- Hi, my name is Carl Trent.
I own a website called dadsguidetowdw.com.
I've been with SBI! since 2008,
September 1st, 2008.
We got one page view.
Yesterday I had 30,025 page views.
If I can do it, you can too.
- So, Carl, for somebody that doesn't know you,
can you introduce yourself a little bit
and talk to us in the context particularly of your website.
It's a pretty exciting subject.
- (laughing) Yes, it is.
Well, my name is Carl Trent.
I was,
just a normal everyday average guy.
I was an air traffic controller
for 27 years and in that job
I was going to be forced to retire at age 55.
So, along the way through the years,
I was always trying to find a retirement job
and I wanted to center it around Disney
because I love Disney, especially Walt Disney World.
Disney has been,
Walt Disney himself and Disney has been a passion of mine
since I was very, very young,
since my grandmother took me to Disneyland
when I was like four years old.
- [Paul] Right.
- It's just been a passion forever
and so, I started out as,
I was gonna be a Disney Travel Agent
and I started learning how to be a travel agent
and I did all these courses,
even got to the point where I was a Disney Travel Agent
part time and was actually about to buy
a travel agency in Texas where we were living in 2001.
- [Paul] Wow.
- Something came up in August of 2001
that caused me, well, actually we got a new job
and were gonna move and it caused me
to back out of the contract
and the guy was fine with it.
It was very amicable, no problems.
But then again, six weeks later
the world changed and the travel agency,
the travel agent business died, really.
- [Paul] Yeah.
- At that time.
So, good for me.
But, I still had that passion
to help people with Disney World travel.
There is just a, at that time back then,
there was just a big gulf.
There just wasn't any help
for people that wanted to go to Disney World.
And this was before the internet got real popular,
so, 2008 I ran across SBI!
Build your own website.
Build a website that sells.
Build a website that makes money.
But, you have to put the work into it,
put the passion into it,
build a website around your personality
and around your passion
and so I knew that the Disney,
Walt Disney World was a very competitive market,
didn't ever really expect
to get into a really high place.
I just wanted to get to where I could help some people
with their trips to Walt Disney World.
Through the years that the site's grown
there was a couple year period
where I kind of went away from the site
and I started my online magazine.
And started building that as a product
to sell on the website and to others
and it just has grown and grown and grown
to where just this last month,
found out that we were ranking on the first page
of Google for the phrase Magic Kingdom
which has tremendous numbers
and just to get on the first page of Google for that
just it's been quite a ride.
It's just been a lot of fun.
- That's really interesting
because you talk about how you sort of
started out because you wanted to help a few people
but in actual fact, it turned into,
I almost said lifestyle and I suppose that's true
but it really became a life's work.
- Yeah, it's really become,
well, it's not work, it's fun.
I mean, it's just what I love to do
and so I get to sit around all day
and talk about my favorite thing
and write about my favorite thing
and I love doing the computer part of it.
I'm a computer geek.
I'm a website geek.
And just the whole thing is just a dream job.
It really is.
It's just, if I would have laid out my life
I couldn't have laid it out any better
than what it turned out.
- Very good, so for somebody
that's listening to this right now
you talked about how important it was to be,
or how great it was to be page one for Magic Kingdom.
Can you outline for somebody
that doesn't necessarily know too much
about website traffic or building an online business,
or they think they do
but they don't know much about keywords,
what the significance of that is?
- Well, the significance of it is that
Magic Kingdom is a term that's searched,
let's say a million times a day.
And to get to the first page of Google
for that particular keyword,
now I won't say that just being on the first page
is great 'cause we're not getting a lot.
We've got traffic, we've got probably 12 pages
to get more traffic than the Magic Kingdom page
because we're ranked number one or two in search
for those terms, but just to get to the Magic Kingdom,
to the first page, the first three slots are Disney slots.
The next slot is a Wikipedia slot.
And there's, the next slot is one
between me and another Disney webpage.
But we're beating TripAdvisor,
we're beating, just huge.
- [Paul] Everyone.
- Everybody, Yelp, just anybody.
There are a lot of big players in the Disney market
and to be on the front page
for that keyword, it's just pretty spectacular.
But, if I was in the top three or four
then the traffic would be pretty spectacular, too.
But, that's just the reality.
- But, the traffic is, nevertheless, spectacular
because you're able to run a full-time business
off this, aren't you?
- Yes, we have a lot of traffic.
Our main money comes from our magazine.
That's where we make most of our money.
The website is probably a little under-monetized.
But, that's not the goal.
The goal of the website is to get people on our email list,
to help people
so we can use our newsletters
and we can get that interaction
that we can use to help people
and so if we had a goal just to make money,
be full of AdSense ads, it'd be full.
It would just be plastered.
Yeah, we'd be making more money off of it, but.
- It wouldn't be what you want.
- [Carl] It's exactly right.
- And that's really a powerful difference, isn't it?
It's interesting listening to you
because I know with sites or with Site Build It!,
we talk about your voice and your passion
and things like this and clearly,
that's what drives it.
It became from something that you just thought you'd do
a little bit to help some people out
into an overwhelming opportunity for you
to really live an ideal life
and to me that's like you're just constantly sharing
your love of the subject and your enthusiasm
and anybody that's even listening to you now
can really get how engaged you are in it.
It's not just like a, oh, yeah,
well this is an exciting thing
that that we really think you should be excited about.
(laughing)
- Yeah, no, I'm living the dream.
(laughing)
- So, with that in mind, Carl,
it's not really just the website itself
that's doing the traffic and the keywords
and the content and all the rest of it,
you also have an extensive presence
with social activities and also using other things
like video and Pinterest and all the rest of it.
Can you outline, first of all,
what the other social activities are
and what impact they have on the site.
- Well, we have,
I'm gonna forget I'm sure, something.
We have a Facebook channel, a Facebook page.
We have a Facebook group which we just started
about six weeks ago and we've got
1,200 members in it now, very active.
We have a YouTube channel for the website.
We have a Pinterest page.
That's probably about it.
Those are the ones we kind of focus on.
We do Twitter.
We do auto Twitter from our Facebook page.
We've never found Twitter to be particularly helpful
in our niche but we've tried to,
one of the reasons you want to do social media,
one of the reasons I wanted to do social media,
because it's social proof to Google.
It tells Google that you have a presence
that's not just your website.
So we've got a presence.
We've got a fairly active Facebook page.
Our Facebook group is active.
We started a YouTube channel.
Well, we started it a long time ago.
We started to get active on it in December of 2016
and started really ramping that up.
We go back and forth on Pinterest.
We're active for a little while and then we're not.
I do have a full-time person that works on social media.
And then the one thing that I've mentioned before
that a lot of people don't think about
is how active we are with our email.
We send weekly emails and then we send
emails intermittently probably another,
over a month's time we'll send probably
not just the four newsletters,
but we'll send probably six or eight more reminders
or offers or things during the month.
So, it's a whole package.
It's just anything we can think of
to get people talking to us, talking to people
and get interaction, that's what we're trying to do.
- Okay, so, let's talk about
some other sources of traffic then.
And I wanted to particularly focus on video
and your use of video.
One of the things that I'm really struck by
is your use of the live question and answers
or live conversations and this, to me,
seems to be probably, I mean I know you do other videos
but this seems to be the most
present-time impactful thing that you could be doing
with your viewers, if you like,
with those that are engaged in the content.
Can you talk a little bit about,
first of all, what prompted you to even start to do that
or was it just a no-brainer?
- When, I don't know where I heard this from,
might have been from you, I don't know,
was to take, to make,
to create content, instead of writing it out,
do it as a video and then have it transcribed
and turn that into a webpage, too.
So, I've had, for years I've had this,
what I call, Ask Dad page
where people can ask me questions.
They send 'em in and I type answers back.
So, in December of 2016 we decided to start
doing this weekly show where we'd do a full show
with news and ads and the main part of it
would be I would answer the questions
from the Ask Dad page and then also
the people watching it could send questions in live
and I'd answer 'em right then and there.
Live, so every week, every Friday at noon,
it was called Lunch with Dad.
Every Friday at noon, I would show up
and I'd spend right about an hour
going through the news and all of the questions.
We would have on the average of about 20 questions a week.
And eight to 10 of those
would be made into SBI! Content 2.0 pages.
We've made, I don't have my,
know how many hundred we've done since we started.
I know at one point we had
over 500 question videos on YouTube.
We'd also take, we'd cut Ask,
we'd cut the Lunch with Dad up
so each of the questions would be turned into a video
and we'd put that on YouTube.
At your table had to have the Disney dining plan.
Now they've fixed that,
I don't know why they ever did it that way
but now they've fixed it.
So, we're getting content on the website.
We're getting content on YouTube.
We're generating traffic on both channels,
cross traffic, cross promoting.
But the thing that happened was people were just engaged.
We'd get 200, 300 comments live as we did it.
It was just very engaging.
People just wanted to be involved with it.
Due to time constraints, 'cause it took a lot of time
to prepare for that, two weeks ago we quit doing that
but what we're doing now is I'm doing
one or two a week where I'm going in live
and I'm saying, hey, we'll talk about a particular subject
and then I'll open it up for questions.
Any questions you've got,
so and they know in advance I'm gonna be there.
So, the questions are still coming in.
We did one last week
that had 236 comments
during the live stream.
So, it's really, you talk about getting a Facebook,
and this we did in the group.
We've moved it over to the group
because what I found out with Facebook,
and what I've found with Facebook,
if you've got a page, good luck getting Facebook
to show that to anybody.
- [Paul] (laughing) Yeah.
- They just don't show it to anybody.
But if they're in a group,
guess what the first thing they see is.
If they're active in a group,
the first thing they're gonna see is that group,
what's going on in that group.
So the group tends to get more interaction
than the page that's got 80,000 likes on it.
So the group with 1,200 people gets more interaction
than the page with 80,000 likes.
So, it's just, we're trying to adapt
with the changes that Facebook makes.
- Yeah, it is quite an interesting thing
and I've noticed how effective groups can be.
I don't think that that's any particular surprise,
as long as you've got the interest there.
But, part of having a group from my point of view
is that you actually have a little bit more control
over Facebook because, as you say,
with the newsfeed it can just disappear
but with a group, people are committed.
They go into the group.
They're getting notifications and all the rest of it
and you know that they're there.
And it's also special
so people want to be in there as well.
- Yeah, and you have a little more control
over not only who's in it but moderation.
We've got moderators in the group
and it just, it's just easier to handle than the page.
- Right, so let's just divide this up then.
You're doing the live thing now
in a different format to the group only.
But, so to the general Facebook stream
is that just photos and maybe news updates?
I notice that you have a calendar, I think,
like what's on, that sort of thing.
- Yep, every morning first thing in the morning
we put up what's going on today.
The weather, the crowds, the special events,
the hours, that comes up first thing in the morning.
During the day we'll post five to six times,
different things, content, new content,
we create new content every day
so there's new content going up.
There are pictures.
If we do a live, we will share it into the main page
so the main page is still seeing it in real time.
But, it's actually happening in the group.
But, anything that comes up,
if there's a news item we'll post it.
So, it's just, we used to,
back when Facebook was a lot better,
we used to post 16 times a day.
Now we're down to five.
And that's just the reality of how Facebook works.
- Yeah, that's right.
So let's focus a little bit on YouTube.
And I'll probably come back to Facebook again in a moment.
YouTube, you have been creating videos consistently
for a hell of a long time.
Can you give us an idea, I mean,
you've talked about the question and answer ones,
but the custom made ones, if you like,
how long have they generally taken you to create?
- The custom made ones aren't really,
the ones we're doing, I do for the Dad's Guide channel,
don't take long.
I write a script.
I set up my iPhone on a tripod.
I talk to my iPhone and I just,
I'm not one shot but two or three shots
I can usually get through
where I've done the whole thing in one take.
- And you're editing it yourself?
- I have an assistant that is a video editor
and I send it to her.
She puts on the front and the tail
and if there's anything that needs to be trimmed
in the middle, she'll do that.
And yes, she takes care of that, not me.
- [Paul] So she knows well enough what's right
and what's wrong and what to fix and what to leave.
- Right.
- [Paul] Right, that's exactly what you need.
So those videos, how long do they tend to be?
- Short.
Two to three, five minutes at the most.
The problem with the live stream is
I tend to ramble when I'm on the live stream.
I'll do a review of a restaurant.
It'll be 14 minutes long because I'm off on tangents
and thinking about everything and,
but when I'm doing it to camera
and have a script I'm thinking about
and it's shorter because I'm much more focused
when I'm just doing that,
when I'm just doing the thing to the camera.
I'm much more focused so they tend to be
three to five minutes.
- What's your most wanted response from these?
- For people to watch 'em. (laughing)
- [Paul] But it's a new audience, isn't it, watching these.
- It is a new audience.
We're building audience over on YouTube,
that's kinda what we're doing.
In fact, our YouTube strategy,
it's pull it out of the hat.
We really don't know what we're doing yet over there.
We're just starting to really think about
what we're doing on YouTube and how to do it better.
It's been kind of, we started this as a content building
for SBI! strategy and now it's kind of morphing into,
okay, we gotta start getting a little smarter about this
and getting a little more,
so we've started creating a list
of things we want to do with our YouTube.
Now we've got people into expecting videos every day.
So, it's going to be hard to match that appetite
and to create good videos every day.
So, it's gonna be a challenge.
- So let's go back to Facebook
because that's really probably the area
of great interest for me here now.
You're doing a lot of live broadcasting
for many people, they don't really
have the wherewithal to do it
or the knowledge about how to do it.
Can you just walk us through what you use
and how you use it and how effective it is?
- Sure,
start with, I don't have a camera.
I, when we're doing our Lives on Facebook
I use my MacBook Pro.
I have my MacBook Pro.
I use my camera right on my MacBook Pro.
I use a program called ECAMM.
I think it was $35
that I paid for ECAMM, it's not a subscription,
it's a one-time cost.
And I use that.
That posts to Facebook.
That posts directly to Facebook.
- Automatically? - Automatically.
You set up a time, you schedule it
or you can do it live.
I mean, you can post, I wanna go now.
And you can post to groups or to pages.
Like we've got 10 pages and 15 groups.
I can pick which one.
I've got some dead groups, when I wanna test something
I'll go into a dead group and I'll test it.
You can do interviews.
It's getting more robust all the time.
And we use that.
I have a Yeti microphone that I use
but it's sitting right here.
I got a black one so you can't see it.
(chuckling)
- We'd better tell people what a Yeti microphone is.
It's by a company called Blue, would you believe,
it's a Blue Yeti.
- Blue Yeti.
- And it's very good. - It was always Blue.
This one they did special and it was black
so I thought black looked cool
so I had to have a black Yeti.
But, we use the ECAMM.
I'll schedule something.
You can put pictures like I have,
a sponsor I have their little ad up here.
I set my room up.
I set everything all up
and I talk to the camera
and I, when the time comes it says Go Live,
I punch the Go Live button and here we go.
- [Paul] Right.
- I also do some sound, usually.
I like, I'm into classic rock,
80s, I'm an 80s, 70s, 80s, 60s, 70s, 80s rock
and I'll play snippets
and I gotta be careful about how long
of those I play 'cause if you play too long
and YouTube says you've got copyright infringement
so I'll keep the snippets pretty short.
But I've got an external mike that I use
that boosts the sound up for the snippets
but it's pretty simple setup.
It's cheap.
The Yeti was $129 and the external speakers like 50 bucks.
You know, for 200 bucks you got everything
ready to go.
- So, you really are your own little production house.
(chuckling)
So, you've talked a little bit about,
you've talked a little bit about the assistants you have
and I think for somebody watching this right now,
they're going, well I'm just me.
How on earth am I going to have a site
that's got, obviously, thousands and thousands
and thousands of visitors a day.
It's funding all of this.
I can't do it all by myself.
So tell me about your team, your hidden elves.
- I was right there.
For years I had no help, no paid help.
In fact, until I started the online magazine
I did not have any paid help.
The online magazine has driven most of my paid help
because it is a multiple full-time jobs.
And as things grew,
I could probably do everything for the website,
of the Dad's Guide website by myself,
but adding that online magazine and
we're running two big businesses,
content creation, magazine,
the online magazine's moving to print this year.
I mean, it's a major undertaking.
And so when I started back in 2013,
I started the online magazine
and then early 2014, well, I had this lady
that was helping me write content.
I wasn't paying her much back then
but she was writing some of the Ask Dad pages.
I was still working full time.
So I'm out in this website, starting this online magazine,
working full time with unpaid help.
So, I've been there.
So, when the online magazine started, we made some money,
middle of 2014 I hired my first assistant full time
and her job was mainly to work on the magazine.
She's the editor of the magazine.
She works as much as I do keeping track of the magazine.
And she does the video editing.
But I still do most of the Dad's Guide stuff myself.
I do all the content writing.
I do all the, I upload all the pages.
I mean, I do pretty much most of the website stuff myself.
Yeah, I get a little help but,
yes, I don't do the, I've done when we had the
16 posts a day for Facebook, I was doing those.
And still working a full-time job.
So, while it sounds like a lot,
you can do it as a one-person shop.
I don't have to do it as a one-person shop anymore
but that's only because I got 7,000 other things
that we're dealing with.
We're printing calendars.
We're writing books.
I mean, right there you see my book.
We're trying, we're building a pretty large business
so it takes more than just what you would for a website.
- You know, you talk about the expanded team,
it does seem to me that you reach a tipping point
where if you want to grow, you have to have some extra help
even though it does cost you money.
Was that your experience? - Absolutely.
Absolutely, there just comes a point
where you can't do it all.
And it's a good thing to have help.
I'm a firm believer in team.
My full-time team, I have two full-time assistants.
I have eight photographers to work on our team.
We've got 20 writers.
We've got a team of about 50 people
with proof-readers and everything
that goes into the magazine.
We've got a really large team
and I said this once in the forums,
you don't have a business until you've had to make payroll.
(Paul chuckling)
You just have a website.
But when you have to make a payroll,
then you got a business.
- You know, somebody listening to that right now
is liking, oh my God!
(chuckling)
And it's really important to make the point
that you don't have to build it that big.
That's your particular passion.
- [Carl] No.
- But I think what I really wanted to say
was that the beauty of an online environment like this
is that you can really grow it as far
north or status quo or whatever you wanna do as you like.
It is really up to you.
You know, there are some really tight niches
that wouldn't warrant this.
- I'm in a huge niche.
I'm in a huge niche, it really is.
There's probably 100 new websites started today
for Walt Disney World.
- [Paul] No, really?
- Yes, it's just everybody thinks they can do it.
But it's not because I did it myself.
It's because I've built a team.
I've had help.
SBI!'s been a great help.
And me, I'm just driven to do these kind of things.
It's just my nature.
It's not my nature to relax.
I just can't do it.
So, you don't have to be like me.
It's not, it's okay.
You don't have to be, but.
- [Paul] Nah, I mean, you're site might be
about a little church in an obscure English village
and that's fine, too.
There could be a huge amount of interest in that.
- Exactly, and the good thing about SBI! is
you have the platform to get dominance in any niche.
If I can get it in the Disney World niche,
you can get it in any nitch or niche or whatever you wanna.
- It's interesting, you raise
the impact that SBI! has had for you.
You've been with the company or using it as a platform
for a long time, since then WordPress has come up
and lots of other platforms.
Have you ever been tempted to move?
- Absolutely, absolutely.
In fact, I think it was last year
that I wrote in the forums,
I'm done, I'm going.
I have WordPress sites.
I've got probably, I've got six WordPress sites.
And the temptation is always there
but then all it takes is one big traffic rush
on one of my sites, which freezes my whole account,
and I'm paying $170 a month for my WordPress sites
and if I get a big traffic rush for some reason
then they all go, we're in maintenance mode
for a few minutes and if that's when I'm doing a big sale,
which has happened multiple times,
then I've lost a bunch of money.
So, and with SBI! if I get a million hits a day,
it doesn't matter, it's gonna work.
It's gonna be there.
I'm not gonna get dinged or,
like I did with my former host,
get my whole account shut down
because I had a traffic rush.
And no notification.
Somebody just sent me a note, said your account's down.
I go and they tell me, oh, are you the owner?
We've shut your account down.
What?
- [Paul] Why?
- We think you're getting spammed.
No, I just wrote a post that everybody in the world
wants to read and the last thing I want
is my site being down right now.
- That's really interesting
because it is a fundamental difference
between, I think, a lot of platforms and SBI!
and I've actually never thought about it before
but when they talk about
build a site that makes you money
or a site that works
or an online business that works,
what it's exactly talking about is saying
that we actually think business.
We are actually designed for you
to be incredibly successful,
not for a situation
where you might only get 100 visits a day.
- Right.
Yeah.
And the thing with the page speed and the images
is just, for me that's incredible.
I put my images up, my pages load immediately
and I can have 30 images on a page and it loads.
You go on their WordPress, on the WordPress site,
you put (grinding).
It's just, and that is one of the reasons
I can dominate for words like Magic Kingdom
because my images load and other pages
have to keep images off their site
because they don't load fast enough.
- So, one of the burning questions
that I've wanted to ask you,
on a completely different tack,
one of the burning questions
that I've wanted to ask you for a while,
because I grew up with Disneyland in the 60s.
Black and white television, Donald Duck cartoons,
absolutely awesome.
We didn't have television.
I went over to a neighbor's house
and we had ice cream and cake for dessert
and watched Disneyland.
It was very special and I've never forgotten it.
I'm pretty curious what it is
that got you really engaged in it
and how you became Dad.
- Well, I think that's kind of two different stories
but
I grew up in the Wonderful World of Disney era
with Bambi and Snow White and all the Disney movies
and yeah, I'm a guy, but I kinda like those things
and my mom was a Disney fan
and I kinda had
a really love for Walt
and followed him very carefully,
wrote high school papers about Walt
because he was just kind of my hero
because of his technological advances,
because of what he had developed,
how he had gone from nothing, literally nothing
to developing this empire.
Not that I want to develop an empire,
yes I do, but (chuckling) anyway,
but how I became Dad was when I started looking at SBI!
I wanted to build a site where guys could come
and get a love for Disney
and so it was going to be a Dad's Guide to Walt Disney World
where I was the Dad and I was going to help guys
into the Disney lifestyle.
As the site started growing
and we started getting statistics,
especially through Facebook,
I noticed this first on Facebook,
our Facebook page started growing,
I noticed that Facebook analytics was showing me
that 65% of our traffic was from women
and only 35% was from men.
How do you have a site called Dad's Guide to WDW
being 65% women, so we kinda changed our tone
a little bit, I kinda changed our tone a little bit
and we started talking about Disney in general,
making it less gender specific
and just spreading my passion for Walt Disney World
and apparently women really enjoy that.
It stayed at 65-70% women.
It still is 65-70% women.
Just everything we do gravitates to women.
I guess the Disney niche kinda gravitates
a little more to women than the men
but I'd still love to do the come on guys.
I do this every once in a while.
Come on guys.
You need to fall in love with Disney.
But the Dad thing was I'm a dad.
I'm proud of being a dad.
I love my kids.
I love, and I wanted to kind of give that perspective,
a dad being trustworthy, being the helpful,
the pat on the back, the kick in the rear when you need it,
just that dad figure, that Ward Cleaver figure,
if you, just that,
the idea behind Dad is that perfect dad
that you wish you had
that tells you what you need to know about Disney.
You trust him, that's one of the things I say
multiple trust, trust, trust me
to build that trust and that,
and that I'm open and you come to me with a problem,
I help you solve it.
So, that's what the Dad brand is.
- Well, on that note, I think that's a wonderful way
to actually end the conversation
except is there anything particular
that you wanted to cover or we should bring up
that we haven't thought of.
- Just to have passion for whatever you're doing.
Just to have passion, get it out there.
Interact with people.
Whether it's your followers,
whether it's other people in your niche,
your competitors, interact with people.
Build teams.
Build, your team doesn't have to be
people that work for you.
You're team is who you interact with,
who you're talking to,
your followers, your other competitors.
They're part of your team.
Build your team.
Build those relationships.
It will help you tremendously as you go forward
and just be passionate about whatever you do.
- Well, on that note, thank you very much, Dad.
I've really enjoyed this little chat
and I'm sure it will help us all.
- Thank you.
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