Knowing When it's Time to Let Part of Your Business Go with Joseph Hogue of Let's Talk Money

Joseph Hogue is creator of the Let’s Talk Money YouTube Channel with over 500,000 subscribers.

We talk about candidly wanting to earn money as an online creator, letting go of projects that aren’t serving you well and the important questions that multi-passionate content creators need to ask themselves in order for their projects to grow.

• Equity analyst background-private wealth management and in 2013 decided to start an online business and discovered that blogs don’t make money but learned how to monetize quickly.
• He started a YouTube channel that currently has over 500,000 subscribers
• Joseph went into the personal finance space with the idea of making money.
  
  • Looked at blogging first as a business
• Self-publishing was a great way for him to repurpose the content that he was creating on his low views websites.
• I share why I rebranded and included the phrase “money hungry”
• Content creation is still really in its infancy and people aren’t aware of how much work goes into creating digital content.
• We dig a little deeper into why Joseph began self-publishing and how he researched the different ways that content creators are making money online.
  He created a content strategy around self-publishing
• I wonder how people found his books? This was a total gamble.
  
  • Joseph used SEO
• Why did YouTube resonate with him? Why did he stick with YouTube?
  He encountered success really quickly on the channel and was able to monetize within 4 months and focused on hot topic videos
• Joseph shares one of his favorite strategies-go to a (5-10) channels similar to yours, sort that person’s most popular videos top 10-15 videos. Pay attention to the keywords and topics.
  
  • Find the topics popular on all of those channels and then share your take on the topic
  • YouTube prefers to promote channels that are siloed into specific content
    
    • Graham Stefan
    • Andre Jek
  • He tried to do different topics and Joseph found that multiple topics slows down the momentum of the other videos on a person’s channel
    
    • Focus on the person vs. what they're talking about on the channel
• Joseph shares his monetization verticals
  
  • Self-publishing
  • Video courses
  • Downloadable spreadsheet
  • YouTube ads which are around ¼ of his income (more than he expected)
  • Affiliates
  • Sponsors
  • Mastermind group
• He points out that content creators have to have metrics around the progress around their monetization and in the beginning when you have a smaller community the approach is different
• Multiple revenue streams are important to have because of the uncertainty around each revenue streams
• How does Joseph avoid “Squirrel” syndrome with all of these areas of focus
  
  • He has a very defined and definite schedule
• Joseph works on all content strategies. He has a list and works through them outside of the normal ideas that come up each year on the calendar.
  
  • Affiliates and sponsors influence this strategy as well
• Right now Joseph is in the midst of a major pivot and I know that a lot of multi-passionate content creators will pay attention to the pivot he’s working through. He found that he just didn’t have the time or motivation to focus on the other project.
• There’s a point where you have to ask yourself “what to do when you have a split focus?”
• He’d tried to find business partners, managers and other stop gaps that just never worked. He also realized that he didn’t want to manage other people and that wasn’t the way he wanted to scale his business.
• For people who are new to content creation, test out the different types of media to see which o