Brilliant Ideas

#18: How Matt Diamante Turned His Biggest Setbacks into a Multi-Million Dollar Business

• Alyssa Bellisario

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Matt Diamante, founder of HeyTony digital marketing agency, shares how he transformed business failures into a multi-million dollar success story by creating affordable digital products for small businesses. He reveals his philosophy of making SEO tools accessible to help as many entrepreneurs as possible, believing small businesses are the backbone of every economy.

• Failed ventures including a Lightroom preset company and a cologne business taught Matt valuable lessons about when to walk away
• Created digital products priced at $10/month when competitors charge $30-$150 for similar functionality
• His website audit tool helps identify SEO issues while including video tutorials on how to fix them
• Watchdog tool tracks competitors' website changes for just $10/month, giving small businesses enterprise-level intelligence
• Content creation strategy involves recording answers to common questions and repurposing across multiple platforms
• Use ChatGPT to turn video transcripts into blog posts and social media scripts
• When content performs well organically, turn it into targeted local ads
• Experiment with posting on multiple platforms as content that fails on one might thrive on another

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Matt :

I want to help as many small businesses as possible because I truly believe and know that small businesses are the backbone of literally every economy.

Alyssa:

Welcome to Brilliant Ideas, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of some of the most inspiring digital products created by solopreneurs just like you. I'm your host, alyssa, a digital product strategist who helps subject matter experts grow their business with online courses, memberships, coaching programs and eBooks. If you're a solopreneur with dreams of packaging your expertise into a profitable digital product, then this is the podcast for you. Expect honest conversations of how they started, the obstacles they overcame, lessons learned the hard way and who face the same fears, doubts and challenges you're experiencing, from unexpected surprises to breakthrough moments and everything in between. Tune in, get inspired and let's spark your next big, brilliant idea.

Alyssa:

Welcome back to the Brilliant Ideas podcast so happy you're here. Joining me today is Matt DeMonte, the founder of hey Tony, a digital marketing agency who helps small businesses master SEO to achieve results. He's built an impressive suite of digital products, from a best-selling SEO course, the world's cheapest website audit tool, a hey Tony's Insiders community to a competitor tracker called Watchdog. Join me as we dive into Matt's story and learn how he turned his business setbacks into a multi-million dollar success story. Let's dive in. Welcome to the show, matt. I'm so happy you're here.

Matt :

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This is gonna be fun.

Alyssa:

I know I'm glad to have you as well and I've been following you on Instagram for a while and I've seen your growth over time. But what's interesting is that before you built hey Tony, you also experienced your fair share of business setbacks, which I know for so many people it's hard to believe because they see how successful you are on Instagram and how you've become this like go-to, like SEO influencer, and so hearing about those not so perfect moments is what my listeners can really relate to. And for someone who's listening and might be in that weird space in business where they've had it for a while, they you know they're aren't growing, but they're just not sure what their next direction is, can you shed some perspective on when you knew it was time to give up on a business or an idea and then how did you know it was just time to just move on?

Matt :

Okay, that's, that's a very good question. So I've had a lot of failed businesses, startups, ventures, whatever you want to call them, um, and oftentimes they involved multiple other people. So for me that was. It's always a red flag when somebody's like, well, do you want to partner with me? I'm like no, I want to make all the decisions. I don't want to do everything for myself, um, which you know has its pros and cons to it.

Matt :

But, uh, one of the businesses that I started was a Lightroom preset company, right, I don't think I mentioned that to you before, but so it was selling Lightroom presets and it was this website where you just go buy Lightroom presets. I think it was like 12 bucks or something for a pack of like 10 presets and we had tutorials and all this kind of stuff showing people how to install them in Lightroom. And I partnered with this guy, uh, out in the States and he's a photographer, so he was making all these presets and he was also a client of mine. So we were I was doing, I was running ads for him and stuff like that while we were doing this other business on the side. Um, and this is like very early days, hey, tony like me and I have one other person on the team and he stopped paying me as a client. We were still doing work. They stopped paying me. And this other website it was called Hue and Hatch it's still live, people still buy and people still do randomly buy Lightroom presets, even though we don't do anything on that site. He yeah, he really stopped paying and that the other website was making money. So I was like listen, like I'm just going to take this website and kind of shut down the business, like roll up the business, whatever, because you haven't paid. And he was like, okay, it sounds good. I was like sweet.

Matt :

So after that, like we were, we're getting all of our revenue from running ads. So as running ads, you know, you have to spend your own money to make the ads back. And I was spending like, let's say, a hundred bucks a day to make 150 bucks a day, which was really great. But I was like if this starts going the opposite way, then I'm spending a hundred bucks and I'm not getting my money back and I didn't have that much money at the time to you know kind of risk to gamble with. So for me I was just like you know what, I'm going to shut this business down. I have other stuff that I'm doing as well, and I think that's really common for a lot of entrepreneurs. It's like you can't focus on all these different things at the same time, like you can't focus on all these different things at the same time, yeah.

Alyssa:

And like when do you close something down? Yeah, no, that makes sense, yeah.

Matt :

And so when do you, when would you close? When it isn't profitable anymore? And you just kind of figure that out. It was still, it was still profitable, but I was like it's not worth the risk to me to do Right, especially if I didn't have somebody else who was like fronting the money, a risk to me to do right, especially if I didn't have somebody else who was like fronting the money. Now I'll spend, you know, 50 to a hundred $200 a day on ads just as a trial to see if an idea is viable before I do it. And when I say idea, I mean like, am I selling a course? Am I selling a tool? Am I selling? You know people would sign up to my email list. I'll spend that money just to see if it actually makes sense.

Matt :

But speaking of not having time to do a business, I actually had a cologne company and I wish I had one around here. I have a couple left. So I started a cologne company Like do you know the wax colognes? Yeah, so a friend who he at the time was running like a branding kind of design agency and I was doing ads and SEO and all this other stuff. And again, this is pre-anything big with hey Tony, nobody knows about us, no kind of thing. So we started this company. We each invested close to $10,000 in getting this cologne developed and we got it made in France, all this stuff, and we got like a drop shipper in the states uh, who could you know ship it out that, integrated with our shopify store, all this kind of stuff? So we spent months trying to figure out what scent we wanted, right like what's that we like best, all this kind of stuff. We did the branding. Um well, he did the branding and I did the marketing side of things. And we eventually got all the cologne. It was made and we didn't know. We don't know anything about importing and exporting. So we got it sent to um, this, this drop shipping warehouse in uh, oh my god, illinois, like just outside chicago. So this I don't know pallet or several pallets I've never actually seen what it looked like. But it got delivered to the Chicago. It was the O'Hare airport in Chicago and they were like, where are the import papers? And we're just like what do you mean? I thought you could just bring stuff here and sell it. And we were talking to our accountant because we had the same accountant and he's like you guys are fucking idiots. You have $20,000 of colognes sitting at the airport. They're just going to destroy it or return it. You need to have those papers. And anyways, long story short, we eventually got somebody at the dropshipping warehouse. They knew import, export something and they were able to get it at the dropshipping warehouse. They knew import export something and they were able to get it to the dropshipping warehouse.

Matt :

And then we realized we just spent all our money getting this thing made and we ran some ads. You know, probably spent like a couple grand on ads and it was so expensive for us to make. I think it was costing us like almost like 50 or 60 bucks per unit or something like it was something crazy that we had to sell for 80 bucks to really make any profit and like that's a more luxury item. We didn't think about doing influencer marketing. That was an expensive avenue as well. So we were running ads and nobody knew about the brand, so nobody was really buying it and so we just kind of let it sit there and we're like, yeah, we'll come back to this Like it's at the drop shipping center, like it's totally fine, they charge us like 20, 30 bucks a month just to store it there.

Matt :

And if we do get orders, they'll ship it out.

Matt :

So a couple of months go by and my accountant's like what are you doing with all that stuff, like all that inventory you guys have?

Matt :

I'm like, oh, it's like just sitting there right now, we're going to come back to it.

Matt :

He's like you guys made a mistake. And I'm like, no, no, it's totally fine. Like we're like we got busy with other stuff. We're going to come back to it when things slow down. He's like how are you expecting things to slow down? And and a half of it sitting there.

Matt :

I just called the drop shipping center. I was like destroy it, get rid of it. And again we had to pay a fee for that. So for me in that situation, or for me and my friend, we're just like we had to have a conversation like how much money do we have to spend to potentially get our money back? And you know a lot of people have this sunk cost fallacy. It's like I spent I have have twenty thousand dollars of inventory at this warehouse like I gotta, I gotta sell it right, and we just we're like we don't want to spend another 10 grand or 15 grand, 20 grand, whatever, in order to sell this product that is just sitting there, when we could get a couple clients you know that we're working with and just make all that money back yeah, that's really complicated.

Alyssa:

I could never do something like that. It would require so much time and so much energy and like so much too much. And that's why I think you've you know you've done so well with digital products and digital marketing, things like that because you're just like just so much easier than having to run like a physical product business. Physical product business, you know, I've experienced my own setback, my own business setback before the business I have now. I was like in my early 20s, like fresh out of university, I ran a bath bomb business back in 2015. Like, yeah, like when they it was, I like ran it on Etsy. It was like a bath bomb business. You know something, just like I just thought, I just thought, oh, I could, I could do this, Because that's when, back when, Etsy was actually doable. Now it's a really competitive market, but I was doing weekends at markets.

Alyssa:

I was selling on Etsy and doing all my ads. It was so you know what, by the end of it I was so out of breath, you know what. And then it came to a point where it wasn't so much that I didn't have any orders, it was that I didn't have the inventory Like I had to make all that. Everything was handmade, and so I was like trying to fulfill the orders and I just couldn't keep up. And you know, my mom was saying to me well, you know, you just need to open up a kitchen. And I was like I don't have the funds for that, like I'm just, you know, in my early twenties, trying to just make it through. I don't have the funds to open up a kitchen. So I had no other choice but to close it. And I just thought, you know what, there's an easier way to do this.

Alyssa:

Um, but then, you know also, but then back in my early twenties, when I was just starting to get the idea of an entrepreneurship, when that had to close, I felt myself like I, my self esteem, or like I don't know an ego. It kind of took a bit of a hit, because I thought to myself, well, I, I'm just not cut out for it. You know, like I come from a family of entrepreneurs. Everybody I know is entrepreneur.

Matt :

I come from.

Alyssa:

Italian family, you know, and so everybody just has done really well for themselves and their own business and I just thought like, okay, clearly I'm not cut out for this, but I just think it just takes time to figure out what you're great at, what skills you have, and the oh my God, what's it called? Got through the process.

Matt :

Um and like for me, like I do come from an Italian family as well, but nobody's an entrepreneur, literally everybody. Like you know, my dad worked at Chrysler for 30 years, my mom's a nurse, like that kind of thing. Everybody had jobs and that was like the safe, secure thing to do. And I don't know. I think I just have a problem with people telling me what to do, or authority, and I'm just like I'm going to do the opposite.

Alyssa:

I'm going to start a business or I'm going to do my own thing. It is true, yeah, no, no, it's true, and that's probably why I really struggle with nine to five, you're right, and you just want to be in charge, and so so when I work with my one-to-one clients, I'm just going to switch gears here a little bit. They know what they want to do, they have a business, and they're kind of just trying to figure out now what their product ladder is and what products kind of would benefit their clients. You're really good at this, so you're going to have some good advice to give, and so I help them build their product ladder in their business, but I can't answer what their clients need, because their clients are not my target market. So how did you come up with your ideas for your digital products, and do you have some kind of process or any tools that you use currently to make brainstorming a little bit easier to do that?

Matt :

So brainstorming, chat GPTs you're going to be your best friend, especially for brainstorming. It's not really that good at coming up with original ideas, but it gives you back what you put into it. Basically. So if you can get really good at prompts and you know, I guess, use the right prompts, put the right information in, you will get back more useful, more useful information, right? So for me, for my digital products, my whole goal has always been I want to help as many small businesses as possible. Not necessarily have them pay me, but I mean, yes, getting paid is great and that's how you run a business, but I want to help as many small businesses as possible because I truly believe and know that small businesses are the backbone of literally every economy of every country. All this kind of stuff. It really makes the world go round. So if I can help a small business get more traffic to their website, get more customers, they can hire more people locally, they can pay more taxes locally, put money, more money, back into the local communities, create jobs, all that kind of stuff. People can go to college or send their kids to college, you know, put food on the table, all this kind of stuff. So I'm like how can I help the most amount of people? And for me, like I just did a quick Google search, I was like how many businesses or small businesses are there in the US? In the United States, it came back with something like 31 million small businesses in the US. I was like that's a lot, like that's a lot of people, and each one of those people is a potential customer, right, whether they want to work with me and my agency or they want to to learn SEO or some kind of other digital marketing, whether it's meta ads or Google ads or whatever. So for me, I was like I just need like 0.00001% of those people to buy my thing and I will be very rich, right? So, and that's just in the U S, that's not including literally the rest of the world, like the you know what is it? Seven and a half billion other people.

Matt :

Um, so I was just like I want to. I want to be the guitar manufacturer, basically, who builds guitars for beginners, because they sell the most guitars, right, they're not the most expensive guitars, but they sell the most of them. And for me, I was like I want to have low, uh, low priced products, digital products that have so much value that people would pay a thousand dollars for it Right. But I don't want to charge them a thousand dollars. I'll charge them like 150 bucks, right. And the next cheapest product is like 300 bucks a month, reoccurring Right. So for me I'm like I know small business owners, I know they don't have money. I'm a small business owner. You know, when times are tight, you're like I'll buy a course for you know 150 bucks and like that's promising to show me how to do all of this stuff, right, I'm not going to spend 300 bucks a month, especially when it's in a foreign currency and that 300 bucks is actually like 450 or 500 bucks.

Alyssa:

Yep, yeah, exactly.

Matt :

So that, yeah, exactly. So that's my my course is like 157 bucks. I have a free course as well that shows people all the fundamentals of SEO and that gets them into the funnel all this kind of other stuff. And then on top of that free course, I have like a bunch of free mini courses and free resources and stuff that people can consume and learn, even the content I post on social media, like that's all free, right. And some people are like, well, you didn't tell them the entire process and I'm like, if you go watch all my videos and string them together, that is the entire process. Just today I was reading a comment. Somebody's like this is like the very first thing like this is you know that people do with meta ads and it doesn't talk about targeting, doesn't talk about this and this and this, and I'm like how long do you want this video to be?

Alyssa:

yeah, like do, how long do you want this video to be? Yeah, do you want to attend?

Matt :

a masterclass? Like I would love for you to pay me money to attend some kind of masterclass, but like I can't fit it all into one video, so just go look through the other videos and you will find your answers, um, but then I. So, with all that in mind, I was like SEO tools are very expensive, right? Audit tools, um, you know, keyword research tools? Like it's going to cost you at least a hundred dollars a month in software to do any kind of SEO, which is very unfortunate, um, but like I looked into doing like a keyword research tool, um, getting one of those developed and it's so costly because there's so much data, there's so much information, um, and I'm I'm like I realistically can't do that.

Matt :

There are cheaper solutions out there. I don't know how they're so cheap, um, but so I I kind of axed that idea once I found out how much it would cost not to build but to actually service each individual user, um, so I had two other tools developed and I made them 10 bucks a month. So one is an audit tool that you just type in your website and then it'll tell you here's all the things that you need to fix on your website in order to increase your chances of ranking higher on Google.

Alyssa:

I'm sorry, hold on, so it's $10. You said $10 a month A month? Yeah, because right now I pay $30 for Actually maybe I think more for Ubersuggest, and it does the exact same thing.

Matt :

Well, ubersuggest also does keyword research, so that's where it's a little bit different. And Ubersuggest is the cheapest keyword research tool I found. I will say the search volume data so how many people are searching for that keyword per month isn't quite accurate compared to the other tools. But all the tools are just estimates anyways. So if you rank number one for a keyword that gets a thousand searches a month, you're probably not going to see in your Google search console that that's accurate.

Alyssa:

Right.

Matt :

So the audit tool just says, like okay, you're missing tags on these pages or you have duplicate tags on these pages or these tags are too long. You know that kind of thing. So it's very like go fix this stuff. Technically, it doesn't tell you how to do keyword research. So I launched that and then I was like what do other keyword research tools not have? Other keyword research tools not have? People keep asking me a lot of questions about like how do I do this and this and this once they've purchased the tool. And I was like you know what? I'm going to make tutorials, how to fix all of these things and what it actually means. So when you go into my audit tool you can actually see me doing tutorials Like here's how to fix broken links.

Matt :

Here's what a broken link is right Go fix that. Or here's what a 404 error is links. Here's what a broken link is right, go fix that. Or here's what a 404 error is. Here's how to set up a redirect, all that kind of stuff. And I was like nobody else is charging only 10 bucks a month. It's all like 30 or 50 or whatever dollars per month to do that. Or it's part of like a package with like SEMrush or something, where it's like, yeah, we'll audit your website or Ahrefs, but you have to buy all of our tools. It's like one big suite and it's $150 a month or whatever it is, and I'm like, well, small business owners can't afford that. They could buy just Ubersuggest. Or if they want to use my audit tool, they can do that as well, and it's $10 a month. So they're coming in at under $50 a month.

Alyssa:

Yeah, I like that Right Instead of $ 150.

Matt :

And then I had another tool developed as well. I'll just tell you about this very quickly. I call it the Watchdog tool and basically what it does is you put in three competitors into there and it tracks all the changes that they make on their site. So if they add new pages, if they remove pages, if they change their title tags or their meta descriptions or their heading tags or even anything in the content like links, it sends you a report every week saying here's all the changes that were made, so you can see if they're changing their pricing strategy, if they are creating landing pages to run ads to. You can see what those pages are and, like, most of the time, they're not linking to those pages from anywhere that a person is going to find on their website. Um, and then it also like if, if you're doing seo or if they're doing seo, it will show you like hey, they changed all these tags from this to this, so it's like okay, well, that's the keyword that they're going after. Should I be concerned? Should I not be concerned?

Matt :

um, yeah, it's, that's 10 bucks a month too. So like I've made these as cheap as I put here, like I see the way you're looking at me, you're just like no, there's no way. But like my goal really is to help small business owners, like let's do it.

Alyssa:

Yeah, you know it's funny because, you know, for a long time, for many years in my business, I always, you know, I was working with many clients who are very like high ticket, like we would be selling thousands per like program or per course, and and it was okay, I think, back in 2020, 2021. But I think the landscape has changed in terms of, like, what people are spending. They're more cautious what they're spending, where they're spending their money, and high ticket is not so much, um, even just affordable anymore. Um, and even from even for myself, like what I choose to invest in, whether it's coaching or, you know, a course, if the course has exactly because I'm a very practical person, just tell me exactly what I need to do and I will pay, pay you for it. You know, um, I just found it actually more helpful to just do something like you know, to purchase, like UberSuggest or something just to do it for me, to do it myself, not to pay someone to do it for me. I just want to learn how to do it for myself and I just thought that was like and it was, you know, it's a good, affordable price.

Alyssa:

But now that you're telling me that, you know this is $10 a month and I'm just like, um, this is worth it and this is something that I would want to do in my business and even for, like the competition. Like I don't I I know I don't do enough of that because I'm just, you know, for me, I'm, I am a one man show, I have a, you know, a VA, but I don't have like a team of people. So, um, something like that would be so helpful because I don't, it's tracking on autopilot, like you don't need to go, you don't ever need to go to their website, yeah, and I don't need to pay someone to do it for me. So, you know, that makes it so much easier. Um, and so I think also two big considerations that I've noticed in your products is that you have a lot.

Alyssa:

It's so accessible and so affordable, which I'm like success in their business when they're not putting like two, three grand for, like a course, and it's like you know, I agree, like you know, you want to help as many small businesses as you can, and so I kind of want to switch gears a little bit to talking about. So I have something really great in my podcast called the brilliant bite of the week, and I think this is really good. This is a quick, actionable tip that you can give my listeners who want to start taking action today, or what can they do to get closer to their next step. And so do you have like a strategy or like an insight tip, mantra that you can share, that can really give them something to go off of?

Matt :

Okay. So there's so many things that I could say, but just in general, if you and I did a video about this, I think yesterday, or was it today, a couple days ago? Anyways, the last couple days I did a video about omni-channel marketing and if you don't know what that is, it's basically just being on as many platforms as you can showing up in video, showing up, you know, in SEO, doing ads, all this kind of stuff. And you know, as you, if you're a one man show or you know one person, show up every day in videos and social media, run ads and know what you're doing and all this kind of stuff. And for me, I'm like just open up a Zoom call and then just record it.

Matt :

Start answering questions that you've heard your customers ask or you've written blog posts about, or even just go to something like answer the public and type in your industry or niche, and it'll give you a bunch of questions people are asking about it. If you are truly an expert, you will be able to answer those questions. Open a Zoom call, record it. It can just be you on the call and answer those questions. That's step one. Step two take that transcript. If you need to get a transcript. You can upload it to YouTube for free and they'll transcribe the video, right? You just have to go into subtitles and click edit and then grab whatever they have there, or there's a lot of AI systems that'll do this for you. I see there's an AI companion on my Zoom here. It'll send you a transcript after the call.

Matt :

So take that transcript, put it into ChatGPT and say write me a blog post answering these questions and make sure that to use, like my personal stories, expertise and experience right, because that's what Google wants to see. They want not regurgitated content, because anybody can do that with AI now. They want to see unique stories. They want to see unique perspectives. So get ChatGPT to do that. And there's a ton of prompts you can use. We have a ton that we use in my agency to write really great content for our clients. But just as simple as write me a blog post answering this question and then, if there's related questions, you can put them in there as well.

Matt :

Then, in that same chat GPD conversation, say okay, using this question, write me 10 viral scripts, or write me a viral script that I can use to record a video and post it on Instagram or TikTok or whatever. So once you do that, it'll give you those scripts. Pull out your phone and this is what I do and this is how I get 4 million people seeing my content every single month and that's like a bad month. Pull out your front facing camera on your phone, right, and record yourself reading those scripts, and you don't have to memorize the entire script. Don't feel bad if you're stumbling through things, and you don't have to memorize the entire script. Don't feel bad if it's if you're stumbling through things and you need to do multiple takes. I've been doing. I've done like 1200 videos or 1500 videos something, and I still I'm like what was that line? I've said it a hundred times, I can't remember it. So do that. Don't feel daunted or discouraged. If you can't get through it the first time, nobody can.

Matt :

Then open up like Instagram's editor, put in all your clips and then delete the pauses, delete the ums, delete the ahs, all that kind of stuff, and then you can put on captions right on Instagram. You can put on graphics, you can put on like. Basically, you could use Instagram to edit your entire thing and it's free. By the way, everything that I've told you so far is free to do, right? Wow, so take that. I mean you don't have to pay for answer to the public, but they do have a paid one if you want to do more than three searches a day. So I've never hit the limit. Just do a couple searches and you're good to go. Gives you a lot of questions, anyways.

Matt :

So do that, record it, edit it and, before you're about to post it on instagram, you can actually download the video from the instagram editor and then you're going to post that same video on tiktok, on youtube shorts, on linkedin, on blue sky, on x, on whatever platforms you are on. I post exact, exact same content on all these different networks. They have varying degrees of success, um, like Instagram. Instagram is the biggest for me, and then it's Tik, tok, uh, and then YouTube, and you know, so on and so forth. So and that might change this year as well, anyways, so you have that video, post them on social media and just keep track, look like every week, and you'll know this because you get obsessed with the numbers. As you start doing this, you'll notice if a video pops off, it gets like a thousand views, when normally your videos get 200 views or 300 views. If it gets a thousand views or 2000 views or even more.

Matt :

Take that video, turn it into an ad and carpet your local area, especially for your local business. Just literally don't do any targeting, except here's the pin in my postal code or in my city, and just spend your money on doing that ad. Because that piece of content is like people are going to watch it. So it's going to go further with the ads, like you're going to get more than you're paying for, basically. And then what you can do is like also add a call to action. So in that video you can either re-edit it or just add something at the end or add text on top that just says you know, text us now or you know, call for a free quote or click for a free quote, whatever it is, and then use that good piece of creative as an ad. So you're doing SEO, you're doing organic social, and then you can also flip that into paid social as well. So you're covering a lot of bases doing that.

Alyssa:

I wrote this all down. I mean you go back and watch the video.

Matt :

I posted like a couple of days ago breaking literally all this stuff down, and I'm actually I'm doing a webinar this week with SEMrush, so I'm hosting a webinar with them and this is the exact topic of the conversation.

Alyssa:

Yeah, you know, and I know that's where people get stuck is like, how do I exactly, as you said, like, how do I just post on my like post content without being overwhelmed and burnt out because I'm just the only person doing it? But that makes so much sense and I'm going to try it out myself, because that's where I also get stuck too. It's like what content do I create today? It's like because you just kind of get inside your own head, Whereas, like, if you know, if I had, you know, if I did have a person who was giving me the content, that I feel like I would be a little bit easier. But I'm the one just kind of thinking and sometimes like, because I specialize in funnels and so I sometimes I get too like inside my head. I'm just like, but people don't care about funnels. Funnels are not sexy, they're not cool, they're not trendy. But it's like, but they need, but people, businesses need to have them. So it's like it's something that needs to be said and needs to be talked about.

Matt :

And same with SEO right, Like it's something that needs to be said and needs to be talked about. And same with SEO. Right, I was going to say SEO is the farthest thing from sexy you can possibly get Right, it's like who's going to watch, like. And when I started posting I was like who's going to watch a video about keywords and internal linking, like what the hell? But I've had people email me and comment be like, dude, you make SEO so easy and fun. And I'm like I made SEO fun for you, like I love that for you. That's amazing. But, like, my intent wasn't to make it fun, it's like to make it like relatable and easy to easy to do so you can grow your business, right?

Matt :

Um, and I like I would say like another big tip is a lot of people will batch their content, right, they'll spend like a day or two out of the month and say I'm going to make a piece of content, so 30 pieces of content, so one for every day.

Matt :

I do all that in two days film it, edit it, whatever. And for me, I'm like if you do that, you are not flexing that creative muscle enough and you're going to feel discouraged that you have to do all this. It might not go well, you might not be feeling well that day, so you'll push it to the next day and it's. You're just going to keep pushing it. But for me I'm like, if you can show up every single day, multiple times a day cause I post two to three times a day um, you're flexing that muscle constantly so I can see an opportunity for a piece of content that could potentially go viral. While I'm on a call with a client or while I'm on, you know, just browsing the internet, I'm like, and then and then expand, you know, once you've mastered one, and so then I'm like okay, maybe I should stick to just Instagram then.

Alyssa:

But then other people say no, you have to spread out, you got to diversify. So what are your thoughts on that?

Matt :

So what if the content that you're posting on Instagram that's not doing very well potentially is TikTok content and it could do very well on TikTok, right? Like? I have a couple of friends. They have huge profiles on TikTok and you know they're in like the marketing SEO space. They have more followers than me on that platform. But as soon as they come over to Instagram with that content does not perform, falls flat. Nobody watches it, nobody gives a shit, right? So it's like that content. We know it performs. It gets like tens of thousands of views or even more on TikTok, but on Instagram, 200, 300 views. So who's to say that you're creating the content for the right platform, even If you're like? Instagram is my platform. How do you know that? How did you determine that? Do you like it? Because you scroll on it more, right?

Matt :

So true Same thing like TikTok, youtube, blue Sky or even Red Note, the Chinese app. That's like the TikTok competitor, but it's all in Chinese. A lot of people went to that one, like the TikTok one. Tiktok was banned for like what was it Like 15 hours or something?

Alyssa:

There was like a lemonade. What about lemonade?

Matt :

I've heard about that one. It's not available in Canada, so I haven't been able to use it. Yeah.

Alyssa:

Yeah, yeah, not really familiar with that either, but yeah. So I mean that's why I'm thinking just like, cause I have my TikTok account set up. I'm just like I'm just do I don't I? And it's like you give me the confidence I'm going to do it.

Matt :

I'm going to try and just like you know business failures, when do you know to close down a business? It's like everything is an experiment, like I have another, maybe two businesses that I didn't even talk about. That it's they were just experiments. Like looking back, if you look at it like we're just going to try to prove a hypothesis here, can we do it, can't we do it. It's like, okay, well, we did it, but then it didn't work out the way that we wanted it to exactly.

Alyssa:

So we're going to close this down, but we're going to take the learnings from that and we're going to carry that forward into the next thing. Yeah, well, that's great. That's great advice, matt, and I really appreciate it. So, matt, I just want to thank you, and you know, for joining me today and sharing your incredible journey and, you know, your insight into these digital products and everything that we've talked about today was just so. I've learned so much, and so I know my listeners are going to walk away with some fresh ideas, some strategies they can use for their own business. So I just want to thank you, matt.

Matt :

Oh, my God, thank you for having me. This was really great.

Alyssa:

Yeah, of course, and before we wrap up, if you do want to connect with Matt directly, just you know check out his digital marketing agency, hatetonyca, instagram, tiktok, and get his free course on understanding SEO. I have actually taken that myself, by the way, and I absolutely love it. I love it. I reference back to it, so that's amazing. Yeah, I do, and because, for me, I do need training in SEO, and so I like things that are just easy. You break them down really easily, and so I find it very, very helpful. I love that. Yeah, I love that, and so it's in the show notes. It's in the show notes, so make sure to grab it when you have a chance.

Alyssa:

I hope you all found this conversation inspiring and insightful as much as I did, and I will catch you next time on another brilliant idea. So thank you for hanging out with us today. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Brilliant Ideas. If you love the show, be sure to leave a review and follow me on Instagram for even more insider tips and inspiration. Ready to bring your next big, brilliant idea to life? Visit AlyssaVelsercom for resources, guidance and everything you need to start creating something amazing.