Ryan Scribner  05:54

I would say there wasn’t any specific moment where I was like, “Man, I gotta get out of here. This isn’t for me.” It was overall. But here’s the thing, too: I don’t want to sit here and say like every nine-to-five is bad. I’m not somebody who says everyone out there needs to quit their job because obviously, we need essential jobs out there in society. And some people are very passionate about the structure of a nine-to-five. But for me, that structure and that certainty that I had… Because I was in a union job and I was already off probation, it was pretty much guaranteed that I’d be making six figures within five years. It was like I could have that job for as long as I wanted to work for a public-regulated utility that’s immune to the market conditions. At that point, I was a lifer with the company.

I remember I spent so much time thinking that’s what I wanted, especially when I was in college. And then, it was the day that I got off of my probation period with the company and I was a full-time union employee when everything hit me. I thought, “Wow, I actually feel like crap. There’s no growth past this point. Sure, I’m gonna progress through this job, and in five years, I’ll tap out at the top end. I don’t want to, at 25 years old, have maximized my learning and maximized my growth, and then from that point, just sit and do that job for the next 20-25 years. That certainty, for some reason, I hated that aspect of the job.

The other thing, too, was the culture. A lot of people who are familiar with unions, there’s the mentality of doing as little work as possible. Drag your feet. I found out that that was the culture with this job. It was something that also started to affect my personal life outside of this job. So yeah, you would drag your feet at work with your job, and maybe people complained a lot. But then all of a sudden, I found myself complaining more at home and with friends, and I just didn’t really like that road I was going down. I didn’t really want to be somebody who ran the clock, worked slow, and was a complainer. And so, between the culture and just not liking the certainty, I just knew. I said, “Man, this is just not the right path for me.”

It was such a hard decision for me to actually quit my job to do this because when I did quit my job, it was very early on in my channel. I had little proof of what was going on. I was making minimal income. So it was largely a shot in the dark, and I didn’t necessarily have the support of all of my friends and all of my family members. I mean, some people really did support me, but a lot of people were confused, “What? What are you thinking?” Because everybody was saying, “Oh, man. You’ve got it made. 20 years old, no debt, no college loans (because I went to community college), making $70,000, on track to make $100,000 in 5 years.” So by most people’s standards, I had it made, but by my own standards, I just knew that this is not the right fit for me.

Robert Leonard  08:47

Yeah, definitely by most people’s standards, that would be “making it,” especially at that point in your life.

Let’s talk about how you were able to build 5 income streams by the age of 23. I think that’s really impressive. So how did you do it? And what types of income streams did this consist of?

Ryan Scribner  09:07

Yeah, definitely. It’s funny because that was one of my videos. I think that’s one of the more popular viral videos I’ve done. Just to explain, when we talk YouTube, at least in this finance community, we call a viral video one that tends to get a million views or more. But to be honest with you, building up these different streams of income all related to my channel, initially, is just something you build one at a time. I think a lot of people hear that the average millionaire has seven streams or seven sources of income. So they say, “Oh, I gotta go out there and build seven sources of income,” when in reality, you build these things one at a time, and then they stack on each other. If you go out there and try to build seven streams of income at once, it’s not gonna go well for you because you’re just going to be too distracted.

But you know, the first one obviously, was the ad revenue from the channel. When I started getting some views, I started making a little bit of ad revenue here and there. Another source was getting into affiliate marketing. I break the affiliate marketing down into multiple sources in that video. Now I kind of lump it all together.

The first affiliate marketing source for me was the Amazon affiliate program. That was a relatively easy platform to promote in. Essentially, I would recommend, “Hey, here’s my favorite book on investing,” The Intelligent Investor or Stock Investing for Dummies. “Click on the link to get your copy.” That would probably cover the first two, ads and then the affiliate marketing.

From there, I got into digital products, which isn’t really a huge revenue piece for my business but that was when I released my course on investing which was back in 2017. Then, if you want to count more, at that point, I didn’t have real estate investment, but I do have that now. At 23, I also did stock investing, so that was another source, earning dividends and growing my income. There was also the occasional sponsored post on my channel.

A lot of people don’t realize something about YouTube channels. Most people think, okay, that model for making money is to have people watch your video, watch the ads, and then get paid as one source of revenue. But the reality is, there’s more than one way to monetize that type of platform. For me, when I first dove into this full-time, I was just solely relying on the ad revenue. At that point, I would barely even call it a business because it was more or less just luck; making a video, having it get a bunch of views and then making some money. Over time, it transitioned from a hobby into a well-rounded business that was diversified into the affiliate side of things, the sponsorships, the course, my personal assets, and my personal investing. Is there any real secret to it? I wouldn’t say that there is. I know a lot of gurus will tell you otherwise, but there’s not. The only truth of it is you build these things one at a time, then you build up your personal assets, then allow that money that you have in real estate or stocks or whatever to pay you dividends or produce cash flow for additional income.

Robert Leonard  12:14

We’ve talked about it. We’ve alluded to it so far throughout this interview. You mentioned that you’ve built a very popular YouTube channel, or what I would consider very popular, with over 530,000 subscribers as of today. You’re also a well-known and successful affiliate marketer. For someone who may not know what affiliate marketing is, what exactly is it? You briefly mentioned it through the Amazon program and maybe some other things, but I think there might be some misconceptions out there exactly about what affiliate marketing is, so explain to me exactly what it is and what it might look like outside of just Amazon.

Ryan Scribner  12:47

Yeah, absolutely. It’s a business model that’s so interesting because most people have no idea this business even exists. They’re just out there surfing the web or watching YouTube videos, click links, and make purchases. It never crosses their mind that somebody might be earning commissions from these clicks.

The best way that I always explain affiliate marketing to a complete beginner is… Let’s say you have your favorite restaurant that you go to once a month or so. And let’s say you that while you were at this restaurant, the manager came over to you and said, “Hey, I know you’re here all the time, you must like the food. I’m going to give you a card to give to your friends. They can get a free meal here, and for every friend of yours that comes in, I’m going to give you a free meal as well.” It’s kind of like that. You’re making a recommendation about something you love or enjoy or use, and if a person takes you up on that recommendation, like in this example; if they go to that restaurant and cash in that card, not only are they going to get something out of it. In most cases, you’re going to get something out of it too. That’s basically what affiliate marketing is. It’s a business of making recommendations or helping with the customer journey by producing content online. That’s how most people are leveraging affiliate marketing these days.

What I do on YouTube is I have different reviews of different brokerages or have a video on the top investing apps or top budgeting apps. In August of 2018, I partnered up with a friend of mine, and we branched out into the blogging space and launched Investing Simple, our finance blog. That blog is 100% affiliate income. We don’t even run ads on it. The only way we make money from that blog is just from referrals. Just for an example here, let’s say you have two popular robo-advisors out there: Wealthfront and Betterment. People may be curious, “What’s the difference between Wealthfront and Betterment?” We’ll produce an article on Wealthfront versus Betterment, and if somebody reads that article and finds the information to be useful, and decide to sign up for one of these robo-advisors, if we’re affiliated with them, we can earn commissions from that traffic.

Robert Leonard  15:04

I think that affiliate marketing often gets a bad rap. Maybe not always, but I think in a lot of cases, it does. Why do you think that is?

Ryan Scribner  15:13

I completely agree with you. As somebody who has a course out there on affiliate marketing, I also get labeled as kind of this snake oil salesman too. The reason why it has a bad reputation, in my opinion, is because when people associate affiliate marketing to unethical marketers. There are two groups of people out there in terms of affiliate marketing, in my opinion. You have those who are ethical affiliate marketers, and then you have those who are unethical. The reality of the situation is you are making recommendations or referrals to strangers.

Now, my cardinal rule for affiliate marketing is I would not recommend a product or a service online that I wouldn’t recommend to my neighbor. The reason is that if I recommend something to my neighbor, and it’s crap, I’m literally just recommending it to make money. But it’s going to be pretty awkward when I check the mail because he’s not going to be very happy with me. But a lot of people don’t follow that same kind of moral compass because they’ll recommend these products that are high-commission that aren’t a good fit for that person just to make money simply because it’s anonymous in a way.

I think you have a lot of people out there that are promoting primarily digital products on what’s called an affiliate network, which is essentially a collection of many different products you can earn commissions on. Just to throw a name out there, we have Clickbank. That’s one that a lot of people use. I’m not saying that every product on Clickbank is illegitimate. I’m just saying that the Clickbank affiliate marketers tend to have not such a good reputation in terms of the products they recommend. Affiliate marketing is like any business out there. You have those who operate in a completely ethical way, and those who are more scammy with it or just don’t have strong morals when it comes to the service that they’re providing.

Robert Leonard  17:02

I’ve also heard you talk about how anyone can succeed in affiliate marketing, and they don’t need to have a following first to be successful. You even said that you might argue that not having a following is an advantage. How is that?

Ryan Scribner  17:16

It’s funny because I’ve talked to a lot of people. I’ve mentored people within my friends’ group about the business of affiliate marketing. The issue I tend to run into when I try to teach the business to a YouTuber with 100,000 subscribers who had done no affiliate marketing, is that they’ve already become pretty used to and comfortable with the way that they’re making money, which is probably running ads on their channel or sponsorships here and there. They already have the wrong mindset around this business. I would honestly rather start with somebody from the ground up who doesn’t have a following on YouTube or a following somewhere else. Because they become so accustomed to that way of making money chasing views to get views on the ads to then earn ad revenue, that it almost becomes a mental block for them. They don’t really understand affiliate marketing, that’s about SEO, longtail keywords, keyword search, and comparison content; or they don’t see the potential with it.

Also, I just think it’s easier with an audience to have them get used to whatever you’re doing from the beginning. For example, if you had 100,000 followers on a given platform, and you never once promoted a single product, you just did value value value. You were just providing a ton of value, and then out of nowhere, you start saying, “Hey, you know, here’s the link to go buy this book on Amazon” or “Here’s this link to sign up for this brokerage.” People aren’t going to like that because they’re not used to it. So it’s definitely better to do it right out of the gate. Have people understand what they’re going to expect from you. If they realize, “Okay, this is going to be a mixture of valuable content and segue that into products that fit our needs.” When people are just used to that, they know what to expect.

So that’s the two main reasons why I say that you really don’t need a following. In many cases, it’s actually easier if you don’t have one, because you don’t have that pre-existing programming of how it is that you’re making money. You can just have your audience get used to the affiliate promotions trickled in throughout your content.

Robert Leonard  19:34

How do you balance that line? Because you don’t want to be pushing affiliate content too frequently. As you said, you want to keep those so they’re familiar with it. Or, you want to make meaningful revenue, so you put it out there from time to time. How do you balance that line of being too much or not enough?

Ryan Scribner  19:52

Yeah, it’s definitely tricky. I’m sure you guys have learned, too, with your podcast, that you can’t please everybody. You’re going to always have a naysayer or somebody who doesn’t like the way that you’re doing something. One of the things that I do is I just pay a lot of attention to my comments. Even though I have over half a million subscribers, I’m still a one-man show in terms of my comments on YouTube. It’s something I think I’ll always hold on to as one of my tasks. Every time that someone on my channel gets a heart from me or a comment, that’s coming from me. I pay very close attention to my comments. And people will oftentimes comment and say, “You’re really pushing this right now” or “Oh wow, you’re overdoing it with the affiliate stuff.” I just keep an eye on that and also be very careful.

For example, I have a given company I’m affiliated with, and I mentioned them in a video. I’m not going to mention them again for at least a month because you really don’t want to burn out your audience. A lot of people end up doing that because they see the money that they’re making, or they want to get all this traffic for these affiliates. Just video after video after video, they’re just plugging these affiliates. Over time that just burns out your audience because people are watching your content for the value. There is a way to provide value, but also have an incentive for yourself. You don’t want to be 100% commercial, with your content, having it all be related to this company or this brand. In my opinion, talk to your audience. Keep track of the comments. If you’re constantly seeing people saying, “Hey, you’re really pushing this product a lot right now,” you may want to ease up on the promotion and focus more on just the value.

Robert Leonard  21:31

We talked about the specific affiliate programs you’re using, but we didn’t talk about the results of those. And so, what are you finding are your most effective affiliate marketing services or products that you’re providing to your users?

Ryan Scribner  21:45

What we found has been true on my channel and my blog is that the comparison content has been huge for us. Initially, when I first got into affiliate marketing, I was just doing a blanket review of the product. For example, we have a brokerage, like M1 Finance on my channel. I did an M1 Finance review. That initially got me a fair amount of traffic. It got me some conversions and I was making some money. So then I branched out, and I said, “Okay, well, let me do this with other brokerages that I personally like, enjoy the service of, and think is a good option.” So I went with these different brokerages and some crowdfunding real estate platforms, but after I went wide, working with a bunch of different companies, late 2019, I started saying, “Okay, how can I not go wider but deeper with each one of these affiliates?” And so, I started looking at what other people were doing, come up with ideas on my own, and one of the most effective things has been comparison content. So, rather than just doing that M1 Finance review, we also did versus comparison. So M1 finance versus Robinhood, and M1 Finance versus Acorns, for example. So not only are we just doing this dedicated review, which would be your short-tail keyword, but we started going after more long-tail keywords even on the blog. We’re even getting into three-way reviews now. So Betterman versus M1 Finance versus Wwealthfront, for example. So not only just comparing two different services but now three services. That’s been a huge revenue driver for us so far in late 2019 and early 2020; it’s that comparison content.

Then the other thing too has been going after more long-tail searches. Basically what I do is take one of these companies I’m affiliated with and just do research on what are people searching for outside of just M1 finance review. I find that people are asking, “What happens with dividends on M1 Finance? How does M1 Finance make money? What happens with taxes?” Instead of just answering the general question of reviewing this product, I started with writing articles and making videos around more of these long-tail searches that don’t have as much traffic. But when you have many of these videos, they do add up to a substantial amount of traffic. That has definitely driven more conversions.

So just to summarize, it’s been the comparison content and more longtail keywords that we’re going after.

Robert Leonard  24:21

And so, which of your platforms do you think converts best for you? Is it YouTube? Is it your blog? Your website? Maybe even social media? What is converting best for you?

Ryan Scribner  24:31

Right now, it is definitely the YouTube channel. But if you ask me this question a year from now, I bet you will get a different answer because of how rapidly the blog is scaling up. Because we’re out for about a year and a half in right now, and anything that you build online is going to take a long time for it to start seeing results. But we’ve put in a lot of work on this blog, and we’re starting to reap some of the fruits of our labor, and seeing some very strong numbers. But for now, yeah, I would say if I were to break it down as a pie, 85% of my affiliate revenue is coming from YouTube right now. And I’d say 15% is coming from the blog. I don’t think any is coming from social media.

Occasionally, for example, Fundrise is one of the platforms I’m affiliated with. I’m also an investor of this platform, so I get dividends from them on a quarterly basis and I reinvest them. When I earn my dividends, I’ll pop on my Instagram, do an Instagram story and say, “Hey, you know, I just earned $82 of passive income. Swipe up if you want to learn more.” I’ve done the tracking on it before because I can do tracking based on specific links and see, “Okay, how many conversions came from the social media post?” It’s usually none. Maybe one or two here and there. So yeah, definitely 100%, I would say it’s from the blog and the channel, with 85% right now being from the channel. But I’m willing to bet in a year from now, it’s going to be more skewed towards the blog

Robert Leonard  25:59

How about paying for advertisement through platforms like Facebook and Google to generate affiliate income. Is that a strategy that could work?

Ryan Scribner  26:09

It is a strategy that could work. Fincon earlier this year, I was there, and I was talking to some affiliate marketers. I was talking to some people who use that as their strategy, and they were making money with it. But just to be completely honest, I have never once done it. I guess for me, the way I think about it is if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. I’m able to leverage my platforms, and I have ranking authority on YouTube, and ranking authority with this blog, and also have these existing affiliate relationships too, which helps a lot. But if you were brand new to this, you’re not going to be able to make something like an M1 Finance review as a video and have it be anywhere near the top of the results because you don’t have any proof on YouTube and you don’t have any ranking authority. For me, because I already have that authority, having done three years of videos or more, and having written over 100 articles on the blog, because we have that authority, we can do a comparison piece of content and have it rank high enough that we’re able to make some money from it.

However, if I were like completely green to this, and I had no audience anywhere, I would definitely try it. I would try to see if I could make money running ads. Just to give you guys an example of what this might look like, let’s say you did a video on YouTube called Top Three Budgeting Apps for Millennials, and then you had three budgeting apps all of which you were affiliated with. If somebody clicked and downloaded, you earn a commission. If you have a specific tracking as to how much you’re earning off that video alone, you could then run an ad campaign on YouTube and say, “I want you to run this video as an ad. Show it up on the homepage.” Then you would be looking at, “Okay, what is my cost per view? How many conversions am I getting?” And let’s say I dumped $500 of ad spend into this video. Am I making more than $500 in affiliate conversions? If you’re making $600-800 dollars, then you have a profitable campaign there, and it may be one that you decide to scale up.

I know people have done it. I just personally haven’t. Maybe down the road, what I could see doing, potentially, is I might hire somebody to try to do that for our businesses for the blog and for the channel. But it’s probably not something I would independently try to do just because I like to focus on what’s working right now for me, and that’s just creating content and relying on organic search.

Robert Leonard  28:32

Once somebody has built up the type of platform and following that you have, where does somebody go? What is next?

Ryan Scribner  28:41

It all depends on what your goal is with this type of business. If you’re looking to leverage it into speaking opportunities, you can go that route with it and you can speak at different conferences. Maybe you want to get into digital courses. A lot of people will take their expertise, package it up, and sell it in a course; which is something that I’ve done. You also may find people that literally build a business to sell it. I know a lot of people in this space who have built up blogs, build them for 5-10 years, and then have an exit strategy as their goal is to sell it and maybe do something else with that.

So it really comes down to what aspect of this business you enjoy the most. For me, I just love doing the business. It’s not really like I have an exit strategy. The blog that we do has an exit strategy many years down the road. We do want to sell that. But as far as my channel goes, I may not be on there as frequently 5-10 years from now, but I still see it as something I’ll always be doing; which is documenting my own investing journey and sharing my own information and research with people. And I just love getting on camera and making videos. That’s the enjoyable part for me. But I guess, as far as where you would take it, it just comes down to what’s your favorite aspect of the business. Do you like speaking? Do you like the notoriety? Do you want to build yourself up as a celebrity and try to get verified into speaking? There are so many different avenues you could go with something like this.

Robert Leonard  30:06

As someone who talks about stocks on your YouTube channel, you’re probably a stock nerd like me. And so, I want to talk about your number one stock pick for 2020. What is your favorite stock pick for this year and beyond? And why?

Ryan Scribner  30:22

It’s funny. This year, I definitely have gotten a lot more conservative seeing that we’re in what I think is the late stages of a bull market. A lot of people think that as well. I said, “You know what? This may be a good time to get out of some of these tech stocks and get into some more blue-chip or dividend stocks.” So I really spent quite a long time in the months of November to December studying a lot of different stocks, looking at the Dow 30, and figuring out what companies do I really want to invest in.

Right now, the one that I picked is going to be a big one for me. I started investing in IBM, and I think it’s because a lot of people view IBM as their legacy business. IBM was this hardware company that made computers, and a lot of people, if you ask them, including even myself not long ago, had no idea what does IBM even do? How are they even around anymore? And so, IBM has been transitioning out of that legacy business and into a lot of very exciting new industries and technologies. If you look at the stock, it’s been a snoozer for the last, I think, 10 years. In my opinion, I feel that there’s big potential based on their acquisition of Red Hat and the different technologies and industries that they’re involved with. So that’s where a lot of my money’s going. They’re a great dividend payer too, which again, gives you that potential to be paid in two different ways. 

Robert Leonard  31:43

Not too long ago, I think it was back in 2018, and maybe in the early parts of 2019, there was a lot of talk around Warren Buffett’s stake in IBM, and how he sold a lot or even all of it, and how he took a pretty big loss on that. What makes you confident that your investment is going to be successful when it seems that Warren Buffet, one of the best investors of all time, has given up on the stock?

Ryan Scribner  32:04

At the end of the day, I’m just basically going off of my own research into the company. Seeing that they’re being involved with blockchain and these different technologies, I just think that they’re involved in a lot of businesses that are going to be big in the future. Of course, with stock market investing, you could be right, you could be wrong, but it’s a company that’s been around for a very long time. At the end of the day, it’s just something that I have a good feeling about after having done my own research on the company. Obviously, if I had to pick companies at this point in time, and I had no idea of what the share price was, IBM would not be my first pick.

But at this point in 2020, we’re looking at a time when a lot of companies are trading at very high valuations. I was not comfortable buying into a stock at this point in time, trading at or near all-time-highs. So, right off the bat, that eliminated the majority of the companies out there that I may want to invest in. The price doesn’t make sense right now. So I was ultimately looking at companies that are trading at a valuation that’s not insane. But anytime that you’re investing in a company where they’re not trading at all-time highs when the market’s at an all-time high, well, there’s something going on within that company where investors are wary of it. So you know, I’m trying to capitalize on some of that pessimism and maybe write with it, I may be wrong. But that’s, that’s the beauty of investing.

Robert Leonard  33:29

To compare you to Warren Buffett really wasn’t fair because you never know what his situation was. Maybe it had nothing to do with the stock and maybe he just needed the cash to deploy into something else. That’s probably unlikely given how much cash is sitting on his balance sheet, but maybe he had a very high-conviction idea. He really wanted to allocate that percentage of his portfolio to it. I know he’s been investing heavily in Apple and maybe he saw that as a better opportunity than IBM, and so there are so many different reasons as to why he might have gotten out of that position and that just might not make it the right fit for him. But it could be a great fit for you or it could be a great fit for someone else. So definitely, it’s an interesting pick, and I know there’s a lot of debate going on about it right now. As a stock investor myself, it’s gonna be an interesting one to watch play out over the next 5-10 years.

If you were stripped of everything that you’ve created so far, all of your followers and subscribers, how would you start over today? what would be the first thing that you would go out and build or create to start generating passive income?

Ryan Scribner  34:28

If I were stripped of all of my platforms, if I woke up and my Instagram following was gone, my email list was gone, my channel, my blog, assuming I still had the knowledge of this business, it sounds silly, but I would essentially build this business again. However, what I will say is that I wouldn’t necessarily focus on YouTube as a platform because there’s just a lot more income potential with the blog. Again, when I started my channel, I had no plans for making money. It was just something I did for fun, as I said. But now that I understand the earnings potential of some of these blogs out there, especially in the finance space, at the end of the day, we all have to make money to live. And if I’m looking to make money, I would definitely focus more heavily on the blog. But I also might dabble with some different stuff. I might try something like, “Okay, can I run ads and make money through ads with affiliate marketing?” So I probably would dabble with some different things. I might try building up some Instagram pages because it’s pretty easy to build a following there. But yeah, essentially, I would just take this business model of affiliate marketing.

I guess why I’m so passionate about this business model is that once you see it, and once you understand how it works, it can be applied to different niches out there. So maybe you apply this in the finance niche and you build up a blog, and then maybe down the road, you build a blog in canoes or kayaking. It’s the same principle which is provide valuable content, help people with their customer journey or shopping decisions, and then earn commissions from the referrals.

Robert Leonard  35:59

What is the biggest thing that you know now that you wish you knew when you had gotten started?

Ryan Scribner  36:05

For me, the biggest thing that I wish I knew when I started, like, if I could go back in time and talk to myself at the early beginning, I would say, “Understand how valuable what it is that you’re creating.” Because when I first started making videos out of my mom’s spare bedroom, I didn’t think this was very valuable. I knew that the content itself was good information. It was stuff that was genuinely helping people based on the feedback I was receiving, but I never would have guessed that I would have huge brands reaching out to me to potentially run sponsorships, or I would be speaking at conventions and stuff like that. So I think, had I known that earlier on, I probably would have had a bigger vision for what it is that I was creating.

I’m also extremely happy with where I’m at right now in terms of audience size and the lifestyle business I’ve created, but I probably would have told myself, “Dude, you have no idea what it is that you’re creating right now.” I mean, it’s amazing how many people have created personal influencer channels on YouTube now, like Kevin O’Leary and even Russell Brand. He’s making his own videos, and it’s crazy because I see Kevin O’Leary do a video on YouTube and get as many views as me, and I’m just like, “Holy crap! I’m getting as many views as Kevin O’Leary on YouTube,” as just me documenting my investing and talking about finance. So I would have told myself like you’re building something much bigger than it is that you think you are doing just by making these videos. And I think that’s still true and possible today. For people who start different ventures, whatever it may be, I think you never know at the beginning what it is that you’re creating, or how big of an impact you’re actually going to make.

Robert Leonard  37:46

Yeah, I can say the exact same thing about podcasting. Every day, I look in the podcast charts and you see new podcasts, some from some really big names like Kevin O’Leary and Barbara Corcoran. You start to see some really big names that are starting to get into the podcasting space, and it’s really interesting to realize that your podcasts are up there with these people. So I definitely understand what you’re talking about there.

How were you able to handle the patience that you needed to grow this? Because growing a YouTube channel takes a lot of time, specifically in our niche. The personal finance investing, just overall money niche takes time. There’s a lot of competition. How can someone who’s getting started today with their own YouTube channel or blog or even social media following harness patience to really understand that it’s not going to take a day or two days or a week or probably even a year? It’s going to take a long time. How can they be patient?

Ryan Scribner  38:36

For me, that’s always been one of my strong suits. I’ve been a pretty patient person. I do know exactly what you mean because I’ve talked to people who are still early on in the process. Just to give you guys some numbers, the first 7 weeks of doing YouTube, I was doing 20-30 hours a week. I was like a madman. Immediately, when I got home from work, I was cranking out videos, editing videos, and all weekend doing so much effort into this channel; and in seven weeks, I got 100 subscribers. I was averaging two a day. I was messaging all of my friends and family. I was following strangers on Twitter, DMing them saying, “Hey, can you check out my channel?” I was doing a ton of promotion on my own to get 100 subscribers, and in the first two months of my channel, I think I made $4 in ad revenue. Now you have to be a little bit bigger to even make the ad revenue, which shouldn’t matter anyway. But you know, you have to think about that. I probably had 200 hours of work to make $4, with no concept of the fact that I would ever make money with this thing. I just liked it. I thought it was fun. It was a good hobby for me.

And so the thing that I always tell people in terms of an audience when they’re starting out and trying to stay motivated is that we all tend to think about statistics. We think about 10,000 visitors on a blog, or my video got 500 views. Well, if you had that many people in a room, that would be a lot of people. You may think, “Man, this video sucks. It only got 500 views.” Well, if you had 500 people standing in your front yard, you’d be like, “Holy crap! That is a lot of people.” So I think a lot of us, myself included, I have to check myself on this a lot, too. We detach from the fact that every view, every hit on our website, every like, is a person. So when you have 100 people, that would fill most rooms. When you’re talking 1,000, or 10,000, that could fill a stadium. You just have to think about every single view as a person. Maybe you’re not thrilled with getting 100 views a month on your blog, or 100 views a month on your channel, but you’re impacting 100 people’s lives, and that’s substantial. And it’s only going to grow from there.

Robert Leonard  40:41

I absolutely love that because that’s exactly how I think about it. In today’s day and age, I think it’s tough because you’ll log on to social media, and you’ll see somebody else with hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million followers or more, and you start to think, “Well, I’m insignificant, right?” But then, when you think about it the way you just mentioned, it’s so true. If you think about stepping on stage in front of an auditorium or just giving a presentation or a keynote speech in front of the number of people that you have listening to your podcast or YouTube channel or even reading your blog post, it’s a really different way to think about it. It’s hard to even put into words because it’s just so powerful when you start to think of it that way. You really are impacting a lot of people, even if the number seems small.

Well, Ryan, thanks so much for your time! I really appreciate it. I think you’ve provided a lot of value for the audience, specifically those people who are interested in starting a side hustle or starting to generate some sort of passive income. I think that’s really popular these days, especially amongst millennials. When we talk millennial investing, it’s so much more than just stock investing. While that is a big component of it, there are also so many other things you can invest in, and a lot of those things include side hustles and starting your own little operational businesses. So I really enjoyed our conversation today. I think it’s going to provide a lot of insight to the listeners and really help jumpstart them on their journey. For those who want to learn more about you and all the things you’ve built, and connect with you, where can people go?

Ryan Scribner  42:02

Yeah, definitely. Again, thank you so much for having me on. This has been a really awesome discussion. I really agree with what you said there about investing has changed from just putting your money into the stock market and earning dividends to now, with the internet, we can invest in these digital assets that can potentially make you money. I see a lot of people these days taking their time and investing it into something that’s going to provide them with some extra money. Then they can invest even more money into assets, which just amplifies the wealth you can build. I try to cover all these topics. I try to cover a little bit about investing and how I’m investing. We look at good investments I’ve made, bad investments I’ve made, look at it all. We also talk about my business here on YouTube and the business of the blog and also different business ideas, so I think you hit the nail on the head there with the different ways of investing.

But yeah, if people are looking to learn more from me, I would say if you’re curious on the investing side, our blog is a good place to check out, investingsimple.com. If you’re looking for more about me, personally, maybe you want to watch some of my videos, my income breakdowns or anything like that, that’s just going to be Ryan Scribner on YouTube. Of course, if you guys have any questions for me after the podcast, I can’t guarantee I can answer all of them, but I always do my best, and if you just shoot me a DM on Instagram and say, “Hey, I’m coming over from Robert’s podcast, Millennial Investing,” I take it more seriously because then I know you listened to the very end of this. You heard that call to action, and I’m gonna value your time there as much as you value mine. So if you have a question, after the podcast, shoot me a DM on Instagram. It’s @ryanscribnerofficial. I’m sure there are going to be linked as well, but I’ll do my best to answer those questions for you guys.

Robert Leonard  43:48

Ryan, thanks so much for that offer to everyone listening. That’s very generous of Ryan with his time, so if you’re interested in learning more about this, I highly recommend that you take him up on that offer. Shoot him a DM. Let him know that you heard him from the show. Let him know that you enjoyed it. Let him know what you have questions about, and take that conversation over there and learn as much as you can while you have this opportunity. I really recommend that.

I’ll be sure to put links to everything that we talked about throughout the show and all the different resources and platforms in the show notes. You guys can check them out there. I also put links to all of Ryan’s works, his YouTube channel, his social media platforms, and everything in the show notes. You guys can go connect with him there. Ryan, thanks so much! I really appreciate it.

Ryan Scribner  44:26

Thanks for having me.

Robert Leonard  44:27

All right, guys! That’s all I had for this week’s episode of Millennial Investing. I’ll see you again next week!

Outro  44:34

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