Episode 61

Matt Ragland

Jump to 10K Followers With This Content Flywheel

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In this episode, Adam and Carlton are joined by Matt Ragland, a solo creator who was a part of the early team at Convertkit and Podia. Matt shares his content flywheel, how to create a ton of high-quality content, and the practical steps that allowed him to step away from being a full-time employee.

Highlights from the conversation:

  • Matt’s career journey (2:53)
  • Getting started in podcasting (9:23)
  • Daily vlogging while employed full-time (13:32)
  • Matt’s content flywheel (24:43)
  • Providing for other creators (30:34)
  • What’s on the content horizon (35:47)

 

Keep up with Matt:

 

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Transcription

Transcription generated by Otter.ai

Adam Vazquez 0:06
Hey, everybody. Welcome back into Content Is for Closers. It’s Adam solo here for the intro this week, but we have a special episode with Matt Ragland for you. Matt has been around the marketing space for quite a while he was one of the first employees at ConvertKit. He also worked at the project management software Podio or task manager and then went on to start his own content creation career. He became pretty well-known on YouTube, especially in the productivity space and bullet journal niche, and then kind of has expounded on that over the last several years. Still talking about productivity, talking about creativity, being a solo creator, and has leveraged that into the brand and that he has today.

On this episode, we get into kind of the history, some of the very practical things that he did in order to go from full-time employee to solo creator. I learned a lot from that part and then really dug into his content flywheel. I think that part is going to be very helpful for a lot of you who are looking to be prolific creators in your own right, Matt creates a ton of really, really high-quality content, and we got into his exact process for doing so. So hopefully you enjoyed this episode with Matt Ragland, YouTube creator extraordinaire.

Intro 1:28
Put that content down. Content. The close is over. What’s your name? Content. That’s my name. You know why, mister? Because you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight. I drove an $80,000 BMW. That’s my name. Content Is for Closers.

Adam Vazquez 1:50
Alright, we’re back. We’ve got Matt Ragland on the show. And if I can prod you, dear listener, to watch any of our YouTube videos, this would be the one to watch. Because in addition to being a creator, Matt has ready made a career as a hair, YouTube influencer as well. I’m jealous. Just as we’re sitting here, Matt, looking at you. So thank you for joining the show. And thank you for your locks of love.

Matt Ragland 2:18
Yeah, definitely. Well, I appreciate you saying that. You’re not the first one to make that comment. So Okay. Very, I feel very fortunate. I’m still waiting for some of my hair brand deals to come in. Because influencing is high. It’s some good last year. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I just took like six inches off last month.

Adam Vazquez 2:37
Wow. That is a lot.

Matt Ragland 2:39
Yeah, it was even more.

Adam Vazquez 2:41
Well, in addition to your burgeoning beauty career, Matt, you have done a bunch of different things in the content space, I think you are one of the great examples of what a lot of us aspire to do. You worked at a content-related company for a long time (which we’d love to hear about) and have made this transition into being a creator full-time in addition to starting your own agency. But for those who aren’t familiar with you, maybe give us that story. How did that come together over the last several years?

Matt Ragland 3:10
Sure. And I’m glad you made the point that it was several years. For me, I don’t think it has to be that way for everyone. But the way that content has changed content marketing, the way that blogs and social media and YouTube have all changed. I’ve done it all with varying scales of success. But I first started blogging about 10 years ago, wordpress.com blog and made the change to self-hosted I was writing for a while I did a pot I did a 30-episode run of a podcast myself back in 2014. Just pretty wild thinking back you were in? Yeah. And then imagine if I had stuck with it. We’ll come back to that. We’ll come back to that thought, that temptation. But in 2015, I started applying for jobs in content and creator-focused startups. And I became I got pretty close with a couple my most memorable interview was I was a finalist for a product manager role at backcountry.com And I got flown out to Salt Lake City and Park City for a couple of days to do interviews with the team. That was super cool. But then I ended up working at ConvertKit. In late 2015. I was the fifth member of the team at ConvertKit. We had less than 1000. We had less than 500 customers at the time that I joined. And I started working on the success and onboarding team and also migrations and that’s where I started to. Not just I was always going to continuing my own creative work I wrote I’m for the ConvertKit blog, I was doing my own writing on my side and on medium that that point medium was like super big five years ago. And the other thing that made a big difference to me was I started interacting with a lot of the creators that I admired. And one of the things that you may not expect from that type of interaction was not that I learned some particular tip or trick or secret strategy that like, helped me in any big way. A lot of it was just the confidence of seeing that, yes, these people are prolific, and in their own way, they are special, but there’s nothing super special about them that I don’t have. And maybe I didn’t like fully believe that before. But the more that I interacted with creators that I admired now, they’re really great people, but they’re also like, not that much better than me. Yeah. And that, that understanding of that confidence, and it’d be like, Okay, well, they’ve all been in the situation that I am in right now. And I can just continue to make progress. The tipping point for me, in my creative career came when I started on YouTube, I think it was in 2017, I started my YouTube channel in February 2017. And I made a commitment to do, I did a video every day to start. And that just helped. That helped me, that helped me like just add content and get the reps in, which is a concept we’ll come back to. But it also helped me fill up my YouTube channel, like you can, anybody can obviously put videos on YouTube, but when someone lands on your channel, and they find a video, like through YouTube that resonates with them, you want to give them a back catalog of content to then be able to bench through and just having content available is the best way to do that. And so the quicker you can like, add in a back catalog, even if it’s relatively short, like I would say— Now we’re getting into strategy a little bit. I would say like, make more small things early than the big things because one, you’ll fill up your back catalog faster, and people can piece your content together. And two, I don’t especially early on, like spending too much time on a single piece of content. Because early on, you’re not going to know what really resonates with people. And so just think of like one piece of content and one core idea for the topic, a sir, a brand that does this really well right now. And of course, like, of course brand is ship 30. For 30. Anybody who’s been on Twitter is familiar. In the Twitter creator space is familiar with ship 30 At this point, but they do a really good job with it. And I think you can take that same concept of like, instead of thinking like, I have to write 1000 word essay, or I have to have a 2,000 word, blog post or whatever this thing like, what can I write what is the one thing that I can communicate in 250 ish words, and do the same thing several times per week instead of like, once a week, or even worse, the thing that kills so many, early-stage creators is not a lack of ideas, and is not a lack of quality, even it’s a lack of consistency. If you have like, save two to 3,000 words of ideas, or 20 to 30 minutes of video content or podcast content inside of you, it’s better to space that out among three to four to five pieces of content over the course of a month than just one big batch right at the beginning.

Adam Vazquez 8:56
Yeah, we are doing a version of this with our YouTube channel, because we’ve been predominantly focused on podcasts. And so we’re now building and I think shorts is really making this approachable for creators of all kinds of abilities because you don’t have to be able to edit, like you said, a 10-minute video, you can do something that 60 seconds, 30 seconds and bill up the backlog that way.

I want to poke on a couple of things. So first, you said you did create the podcast back in 2014. And you did some vlogging as well. Was that around the same concepts of productivity? Were you already thinking about those topics back then? Or were they different endeavors?

Matt Ragland 9:38
They were different endeavors. I was thinking about productivity then but not in an expression of content sort of way is something that I was really interested in personally. And I wanted to optimize my time and so I was getting into calendar time blocking. I think deep work came out around Dan and I had read deep work. But the topics for those were very much around the concept of marketing, storytelling as a marketing device, or vice versa. And so the I don’t even think the podcast is really live, because I definitely stopped paying for Lipson a long time ago, is the name of the podcast, though was story signals. And one of the things that was really good about that the most valuable part of it, and you probably experienced this now, it’s one of the best parts about podcasts is the connections that you can make with people. When you have a podcast, and when you have shown your ability to publish podcasts and carry a conversation and be a good host, and ask interesting questions, you can reach out to a good number of people. And I think for me, a couple of like, key connections that I made during that podcast that have paid off, since in different ways one was in 2014. I interviewed James Clear. His first website was called Passive Panda. I think he was still kind of doing some Passive Panda stuff at that point. So I got to talk to James way back then. And we’ve stayed in touch. Another one that probably a lot of listeners may not recognize, but his name is Ryan Delk. Ryan is good friends with Nathan Berry, who is the founder of ConvertKit. And they were in a mastermind together. And so when Nathan was talking to when I was interviewing with Nathan for role at ConvertKit, I was able to make a connection with Delk. And from as far as I no doubt, gave me like a good thumbs up because we had a very cool podcast conversation together. Yeah. And so yeah, that was a year before at that point, but it had certainly paid off. So they were different. They were different topics. But one of the other things that like I don’t always talk expressly about because it’s not my topic. But I’m very, I’ve always been very intentional and very focused on like, good relationships and building relationships and building a positive network as well. And that has paid off for lack of a better term, in multiple ways, both literal and relationally over the past 10 years.

Adam Vazquez 12:37
I love that. I think it’s such a great point. And listeners of this show know what, when you were doing your show, that’s about when we launched our first podcast, and unfortunately, after about 18 months, like got all the guests that you were describing, and ran out of steam after like 75 episodes, and it’s one of I don’t have very many regrets, but it’s probably the biggest regret I have is not continuing that to this point. Because it was just such a bigger show at the time. So much more attention. Like you said, what if we would have just kept with it? Weirdly, just funny, I go to church with Ryan Delks’ parents.

Matt Ragland 13:14
Oh, wow.

Adam Vazquez 13:14
Yeah. Super small world. Yeah.

Matt Ragland 13:19
Yeah, I haven’t talked to him in a while, but he’s a great guy.

Adam Vazquez 13:21
The other thing that you mentioned was that you started creating a YouTube video every day. Were you still full-time employed at ConvertKit at the time?

Matt Ragland 13:30
Yeah, I was full-time at ConvertKit. The first two year to three years that I had the channel, I was like full-time at either ConvertKit or Podio. I certainly did not keep up the daily cadence. But my goal at the time, and this is my goal at the time was just to publish the video like Gary V’s channel was really was really, really big at that time. It’s still really big, but it was really, really, really big at that time, and there was something that he said that really stuck in my head and has continued to whenever I get into a wall with YouTube, even though YouTube is very much changed over the past five years, the expectation of quality is way different. But at the time, Gary was saying, “Don’t create. Document. Don’t create. Document.” And that really stuck in my head. That was my principal for the show for the channel at that time was we were actually in, we moved to Chattanooga that month. We were just talking about that. And so there’s just a lot going on in life. We had an almost two-year-old son, we were living in this little apartment. We were both my wife and I were both working full time. We were like doing all kinds of things and I was just recording, doing like the daily vlog thing real okay. And I was trying to what, what a more consistent cadence we talked about like doing making multiple small bets say like in the ship 30 model. You can do a similar thing to say like a three to five-minute video again, one idea one concept. But the thing that was helpful to me at the time was if I’m doing a lot of videos or writing a lot of content, you can try a lot of different content types or topics without feeling like just one has to hit. So I was talking about marketing, I was talking about parenting, I was talking about fitness, I was talking about working at startups, I was talking about customer development and onboarding, and like, all these different things. And after about six months of doing daily, and then going into weekly, I made a video that was called How, how I plan my week in a bullet journal. And so that was like my first specific super specific productivity video. And even more so for that I just basically happened upon the bullet journal community on YouTube, which is quite vibrant, and very willing to watch videos. And what I saw at the time, as I think at that point, after six months, my most popular videos were two maybe 300 views, it was not good, it definitely was not taking off, which is a side thing that you have to enjoy, enjoy what you’re doing. And I was really enjoying making videos. So I made this productivity bullet journal video. And I noticed after maybe a month that it had like 500 views, I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. And then like another month went by, it was getting close to the end of the year. And it was up to like 800 views, but it was kind of like slowing down. It’s like, oh, it’s still like five times as popular as my normal videos were at this point. So I decided and I had around. So this was December 2017. I had been vlogging for almost a year and had about 650 subscribers. And my most popular video had 800 views. I made another bullet journal video that I released the day after Christmas. That was basically titled like how I plan my year in a bullet journal. And my goal at that time was like, I hope this video eventually helps me get to 1000 subscribers and as my first 1,000-view video. And within like two days it hit 1000 views watch at the time for me, I was like, Oh my gosh, yeah, yeah, easing. And within a week, I had gone from basically 700 to 1,000 subscribers in Corona. And then I for the next six months, I basically made some kind of bullet journal-related video almost every week for the next six months. And in those six months, I went from 1000 subscribers to 10,000 subscribers. That’s and it, it was really wild. I still have not had, like, I probably haven’t had that kind of growth sense, which is like a whole other conversation that I don’t think I can fully answer. But like 2018, I went from 1,000 to like 18,000 subscribers that year. And I definitely have not had that kind of growth sense, which again, is a different conversation and a something that I still haven’t quite cracked yet. But the last thing that I want to say about it is I just started to turn all of the ideas, and especially all the things that I was doing from a productivity perspective, through the lens of the bullet journal. So there’s a bunch of thing, I used the bullet journal, basically as a Trojan horse for how I looked at the world. So it’s like if it’s how to calendar blocks, like here’s how I calendar, like, well, I calendar block, here’s how to do in a bullet journal, I track my to dues, here’s how I do it in a bullet journal. So as long as the other thing and this is like more specific for me at the time, but it’s always helpful from a content perspective to think about how far down can you reasonably niche? And I say niche, not niche. I’m happy, whoever disagrees. But it’s helpful to have like two or three levers that you can niche down on. And so like, it’s not just productivity, it’s the bullet journal. And it’s not just the bullet journal. It’s from a guy’s perspective because most of the bullet journal channels are run by women, and they’re wonderful. Then even like further down, that it’s a very minimal kind of Spartan layout. It’s not decorated, it’s not artsy because not all those things are usually mutually exclusive. So it’s productivity. It’s analog bullet journal. It’s more targeted at males even though I was never was like super intentional about that. And then it’s very minimal. So like taking those layers down because there are plenty of dudes who like to write down their tasks and not use a task manager per se, and don’t want to draw on their notebook. And there are also plenty of women who don’t care to draw or don’t want to draw or themselves. So like going a few layers deep on a niche really helps someone come to my channel and think, “Oh, this is the thing for me.” So anytime you want to start at a top-level topic, how far down can you niche will help.

Adam Vazquez 20:43
So practically speaking, was it going through that year period of weekly publishing, and then figuring out that filtration system? Were those the two main levers that allowed you to go from full-time employee ConvertKit/part-time creator to full-time doing this?

Matt Ragland 21:04
Yeah, because as the audience grew, I was working at ConvertKit at the time, and then I was working at Podia, which is a course and product platform for creators. And so like, I just had the good fortune of understanding those levers in the creator-like stack, as well. So from day one, I was collecting email addresses. And then pretty, pretty soon, once the email list was active, again, there was a short course. And then there was a, like, one-week workshop intensive. And so there’s like a steady progression. And so, yeah, that it was all connected, it was all strategic at the time to be able to do that. But I think like as you can look at how you build those things, it’s not impossible, but I like honestly, in my experience, it’s unlikely these days that most people, especially early on in their process are going to have like a $20,000-$50,000 launch event that’s going to allow you to quit your job. Like, one, those were probably more prevalent, when like ebooks and courses were, were like, a brand new thing for the first time. And like again, the bar was lower, which is fine, especially based on what we see now. But like what I’ve done, and what I see a lot of people do now when they’re trying to make this full-time operator, like salary to side hustle to full-time creator is that it is a very iterative process. So I would make 5,000 and then 15,000 and then 20,000. And then I had to also be disciplined enough to start saving some of those things as well. Like, and everyone’s circumstances are different, like I had, when I went full time I had two kids. And now I have three kids. And so I wanted to fix I wanted to needed to I had six months of expenses in the bank. For full disclosure, I sold some investments and took another three months of runway out. And so it ended up being that I probably needed based on if I unless we were really going to take a step back from our lifestyle, which is more challenging. Like ifestyle creep is a real thing. It’s challenging to do that is like I probably needed nine months and probably closer to a year. But I would still say probably six months was solid because I don’t know how much longer it would have taken me to get to a year of expenses and how much I would have given myself excuses to keep waiting. So I really had to go for it.

Adam Vazquez 24:10
Our audiences had to hear my version of that several times. But similar thing six months was was the number we started with. And we weren’t backed up to even after six months, but there was enough of a light at the end of the tunnel that it was like okay, yeah, but let’s just keep pressing forward.

So that brings us sort of to what you are doing now. Obviously, you talked about other creators being prolific. I think you’re a prolific content creator in all the different things that you’re doing. Tell us about your content flywheel and what it looks like today.

Matt Ragland 24:41
Yeah, so even though my main channel is on YouTube, most of my flywheel starts with writing. And I send a newsletter twice a week. That is a thing that almost every week does get done at least once and goes out every week and out Say over a quarter, I probably only miss the second sent like, two times. But that’s getting better and better. The flywheel starts with writing. And a lot of times it will be. A lot of times, it’ll even start with a tweet. So it’ll be a fragment of an idea that I might share on Twitter. And if it gets some traction, if it gets even a couple of replies and a handful of likes, I think, okay, there’s something there. Because I’m not huge, huge on Twitter. And so like some engagement is like, a good sign a good signal for me. And so I’ll expand on that idea in the newsletter, and if something but I also will often just start with an idea that I have for the newsletter, if that hits for the newsletter, I will often then turn that into a YouTube video. Sure. Because I know like this, this is working. And then in the YouTube video, and I also sourced the source these through email replies or Twitter comments, is if someone—and this was really big for me when I made that first jump from 1k to 10k in 2018—is if anyone comments, especially on a video that says like, oh, this thing that you talked about briefly, I found really interesting, where I would love it if you clarify this some more. Like as an example, I told you I did the annual planning video. Well, one of the things that I talked about, there was a time blocking strategy. I call it the 10 blocks, but I’ve talked about it for like 90 seconds. And lots of people in the comments were like, Oh, what’s this 10 Block thing? Can you explain it again, and you didn’t really spend any time on it is like a 30-minute video. So there were lots of things. But then the very next video that I made is like, oh, yeah, let me do a deep dive on 10 blocks. And that video did really well. Those are still like, probably two of my top five most popular videos are those two. So anytime you can get engagement Questions, comments from an audience that should feed into your flywheel because you literally know there’s something there, you don’t have to guess it’s literally right there. And then the other piece of this is just through a curated as this sounds pretentious, a curated information diet. Sounds very pretentious. And as I’m not as good at it as the pretension shit sounds. But I do have a rough but workable system of I do have a rough but workable system of capturing ideas, notes and highlights from different things I read, watch or just think of, and I take time out of each week to develop recent ideas. That’s really important. I don’t press myself to do it. I don’t like if there’s an idea that isn’t resonating anymore. I don’t like try and bring something up. But if there’s something that does, like it sparks enough to for me to make some kind of highlight or note about it. And then when I go back through it again, and there’s still something there is like okay, there’s something there for me. And so I’ll elaborate on it a little bit just like in the note on the file, wherever it happens to live. Usually for me, that is a notion or Rome. And so now I have like basically building blocks of content. Thiago forte talks about this a lot in building a second brain. Marie Pullin is great at developing these, as well. But now, when maybe if I don’t feel creative, I don’t feel inspired. Maybe there’s nothing that I’ve written on Twitter that has like had any impact recently. Then I can go through these recent notes and ideas and be like, Okay, this Yeah, this still sounds interesting. And I actually have a sentence or two of content that I can plug directly into the newsletter and then build from there.

Adam Vazquez 28:56
That’s awesome. Just observing through what you just said, you talked about your Twitter following being maybe a seedling of an idea and then taking it to your newsletter and then potentially taking it to YouTube. Obviously, I’m sure there are all versions of that, but in that stack—I might be wrong—but Twitter’s where you seem like you have your smallest following, newsletter is bigger, and YouTube is obviously biggest. Is that intentional? That you test ideas on a smaller scale and then expand?

Matt Ragland 29:25
Yeah, I’d never thought of it that way. I never thought of it that way. Okay, but I think it’s more about just what Twitter is like Twitter is, is micro thoughts. And the expectation is I can share like the seed of an idea, the spark of an idea. And as soon as like, Oh, that’s interesting, or Oh, tell me more. What do you mean by that? Like, okay, well, I can not just elaborate in on Twitter, but I really okay, let me write this out a little bit more in the newsletter. In the newsletter, there’s also a progression of scripting almost as well. So I can, if I write about something in the newsletter that then becomes part of a video, then I can take sections of that and turn it into part of the script for a video.

Adam Vazquez 30:18
Now, in addition to all that you do as a creator and sort of mimicking actually what you what you’ve built here, in terms of a flywheel and such, I know you have an agency as well that provides part of that to other creators. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Matt Ragland 30:32
Yeah, absolutely. This is relatively new for me, in 2021, that was last year, I was all courses coaching YouTube videos. And then I had also started doing some operations work on the side, like helping creators like me with their email newsletters with their courses. And I connected with another like former ConvertKit colleague, his name is Daryl Westerfeld. He was the first head of growth at ConvertKit. We both started around the same time. But he had done some educational course operations in the past as well. So we joined, we joined forces, and built up a little team. And one of the things we noticed as we started building courses, or operating courses for these creators is surprise, the ones who were sending the most consistent emails were the ones that were getting the most sales, and especially the best conversion rates. And so during the summer, literally this summer, we started pivoting some of our service from like course development and operations to managing email newsletters for creators. And the way that that works for us is it is a little bit like a ghostwriting service, there’s a ghostwriting component to it. But the way that we’ve organized it, and the service that we provide to the graders is not simply like, Hey, let us go straight your newsletter, it’s literally let us take the whole thing off of your plate, is the people that we tend to work with are not super active newsletter writers. Right now, they usually they have an email list. And maybe they’ve done it in the past, or they do it occasionally. But the value is there to send weekly to improve their core sales, to get them more clients depending on their business model, or to do newsletter sponsors, which is something that the ConvertKit sponsor network has really been helping a lot of creators with recently, myself included. And so when you send weekly, everything else gets better for your business. And so what we do is we use the creators own content flywheel, but they don’t again, they don’t have to do anything with it, we source we do all the research. For back catalogue content, then we write, we edit, we send it to the client for review. So if they want to change anything they can, but then we take it the rest of the way. Also, it’s not just like, here’s a Google Doc with your newsletter, have fun in ConvertKit approve it, we put it in ConvertKit, we handle the automation, the linking, and then we schedule it and send it and so our clients don’t have to log into ConvertKit. But they still get a newsletter that goes out every week.

Adam Vazquez 33:20
Yeah, it’s such a beautiful thing. I know a lot of creators that we work with get can get overwhelmed with, “I don’t want to learn the technology.” And what’s beautiful with this is you have the obviously a ton of experience with the platform and have built the content yourself for your own brand. So have both of those sides of experience.

Matt Ragland 33:41
Awesome. Oh, good. Yeah, part of it sounds a little infomercial Lee sometimes it’s like not only can I do this for you, but I’m also a client myself. This is like an edition of my newsletter that I didn’t write like, it’s part of a YouTube video part of a podcast series that I did in the past so it is still in my voice. But like writing those words in this way and putting it into ConvertKit I didn’t do that as well.

Adam Vazquez 34:08
Yeah, and anybody who’s created anything understands the lift that comes with that like this is one of my big hills to die on right now is so I used to work for Gary Vee obviously loved him. I think the idea of repurposing content and the way that he what he means behind it is different than the way that it gets used and plastered. And to me, what you’re describing is a beautiful way of repurposing content. You’ve talked about a topic, you have it, but then you have other experts who make that tailored to the platform.

Matt Ragland 34:44
And I’ve always taken that like from him. I’ve actually like used his I was talking to someone today who was going to take pieces from their newsletter and turn it into Twitter threads. I was don’t just copy and paste like into it, like make it a Twitter thread like it should be native content. And so that’s what we do. And I think it is interesting and helpful to people is like, if you have a YouTube video that we can turn into a month of newsletters, this isn’t just transcribed, copy, paste, it’s like we’re going to get to, like the heart of the topic. And we will like, still use your words still, like use your screenshots and everything, but we’re going to make it into an email. It’s not just a copy/paste transcription, it’s going to be a good newsletter.

Adam Vazquez 35:27
Matt, I feel like I could talk for hours with you, just with so many more questions, but I want to be mindful of time. And we ask every guest that comes on what is something, either a trend that you are noticing, or just something that you have going on, maybe even with your agency that you’re particularly excited about going forward.

Matt Ragland 35:47
I’m really excited about the opportunity for sponsorships for newsletter creators, and it’s something that can be really, really impactful. It can help you monetize sooner rather than later. And it’s something that does take some work to like source brands, the converted creator network, which I’ve already or sponsored network, which I’ve already mentioned, is doing a lot of that legwork for creators.

Adam Vazquez 36:18
Can you just give us your little— I know you tweeted a case study, but it was so memorable and so powerful. Can you just describe that?

Matt Ragland 36:26
Yeah, so I didn’t start— As I said, some of this is very recent for me as well. But I, it can be challenging to find sponsors, and to like, go through the whole, like, negotiating pitching media kit, the whole thing. And there’s still some of that that is like table stakes to start getting sponsorships. But it got to a point where again, like, I’m very mindful of my time and the impact of my time. And so it was always a case to me of like, okay, well, I could spend a couple of days, a couple of weeks not have like total time, but like, over the span of a couple of weeks, I could try and like nail down this brand deal. Or I could just do a workshop and make the same amount of money. Or I could like work on my course. Or I could go find a new client. He was always like such an additional left, even for me that like understands 90% of the components, it was still a lot. Yeah, but what the ConvertKit sponsor network does is they just send you, like, here’s your sponsor, and you get to approve everything. But it’s not anyone that I wouldn’t want to work with. But they sent me like, Hey, do you want to work with this, and we’re like, great, they’re like, cool, here’s the link, here’s the copy, here’s the image, just put it into your email. And you’ll get paid at the end of the month. So went from doing like a very occasional one-off email sponsorship that was always connected to a YouTube sponsorship. So I would just like throw it in there like, hey, extra $500, you want to do a couple of emails and make sure I’m like great free money for me. But now like, I get, like, basically four to 500 bucks per insertion on my newsletter, and I send twice a week. So eight cents on average, usually per month. And that’s $4,000, that two months ago was just not there. And I’m doing the same work. So hopefully it will be the opportunity. So that’s becoming more and more mainstream. I think the last thing that I would say about it is don’t get stuck thinking that you have to be over 10,000 Or even over 5000 to get a sponsorship there are like mechanics in place, and there are opportunities for that. I think it’s worth the experience to start trying to do those things. And one other person to shout out on the sponsorship front, his name is Justin Moore. He’s the creator wizard on Twitter. And he has like millions of dollars in sponsorships booked over the past 5-10-ish years with his own his own channels. And he’s been a great resource for me and many others figuring out no matter the size of your platform or audience how you can start getting sponsorships and brand deals.

Adam Vazquez 39:20
Incredible. That’s such a great practical thing for the listeners to using can go can go start using that today, especially if you’re already using ConvertKit. Matt, if people want to check out your work if they don’t check out your channels, where’s the best place to send them as we go out from here?

Matt Ragland 39:33
Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at Matt Ragland. You can also like find out more about my agency and the offer and get on an email list for that regard, whether we work directly or not, go to yourweekly.email.

Adam Vazquez 39:49
Yourweekly.email, and we’ll we will link all that below. We appreciate your time. We know you value it and we’ll have to do this again sometime soon.

Matt Ragland 39:58
Yeah, thanks so much, Adam. Appreciate it.

Carlton Riffel 40:00
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