwits, Google Finance, if you mention this, the stock ticker of the company, it’ll show up and some of those kind of more specialized financial portals and you have to do a little bit of work to get into those sites, into those portals but if you are and you mention the tickers of, the stock tickers of publicly traded companies in your article, you can pick up a lot of extra traffic that you wouldn’t normally get form Google Search.

Success Harbor: Oh wow. That’s impressive. That’s impressive. How did you figure that out?

Matthew Paulson: It actually happened by, by accident. I had one of my writers, I think a big Sidney group mentioned the stock in 2009 and I just saw that particular article just got a ton of traffic from Google finance and Twitter and a few other places and I thought, hey I should have them do more of this so, I just kind of had everybody start doing it and traffic just sky-rocketed from there on and we were really able to take some, some article type, some, we were able to latch on to certain news, certain formula, formulae so whenever a company writes you know or does an earning announcement you know it’s basically the same story every time. So we are really able to kind of make a system out of that and kind of have this, you know we didn’t really have to look for new content all the time because whenever you know a big company announces earnings or announced dividends that’s the story, so we were able to kind of build the system off and regularly pour on those and get a lot, and get a lot of traffic as a result of that.
Success Harbor: So when you say, traffic skyrocketed, what was that traffic? What was the traffic before and what happened after Google News and these other sites picked you up?

Matthew Paulson: Sure. So we were, and we were probably at a hundred thousand pages per month. You know in late 2009. We got picked up then by here mid 2010 we were at about a million pages per month and I think now we’re at about two and a half million pages per month.

Success Harbor: Even a hundred thousand is very impressive. How did you even get? I mean you’re talking, you’re not talking about, I mean I talk to bloggers that have blogs on since like 2004, 2005, some of 2003, you know what, I mean ten years and they have the kind of traffic that you have, so how do you even get a site to a hundred thousand visitors?

Matthew Paulson: I think it’s a matter of finding out you know where is I, who is my audience and then where are those people at on the Internet, and then how can I reach them and it just happened to be that people that are interested in investing are very easy to reach so I kind of got lucky there. I mean there are so many sites targeted towards people that invest in individual stocks and it was not terribly hard to get into those portals. There are still a few places I’m trying to crack like Yahoo Finance, I haven’t really been able to get into yet but there are a lot of places that aren’t hard to publish content for that we’ve already reaped the rewards for. And it’s not the same in obviously every industry but finance happened to work particularly well.

Success Harbor: So is it through guest posting when you say I’m trying to get into it? How do you try to get into those portals?

Matthew Paulson: Sure. So with like Yahoo Finance, they only let people like they have pages for each company and on that they have like a news section and they only let like people in who are kind of their partners and they do business development deals and it kind of varies a little bit as you go from platform to platform, like on stocks I would say, I just send them an email to say this is what I want to do, are you guys okay with it and they said, sure go ahead. You know so that, they send me a couple thousand page views a day just from that site and anybody can publish to Twitter using the hash tags for stocks and Google Finance takes some work to get into but it’s not impossible. There’s an application process for that.

Success Harbor: Okay, so, so you got in about a year, you got to 92,000 subscribers?

Matthew Paulson: No that well right now I’m at, some of the investment newsletter so when I started collecting emails, I just, that was probably in January of 2011 so that’s really been over three and a half years that that 92,000 has been built up over.

Success Harbor: Okay so three and a half years and 92,000 subscribers. Now do you also own, Analytics, Analystratings.net?

Success Harbor: Yep, that that’s my site as well and it’s, the reason I started that site was because American banking and news and kind of my other financial websites, they, they did very well in terms of advertising revenue but some , so much of the traffic came from kind of those specific search portals and you can’t always control that, that flow of traffic and I just didn’t want to be so dependent on these other companies to send me traffic to generate revenue so I decided that you know I’m going to need some customers that are buying something from me so I really wanted to kind of have my own audience that I could kind of contact at my discretion. So that’s why I decided to start doing the email thing and put you know I kind of put in opt-in forms on my website so I could, like, catch as many emails as I could. You know when I first started collecting emails I didn’t really know how I was going to monetize it at the time but I knew that if I, if I was going to be able to, if I’m going to, if I wanted to sell something to my audience I’m going to need a way to contact them directly. So I started, you know we had, been covering stock ratings for a while on our website so I thought you know we already have the data, so we can just send it out in an email in a newsletter. So you know there’s no way to get people to give you their email address and it kind of, kind of exploded from there. Even after, I think after collecting emails you know for about six months we already had ten thousand people subscribed to the free email list so it was really something that started to take off really quickly.

Success Harbor: So, what do you use, do you use Word Press and some plugins to squeeze the emails? What is, what tool do you use for that?

Matthew Paulson: Sure. So all of my sites, all my kind of front-end websites that people visit are based on Word Press and then the opt-in four hours are, I had a developer actually make the most recent versions of them and so what I wanted to do is pretty specialized to what I am doing because the formatting so I had a, a guy that I know put it together but they’re obviously plugins like pop-up domination that can collect email addresses as well for you pretty well.

Success Harbor: Yeah because I’m looking at analyticsratings.net and I don’t see really aggressive way of getting emails there.

Matthew Paulson: If you like, open up like a private boxing window and you go to it, there’ll probably be a pop up that will show up. Like it’ll only show up once a day I think so if you.

Success Harbor: Yeah I was there yesterday so maybe that’s why it’s not showing it. The group probably hasn’t expired.

Matthew Paulson: Yep, yep.

Success Harbor: Okay so now how do you make money with, with these subscribers? Do you have products that you sell or is it advertising only?

Matthew Paulson: Sure.

Success Harbor: What are your revenue sources?

Matthew Paulson: Sure there’s actually three and when I first started I thought the money was only in like subscription to paid newsletters and I do pretty well at that but there are also two other things so for the, the subscriptions I have two different things. One is a premium version of kind of a daily newsletter that I send out. So when I first started this, I had gotten a lot of feature requests of people that told me they wanted some different stuff in their newsletter. They wanted it like sent before the stock market opens so they have time to make their trade. Some people wanted like a watch list of their stock so they could get kind of more news and information about what they had. Some people wanted email alerts and a few other things. They kind of said you know hey maybe there’s an opportunity here to come up with a version of the newsletter that people get so much value out of that they would be willing to pay for it. So that I launched in I think July of 2011. There’s also kind of a web based version of that where people can have more kind of access to my database of financial information. So that’s another product called RatingsDB. So between those two I think I have about two thousand active subscriptions right now and those are ten to fifteen bucks a month so that’s a kind of a nice monthly revenue stream right there.

Success Harbor: Okay. And all, approximately how much revenue do you generate from just this one business because it’s not just one website, it’s, it’s at least a couple of websites and multiple different revenue services. Can you give our audience kind of an idea?

Matthew Paulson: Sure, so the, my kind of whole business kind of four things put together generate between one hundred thousand and one hundred and fifteen thousand a month and about out of that, about ninety is net profit. So out of that ninety, probably about sixty-five to seventy is from the news websites and newsletter total.

Success Harbor: Okay so let’s talk about the GoGo Photo Contest. What gave you the idea to start and actually before you get into that tell our audience what GoGo Photo Contest is?

Matthew Paulson: Sure. So GoGo Photo Contest is, kind of a, it’s a way for animal shelters and human societies to raise money so they can host a contest, kind of online and basically people will send photos of their animals for the contest and then they will invite, like the people that are participating in the contest, they will invite their friends and family to vote for their animal in the contest and then every vote will cost a dollar so then so whoever, you know, at the end of the contest, has the most votes will win the contest and will win some kind of prize that the humane society puts out. A lot of them will do a calendar and then the winning pet will like be the calendar pet in like the month of their choice. So, a typical kind of human society in a larger city, there’s one in the city I live in, [00:11:52.22] Inaudible South Dakota. It’s a city of about one hundred and fifty thousand people and our humane society is a decent size and they were able to raise I think six or seven thousand this year with us just from that contest alone. And then out of that, we keep, I think it’s 15 percent for the first five grand they raise and then after that so most of them end up paying somewhere between like seven and ten percent given to us in exchange for running the contest.

Success Harbor: And how did you come up with this idea?

Matthew Paulson: Sure. It was actually a business partner of mine. He had been volunteering with the humane society I think back in 2005 and he, they kind of approached him and he had been doing, and they had been doing contests where people process and they kind of approached him and said, “Hey can you help us do this online?” So he had written kind of the initial version of that software back then and last, I think it wasn’t until last July that we kind of turned that into an independent business that is you know making, going to be a company and we’re going to try to make it, max it out this year.

Success Harbor: So about a year ago right?

Matthew Paulson: Yeah. We’ve run, I think, let me see how many contests we’ve run. I think we’ve ran, I think we’ve run about sixty contests so far and we’ve helped animal shelters and humane societies around the country. I think we’re up to about 325,000 dollars that we’ve helped them raise at this point.

Success Harbor: That, that sounds like a very impressive number. Now tell me how do you market GoGo Photo contest?

Matthew Paulson: Sure. So there are, the humane society and animal shelter world is really kind of a close knit community, so they all talk to each other. So there , there is a lot of word of mouth so once we kind of get into an area where we have had some success with the shelter like we tend to get a lot of neighboring shelters around, like we, like, I think a, a basset hound rescue in Florida and all of a sudden like after that, after they had run a contest we got three or four more so there’s, it’s a nice kind of network effect that happens when you kind of go into an area.

Success Harbor: Wow, that’s kind of viral.

Matthew Paulson: It is. I mean there’s also some more traditional marketing we do. There’s email marketing we do to let people know that the contest exists to show the kind of success that other fund raisers have. We’re going to look at going to a trade show that The Humane Society of United States puts on, sometime, not sure, this year, sometime next year but that’ll be a good opportunity for us as well.

Success Harbor: Okay, okay. How did you start Lightning Releases? You know we mentioned Lightning Releases has to do with press releases for small businesses, so how did you come up with that idea?

Matthew Paulson: Sure, so I had a, I was, it was actually when I was releasing one of my products for Analytics Ratings net worth. I did a press, one press release at PR web and then a couple of other press releases with some smaller sites and you know, I just wasn’t terribly happy with the results for what I paid. You know

Success Harbor: So why not? Why weren’t you happy? Give us an idea.

Matthew Paulson: Well I mean with some of the bigger press release sites you pay sometimes, 3 or 400 bucks a year in US. We expect your release to get out there and it just, didn’t really happen for. I didn’t get the value for what I paid for it. It didn’t get out to that many sites and I really thought, you know, I felt I could probably build a network just as good and be able to charge people you know a much more competitive rate than they did so that’s how that idea came to be.

Success Harbor: And when was that? What year?

Matthew Paulson: So that would’ve been 2012 when I started that business.

Success Harbor: Okay so, so how are you different from like a PR web? One thing is cost. You mentioned you were less expensive.

Matthew Paulson: Yeah.

Success Harbor: In what other ways are you different?

Matthew Paulson: Sure, so we are, the benefit that I pitch to, are people who are on the web site is that +you know I’ll get their press release in places where people actually go, like use search engines, Google News and Yahoo news and Bing news. You know people go to those and read the news. They may be looking at you know news about whatever type of organization that you’re promoting and then your article comes up and people read it. I, you know, when you, when your one of ten press releases is on a big network you know your article can get lost in the fold. So what we do is, well, you know we’ll try to get it in places where you know people will read it on those news search engines and also send it out to targeted journalists based on where you are. So a company in Sufa, South Dakota you know we can send your release to two people in South Dakota as well so it’s really kind of a two pronged approach between us getting your release on the web as good or better as some of those other sites and then we also send it directly to people that are relevant that might be want to read it.

Success Harbor: And so you mentioned on on your website that you have worked with about a thousand, about a thousand companies each year use your service for PR?

Matthew Paulson: Yeah I think right now, we’re kind of turning anywhere between 200 and 225 releases a month so obviously a lot of those are repeat customers. A few people though periodically buy them in batches of 50 so it’s kind of nice to know that people are getting the value out of your service. A few weeks ago I had sent like a request to my customers to see if anybody would provide like a testimonial so I think I emailed 100 people and then within a day about 20 people replied back and said sure here’s a testimonial so that was, it was kind of nice of nice to see that.

Success Harbor: Yea it’s always good to hear when people appreciate what you do. How do you market Lightning Releases?

Matthew Paulson: Sure there’s a few things we do. One, we do Google ad-words to target kind of target those relevant key words. I do a little bit of email marketing for that list as well so there’s I, I bought into a few of those stuff from people that have bought press releases from other places so I’ve been able to really leverage those to tell people about our service and kind of compare it to other services that they might have used in the past.

Success Harbor: So you get, you buy an email list from like an email broker?

Matthew Paulson: Yep.

Success Harbor: What, what is the name of that place in case someone wants to check them out for their own business?

Matthew Paulson: I can’t tell you. That’s a, that’s a trade secret.

Success Harbor: Okay. So they only deal with press releases, email addresses, people that purchase press.

Matthew Paulson: No, no I mean, it’s a, it’s just a list broker with all sorts of people that sells lists of all sorts of things. It’s just the list I happen to buy. I think they do a lot of other things as well.

Success Harbor: Okay alright. So you, so you market through email. You market your business through email and some ad words.

Matthew Paulson: Yep and we’re looking at doing, I’m going to try to launch an affiliate marketing campaign to one of the networks pretty soon. I’ve had some people request you know to be an affiliate so I think that’s. I mean the margin, distributing press releases basically a hundred percent so you know you can give an affiliate like a thirty percent commission and you’re still fine at the end of the day.

Success Harbor: Sure, sure.

Matthew Paulson: I’m going to try to, try to get going on that pretty soon.

Success Harbor: Okay, okay that sounds good. So I was going to, you know ask you about, I’m very, very interested in the first one to two years of the life of a business because most, most businesses fail, and they fail fairly early and I just wanted to you know get your input on you know, why, why do you think so many, it seems to me that you were able to start all these businesses, although you haven’t started them at the same time but it’s still you know, it’s one thing to make something successful once but then to do it over and over, you know requires some real skill, so why do you think businesses fail or businesses never take off?

Matthew Paulson: Sure. I think, i think some people just kind of get married to their one kind of idea that they have. My first idea didn’t work. I wanted to be the next big personal finance blogger. I know they have guys from PTMoney on a few weeks ago. I wanted to be that guy.

Success Harbor: Okay.

Matthew Paulson: That didn’t work out for me so.

Success Harbor: So how fast did it fail for you?

Matthew Paulson: Sure. So I started writing on a site. It was called American Consumer News which is also named my company but I started writing on the site in December 2006 and I think it was about, about, kind of mid-2008 when I figured out you know that this isn’t getting the level of traction that I want it to get and I don’t know if I’m ever going to be the next big JD Roth or whoever the big guy

Success Harbor: So we end up at two years, how much traffic were you able to get, how many visitors, I mean did you, was there nothing or was there just not enough?

Matthew Paulson: No I mean the site was getting maybe 1500 people a day but it just didn’t scale to the point where it would you know be more than a 50,000 dollar a year business.

Success Harbor: Okay, okay. So it took you about two years to say, “You know what, this is not, not, not the right business for me?”

Matthew Paulson: Yep, yep and I think at that point some people think, well I tried it, and it didn’t work, I failed and then they go back to whatever it is they were doing before so I think the key is it’s like, “Okay, what I was doing didn’t work perfectly but maybe in that, there’s something that would’ve worked or was working I could just try more of that or is there something else I could try,” so it’s really a matter of when you failed, you have to understand why you failed and then you can try something else then not make that same mistake again.

Success Harbor: Okay, okay and how long do you think, I mean do you think it’s, it’s reasonable to go for two years or somebody should know sooner or you can’t really, you know, how much time do you think you need to know, like you know, I need to pivot here?
Matthew Paulson: Sure. I think a lot of it depends on the type of business that you’re building. Building a blog and building an audience that’s, that’s kind of a slow ramp up unless you’re somebody like John Lee Dumez who happens to take off out of the gate. You know most people for the first year and a half, they don’t have many people rating their posts. It’s really kind of a hockey stick growth when you’re doing it right but you know I’d be getting about a thousand visitors a day for a year straight and I was kind of at the point where I was like, yeah I don’t think it’s going to get more than this so I decided it was time to do something else.

Success Harbor: Okay.

Matthew Paulson: But if you’re going to do like a bricks and mortar business and nobody is coming into your business at all for the first two months that’s a, that’s a big sign that you’re not doing something right so it really depends on the type of business that you have. What is, what’s a reasonable amount of time for it to take off and I think the only way to know that is just to talk to other people in similar businesses and kind of ask them you know how much did you make the first year, how much did you make the second year, how long did it really take you to take off and hopefully you’ll be able to find someone that will tell you that information.

Success Harbor: So why didn’t you give up? I mean there’s so many people that start something and it didn’t work out and then they say, you know what, this is not for me. I’m going to get a job and you know it’s just not, it’s just not fun. What, what, what kept you going and what, what told you, well this didn’t work I’m going to do something else?

Matthew Paulson: I just, I think I’m the type of person that wouldn’t thrive on kind of having a full time job for somebody else. Also, I like to be the person, I’ll, you know I want to get the full value of kind of the economic value that I’ve created. I don’t want to be working at an hourly rate for somebody the rest of my life so I knew that you know while that didn’t work out as well as I wanted it, I made fifty grand a year and it would probably still make fifty grand a year whether I rode on it or not so I though you know, maybe it’s time to try something else and see if that would work better. So it’s I mean a part of it is that I didn’t want to have a full time job and I did at the time and that’s not the kind of life I wanted to live and the other is just like I know there are people out there who are making a great living through Internet businesses but right now I’m not, and I don’t think that the people that have had success are any, any more special than I am so maybe it’s, they’re just working harder and been doing it longer and have gotten beaten up, beaten up enough so they know what, what works so a lot of it is stick-to-itiveness and kind of trying to realize what works and maximizing that and realizing stuff not working and be smart enough to quit and go do something else and I’d like to say that you know I’ve had one failure and three successes, but there’s been nearly half a dozen other sites and businesses that I’ve tried that haven’t really taken off so I’d like to say I’m batting a thousand but really I’m maybe batting twenty percent at the end of the day.

Success Harbor: I’m glad you said that because I think it’s so, sometimes people forget you know and then people when they hear stories like yours which I would definitely consider a success story you know they think well, it’s so easy you know you either got lucky or you know you’re just a genius you know but it’s really not that then you know the more people I interview, the more you know I see that you know that’s just not the way it is. It’s really, you actually, to succeed, you have to fail a lot more than succeed right and?

Matthew Paulson: Yep.

Success Harbor: And, and just like you said betting two hundred average instead of a thousand it just doesn’t, doesn’t work like that. Tell me now, so far it sounds like things went really well but maybe if you could share a mistake, maybe one of the biggest mistakes that you made in business that would be a good learning opportunity for us.

Matthew Paulson: Sure, so I think early on I was, was too dependent on getting traffic from search engines so like a lot of people I get a big chunk of the people that went to my news website early on was from Google and they had an algorithm update and I think it was January 2010 or 2011. It was called the panda update and other than some, I took a pretty big hit as a result of that because of that because you know the length of content I was posting was too upward flight for them. The amount of traffic that I had from Google kind of sunk about sixty percent overnight and you know kind of after that I realized you know I’m kind of at the mercy of all these other companies I’m working with so if I’m going to be in business and stick around a while I need to develop a business that’s going to be okay if one of these companies decides to stop sending me traffic or decides to stop working with me. So that’s what I really wanted to illustrate was that’s where my work came from. I wanted to deal with my own customers. So it’s, I think being dependent on you know a big company that doesn’t really care about you or who you are or somebody you don’t really have a relationship with, that’s a dangerous game and I think too many people do it and too many people kind of get their butt kicked in Internet businesses just by being too reliant on Apple or Google or any company that has kind of a platform that they own you.

Success Harbor: So what do you think is the most important thing for an entrepreneur to do during the first twelve months of being in business. Is it, is it sales? Is it, is it building, I mean in your, in your experience, building your own businesses, what do you think we should focus on in the first twelve months?

Matthew Paulson: Sure. So I think the common mistake that people make in their first year is that they spend too much time building a product or service and don’t spend enough time talking to customers. So I think really early on your goal shouldn’t even be so much about your product but more about identifying kind of market that you want to reach and just figuring out you know is there a way I can market to these people kind of on a cost-effective basis? And is there a way kind of to get repeatedly get in touch with these people to let them know about my product or service? You know can I do direct mail? Can I do email? Can I do ad-words? Is there some website I can advertise on to you know get in touch with these people because you know I’ve built some products that I thought were great products but I just didn’t’ know how to market them so it didn’t really matter that I had a great product because if you don’t know how to get in touch with your potential customer you’re kind of off the deep end. So I think, you know, really in the first year, your two goals should be you know market identification, and market reachability so if you can find a market that has a problem that needs to be solved, and then you also figure out that you can research people then you can kind of start thinking, you know, they have, they have this problem that needs to be solved, you know, can I find a solution for them to solve it and if you can, you kind of have all three legs of the stool that you need.

Success Harbor: Okay. What do you think is the biggest time waster for people that start a business, for entrepreneurs?

Matthew Paulson: I think there’s, there are a lot of people that worry about stuff that might be problems down the road but aren’t problems yet. People worry you know too much about like what kind of software they’re using and just issues that aren’t going to be issues for them for a long time to come. I kind of tell people well you know worry about what web posting that they have. It’s like it doesn’t really matter because you only have fifty people that go to your website a day so I think if you, if you worry about problems, you worry about problems when they become problems. You don’t worry about them ahead of time, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

Success Harbor: Okay. Now if somebody came to you in your family or maybe a good friend that had a job today and said they see your success in business and they say, “Matt teach me, teach me to become an entrepreneur”, what do you think is the first thing they need to know?

Matthew Paulson: Sure, I mean the first thing I think really is to understand what it really takes to start a business. Like I’ve had some friends that have gone to business school and wanted to start businesses and it’s like you have no idea what it actually takes to start a business. You need to work, you know, fifty to sixty hours per week for the next four years to make this happen and I don’t think people really understand how much work it is and everything that they have to do. Some people think that they just have to make something that they can sell which is so much more to that. I think, I think really kind of showing people what, what the actual challenge is, up front you know, really kind of gives them the perspective of, you know if I want to do this and I want to do this right and make it work, I need to come up with a marketing strategy. I need to talk to potential customers. I need to go to product. I need to talk to them and make sure they want it. I need to come up with the operations plan to be able to deliver that product. You know I need to figure out how I’m going to do customer service. I need to figure out my accounting and my corporate structure. Really I think if people understand all those things then they’ll know what they’re getting into ahead of time. I think, a lot of people, like I have a friend, his name is, his name is Peter and he’s trying to start a business for a massage therapist and I love the guy but he spends, he ends up spending nearly enough time to actually make the business happen. You know I met with him like a couple months ago and then I met with him again this week. Anyways, he hadn’t really gotten anything done and I was like, Peter if you keep working at this rate it’s going to take you three years to get your first product out. You need to really step it up. And I, I see a lot of guys like him that they want to do stuff like that and they work on stuff a little bit but they don’t work on, they don’t do enough work in a short enough period of time to really get anything off the floor.

Success Harbor: So I, I only have one more question but before that question I want to you know basically tell people how, give people an opportunity to contact you and get in touch with you, but you know what advice do you have for me, for my? You looked up my blog you know I interviewed over 50 entrepreneurs and you know you’re very successful with your business and you know I, I, you know I want to take advice from you. If you have one advice or a couple of words for me, I, I, I would be, I would very much welcome it.

Matthew Paulson: Sure, I think with you, you’re doing a great job of producing content. I love how many interviews you’ve done and your consistency in doing them and just to kind of write about the people that you’ve done I really applaud you for that. I think, you know, to really, I think you need to look for ways to maximize the content that you’re producing. The question is, how can I get this content that I’m already producing into as many different places as possible so if I were you I’d be looking at getting, you know, versions of your interviews on YouTube. I would try to be creating maybe like an online course that has content from the videos that you have. I’d really make sure that I’m doing social media well. I’d make like a LinkedIn group for Success Harbor. You know obviously John Lee Dumez is a great example for how to promote a podcast well and he, he’s done a great job in getting his content kind of all over the place and Pat Flynn is another great example and if you can get that content in just as many places as possible, that’s you know, how you’re going, how you’ll be able to build that audience as as fast as you can.

Success Harbor: Well thank you Matt and how can people connect with you and what’s the best place to check more, get more information about you and contact you?

Matthew Paulson: Absolutely. So first thing I wanted to share is that I’m currently in the process of writing a book. It’s called 40 Rules for Internet Business Success and it’s going to be out on July 21st and if you want to learn more about the book, the domain name is fortyrulesbook.com. Right now just go to my website but if you’re looking at this after July 21st of 2014 it’ll go to, right to the Amazon page but basically the pitch is you know it’s all the lessons I’ve kind of learnt in building my businesses during the last seven years so that you can kind of avoid some of the mistakes that I’ve made and kind of grow your business faster. So I have been posting some of the chapters on my website. It’s mattpaulson.com and Paulson is P A U L S O N.com. So if you want to read, sample chapters now you can on my website or you can follow me on Twitter and my user ID is just matthewdp, D as in die, P as in pony.

Success Harbor: So Matt, thank you very much. Make sure you check him out mattpaulson.com and hopefully when your book publishes you reach back and I could, I could add that to the podcast notes so people can, so people can find it though my site as well.

Matthew Paulson: Sure. I will absolutely do that

Success Harbor: Thank you very much Matt and hopefully we can connect maybe in a year and see how your book does and see how the rest of the businesses are doing just to get an update.

Matthew Paulson: Absolutely I will look forward to that.

Success Harbor: Thank you Matt

Matthew Paulson: Alright, thanks George.