First, jump inside Copywriting Course to review every page of your site with me today.
Second, checkout this interview with Matt Kepnes, known as Nomadic Matt...he's the founder of the most well known personal travel blogs on the internet. He’s wrote a book called How To Travel the World for $75/day:
(0:41) Matt Kepnes is well known as Nomadic Matt, founder of the top travel blog, and he’s got a new book called How To Travel the World for $75/day.
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(1:08) His last book said travel for $50/day but everything got so much more expensive!
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(2:44) How does a publisher approach you about doing a book? Matt tells the full story of working with publishers vs self publishing.
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(5:48) Why can’t you just self-publish a book? It doesn’t get you into bookstores, airports, etc. Publishers still give you credibility…it’s like a college degree.
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(8:12) What’s the reason for writing a book? It’s a profit-sharing model. They give you $100,000 to use while writing it, but then they get paid back $100,000 before sharing future profits.
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(10:02) Most authors can’t live off their book alone unless they have a huge catalog, or they have some spectacular breakout success book like Atomic Habits.
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(11:16) Ryan Holiday in Perennial Seller talks about how you release a new book but your OLD back catalog makes all the money!
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(12:42) Big podcasts and big email lists are what sell books. The podcast circuit is like the new Tonight Show. Good Morning America and Kelly Clarkson can still sell books but not many other shows.
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(14:15) Who is making money in the travel industry? People still pop up and get popular, but it’s mostly Instagrammers, YouTubers, TikTokers, etc. Blogs are now mainly resources versus the main attraction. Matt thinks everyone should still have a blog where their main content lives.
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(17:47) Sam Parr says building your business on social media is like renting where the rent doubles every 18 months.
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(20:22) Follower Inflation or Follower Dilution is big. If you posted a YouTube video years ago it’d get 5,000 views, but now there’s tons of competition for eyeballs to share.
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(21:15) We're sent a lot of our SEO traffic from CopywritingCourse.com over to SwipeFile.com as we're playing a more "SEO 2.0" game. AI has changed SEO 1.0 and now it's less about long how-to articles, and more about awesome human experiences.
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(25:01) “Every time technology kills an industry, it reincarnates it a little bit different, but way bigger.”
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(25:25) Blogs and documenting trips will make a comeback when you can just yap about a trip and AI builds the content.
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(26:30) My own travel advice is now hyper-specific thanks to AI. I can ask for SPECIFIC recommendations; blogs can’t compete as well.
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(28:17) One thing that will live on is “Branded Searches” — where someone searches your brand/name first. It’s the strongest form of SEO.
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(30:54) Matt just started doing Instagram, and most of the travel content has shifted to video-first, especially on YouTube, then Instagram.
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(33:15) Short Form gets huge view counts, but low engagement. Long Form is way better for connection, and you can chop it up into Short Form for discovery.
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(35:35) Many Instagram and TikTok-only creators can still crush it if they’re big, but most of their money is brand deals.
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(36:35) Joe from ShallWeGoHomeTravel switched to customized South America trip planning and is doing way better than selling PDF guides. Humanized travel recommendations are the future. Kind of like a new form of travel agent that helps you make an awesome trip.
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(44:05) Matt hates video, prefers writing, but is starting to post Reels because video is the path to growth. Despite competition, there are still low-production “pockets” where simple videos perform better than high production.
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(51:10) Matt likes being political online (especially on Threads), but not on his blog. He says you can’t separate travel and world events completely.
