382: Native Advertising and The Penny Hoarder: How to Create a Movement, Scale It, Deliver Massive Value and Make the Most Money from Your Website with Vishal Mahtani

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show episode 382, native advertising and the Penny Hoarder, how to create a movement scale it deliver massive value and make the most money from your website with Vishal matani. Hey everyone, and thanks for listening. We're talking right now with Vishal matani, and he's he runs a website called the Penny hoarder.com and he has lots of interesting things on the internet, so we're gonna hear all about it. So Vishal, great to be talking to you.

Vishal Mahtani 0:32 Oh, and thanks for having me. Glad to have you.

Robert Plank 0:34 So can you sort of tell us about, sort of what you're all about and about your websites and stuff like that?

Vishal Mahtani 0:41 Sure. Well, I, serial entrepreneur, been digital marketing for quite some time. Want to say over seven, about 17 years, and we work with, well, we're currently working with a company called the Penny Hoarder. And the Penny Hoarder is a website that is, it's all about putting money back in people's pockets, right? So it's all about growing, saving and earning money.

Robert Plank 1:05 Okay, great. And so, I mean, is this a blog, or it has, like, training courses, or, like, what is this website? Exactly?

Vishal Mahtani 1:11 Yeah, it's, it's, it started out initially as a blog, but we've kind of grown. We've grown so much that it's not, it's not quite a blog anymore. It's, it's a website about personal finance, and it's it addresses, you know, the way we might budget ourselves, or ways that we're spending our money, whether it be on on coupons, savings on coupons, or savings downloading specific apps like I bought up, for instance, that help you save, save money as you as you live through your life regularly. So it's just streamlining the way you use you, you you handle your personal finances. Okay,

Robert Plank 1:47 cool, and so, so how, like, how did you end up working on this, like, with this website already exists, and then you were hired to kind of beef it up and stuff like that,

Vishal Mahtani 1:58 right? So again, like, my background, I'm a material entrepreneur. I've done, I've started different sites and different different companies, some in the area of a network, like digital marketing networks, other in the area of publishing, and a third in the area of B to C, like products. My last one was actually called. It was a company that sold, bought and sold gently used kids clothes online. And once I sold that in February 15, friend introduced me to Kyle. He kept telling me, I need to meet Kyle. From the time I sold the company, and about three months later, I was vacationing in Cayman Islands, and he messaged me on Skype and said, You need to meet him now. He's ready to blow up and make some big moves. So we Skyped Kyle was in New York. We both live in the Tampa St Petersburg area, but he was in New York, I was in Cayman, and, you know, we hit it off. And a few days later, we were meeting for lunch in St Petersburg, and we hit it off. You know, it was very obvious to me the guy had a tremendous amount of drive and vision and wanted to join him, so he hired me to come build up the business department. And when I say business department, everything dealing with revenue, demand, generation and ad operations, which means our account management team and the people who go on Facebook and buy media. Alright?

Robert Plank 3:22 Super cool. So, so you sort of joined up with this company. And so when, when you first started, and you kind of looked at what you're dealing with. I mean, what kind of happened those first couple of weeks I'm sort of looking for like, you know, what was, what was your thought process, and what kind of like, just kind of ideas came to you when you first started working on this thing? Yeah.

Vishal Mahtani 3:40 So when, when, yes, during the lunch, when, when Kyle and I met he and he shared his vision. Right before lunch, I did look at, I obviously looked at what was going on, how he was building this business. And what struck me, What really excited me is, is how content was playing into performance media, right? So he was able to weave in an honest voice with a with a readership that was engaged performance marketing and performance advertising, right? So talking about specific products and services that he uses and enjoys himself and speaks speak to them from the from the first person and his experience, as well, as you know, even some, some customer testimonials that he might have gotten from those, those services. So it was innovative about this. And what is innovative about it is how you take an honest voice and tie it to partners or advertisers. And part of that key is making it a performance marketing model. So it's, it's more like, instead of breaking a big deal for millions of dollars and then figuring out how you're going to write about it. It's more like, all right, I want to write about this. Let me see how I can get it the quickest way. And that's usually to break a deal. To say, Hey, how about I just send you some traffic, and you pay me on a per person who signs up. You know, payment is where we take all the risk. So it allows for a very quick cycle on, on finding something that. Interesting writing about it and getting paid for it, rather than, you know, this whole long cycle of this long sales cycle that it typically takes a publishing company. And can you

Robert Plank 5:09 sort of give us an example of one of these, some of this performance marketing, because I feel like I'm sort of following along a little bit, but it really helped to sort of hear like a concrete example of, like, some kind of, like, content or blog post that you made that like, tied into one of these other offers?

Vishal Mahtani 5:26 Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to give an example. So a great example of this might be Uber, right? So we're about earning, saving, growing money. So on the earning side, we'll talk about how to earn money while the driving for Uber, right? So people want to become Uber drivers, but they sometimes are hesitant. They don't know what to expect. So we've written, we've written posts or articles about people who have become Uber drivers, interviewed them. Understood what they do on the side. One was a comedian, a stand up comedian, but wanted to make some money on the side. How can they do that? And how do they feel about it? So we got an understanding of what, what it was to become an Uber driver from day one and follow them through their lifestyle, life cycle, of that, of becoming, of that on demand service, how much they are able to earn and what hours. So we go to Uber now and say, Hey, Uber, how much would you pay us for a new driver that comes to you? And that deal is a lot quicker to say, Oh, well, how much traffic can you drive? And and we'll go and do a sort of like a consultative sale to understand what their needs are, and if their needs are, you know, to have more drivers in New York or to have more drivers in Florida, we might speak to that a little bit more. So that helps them gain what they need, which is drivers in those particular states. So they'll become a driver. We get paid when somebody becomes a driver. So we'll just break a deal on where that is, like, how much we get paid for that, for that action.

Robert Plank 6:49 Okay, cool. And that's super interesting, because instead of you just, like, blindly sending traffic to Uber's affiliate program, you're actually talking them to figuring out more of, like, what they need, and then positioning what you have towards what they're asking you for. That's pretty cool.

Vishal Mahtani 7:04 That's exactly right. It's understanding the KPIs, the goals. It's really consultative. What are your goals this month, this year, this week, right? And we can actually speak to that and get very specific.

Robert Plank 7:15 So have you guys had any sort of difficulty with I mean, I mean, like, you link to these offers and there's Uber and stuff like that. But have you had difficulty monetizing the site? Because I imagine if you have one of these high traffic sites, you have to always be kind of staying on the ball to keep the high traffic coming in. And then the other thing that sort of strikes me is, you know, when you you have this kind of topic of, you know, fight, like fight personal finance and budgeting and saving money and couponing. I imagine that there's a big chunk of your readers of that site who maybe they they don't spend a lot of money, so those are like kind of two things that come to mind. So I mean, I might just way off base, or these real difficulties that you guys had to deal with.

Vishal Mahtani 7:56 So no, I Well, I'd say what's really great is that we have we cover a broad spectrum, right? So those that want to that are earning can can learn more about savings, right? And and those that are not earning as much can learn more about earnings. So we kind of speak to both sides of that, and it, luckily, unfortunately, it hasn't been a challenge, but you speak to hard times with traffic, and this really speaks to our funnel, right, our revenue team, who brings in, or who speaks to advertisers who contact us many times to understand what their needs are and if they align well with us. And you know, it's, I'm happy to say, there's, there are many advertisers out there that are straightforward, transparent and and they have a good service that actually does good for society. So those are kind of the criteria. Criteria is to have a value proposition to our users or our readers that brings them real value in either earning, saving or growing, and that is what allows us to generate that sort of traffic, right? So if there's a really cool, cool offer like we have, we work with stash, stash, invest, right? And it allows them to actually save money, right? And and if they do it for a fee that is nominal or even zero, or give them, wave them the charges for the first 6090, days, that's that's a true savings, right? And we can speak to that. And we can now not only put put it on our site and have people who are already on our site engage with that advertiser and understand it from maybe it's our perspective, who's a user or or even one of the one of the customer testimonials, or several customer testimonials, and what they've gotten out of it. We're able to gain traffic from that, but also we can go out and into other social other, whether it be social media or search, and generate more traffic for that, right? So the more good advertisers are, or great products or services we find, the more site we generate, sorry, site traffic that we generate. So it's a it kind of goes in and hand. That

Robert Plank 9:56 is pretty cool. And as you're sort of, you know, like cranking up. Content, getting the traffic going, figuring out the offers and stuff like that. Have you seen any? I mean, I'm sure that there is some kind of, like competition stuff like that, right? So, I mean, have you had any difficulties in sort of standing out or differentiating yourself compared to sort of similar websites to this?

Vishal Mahtani 10:17 You know, it's been a challenge to find that right. And I'm sure, I know that there's people that do sort of things that we do in the way that we function. But really, what it comes down to is, is, is content, right? And we have a very unique voice and and copying content, or, you know, having similar content. I we've seen a couple character, a couple people out there doing it, but not into this level, to where I would consider them competition.

Robert Plank 10:48 Okay, so, I mean, so why? I mean, why do you think that is? Why do you think that that you guys really stand out, and then if someone else kind of comes along, they don't really get the traction you guys have.

Vishal Mahtani 10:59 So there's two ways to look at competition. The way I see it, right? There's a there's business model, and then there's, there's subject matter. What we found is people within the subject matter of personal finance, either, it's either very deep, like a Wall Street Journal, and it's, it's talking about investing in the market and very complex things, or, or it's, you know, on a really light side, and it might even like be more mainstream, like couponing. We're kind of a mix in between this, right? So we haven't quite found somebody that, or another, another competitor, that kind of has this, this sort of mix of traffic, of content. But on the business model side, there certainly are several people who to who are in this area, right? And they have, many of them have different approaches, and it has to do with strategy. Some of them take an SEO side to it, and which is, you know, looking at the wire cutter, or going back in the day of CNET, where it's, it's, it's like this versus that. It's comparison shopping, right? And then doing, doing reviews and comparing products, and that makes a lot of sense, because, you know, you get all this great free traffic, and people who are at the bottom of the funnel purchasing, they can actually, they'll find it at the right time when they're ready to purchase, and they'll click on it and purchase right, and they get paid commissions for that. I think what I think the difficulties I don't know personally, but I would imagine the difficulties that anybody trying to compete in what we're doing in business model is that connection with the with the with the advertiser, and really understanding what they what their needs are, and how we can pull, and we pull our some levers on the on the content side, in order to meet that sort of that criteria. So it's kind of where creativity meets, meets the needs of an advertiser, and it's, we're a creative firm at heart, right? The vast majority of our people are creative and the writers. So I think that's probably why it's difficult to compete, is because it's creative,

Robert Plank 12:57 okay? And I mean, and how big of an operation. This is because it seems like, the way that you've been talking, it seems like it's pretty big. I mean, you guys have 5 million fans. All your posts get hundreds and hundreds of likes and shares and things so I mean, like, how many people do you guys have on staff over there

Vishal Mahtani 13:15 right now? Right now, we're 74 the last I checked, it is changing rapidly, but we're at 74 as of a few days ago.

Robert Plank 13:25 Okay, so, and then, like, how many are writers? More or less,

Vishal Mahtani 13:33 I have to guesstimate at this point, because since we're growing so rapidly, it's about a third of organization is writing, okay,

Robert Plank 13:39 so, like, maybe, like, 25 or so and so, I mean, I kind of asked, I'm sort of curious. Like, I mean, how do you, how do you manage all that sort of stuff? Like, do you say that they have to, like, you know, publish like, X number of articles per week? Or, I mean, what's, how do you sort of make sure that, you know, all those writers on staff are kind of doing their best? I

Vishal Mahtani 14:03 sure i Well, that's actually, it's interesting. You asked that, because it has a lot to do with kind of how we're structured. We on our executive team, it's myself who's more in the business organization. So everything dealing with revenue, with with demand, generation, media buying and technology, where advertising meets, meets, meets, meets technology. That's kind of my area, and on the on that side of the house, it's Lexi Alexis grant, and she's the one that's actually put together this whole team and puts together their goals and and allows them to reach, you know, reach their potential.

Robert Plank 14:44 Okay, cool. So I mean, as far as what you do, I mean, what's your typical day like? Does it change up a lot, or do you have some sort of, like a routine, or, like, certain tasks or certain areas to focus on throughout the day?

Vishal Mahtani 14:57 Yes, obviously, first thing you look at is. Revenue, and I look at costs, where are what's, what's our site traffic like? What is our what's our demand generation site, what sort of media they're buying, and what is our revenue look like, and which advertisers we're generating that revenue on, and and of course, deltas changes between advertisers, and then we walk into once that's kind of in preparation for our morning, but also in preparation for our daily stand up, for our revenue team, where we start to call out and understand where we are with particular advertisers. Maybe there's an advertiser that needs more volume, maybe we're going over budget with another one. We're running a little hot. We kind of had that those sort of discussions for the first 30 minutes of our morning. So that's that's usually, and it's usually follow up for that team on all of those things that come out of that. Meeting for myself, typically, will will meet with with our technology department on projects we might be working on technology. Meet with with with each of the head of revenue, the head of demand generation and the head of ad operations. So these are my, this is typically my days touching base with these people and understanding where we're at, where we're at with particular projects. Super

Robert Plank 16:06 cool. That's interesting to sort of, sort of hear that little bit of insight. And like, how your kind of day to day goes. And so as far as, like, when you're making some of these decisions, like, it sounds like, as far as like the money coming in, most of that, it is from sort of having these, like these, these sort of like these, these special deals, right? These special offers where you, you send sign ups to Uber and then they pay you for sale, things like that. Is that, right? Is that where most of your guys' income comes from?

Vishal Mahtani 16:35 Yes, almost, almost all of it, I'd say, above 90% cool.

Robert Plank 16:40 And I asked that because, I mean, I'm sort of curious, like, have you given any thought, or do you have any plans for maybe some other sort of forms of income, like, maybe, like, courses you guys provide or anything like that.

Vishal Mahtani 16:53 We have some stuff in the pipeline, and happy to, happy to chat more about it, about them, when we launch. But yeah, I think you're kind of along, you're on the same on the right line, on the right track, where we're looking at ways of of bringing our content together and making it and maybe putting a different packaging it differently. There are a few things on the plate that we're looking at, but yeah, right for right now, that is our main revenue stream, but looking at packaging, different products for our consumers.

Robert Plank 17:22 Okay, super cool. And then, and so something else is, you know, as you were sort of explaining your guys's, like, you know, they're different competitors. Or, like, how, like, you know, what your guys thought process you mentioned places like CNET where, you know, sometimes they'll compare products, or sometimes they'll have videos and stuff and so as far as your guys's website, I mean, is it just text space, or do you have, like, videos and audio and other sort of multimedia on there?

Vishal Mahtani 17:50 So the vast majority of is text based. We we do a little bit of video here and there. We're actually working. We have some stuff in the works for more video and more, like figuring out the right secret sauce and the and the angle that will allow us to be successful there. But it all derives from people looking to us to guide them in the right direction, for for for personal finance, but in a fun way. So yes, we're looking into we actually have that. We did a whole stint in, in in Facebook, live, did some testing. We realized that, you know, unless it's, it's something that's super timely or needs immediate engagement, that it doesn't that, I guess what, if we're going to use that route, it needs to be used for one of those two things. So we've actually reduced a bit there and focusing a little bit more on on proper production. Super

Robert Plank 18:43 cool. And it's very interesting just to kind of hear your thought process, and hear about how you're you're kind of looking at where your levels are at, or you try different things, and then kind of examine how those experiments worked out. And then you can say, Okay, well, are we gonna, was that just a temporary thing? Was that just a test? Or, you know, what does that tell us? Or are we gonna do more of that? So it's really cool just to kind of hear like that your business sort of mind working and saying, Okay, well, instead of just kind of going and trying all this stuff and just kind of doing it, just for the heck of it, you actually going and you measure and you track these different things that sort of happen. And so, I mean, in all your, you know, your travels, and all your kind of, you know, ups and downs and business experiences and things like that. Have you ever kind of come across like any, just like, I don't know, like, number one piece of advice, or just the, like, the one thing that's that's always stuck with you, as far as you know, managing all these businesses and things like that?

Vishal Mahtani 19:38 Yeah, actually, you know, I guess since, since, you know, most of the businesses that I've been in are all in the startup phase. So typically, it all comes from, and it's termed it this term of like, you know, a hack, right? Or coming up with a good demand generation or a media hack and growth hack is another term that's used. Sure. I mean, whatever it's called, it really is. It's really defining a different way and being a first mover, whether it's not necessarily inventing an industry, you could go as far as that, but it's really finding that secret sauce, that one thing that makes that unique when whether it's okay, maybe it's you say what we do is, I say what we do is quite unique, but a different spin on it, buying media from a different plate, from different places, and and getting it to really work. So it's about, it's really about elbow grease, but, but then identifying that you've actually found that hack and scale it right, that you found that area that is that has a low demand, where you can buy media or or get the eyeballs at a very low cost, and have the other side of it where you're generating revenue correctly, and then scale it so it's, it's, it's the elbow grease to get there, recognizing that you're there and scaling quickly. At the same time, I've learned this that the hard way. But at the same time, you have an idea. There's probably 1000 other people having the same idea, because typically it's when society and technology intersect. And it's not like you could have done this last year and it would have worked. It's society adapting to a piece of technology, or a new technology coming about that matches society perfectly. So it's about acting on it quickly and then knowing how to scale when you find that secret sauce that makes

Robert Plank 21:19 perfect sense. I mean, imagine if someone tried to invent Uber 10 years ago, or if someone tried to invent cell phones 30 years ago. Wouldn't work, that the timing was wrong. But then if you come across that gold, it sounds like you better scale it. You better jump on it before everyone else who has the same idea who, everyone else who sees the timing is right, gets there before you or beats it of a punch. So I mean, really great advice, really great way of thinking. I love it. Super awesome. And so I want to make sure that everyone knows you know everything about you guys and the Penny Hoarder. And so if people listen to our conversation today, do you have any websites or recommended resources where people should go after listening to our talk today, we'll

Vishal Mahtani 21:59 definitely come to the Penny hoarder.com and take a look at what we're doing. I what we're doing. It's, it's, it's unique, if you, if you go down to like the on the right rail, if you're on desktop, kind of understanding, looking at the trending and recommended content. Those are, those are more of the areas that we would that we're generating revenue in in a native way. You know, just take a look at how native is is come about, and how it's changed. I think getting your head around that will do a lot of good, because I think advertising is kind of the way we see current advertising, whether it be TV advertising or banner advertising, is kind of becoming a thing of the past and and this is, this is more of the way people are interacting. So please take a look at what we're doing. Super

Robert Plank 22:42 cool. So everyone make sure to do that. Go to the Penny hoarder.com and check out about what Vishal was talking about here, as far as just this native advertising thing, and not saying, you know, here's my blog post, here's some random banner ad. It's actually sort of integrated. And there's all kinds of great resources here. Whether you're looking to sort of save money, do the coupon thing, or to grow your money. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff like, you know, paid survey sites through the best online freebies, 12 ways to add five grand to your bank account this year, all kinds of interesting stuff. So make sure that you visit the Penny Hoarder for all those different reasons to see native advertising in action, most importantly, to absorb that content, because everyone could use more money. So check out that site to see money, saving tips, money, growing tips and everything in between, lots of great stuff. And thank you, Vishal, for stopping by and dispensing both sort of a behind the scenes as far as what you do, and then also talking up the Penny Hoarder and all the great stuff you guys are doing there. So I really appreciate and you. So thanks for coming by and sharing some of that stuff. Oh,

Vishal Mahtani 23:45 thank you, Robert. Thanks for having me. Thanks for your time and all your all your listeners that appreciate your time as well.

Robert Plank 23:51 We really appreciate you listening to today's episode of the Robert Plank show. Subscribe to us on iTunes and rate and review us at Robert plank.com/itunes, you.