SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 476: NomadicMatt 1.6M Monthly Views, $400k Travel Insurance Sold Monthly with Matt Kepnes
12 Nov 2016
Chapter 1: How did Matt Kepnes transition from a typical job to travel writing?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Dustin Goodwin. He's in the HR industry, specifically in the software as a service space, looking to increase his revenue. So congratulations, Dustin.
Chapter 2: What strategies did Matt use to grow his blog to 1.2 million monthly views?
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You go, Nathan, they don't book back-to-back times. Or they don't show up after they book. It's frustrating. The answer is, guys, you have to use smart tools. I use a tool called Acuity Scheduling at NathanLatke.com forward slash schedule. I'll tell you specifically how I use it later on in the episode.
Chapter 3: How did Matt monetize his blog through affiliate marketing?
Nathan Latka here, and this is episode 476. Coming up tomorrow morning, you're going to learn from Debbie Johnston. She has over 3,000 employees. She's been in the business for over 30 years, helping get medical care and peace of mind to anybody for $20 an hour.
is up top drive Nathan Latke here our guest this morning is Matt Kepnes and he is a founder many of you may know him from nomadicmat.com a little bit about him so he went really from typical worker to travel writer after growing up in Boston and look he didn't really start by liking travel he didn't take his first trip overseas until he was 23 and outside of a cruise uh
Outside of a college trip to Montreal, he didn't really have any travel experience. Now, after he left college and started the typical kind of American job where he's only getting two weeks of your vacation, he just decided he wanted to travel, right? So he dropped everything, took his first trip overseas in 2004, went to Costa Rica. Most importantly, though, is he used...
Everything's starting there.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of Matt's book 'The Ultimate Guide to Travel Hacking'?
And then a 2005 trip to Thailand, he really started to see what was possible and started building up his brand Nomadic Matt. Now it's Big League. We're going to talk about it today. Matt, are you ready to take us to the top?
Sure am, man.
All right. I just realized I used Big League in your introduction. I feel like Donald Trump. Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's huge.
Chapter 5: How does Matt manage his travel insurance sales and income?
It's tremendous. Really big. Okay. Tell us about, tell us about the, um, start at the American job you got. What was the boring cubicle life you had? What company was it with? What were you doing?
I worked in healthcare administration, uh, right after college. So for three years, I was basically behind a desk doing administrative work first for inpatients and then for, The director of their surgical programs.
Chapter 6: What role does guest blogging play in Matt's content strategy?
Got it. And then let's fast forward actually to Nomadic Matt now, and then we'll fill in a bunch of the blanks. So nomadicmatt.com, you have an unbelievable content strategy. How many unique website views are you getting per month on average? 1.2 million. Okay. 1.2 million. Great. So now let's go fill in all the blanks. When did you launch Nomadic Matt?
Chapter 7: How does Matt utilize his email list for marketing?
When did you realize this was something you wanted to build?
I started the blog in 2008 after a 14 month trip around the world. I had come back to healthcare and was incredibly bored and was like, screw this. I need to go away again. And so doing what all people in our age brackets tend to do is I thought, well, I need a job. What's the best way to get seen? I should build a website as an online resume. So I did that as a way to get people,
Yeah, basically just be an online resume where editors and potential, you know, websites and see the body of my writing. Um, but over the years it just sort of grew.
Chapter 8: What advice does Matt have for aspiring travel bloggers?
And then in about 2010 I made it, I made it go as its own platform. And what do you mean by that? Well, I was getting more and more visitors going, how did you do a trip around the world? And you know, it wasn't very common in 2010 and there wasn't a lot of resources online. Uh, so I just turned, I wanted to write guidebooks and, but then I just turned the website into its own guidebook.
Got it. So how are you walk us through how you're making money from the brand currently? How are you supporting all your travel?
Um, I do a lot of grinder, uh, you know, that really helps a lot.
It helps you find all your, all your good networks connections there.
Yeah. Yeah. That's really where I get all my good networking done. But when I'm not on that service, um, I, about two thirds of my income is affiliates. So that would be people coming to my website and booking their travels through my links. And about a third of that is book sales. Okay. People buying my destination guides or, you know, other, other things.
Is there one book that is like your best seller? That's your go-to or you really have like dozens of different types of content books and it's really spread out.
Um, I have 11 e-guides. Um, but I would say the one that does the best is the one on travel hacking, which is using points and miles for free travel.
And what's the title of that book? The Ultimate Guide to Travel Hacking. Okay. And is this something you self-published or you were the publisher or what?
Yeah, this is self-published. I have a book with a publisher called How to Travel the World. It's $50 a day. That's a print book. And that was New York Times bestseller. You know, now I just get a little royalties from that. But that's... you know, that was one upfront payment a couple of years ago. And then realties here and there.
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