Unconventional Life – Podcast, Blog, Live Events

Author: Jules Schroeder

  • Ep263: YouTube Ads and How You Can be a Retargeting Ad Machine, with AdOutreach President Aleric Heck

    Ep263: YouTube Ads and How You Can be a Retargeting Ad Machine, with AdOutreach President Aleric Heck

    Have you ever seen a bullfrog eat a dozen smaller frogs? Or a video on a haircut transformation? Or even wet paint being scraped off the side of a barrel in the most satisfying manner?

    Youtube is one of the many strange places on the internet where you find yourself spending hours upon hours, jumping from algebra lessons to cat videos, to a crash course in philosophy, and to videos about a dance group carrying a coffin. It entertains, educates, but as Aleric Heck of AdOutreach found out, it can also make millions.

    Aleric, before being the president of his own company, made his first exploits on Youtube through a review channel called AppFind which impressed the heck out of a client. So much so that they invited him to work for them.

    “They basically called me up and said, ‘Hey, we would love for you to drop out of college, fly out here to Silicon Valley, be in charge of YouTube ads and you know in this tiny side of YouTube thing will give you a six-figure salary,’” he narrated. “Maybe for a second I looked at that,” Aleric said, “but I knew that I’ve always been this way—that I wanted to be the king of my own castle.” He understood that there was more to Youtube than cat videos and Top 10 countdowns which is why he is encouraging everyone to dive into this new era of content advertising.

    “Right now is the time to come in as an early adopter on YouTube ads,” he emphasized, “and take advantage of that blue ocean.” He notes that Youtube is the second biggest search engine next to Google and it is a place where you can find leads, get sales, and most importantly, make revenue.

    On top of that, Aleric explains that even young starting influencers can grow their audience using what’s called Youtube Discovery Ads, where users will be suggested to watch your video next because it has the same theme as the previous video you watched; sort of riding the same wave that a more prominent channel has. A great tool for YouTubers looking to grow a fan base or take in more subscribers.

    Aleric notes that each business needs to make adjustments and decide on ads based on their own capabilities, but for him, there are set rules that one should follow which pay off big in the long run, one of these is to at least spend 20% on retargeting ads, guided by the Pareto Principle.

    He also encourages businesses to diversify their online presence in multiple platforms—omnipresence as Aleric put it—where he spends at least $50 a day, testing new platforms.

     

    More from Aleric:

  • Ep262: Enjoying the Freefall Through Life, with Australian Freediving Record Holder, Adam Stern

    Ep262: Enjoying the Freefall Through Life, with Australian Freediving Record Holder, Adam Stern

    Freediving is basically a sport where people hold their breath and see who can sink the deepest. In detail, it combines physical training and lung endurance, with mental focus to create the most effective and safest way down.

    For Australian record holder Adam Stern, freediving isn’t just a sport. Sharing with us his passion and love of everything it has taught him, Adam has taken the competition out of the water and made it his way of life.

     

    Diving-bum Days

    In his younger years, like many of us wasn’t too excited about being a worker or a corporate employee, or to be under any boss. After earning his degree in theatre, Adam spent years backpacking across Asia and the Caribbean.

    One day in Koh Tao, Thailand, he came across a sign that offered freediving lessons which then led to the athlete and Youtuber who we know now as Adam Freediver.

    Living affordably in Asia, he could afford to train full time and dedicated his life to training in various waters in different parts of the world. Though despite his dedication to the sport, going professional in the sport wasn’t enough to support him financially, but the sheer passion of Adam kept him going.

    “I would go home—absolutely broke—and I would get some horrible job in like a factory or something that was gonna pay really well,” Adam narrated, “so I could make a lot of money in a short period of time, and go away again to a new place to train and dive with new divers and learn from them. I wasn’t making any money out of freediving, I just loved diving, I love training, and I was just happy to be doing that.”

     

    Choosing to Freefall

    Describing each dive and training session as a form of meditation, Adam takes in every instance of life as he would do underwater.

    He describes that a freediver will let the air escape him and his lungs will then compress to start sinking. Here he would stop paddling and let the intoxicating feeling of sinking down take over—the freefall.

    For one to really enjoy and make the most of that one breath that we have, you have to be in a state of total relaxation and understand that you are in full control of how this dive will go.

    As Adam put it, “I can be in control of my body—I can be in control of myself—even if I’m in a situation that might be adverse. How I respond to things can be absolute and so no matter what’s going on in life, as long as I’m in control of myself, I’m fine.”

    For him, the unconventional life means to always be in control of himself—liberating freedom wherein he can choose to do what he is passionate about, and he is also wishing that people also have the courage to take that brave step of taking control and make the most of that one breath we all have.

     

    More from Adam:

  • Ep261: How To Book Big Names Into Your Podcast, with Command Your Brand Media founder, Jeremy Ryan Slate

    Ep261: How To Book Big Names Into Your Podcast, with Command Your Brand Media founder, Jeremy Ryan Slate

    Other than it’s time-consuming advertisements and often mediocre content, there are more and more reasons why a lot of us are turning away from the television. One of those is that in today’s advancing digital access and almost production-level free software, almost anyone can host their own “TV Show” and make an Oprah Winfrey of themselves with a computer, internet, and some recording hardware.

    However, with everyone racing to get the most views and internet traffic it’s easy to get buried by the sheer number of digital influencers who’ve had a head start. So how can you catch up to this fun and lucrative use of online media?

    Before Jeremy Ryan Slate was dubbed a Top Influencer by Forbes, the young Oxford graduate made money through some handy-man jobs, before teaching at a high school. Now he hosts the Create Your Own Life podcast that studies people of excellence, and the Command Your Brand Media that helps businesses optimize their PR strategy. Here are three tricks he shared with us to increase your reach and audience.

     

    The First 24 Hours Make The Biggest Mark

    Starting out in podcasting as an unpopular person, Jeremy knew that he needed to come in guns blazing—getting every person he could find to subscribe.

    “When I started out, I knew that one of the major things that ranks a podcast is the number of subscribers you can get in a 24-hour period in ratio to the number of current subscribers that you have,” he noted, “so right out of the gate, I was really pushing everybody that I noticed to subscribe—I was pushing for reviews, too, but they don’t really have much influence on your ranking if any at all. So really I was pushing as many people as I could to subscribe, and that really pushed us to have 10,000 listens in our first 30 days.”

     

    Know What Makes You Different

    It’s easy to get lost in trends and copy the styles that work, but Jeremy stressed that you should have a reason for what you’re doing. It should be clearly defined what your podcast talks about, what your channel is used to, and what a viewer can expect from your platform.

    There is an audience for everybody but it’s key to start somewhere that people already like, then grow more defined as you go along.

    “My show started as something for people creating life on their own terms,” Jeremy said, “and it’s gone gradually too, how do you be extraordinary and be world-class at that. So you kind of continue working on that [your show’s initial reason] to get there.”

     

    Content is King

    Being a regular “Joe Nobody,” Jeremy was counting on the fame and quality of his guests to carry and grow his podcast. To do this he made a list of 100 people that he admired and created an intense system of follow-ups that ensured every guest was there to make the most of every episode.

    “I created a Google Sheet, without all the names, emails, phone numbers anything I could find”, Jeremy emphasized, “and I created a follow-up system where I basically reached out to all these people day one by writing individual emails to them. It took me about eight hours which was pretty nuts, and I followed up with him every 30 to 60 days. The first person I reached out to was Seth Godin and he said ‘No, but when you get to 400, we’ll do it,’ and he was Episode 400 of the show.

    It was this consistency and dedication to the show that earned Jeremy his place in iTunes Top 100 and the number spot in the business category. Jeremy noted that even American entrepreneur Dave Asprey found time for his show after half a year of follow-ups.

    This intense dedication to the show’s subscribers is also reflecting in Jeremy’s ad campaign strategy, which he shares with us, that utilizes Retargeting Ads, a formula for making viral 30-second videos, and even noting the relevance of LinkedIn—a relatively smaller social media site with a more professional audience—to extend his reach and promotion of the show.

     

    More from Jeremy:

  • Ep260: WFH. Living Life On Your Own Terms, with Badass Digital Nomad host Kristin Wilson

    Ep260: WFH. Living Life On Your Own Terms, with Badass Digital Nomad host Kristin Wilson

    “WFH”—an acronym that was almost non-existent until 2020— is now the most popular trend globally with the pandemic affecting the lives of every nation and social class, forcing us to Work From Home. After decades of investing millions into the tech industry to make smaller computers, powerful smartphones, and whatever the heck 5G is, there is a sort of beauty to humankind’s obsession with tech now that we can work remotely.

    It sort of a delight in a way when you think about it: years of competition and advancement has prepared us for a pandemic of this magnitude. But even before the word COVID-19 was carved into our minds, entrepreneur, writer, influencer and surfer Kristin Wilson has been working from home and advocating remote work for the past 18 years.

    Now, Wilson is lending her knowledge to help people, relocate and live better lives without being stuck in an office space. An “advocate” of WFH years before the pandemic, she has worked as a digital nomad and has preached its benefits through her writing in Medium, and Quora, as well as her YouTube channel Traveling with Kristin, and podcast, Badass Digital Nomads.

    Though it has affected travel for most of the world, she acknowledges that this pandemic pushed the lives of everyone almost a decade into the future. “Well you changed, literally overnight,” Kristin said, “because before the pandemic happened, I was estimating that it would be at least another 10 years before the majority of companies accepted the possibility of remote work and work from home for their employees.”

    “I was kind of acting as a remote work advocate to not only help individuals work remotely but also to prove to CEOs and companies and small business owners that their employees could work from home and that it would be a win-win for everybody. When the coronavirus happened, I was like ‘Okay my work here is done.’”

     

    Making Your Own Path

    Even back in her middle school years, she knew that she was not meant to be stuck in an office space.

    “In middle school, the personality tests and the career tests, well I actually would fail those,” she said, “like I would get the results back and it would say, like, ‘Error message, could not fit you with a job’ and then all my classmates would be like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be a doctor, I’m going to be a firefighter,’ you know, all of the like cliche jobs and mine was just like, I had too many different interests to fit into any job profile. So fast forward to when I was in college, the anxiety of choosing a major was like the same thing. And the only thing I knew that I liked to do was to travel.”

    Now that she’s achieved the work-life balance that she has dreamed of, Kristin has made it her life duty to help others see the beauty of life outside the workplace and even assist them in moving to new places.

    “I’m just on this path to share everything I’ve learned about creating your own job, working remotely or living in foreign countries, and just living life on your own terms.”

     

    Building Your Roots

    Though technology has closed the distance of communication, this globe-trotting entrepreneur acknowledges that our electronic monitors are not a good enough alternative to genuine human connection.

    Which is why she wants people to make connections and build communities, through “slow travel” which means staying in a foreign country for more than a just week or even a month.

    “I even had the T-shirts that say Slow Obsessed With It,” Kristin said, “because when you travel really quick, you meet a lot of people, but the relationships are all on this acquaintance level and it can feel really shallow, sometimes, but also you can go really deep with people quickly and have like this soulmate-connection.”

    She predicts that when the travel bans are lifted and the effects of the pandemic have simmered down, she foresees that there will be a “global migration” and people will realize what they’ve missed while being away from the office.

    In the end, Kristin emphasizes that other than sightseeing our most important experience in our global journeys is the connections with people that we make, and at times our realizations may overwhelm us, that she has this to say:

    “As human beings, you still need that core group of friends that you can rely on and that core community,” Kristin says, “and if you start to feel like you’re disconnected or that you’re really alone in the world, [you] just kind of step back and go back to your roots a little bit. [this could mean that] maybe it’s time to go home.”

     

    More from Kristin:

  • Ep259: 3 Ways to Love Better, with School of Love NYC founder, Monica Parikh

    Ep259: 3 Ways to Love Better, with School of Love NYC founder, Monica Parikh

    They say experience is the best teacher, but they never tell you how often cruel the teaching method is of this metaphorical professor. As we spin this thread of life we are on, we’re constantly caught off guard no matter how much we prepare, but how we deal with these setbacks and surprises is what shapes us as people.

    For Lawyer and School of Love NYC founder, Monica Parikh, her unexpected divorce with her husband was a dark time in her life but it was also the spark that started her journey to guide professionals and young people through the confusing world of intimate relationships.

    After her husband suddenly decided one day that he no longer wanted to be married and walked out the door, Monica was devastated. The first years that followed were what she called “the dark night of the soul” filled with questions and longing. However, it is when our hearts break that light enters through the cracks.

    After regaining her ground, she decided to study this vague idea of love and dedicate her time and energy to helping others about it. Monica had an Ivy League education, a law degree, but still decided to educate herself in psychology, non-violent communication, and even quantum physics.

    She shares with us three tools that you may add to better your relationships, not just in love but in life, holistically.

     

    Set Your Boundaries

    Monica recognizes that marriages and other romantic relationships do require intimacy. But that intimacy should not be without limits. She says that partners need to listen to each other and approach each boundary with respect to mature as adults.

    “We need, basically, someone to calmly teach us how to mediate conflict and de-escalate it,” she says, “how to align needs, how to set boundaries, and how to move to a place of interdependence as opposed to codependence.”

    “Your life is not just about one person, where you ask that person to fulfil all your needs,” she adds, “you see that you live in a village, and we have lots of different people we need to talk and relate to. So really, marriage and relationships are just a vehicle for personal self-development.”

     

    Look Inward

    The former public interest lawyer shares a story where a woman, after a first date, decided to visit her partner—who lived in a different state—and stay at his home for four days. The girl told her that after a while, the guy started being crabby with her.

    The woman told Monica that the guy was a narcissist. “The problem with, when we look outwards, we sometimes don’t look enough inwards,” Monica told her, “and the inwards look is, was it a good choice to spend four days with a stranger?”

    She notes that the situation the woman was in was an overwhelming one for both of them. She notes that people need to start taking “personal accountability” for the relationship-decisions they make.

    She thinks that narcissism is a “pernicious disease in society” which is why she also places boundaries on social media—a platform that promotes self-centred behaviour—for her relationships and work life.

     

    Take Care of Yourself

    “You can’t take care of other people,” she says, “until you take care of yourself. So the better I take care of me, the better I take care of a lot of people who need me to solve relationship problems.”

    During the dark grieving stage of her divorce, Monica focused her energy to move on in a healthy and positive way. She maintained a morning routine of one hour for exercise followed by a calming 45-minute meditation.

    She also adds that the effect of processed food on her brain was dour, and she’s mostly had a vegan diet. She adds that our wallets are just as important to our health as much as our food. After that dark time of her separation, she allotted some time on analyzing her personal finances, and since viewed money from a different perspective, adding that it was vital to learn about if she wanted to help this generation’s burgeoning youth.

     

    More from Monica:

    Visit her website www.schooloflovenyc.com

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