The Entrepreneurs Radio Show 041 David Risley

THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur‟s Radio Show Page 1 of 25
EPISODE #41: DAVID RISLEY
David Risley, founder of PCMech.com, is the guest in episode 40 of Diamonds in Your Own Backyard:
The Entrepreneurs Radio Show, Conversations with Successful Business Owners that Grow Your
Business.
Not only is David a pro-blogger but he is also a blog marketing strategist, online entrepreneur and
author of two books: Build Your Own PC and Build Your Own Network. Listen to this rock star discuss
the differences between important software, how offering a product or service to solve a problem can
lead to success, and what, ultimately, the point is in building a business.
David Risley
– Structuring Your Blog PROPERLY for Success
Travis: Hey, it's Travis Lane Jenkins. Welcome to episode number 41 of "Diamonds in Your Own
Backyard: The Entrepreneurs Radio Show, Conversations with Successful Business Owners that Grow
Your Business.”
Sandra, my co-host and good friend, is still in the center of Daytona International Raceway. Sandra, I
know you‟re listening. We miss you. Get back to us as soon as possible.
Today we're talking about one of the most powerful marketing platforms available today. Before we get
into that topic, I want to ask you to be sure and stay with us until the very end if you can because I want
to share an inspirational quote with you and I‟ll also reveal who I‟m going to connect you within the next
episode.
Now if you enjoy these free podcast that we create for you, we‟d really appreciate it if you‟d go to
iTunes and post a comment and rate the show. This would help us reach, instruct and inspire more
great entrepreneurs like yourself with each and every episode.
Now for some quick perspective on Diamonds in Your Own Backyard‟s radio show--for our new friends
that just joined us--I want you to think of this as a conversation between four friends: just me, Sandra,
when she's here, you and then of course our guest. Now even though we‟re talking with some of the
brightest entrepreneurs and brilliant thought leaders around, this is still just as if we were sitting at a
table with each other.

Now everyone that we're talking with has found success doing what it is that they teach, and they want
to help you by sharing what they've discovered. Normally, the only way to get this level of personal
access to so many high-level entrepreneurs, beyond having your own show, is to join a high-level
Mastermind, go to the seminars, go to the events, and just build those relationships over several years.
Now with this podcast and this platform, I get to share these great people with you to fast-forward your
connection and your success without you having to go through all of that.
Now today our guest is David Risley. David is a blog marketing strategist and online entrepreneur.
David‟s largest publication, PCMech.com, which I‟ll share with you later, reaches 300,000 people,
generating over a million page views per month. The mission to this site is to help normal people get
their geek on and live the digital lifestyle. The site covers current events in the technology industry, as
well as how-tos on topics like PC building, upgrades, troubleshooting, mobile, Internet and the like.
David is also an author of two books: “Build Your Own PC” and “Build Your Own Network.” So
basically, David‟s a rock star. So without further ado, welcome to the show, David.
David: Thank you for having me.
Travis: How are you?
David: Pretty good. It‟s funny you brought up the tech site. That site is a lot more automatic now than it
used to be.
Travis: So you don‟t spend as much time on that?
David: Not as much as the other site that I‟ve got, but PCMech is still a large site and it‟s doing well.
Yes, I guess, after running it for as long as I have, I‟ve gotten it to a point where it really does, probably
90 percent, run itself now, which is awesome.
Travis: Man, I love set-it-and-forget-it-type businesses. Hey, before we get into… I know there‟s a lot of
different directions that we could go with this conversation, but before we get into the things that you
teach and the things that you‟re doing, can you give us the back-story of who you are and how you get
started in business?
David: Sure. I got started in this whole thing about 15 years ago now, so I‟ve been doing it a long time.
I like to say that I was blogging before the word “blog” even existed. Basically, I got started when I was

about one year into college. So I guess--what was I, a sophomore or something? I saw a magazine
article in Yahoo! Internet Life, which is obviously not in publication anymore, about how to build a
webpage in 20 minutes or less. It just sounded interesting. As you just mentioned with my technology
site, I came from a geeky computery background. I always thought that stuff was cool, so I was like,
“Hell, if I can try to make this website maybe I have a new use for my computer.” It was just something
fun to do, so I did that. Obviously, like a lot of people, my first site was really useless and had a lot of
animated icons all over it, powered by Netscape, all these kinds of things.
Travis: Right, right.
David: Eventually, I realized the site needed to have a point if anybody was going to care about it. That
is what ultimately led into, well, what is now PCMech.com and me getting into the tech blogging space.
I‟ve been doing it for a really long time and it came from very humble beginnings. I never got into this
thinking that it was going to be what I ended up doing for a living. I just had hobbyist views of it. I mean,
I was in college. I thought that I was going to go down the typical route and of course three years later
when I had graduated college, I realized I wasn‟t going to go the typical route.
Travis: Good for you. How long before this thing really turned into a business and you started
monetizing it?
David: I probably started monetizing it maybe a couple of years in. See, at the time, this was during the
dot-com boom period. The idea was that everything Internet was just--you touch it, it turns to gold, so
people were starting to run advertising and things like this.
I remember speaking to a guy who runs--his name is Anand Lal Shimpi. He runs AnandTech.com now--
humongous tech review site. He‟s a heck of a lot bigger than PCMech.com is now. But I remember
talking to him via chat at that time, and he was telling me about some of the advertising that he had
been running. I was like, “Maybe I should give this a try.”
I was on GeoCities at the time, which obviously doesn‟t exist anymore. I want to say Yahoo! bought it,
and then they killed it but… So, anyway, it was free hosting. Then I moved over to a real web host
because I had to do that in order to be able to run ads. It would‟ve broken the terms of service of
GeoCities to do that. So that‟s what I did. I was making a little bit of money even in college. It wasn‟t
enough to live off of or anything but it was enough to where I could see the potential of it. Then by the
time graduation came around I realized that I could probably spend all of my time doing this stuff and
turning it into something bigger than what it was.

Travis: Interesting. Yahoo! was a place where a lot of businesses went to die.
David: Definitely, yes.
Travis: Okay, so we‟re talking about the first step of monetization and that‟s a big deal--to start making
money off of something that you‟re having fun with and can be passionate about with also. How long
before it took you from monetization, making some money to actually starting to find some pretty
serious levels of success doing that?
David: In the order of years, probably at least two or three. I don‟t remember the exact timeline. But
when I decided to do this as my full-time endeavor obviously the income went up but it still was not
enough. At the time, like a lot of people, I was still with my parents for a little bit around that time of
college, so that obviously helped. When I moved out of their house directly into my own--instead of
getting an apartment or anything like that I actually went and bought my own house. A: I could afford it,
but B: it was also a means of just stepping up my game a little bit because I know one thing about
myself--is that when I have a need for income, I always find a way to make it happen. I‟ll find a way to
meet the need that I have. My business expanded when I did that. I was supplementing some of it by
doing some programming and things like that for clients because my focus in college was information
systems. Basically, I came, again, from a geeky background. I would‟ve been doing database admin or
programming or something like that. I obviously knew how to do it, so I was doing some of that for
clients to supplement it. But as it turns out, as the years unfolded, I was able to turn off doing any of
that client work and basically just do the website. By that point, it wasn‟t just advertising that I was doing
anymore. I moved on to some other things as well.
Travis: Was it a straight upward climb or was there… One of the reasons why I ask is—and I guess,
really, what I‟m trying to get at is the turning point--because the name of the show is "Diamonds in Your
Own Backyard,” and really what that means--it comes from the story of acres and acres of diamonds,
where a lot of times what we perceive as a failure or a low point is really the turning point of moving in
the direction of finding what we‟re meant to do or success or whatever. Was there a major shift or
turning point that moved you in the direction that you are now?
David: Yes, there actually was. Again, I mentioned that dot-com boom earlier. Well, a lot of people who
are around then probably also realized that there was a huge dot-com crash right after that.
Travis: Right.

David: A lot of companies died. What happened during the boom was that I actually got an offer to
purchase PCMech.com and we went ahead and did the deals. It looked awesome on paper. It was a
seven-figure deal on paper. It came in the form of a certain amount of cash flow on a monthly basis and
then stock options. Now at the time I was just a young kid. I did not really understand how a lot of that
stuff worked, and they float a seven-figure number in front of me at that age. I‟m like, “Holy hell.”
Travis: Heck, yes, right?
David: I come to find out stock options are useless for a company at that--that was at that point in its
development cycle. Then when the crash happened the crash affected that company pretty hard. How it
has affected me was that A: I had to jump through some legal stuff to get my site back from them
because they were totally not obeying their contract, but what it also did was it made the advertising
revenue temporarily, almost totally dry up. It was in this position where they own the website. It was a
huge problem that I had to deal with to get the site back onto my own server and have control over it so
that they didn‟t literally just pull the plug on my site as these people died. But I was also forced with this
thing, I was like, “I‟m not making any money with it anymore.” That really hardcore put me into the M.O.
of I need to have not all my eggs in one basket and that ultimately led me down the road of selling my
own products on the site because I needed something that was not advertising anymore.
That experience obviously taught me a lot about the value of having multiple things going on at one
time. Now, even when I help bloggers on my other website I‟m one that downplays the importance of
advertising because I think it‟s a great way to make money but you have to keep it in perspective. If
you‟re completely dependent on that it can lead to some problems. I come from a point of experience
when I say that.
Travis: Yes, and I believe that it‟s more of an ancillary type of thing rather than one of the main
sources, right? Do you agree with that?
David: I do. I still run advertising on my tech site at PCMech but I am not pursuing it very hard because
I‟d rather focus on my in-house revenue sources. For me, it‟s just like a nice pretty maintenance-free
source of pretty steady revenue. On my other site I don‟t write any ads unless they‟re for my own stuff.
Travis: Okay. Now did this shift drive you into bankruptcy?
David: No, it didn‟t go that far. This was early on in my career so to speak. I was in a position due to my
age and things like that, or I didn‟t have the weight of--I didn‟t have a family yet. I don‟t think I had even

bought my house yet before this happened. That did help, the fact that I didn‟t have that much riding on
it yet.
Travis: Yes, because most businesses can‟t stand the decline in revenue because it just kills operating
capital, and operating capital is the lifeblood of a business. A lot of times, to really find epic levels of
success, they say that you normally have to lose your first round of money that you make to learn some
valuable lessons and dial some things in while still being aggressive on any other levels. So that was
the major turning point, although you didn‟t have to file bankruptcy.
David: I didn‟t have to file bankruptcy, and it was definitely a big turning point, probably more in terms
of my own viewpoint on the thing than anything else--the idea of thinking about my business in terms of
building something that has a leverage and longevity to it. I guess it had not occurred to me at that
point. I mean, obviously I was young. I was building businesses a hell of a lot earlier than a lot of other
people have but it was a good lesson to have because I really realized that when you‟re building a
platform and building a “business” but doing it completely based on something that somebody else
built, then you‟re really not in a very good secure position. That whole experience really drove that one
home. There were some other turning points in the lineup of my business, but that was a pretty big one.
It was probably the first.
Travis: Yes, I think that turning points are a constant thing, but there‟s normally a paradigm shift. It
sounds like that‟s where your major shift was. Perspective is everything, right? Perspective is how you
run your business, how you really do everything.
David: Yes, really, when you start--especially as a blogger because even nowadays, most bloggers
are in this mentality of monetization equals advertising. Just breaking that mindset and realizing how
insecure it is—I don‟t know, something like that--and the importance of selling your own product, and
that‟s really essentially what businesses do--is they provide a product or service that solves a problem.
I was like, “Bingo!” It was almost like I came back to reality.
Travis: Yes, there is several sites that I go to that they make them so sticky but not sticky in a good
way, sticky in a way that I can‟t get out of there. It‟s really frustrating and I vow to never go back to
those sites with constant pop-ups and constant this or that and their entire… It‟s like a treasure hunt. I
may be looking for a specific piece of information, and they present it in the search as if it‟s really the
answer that I‟m looking for and then when I get on the page, it‟s buried somewhere amongst all the ads
and all the da-da-da-da-da. I think that that model is gradually going away, isn‟t it?

David: I think it is. That‟s basically interruption marketing which is what‟s been happening a lot:
commercials… A lot of the advertising that we see is essentially interruption marketing. You‟re not in
that train of thought but yet something comes in there and tries to interrupt you to put you into that train
of thought whereas what I teach and what we pretty much do as bloggers—what I help bloggers do and
blog owners do is not do interruption marketing but more joining the conversation that‟s already going
on in our heads and then leading them to the conclusion.
Travis: Let‟s go in that direction. What‟s the big picture? What do you feel like is the single most
important thing that you teach that business owners should be doing? Let‟s go at it from big picture and
then drill into it a little bit.
David: Well, probably the number one thing that I always tell people as my first line of advice is to build
that e-mail list. The blog is a great platform to have but ultimately where your leverage is going to come
from is something like an e-mail list where you can reach out, mobilize your community and point their
attention at something on demand. If you don‟t have the ability to do that, then you really don‟t have
something that has a lot of leverage to it because a blog just sits there on the Internet and it‟s
reactionary. It has to sit there and wait for somebody to come to you. With an e-mail list you can bring
them to you. To a lesser degree, social media can do the same thing. It can reach out and drive them
in, but a blog by itself doesn‟t do that.
Travis: Okay, so do you need to… So one of the most important elements is e-mail. What do you teach
as a whole? You teach blogging as a strategy and then to take them down a process of sharing
willingly, wanting to share their information with you based on the quality of the content of the blog?
David: Essentially, yes. My focus these days is how to utilize a blog as an effective form of marketing
but underlying that comes a lot of the other avenues that people think of like e-mail list and their social
media, video marketing, podcast like what we‟re doing right now but all of this coming together as a
form of online marketing that a lot of businesses don‟t typically do because a lot of businesses are still
on the mindset of Yellow Pages and the traditional stuff.
Travis: Right, right. Now I‟ve got a foot in both worlds. Now I started out in my first business 22 years
ago, and really, all we did was what I call one-step marketing: “Hi. We‟re so and so. Quality is number
one. Give us a call,” right?
David: Right.

Travis: It worked. It was expensive, but it worked in that day and age. It‟s shifted now to where… You
can still do that. It‟s very, very expensive and the Cost Per Lead and the Cost Per Sale has gone
through the roof, and that‟s what hurting a lot of people. Actually, we made the shift several years back
from focusing on educating and helping, and one of the side benefits as we did that overtime is it did
the sorting and sifting for us. It brought our most ideal prospects to us, our clients to us. Then the
people that really weren‟t a match consumed our information and said thank you and moved on, which
was good for business too, right?
David: Right.
Travis: So now how does local businesses or how does a business build to the level of success that
you have with some of your blogs? What‟s the key to that?
David: Well, a local business is a different type of animal. Well, see, most of the people that I‟m
working with right now they‟re not location-specific, so that does a difference. If you‟re doing it for a
local business, a lot of it is going to come down to obviously talking in a local way for SEO purposes
and things like that on the site but it‟s also going to be backed up by some local marketing to drive
people into the site because you‟re specifically looking for people in a certain geographic area.
Travis: Yes, that‟s a good point. Plus there‟s limitations there to being able to build your size of the
audience--is when it‟s relevant to a local market. So let‟s move it more into the realm of what you do
teach. These people are not constrained by the city. Maybe they‟re national. Maybe they‟re global,
right?
David: Yes.
Travis: So what‟s the strategy there to build such an incredible loyal following like you have now?
David: Well, first of all, I‟m the kind of person that takes--my instinct is that I will try to take anything and
make it simpler. I‟m always a big-picture kind of a guy. I think that a tendency like that is great in a field
like this because the very nature of this topic is humongous, right? How do you build a blog up to the
point where it‟s getting 100,000 page views in a month? It‟s a huge topic.
At the end of the day, really, what it comes down to is identifying the core problem that you‟re trying to
solve for people thinking of it in terms of a business, a business to provide a product or service in order
to provide a solution to some problem that people have. Now as a person who is trying to do this
exclusively on the Internet and using a blog you should have the exact same mindset. Go out there and

find people who have this particular problem or certain set of unifying factors that drive them and then
you are providing solutions to that with the medium of blogging. Then from there in terms of promotion,
you got to get in to going multimodal in terms of videos and e-mail and social and all that, tying it all in.
Again, I‟ll try to keep it simple--is wherever the type of people that you want or hanging out already, you
want to go there and interact with them and then bring them back to your site.
Travis: Hey, David, would it make it easier if we picked a specific topic and drilled into it in that way?
Because I understand what you‟re saying. At times, people ask me such a vague question that it‟s so
big I have a hard time even getting my head around it, right?
David: We can go into whatever direction you want to go, really.
Travis: Yes, so is there--not knowing what specifically the niches that you‟ve been working in, could
you take one of those and walk us through it, like a mini step-by-step process to a certain extent so that
it‟s a verbal illustration of what you‟re talking about?
David: Well, do you want to talk about my Blog Marketing Academy site, or do you want to talk about
the tech site?
Travis: Yes, let‟s talk about your Blog Marketing Academy site. Are you cool with that?
David: Sure, absolutely. So we want to talk about in terms of like a case study and how I grew it?
Travis: Well, or how you would--yes, you could take it either how you grew it, or how you teach
people. Because at the end, what I want them to do is if they feel like this is something that resonates
with what they‟re doing in their business, I want them to connect. I‟m all about connecting people with
great people like yourself to help grow their business and take it to that next level. So if your business is
a great model of how that worked and it clearly illustrates what‟s going on then definitely take us down
that path.
David: All right, well, see where do we start with this? We talked about how I built up Blog Marketing
Academy. I‟ll give the bird's-eye view of it. I went into it realizing that there was a need, essentially, and
also realizing that I had a unique perspective on it, being that I had just grown this technology site into a
pretty big thing. Especially in that market, a lot of people love to see that somebody has done it and
something that didn‟t have to do with making money online because making money online is like a
whole different animal all by itself. So I started to guest posting on the other sites. That‟s a great way to
bring in new blood. The next, probably the biggest factor in the growth of that site was that I did a full-

scale product launch. When you do a product launch and you‟ve got a lot marketing going on, you‟ve
got affiliates involved with helping promote that, is by its very nature going to create a lot of buzz for
you, your name, your brand.
Travis: Right.
David: So that helped substantially. It put a lot of people on my e-mail list, and it really grew my
readership a lot. Just by actually doing actual marketing instead of worrying about YouTube videos and
all that, I actually went and launched the product. From there, I kept up the momentum in terms of
launching other products, continuing to write on the site, etcetera, etcetera.
Travis: Okay, okay. The strategy that you‟re talking about applies a lot to what I do with my own
business here--is I really don‟t have any boundaries within the state that I‟m in, and just collaboration
with other people in the industry in itself just organically grows things. So many people are focused on,
like you said, creating maybe a video and they believe… I believe that there‟s a misunderstanding of
how to propel a business and I want to dive deeper on that. A lot of people think they‟re going to create
a video and it‟s going to attract droves of people, like Justin Bieber did to get his career going, right?
David: Yes.
Travis: Yes, which is an anomaly. In music--by the way, YouTube is great for music, but it‟s not as
great for businesses and stuff, and a lot of people are talking about that, but my point is: collaborating
with influential people that are doing what you‟re doing or similar to what you‟re doing is extremely
powerful. I don‟t think that really gets talked about or gets enough airtime on that. Everybody is
constantly looking at a way of getting an ad in front of you or some paid form. When somebody‟s other
ways of--I guess, what I would consider earned media. What we‟re doing right now is earned media.
You‟ve got a great reputation. I‟m in a Mastermind, and this guy recommended you to me. So you‟re on
the show. This isn‟t paid. So we‟re two experts in our industry working together to co-collaborate on
something, co-create something, and through that, you build this big following. That‟s basically what
you‟re talking about, right?
David: Yes, absolutely. If you‟re trying to bring readership to a site, to a blog that you own and operate,
if you look at the big picture of the Internet, you‟ve got a bunch of eyeballs out there but they tend to
centralize in certain areas based on their interest, so the whole idea is getting in front of those people.
Now, as you properly have just said, you could either try to interrupt them with advertising, or you could
actually enter the community. One of the ways of entering that community is to find the leader. Usually,
there‟s at least one leader or a series of opinion leaders in that community, and you can form a

relationship with them. One of the ways that people do that, for example, is what you‟re doing with me
right now. You brought me onto your show. On a blog basis, you can go on there and write a guest post
for them.
By the way, one of the things that one can do is not only find blogs that are tightly related to whatever it
is that you‟re doing. Sometimes you can go and you can find blogs that are maybe somewhat related
but still very different and guest post over there and relate to what you do to that audience. This is an
idea that--I read a book called “Blue Ocean Strategy” recently. It‟s the idea of instead of everybody
fighting over the same turf, which turns the oceans red because of all the fish competing over the same
food, you‟d go to where the water is blue, where there‟s not as much competition. One of the examples
in my own space is that I have a good friend of mine who happens to run a blog about flight instruction
because he‟s a flight instructor, and I was thinking, “Heck, I could approach this guy and be like, „Hey,
can I write a guest post for your audience?‟ and relate why flight instructors might be interested in doing
a blog to market their instruction practice,” whatever you might call that. It‟s just the way of thinking
outside the box instead of thinking in certain lines all the time, which I see a lot of business owners tend
to do that.
Travis: Yes, instead of looking for people that are just hot on blogs, look for people that can drive their
business through blogs.
David: Absolutely. In my space in particular, it would be useful because people who read blogs about
blogging—it tends to be very incestuous in a way because they‟ll reach tons of other blogs about
blogging, and there‟s a lot of noise. If you step outside the noise and you talk to a completely different
crowd, it‟s a whole different ballgame.
Travis: That‟s it--excellent illustration of the “Blue Ocean Strategy.” I downloaded the audio quite
awhile back and listened to that excellent book. Why is this--what we‟re talking about seems to be a
mystery to so many people. Do you find that to be true?
David: Yes, for sure. By the time somebody has reached me, they have at least some reality on why
they need to do this, and they‟re like, “Okay, let‟s do something.” When you go out, people who are not
already on my site or on a similar site, and you talk to people about just general Internet stuff, I realize
just how unique somebody like you and me are who understand this stuff because most people are just
not thinking about it all day. It‟s very foreign.
Travis: Yes, yes, it blows my mind because it‟s such a critical part of business that… So many people
spend their time thinking on things that are not as critical to their business as this. It‟s like they spend

their time reorganizing the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, rather than trying to get everybody moved
to another location safely. They‟re just not being strategic about the way they‟re using their efforts, their
time, all these other things. A connotation of that is I belong to several groups in Facebook, and these
are high-level, intelligent, successful people and a lot of them will not support anyone on the post in the
things that they‟re doing, yet they want you to support them.
David: Right.
Travis: This is a world where you get what you give.
David: Absolutely.
Travis: So how on earth can you expect people to come out and support you and click “Like” and leave
a comment and all these other things when you don‟t do the same thing in your own community? Just
so many people don‟t seem to be getting that. One thing I wanted to ask you about blogs is there‟s so
much information coming at us. When I looked on LinkedIn, there are so many things flowing by in the
river there--Facebook, Twitter, all these other things. Are people reading blogs still?
David: Yes, they‟re definitely reading them. The thing about it is the blog is just a platform. What goes
on is completely up to the person who owns it. Some markets, obviously, are different than others. The
space that I‟m in with regard to blogging and marketing is a very noisy space, but definitely people are
still reading it. If you‟re in a space which isn‟t as noisy, it‟s going to be easier to stand out because
there‟s not as many people there. Absolutely, they‟re still reading them. They rank really well in search
and everybody‟s going to Google and looking for things and WordPress blogs are popping up all the
time.
Travis: Well, I know that everybody has a different way that they like to consume things. I‟m a big
podcast person, and that‟s the reason why I created a podcast--is I like to be able to listen to content
while I‟m doing other things: while I‟m driving, while I‟m working out. It really allows me to get a lot of
things done. There are some people who like to read. Others are very visual. Some are auditory. Some
like to see videos. So, I guess, really, what you need to do and I realized this, is you need to provide
your content in as many forms as possible and let your prospects and your readers or your followers
join in however--in whatever way makes them happy, right?
David: Yes, and to that note, I will--I‟m a big believer in putting out stuff in multiple formats and to that,
one of the things that I‟ve been starting to do—and I don‟t do this with every post but I do them with a
fair amount of them now--is I will actually create my blog post by speaking it out. What happens is that

now turns into a podcast which goes out on iTunes and the whole in the yards. I send that recording to
my VA and she transcribes it and that turns it into the blog post. There‟d be an extra step but it‟s still not
that difficult to turn that whole thing into a video because all you really need to do is add a visual
component to it. It could just be a simple slide show of photos that--you could have somebody make
some simple slides and tack that on to your audio and turn it into a video. Long story short, you created
it at one time but you‟re creating it in three different formats. You let people take their pick as to which
one works.
Also to that point--there‟s going to be a lot of business owners out there listening to this--is I know a lot
of people are hesitant to get into blogging because they think it‟s going to be extremely time-
consuming. They don‟t think that they‟re very good writers, what have you. But I encourage people to
not get stuck in associating the word blogging with writing. The blog is just a platform. You can stick
podcasts on there. You can stick videos on there. You could do all the above on the same website. In
fact, I usually recommend that business owners create their content in whatever is easiest for them. If
some people can speak really well, then just do that. There‟s dictation apps on the iPhone. You can just
speak or write into that thing. Have somebody on Fiverr and transcribe it for you and bam! You got
yourself a blog post.
Travis: Yes, I agree with you. It‟s good that you point that out because I think blog posts are
synonymous with people thinking, “Well, I need to sit down and write and I‟m not comfortable writing.”
Well, we all speak. We speak on a regular basis whether it‟s to our friends or whatever, so that comes
to all of us naturally. Like you said, get out of your own way and just speak it in there. Now do you
release your audio that you send to your VA. Do you release that as a podcast?
David: Essentially, yes. Now by the time it goes into iTunes, we tack an intro and an outro on the end
and everything, so it sounds like a podcast. She gets the raw recording, and what I actually do is just
once I export to MP3, we have shared Dropbox folders, so I‟ll stick it in Dropbox. She knows to go look
for it and she knows exactly what to do when it shows up in her folder.
Travis: Okay, cool.
David: She actually takes care of uploading it to the blog and the whole thing.
Travis: Yes, That‟s the way to do it: have your team facilitate all of those things in the backend. I just
started to listen to Chris Brogan‟s podcast and he‟s been adding his blog post turning them into an
audio at the end of his podcast which--again, I love audios, so I think it‟s just the way to go for a lot of
people. It really seems like it‟s trending in an upward direction big time currently.

David: I think it is, too, and in fact I need to get more regular about it and be like to the point where
every blog post comes out this way. I was having people come to me and say, “Hey, I found you on
iTunes.” These are new people that probably would not have known about my site otherwise. So I know
they‟re definitely in there. Let‟s face it. You look at the numbers on how many people are walking
around with these iPods and iPhones and stuff in their pocket. It‟s absolutely insane. If we‟re not
tapping into that in some way, we‟re really being stupid.
Travis: I know. Yes, I agree with you. You‟re preaching to the choir, David. I‟m with you. I‟m onboard.
Hey, so give me a quick breakdown of what your couple of businesses do.
David: All right. Well, the first business is the one you mentioned at the outside of this and that‟s
PCMech.com. So that is a technology blog. The business of it is--well, basically what I do is I provide
plain English information about computers and technology. Now the space has changed a lot since I
launched that website. There‟s not as many people out there, believe it or not, building computers as
there was when I started. Nowadays, people are buying a lot of laptops and iPads or Macs. You don‟t
build those things. You just buy them and sell them or whatever. So the space has changed a lot. One
of my personal focuses now is to bring what I think are cool web apps and stuff to their attention. It‟s
changed from a very hardware-oriented site to more like solutions-oriented, anything tech related.
Now the business side of it is there‟s some advertising involved, and then I also have a membership
site attached to that. So there‟s a pdf newsletter, where we have some exclusive content inside of that.
Pretty soon, we‟re also going to be doing a little bit of curation inside that newsletter where we bring
some of the best of the best that we‟re out there finding on the Internet and put that into the pdf
newsletters as well.
Travis: I like that. That sounds good.
David: They‟ll pay monthly for that. So that, again, is one of my ways of having in-house revenue on a
tech blog, which most blogs don‟t do. Most tech blogs are very ad focused. I‟m one of the few out there
I think that actually manages to sell something on my own. It makes me a lot less dependent on others.
Travis: I like that. Hey, quick side question before you segue into the other business there: so how
many of those site visitors… Is the 300,000 uniques a month--is that still accurate?
David: It‟s changed. It‟s lower than that now.

Travis: Okay. What percentage are you converting to a paid membership? Do you mind--you don‟t
have to give us the numbers, but can you share a percentage? Is it 10%, 8%, 5%?
David: Of all traffic, no, it‟s a lot less than that. I don‟t know the exact percentage but it‟s… first of all,
there‟s a funnel there. They show up on the site and that‟s fine. There‟s thousands of pages on the site.
The first step of that conversion is to get them to go into the sales page for the actual membership
offer…
Travis: Right.
David: ….which obviously is one of tons of pages on there. Then the next step is to get them to take
some action on there. Obviously, percentagewise, it‟s not going to be that high of the entire collection of
people that come there every day. I think right now we have about 900 members in the program.
Travis: Not bad at all. Okay, so I interrupted your flow. You were about to eloquently transition into the
metrics of your other business or giving us a quick overview.
David: Yes, so the other business is blogmarketingacademy.com and in that business I help people…
There‟s basically two segments of my audience. One is bloggers. It‟s self-identified bloggers, people
who are trying to monetize their site and make some money with it. On the other hand, I work with
business owners, typically coaches, consultants, things like that, who are trying to leverage the Internet
to grow what they‟re already doing or to remove themselves from the whole time-for-money equation. I
get those two sides coming in there, and the common denominator is they‟re trying to learn how to use
blogging as an effective form of marketing to generate revenue. That‟s what I help them do. I have a
several products in that line, but my main focus right now is the actual academy. It‟s Blog Marketing
Academy. There‟s obviously a free blog there but there‟s also a membership site component to it which
is where I‟m actually focusing on in terms of my actual training stuff.
Travis: What type of business would that apply to, or is it really any type of business for the Blog
Academy?
David: Well, for people who come in with existing businesses, I‟m seeing a lot of, like I said,
consultants, speakers, coaches, things…
Travis: I know that‟s who you‟re seeing but is it applicable to all categories of business owners or
what?

David: Not all. You had mentioned local earlier. Quite frankly, if somebody comes in there with an
exclusively local business and they‟re like, “How do I use the blog?” it‟s going to be a different type of
setup than one I usually help people do. So that‟s one it would not very well apply to. But if it‟s a
business where you‟re trying to drive people into e-commerce sales or you‟re trying to have people sign
up for a service that can be delivered regardless of where they‟re located, my stuff will help.
Travis: There you go.
David: Bloggers, these are the people who come in without existing businesses. They‟re just like, “I
have a blog and I want to make money with this.” Again, they are… The biggest thing I look for is the
strength of the market that they‟re in, whether their audience is being motivated by a problem, looking
for a solution, those types of things. Typically, if somebody comes in and they‟re blogging about politics
or they‟re blogging about celebrities or something like that, it‟s a much different game than what I teach
because those types of things are either very hard to monetize because of the topics, or they‟re pretty
much just stuck with advertising because they don‟t unify around anything that you can then offer a
product for.
Travis: Are you talking about the difference between a soft topic and one that people can actually
make money on? Celebrities, it‟s hard to monetize that because that‟s not really going to increase
somebody‟s income, right?
David: Yes. What I look for is the audience… I look for what their motivation is and what they‟re trying
to do, and it needs to be unified toward something that would naturally lend itself to some offer.
Travis: Right.
David: Celebrities don‟t because they‟re just there for entertainment value.
Travis: Right.
David: People with just personal blogs and they‟re just blogging about whatever happened that given
day, and it‟s more like a journal--those types of things are not really monetizable. The same thing with
politics. The thing about politics, you can work people up. You can get people very emotional, but then
what? I mean, really, the only currency of politics is voting for somebody. It doesn‟t lend itself to a
business.

Travis: That‟s a great point. That‟s a great point. Hey, what membership tool are you using? Are you
using a plug-in, or are you using WishList? What are you using?
David: Yes, I‟m using WishList Member, and I run it through a shopping cart called NanaCast.
Travis: Okay, okay. Hey, what do you say we transition to the lightning round? I did give you three
questions for you to ponder. I‟m sure you‟ve probably been losing sleep over those, pondering these
three questions. Are you ready to move into this?
David: Absolutely.
Travis: Okay. Let‟s see. What book or training program had the biggest impact on you or your
business, or that you would recommend to other business owners? Let me say it like that.
David: Okay, so the biggest impact came from--it wasn‟t a book. It was actually an information product
called Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker. In the Internet marketing space, people are usually
pretty familiar with this because when it comes to a launching, people are just like, “Hey, that‟s Jeff
Walker.” For me, I had the blogger mentality for the first many years while I was developing this whole
thing. I bought Jeff Walker‟s product, and it wasn‟t an easy buy. It was outside of my--something that I
could easily afford at that time. But it completely changed my outlook on how to grow the business and
thinking in terms of actual marketing as opposed to the way that I was doing it before. It represented a
huge shift in my business, when I went through the PLF program. It‟s not just about launches. You‟ll
learn a ton of actual marketing inside that program, so you can apply it to doing an actual product
launch, but you can also apply it just to your normal everyday stuff. It‟s very, very valuable there. Plus
he delivers a lot, not only inside the course, but he does annual events, the PLF live event. I‟ve been to
it now, I think, three times. It‟s usually a great event to go to. I always get some real big takeaways that
shape what I do in the following year after going into that. If you‟re a PLF person, you just go to these
events. It‟s not even 100 bucks to go. It‟s basically like an alumni gathering, really.
Travis: Right, right. PLF stands for Product Launch Formula, and he‟s a super down-to-earth,
easygoing guy, too.
David: Yes, very humble guy.
Travis: Are you in his Mastermind?
David: I‟m not. No.

Travis: Okay, yes, he‟s a great guy. Thanks for that recommendation. What is one of your favorite tools
or pieces of technology that you‟ve recently discovered, if any, that you would recommend to other
business owners and why?
David: The one that I discovered the most recently is OfficeAutoPilot. Now I know, I think… because I
just listened to one of your prior episodes where you talking to Jermaine Griggs, and he‟s really big into
Infusionsoft. He‟s done really incredible things with Infusionsoft. OfficeAutoPilot is like another
Infusionsoft. I was with a company called AWeber for the longest time for my e-mail marketing, and
AWeber is a really great company but it‟s very e-mail-list focused, whereas one of the things that I
realized, and a lot of people have already realized before me is just the power of your database and
having a real customer relationship manager in a real database here and treating it as such. So one of
the things that I‟ve done is I‟ve switched everything over to OfficeAutoPilot. What it allows me to do is
really automate a lot of the marketing stuff, and not only that, to segment my list like crazy so that I‟m e-
mailing people only what they‟ve actually shown that they‟re interested in rather than every time I have
something to say, I blast the entire list simultaneously. So it‟s a whole different way of doing it. It really
comes down to what we were talking about earlier in terms of interruption marketing. The way that a lot
of people treat their e-mails lists--it‟s basically interruption marketing because just like when you e-mail
the same exact thing to your entire list, then most of the list isn‟t going to be interested, but if you‟re
able to more tightly target it, then there‟s a much higher chance that they‟re going to actually be
interested and they‟re not going to view it as an annoyance because it‟s--they‟re going to be like, “How
would this person even know that I was interested in that topic?”
Travis: Right, right. Yes, it‟s spooky. They‟re like, “Wow! I did just open that. How did you know?” Well,
because we‟re watching you. What surprises me is I would‟ve bet money, marbles and chalk that you
would‟ve been an Infusionsoft man, considering your techie background. What‟s the reason for that?
David: I‟ve compared the two--in my comparison… This was before Infusionsoft made some changes
because they‟ve made some interface changes. Funny thing is I‟ve talked to many people who use
Infusionsoft and I‟ve talked to people who either were with it and they left it or people who just decided
not to go with it. It seemed like the common denominator was that Infusionsoft was still rather
complicated to use. Funny enough, the people who I talk to who really dug it, I found that they were not
using it themselves. They had their team using it for them, so they had this layer of separation. Even
though I have VAs, I didn‟t want to have a tool that I couldn‟t easily go on there and manipulate like
crazy. So I worked with OfficeAutoPilot because all the reviews that I was seeing at the time we‟re
saying it‟s basically like Infusionsoft but it‟s easier to use. Also, speaking of PLF, I was at their last PLF
live event, talking to some people who were using OfficeAutoPilot, and they were giving me some

seriously awesome feedback. They were telling me about some changes that are going to be coming
out with them in the next couple of months with the new interface and everything. They‟re just like,
“Okay, I‟m just going to go that route.” Actually, I heard Jeff say from the stage--he says that if he had
to pick all over again, he‟d go with OfficeAutoPilot.
Travis: Are they cheaper? What are they a month?
David: I‟m paying $297 a month, and that‟s their lowest-level plan. I don‟t think they are cheaper. I think
they‟re either right in the same ballpark or maybe slightly higher. But the one thing you need to look at
is their e-mail quota because I think Infusionsoft might allow you to send more e-mails than
OfficeAutoPilot before they bill you more or whatever that is, so you‟d have to compare the two in that
regard.
Travis: Right.
David: Infusionsoft has got a longer-term following just because they‟ve been active for a very long
time. There‟s a lot of things that integrate with it, but I like getting onboard with companies that are still
in their growth face and OfficeAutoPilot, I think--right now, I‟m pretty happy. I‟ve been using it for maybe
a couple of months now.
Travis: So they‟re integrating… They‟ve brought customer--CRM, customer relationship management,
e-mail management, automation of payments and all of that stuff together, actually both of them have.
Is that what you‟re saying?
David: Yes, they actually do the same thing. It‟s just a matter of how Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot
are very comparable, but regardless of which you go with the two… I mean, they just both blow
something like a AWeber out of the water…
Travis: Exactly.
David: …not in terms of e-mail marketing because AWeber‟s fantastic at that, but in terms of all the
automation and tagging and all of that, it‟s just… For example, you look at a blog as a marketing
platform. How cool would it be, and I‟m going to be setting this up, is that when they‟re on my list, the
system knows who they are. It‟s seeing what they‟re doing on my blog, and if it sees that they‟ve visited
a couple of articles about some topic, I can automatically tag them as being interested in that, right? It‟s
just fine-tunes the marketing about what they‟re actually interested in. I can base it—it just magnifies
the effectiveness of blog marketing.

Travis: Yes, and then later you can send a relevant message to those tags.
David: Absolutely. I mean, even if somebody visits my products or services page--let‟s say they go to
my services page and they visit the page about my consulting or something like that, and then all of a
sudden, just magically, they get a follow-up e-mail from me, following up to see what they could use my
help with on a consulting.
Travis: Right, right. Yes, yes. Well, I didn‟t--my goal wasn‟t to challenge you on your recommendation
as much as for my own selfish reasons to compare and contrast the two between each other, so thanks
for going deeper in that. I surely wouldn‟t challenge you. I just wanted to know.
David: Sure.
Travis: Thanks for that recommendation.
Travis: Let‟s move to the third question. What famous quote would best summarize your belief or your
attitude in business?
David: This one, I was thinking about, and it really came down to the fact that I don‟t really think in
quotes. It was like, okay, the honest truth is I really don‟t think that way because I tend to--I‟ll read
people and I will look at quotes, but what I tend to do is I tend to take that thought in and make it my
own, not in terms of just, “Hey, I just made my own quote,” but in terms of… I don‟t feel like one can
actually apply something in their life or their business unless they make that thought theirs. I guess it
comes down also to the point that I suck at song lyrics and stuff, so maybe I‟m just memorizing words,
but I tend to think more conceptually.
One of the things is--I think any business owner needs to run their business based on what they think
and stop looking just to other people to basically do their thinking for them. For that reason, I don‟t keep
a library of quotes around. I don‟t really remember them. I‟d rather make my own quotes.
Travis: Fair enough, fair enough. No worries. I was just want the authentic you, and if that‟s not
something that resonates with you, then good on you. I‟m fine with it. I want to throw you an extra
question in there that I didn‟t send you--is what do you dream of now in business? What inspires you?
What dreams do you have of achieving next?

David: I‟ll tell you what my focus is right now and it actually goes toward why I just switched over to
OfficeAutoPilot. I‟m really working to create a business that is a lot more automated that it is now, to the
point where I feel like I‟m fulfilling my end of the bargain with the people who decide to do business with
me because the ball is not getting dropped. You can use software to do that. But also in terms of
freeing me up because—I mean, I‟m thinking ahead. I‟d like to possibly get into some other lines of
business that are still going to be Internet-related but not necessarily just helping bloggers and things
like that because I came from a different background. I‟d like to not end on this background. I‟d like to
do some other stuff. So one of the things that I‟m looking really to do, and it‟s going to be my focus this
year, is to really systematize the business and groove in these systems and such that I can work when I
need to work or focus on these core things that I need to be the one doing it, and the rest of it is taken
care of either by staff or by software like OfficeAutoPilot.
Travis: I commend you for thinking like that because so many people think that since they‟ve started a
business that they need to stay doing that one single thing and you really can step up out of that. You
can say, “Listen, I still want to serve these great people, but I don‟t want it to take the majority of my
time, and so I‟m going to move on something else that I‟m more passionate about, and I‟m just going to
set this up to where everybody gets the time and attention they deserve but it doesn‟t keep me from
growing .” So I can commend you on that. A lot of people never get that level of awareness, and they
spend their life stuck in a rut that they were passionate about 20 years ago and really don‟t care about
now. The person I was 20 years ago, David, is nowhere to be found.
David: Right.
Travis: I understand what I wanted at that time, but I‟m very little of that person that I was 20 years
ago. I was stuck in that rut for a long time, so I commend you on that.
It‟s been great connecting with you and sharing all of these different ideas and thoughts. I know I hit
you from the same angle a couple of different times. You‟re just so sharp on this topic that I want to
make sure that me and you together are doing a good job of creating that visual picture for people so
that they can understand how this applies to them. Also, the objective of the show, like I said at the
beginning, is just connecting my guest with great people like yourself to grow their business. So I
appreciate everything that you‟ve shared and taking the time out today.
David: You‟re very welcome. It‟s been a lot of fun. I‟m still very passionate about this topic. I absolutely
love it. I‟m pretty much live and breathe the stuff. But like what we were just talking about, one of those
things and why I‟ve been thinking about the automation is because, like a lot of people, I am
multifaceted. I‟m not only interested in this. I‟m actually thinking about maybe getting into doing some

software again. That‟s what my original roots came from before I started doing this exclusively
information-based stuff. Ultimately, at the end of the day, all this business stuff that we do is designed
to empower the lifestyle that we want. It‟s not designed to necessarily be our entire life. I‟ve got kids
and stuff. I want to spend time with them. I want to do other things as well. I want to get back into scuba
diving. Yes, it‟s just one of those things where the business is here for a purpose, and it‟s so good just
to keep an eye on that ball and why we‟re doing it.
Travis: Yes, exactly. How old are you, David?
David: I‟m 34.
Travis: 34. Okay. Well, you‟re--man, you‟re ahead of your time. What social-media platforms are you
using to drive your success beyond your blogs?
David: Right now, I‟m focusing mainly on Facebook and Google+. What gets the most of my time is
Facebook, and I think it‟s just by its nature. I just like using Facebook. I have a hard time, like a lot of
people who are probably listening to this, feeling like I‟m getting spread out by trying to use too many
platforms at once. I was completely ignoring Google+ but I‟ve decided to get back into it because let‟s
face it, it‟s Google we‟re talking about.
Travis: All right.
David: Our community feature--they just put it into Google+--is going to have a lot of potential to it. I
had started up a group. I look at that type of thing as an extension of my e-mail list in a way, a way to
engage with my community. Also, when they‟re on a social platform their mindset is different. We need
to take that into account--they‟re there to interact and be social--whereas on our e-mail list, a lot of us
have this inbox-zero mentality and we just want to empty it out and really get aggressive with the delete
button. So I think e-mail‟s just changing. We need to not only think about our e-mail list. We need to
engage people. I think that naturally is going to bring us to social. For me, it‟s Facebook, Google+,
Twitter. I still use it somewhat. I know that I should be using LinkedIn more but I‟m just not there very
often. I know that I‟m underutilizing it.
Travis: Yes, yes. Yes, I am, too. I‟m constantly under construction and working on improving all of
those things. I‟m going to connect with you. Are you active on Twitter? Did you say Twitter also?
David: Yes, just my name: David Risley.

Travis: Yes, okay. What I‟m going to do is--so what links would you like to leave? Then, of course, I‟ll
take the social media links from you later, and we‟ll post those on the site as well. How can people find
you?
David: The best place would be blogmarketingacademy.com. So that‟s pretty much my home base for
pretty much everything, so it‟s a great way to go. Then specifically what I could do is recommend--I
have a 30-Day Blog Transformation Challenge. It‟s completely and totally free. It‟s a video course on
how to affect and utilize blogging and have it basically not turn into your own rat wheel, essentially. It‟s
a video course, so it‟s on blogmarketingacedemy.com, but there‟s a shortcut link that you can use
called blogtransformation.com. It‟ll point you right in there. E-mail address comes on, and then you‟re
just going to get the lesson sent to you via e-mail.
Travis: I like it. I like it. So I‟ll post those. Can you hang out for a couple of more minutes?
David: Sure thing.
End of Interview
Travis: Okay. So listen, I want to remind you guys--now I told you he was a rock star, and I was right,
right? So I want to remind you to go to the show notes below David‟s episode. I‟m going to post a little
bit of his bio and the links and just some general things that we talked about in the show.
I want to remind you to go to diyob.com, so that‟s short for Diamonds in Your Own Backyard. So it‟s
diyob.com. Enter your name, and we‟ll send you the “2013 Business Owner's Guide: From Frustration
to 70 Million Dollars,” a behind-the-scenes look at what you need to know to grow your business to
incredible levels of success. Now I want to stress, you don‟t need to be at any certain place in your
business. You don‟t have to have the desire to build it to that size. There‟s just a lot of things that
people are not talking about that I share with you on my journey of building my business that I think are
essential in helping you get there.
Also, when you opt in, you‟ll become a member of the Authentic Entrepreneur Nation, which is a
network of people, tools and resources that you can refer to, that you can trust to grow your business.
This is basically a private rolodex, that Sandra and myself use and recommend of people that we trust.

In the next episode, I'm going to connect you with Sean Malarkey. Sean is the cofounder of inspired
marketing, the number one company that creates digital online training with a focus on social media. Be
sure to join us.
Today, I want to close the show with an inspirational quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. The quote
reads, “Take the first step in faith. You don‟t have to see the whole staircase just to take the first step.”
Now I believe that this quote applies to all of us as business owners by telling you to stay in action.
This is Travis Lane Jenkins signing off for now. To your success, may you continue to inspire those
around you to take action and go after their dreams, too. Talk to you on the next episode. Take care.

How We Can Help You
We know that finding someone that you can trust online today is hard and that so many “so called
gurus” are self-‐appointed and have never really even done what they teach you to do. That‟s exactly
why we created the Double Your Profits Business Accelerator. This is an exclusive offer for our fans at
a fraction of its normal cost.
Here's what to expect. We'll Schedule a 'One on One' private session, where we'll take the time to dive
deep into your business and tell you what is missing, so that you can have your best year ever!
We'll do this by performing a S.W.O.T. Analysis. This tells us your Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities and Threats within your business.
This will be an eye opener for YOU, for several reasons, however some of the most common reasons
are.
As the 'Business Owner' it‟s difficult to see the big picture of your own business because you‟re in the
middle of a daily management.
And you are too emotionally involved to completely impartial.
This is a common problem for EVERY business owner. It doesn‟t matter if you are a one-man army, or
an army of 150, the problem is still the same.
Travis Lane Jenkins
Business Mentor-Turn Around Specialist
Radio Host of The Entrepreneurs Radio Show
“Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs That Grow Your Business"

The Entrepreneurs Radio Show 041 David Risley

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