Scaling to 12 Million Monthly Visits with Chris Parker

In This Episode

• [02:10] – Stephan welcomes Chris Parker to the show.
• [08:24] – Chris highlights organic traffic success from a Netflix documentary, utilizing a revised data breach article kept on the site.
• [15:22] – Stephan recommends being generous with resources for clients without expecting direct benefit.
• [16:43] – Stephan and Chris explore the benefits of YouTube shorts and emphasize the importance of having the right team and strategy for creating engaging content to retain viewer interest.
• [20:39] – Chris underscores his mission and purpose.
• [27:47] – Chris implemented a responsive design, eliminating separate mobile and desktop CSS for his site. Studio 1 Design provided conversion-focused UI.
• [33:04] – Chris added a personal touch with ‘Hero’s Journey’ and ‘media page’ for social proof, attracting opportunities like national news.
• [36:58] – Chris discusses being street-smart about privacy and the potential consequences of sharing personal information.
• [44:44] – Stephan and Chris reflect on their long-term working relationship since January 2017.
• [48:04] – Chris recommends using two-factor authentication for online security and promotes his podcast, Easy Prey, and website, whatismyipaddress.com.

Jump to Links and Resources

Chris, it’s so great to have you back on the show.

Thank you for having me back, Stephan.

And I really appreciate you doing this as a case study so that we can talk about some of the amazing strategies and results. So let’s, first of all, talk about where you have gone from in four years: 6 million visits a month when we did episode 231 back in 2020, and now you’re at 12 million. That’s awesome.

Never thought we’d hit 12 million visits a month. It’s incredible.

So, what do you attribute that to?

I think you and I have talked about this. There’s a portion of it that I attribute to God and a portion that we attribute to working hard and having your team do such an excellent job. I think all of it is kind of that white hat technique that we’ve never tried to do anything underhanded or malicious or anything that would be questionable. It’s just always tried to do it right. If we do it right, God’s going to bless it, and it’ll be a success, or it won’t, but at least we have done it in an honorable way.

If we do it right, God’s going to bless it, and it’ll be a success, or it won’t, but at least we have done it honorably.

Yeah. And there’s a little secret here that maybe our listener or viewer knows, but maybe not. Almost everything is a blessing, ordained and orchestrated by God. So if your traffic, heaven forbid, takes a nose dive, that’s a blessing, opening you up to a learning opportunity, a new chapter in your journey, some sort of epiphany or potentially a partnership or a right-sizing of your business. So, what’s the next step a listener might take to incorporate faith and trust and just kind of hand over the reins to God, like surrendering? What’s the next step for our listeners?

I guess this is something you’ll have to, in a sense, figure out for yourself if it’s the right option for you. My wife and I are actively involved in our church, and we’ve given to quite a variety of charities over the years. And every year, we kind of evaluate our goal for the next year. What are we going to give? What kind of personal growth do we want to have? What do we want to do with the business? And we came up with a goal of being able to give $100,000 in one year to charity. 

The challenge was that the business was not at a point where, without it growing, it just wouldn’t be feasible. We’d have to dig significantly into our savings to do that. And so we said, “Okay, regardless of what happens, we’re going to do this.” And part of it was to change how we thought about prayer. Previously, we’ve been praying for the business to do well, and it felt a little bit icky in the sense that I’m praying that I can do well.

Financially, we’re doing well. Do we need more money? This just doesn’t feel like the right attitude we should have towards money. And so it really helped us reframe our thoughts on money. We went from praying for the business to do well so that we could have a lot to praying for the business to do well so that we could give a lot. And lo and behold, that year, the amount that I could take home from the business at the end of it was enough for us to give that $100,000 without tapping into our savings. So, to me, it was just absolutely an answer to prayer, proof of God saying, “Look, if you trust, you have a goal, you commit to it regardless. I’ll help you make it happen.”

We went from praying for the business to do well so that we could have a lot to praying for the business to do well to give a lot.

Yeah. You did this in January. You and your wife committed to the $100,000.

Yeah, this is kind of our end-of-year wrap-up. We would start thinking through what we are going to do. And, okay, effectively January 1, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to give throughout the year as if we’re going to hit the goal, not just wait until December 31 and then give it on the last day of the year, but every month, we have a percentage of it that we are going to give regardless of what happened.

That’s amazing. Yeah, I’m really impressed with your faith, commitment, and generosity. I want to honor you for that. That’s super cool.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

She believed in you as well.

Yes.

Yeah, that’s super cool. This is one of those things that you can kind of test God on in the Bible. He invites us to test him on this tithing 10% concept, and if we stretch, he’ll make it happen for us. Yeah, I don’t remember the exact biblical quote or whatever. Do you remember any of the details?

I don’t. I won’t be able to quote it correctly, but I believe it’s Malachi 10 for the listeners. Basically, it’s one of the one, if not the only, places in the Bible where God says, test me in this.

How cool is that? Who would think that on a marketing show, we’d talk about testing God, and it actually worked amazingly?

Maybe more marketing podcasts should talk about it.

I think so. All right, so let’s talk about some of the strategies. You’ve been relying only on organic channels, right? You have not been spending any money on paid ads, except for a very small amount on YouTube. So, let’s talk a bit about the organic and the little bit of pay that you’ve done. But other than that, there is a little bit of paid, which is a tiny fraction of your marketing spend. Right?

Budget spend, yeah.

You’re not doing any Google AdWords other than that little bit of YouTube. You’re not doing any Facebook, Instagram, TikTok ads, or anything else. Right. And you haven’t been,

At least not In the last four years for transparency purposes. Yes, I did Google Ads probably more than ten years ago. Did some Facebook ads more than five or six years ago, probably. But definitely in the last four years. I don’t get ROI on ads. Marketing is a little different.

Definitely getting some ROI on your marketing, just not the ad side of it.

Absolutely.

So, what are some of the most lucrative and valuable channels for you on the organic side?

It’s kind of funny. We had talked about it recently. We have benefited from Netflix doing a documentary on the Ashley Madison scandal. 

I think we had one article written about it, about the data breach quite a few years ago when the data breach happened. And because we had tweaked that article over the years and didn’t get rid of it when it got old, lo and behold, there becomes a news story about it. And we got tons of organic traffic off of that. It’s one thing that’s kind of a very niche, small vertical.

So the way that I say we are, because we helped you write about that particular topic. So what would somebody who’s listening take away from this? How do you ride on the coattails of something that’s trending, such as a Netflix documentary or some trending hashtag or whatever, like some trending topic? You have maybe some relevant topic. What do you do about it?

I think you can update it; if you have an existing article on that topic, you can modify it to add some relevance to that news story, or you can write an article about it at the time, make sure that it’s linked well on your website, that it’s a well-written article, and that it actually brings value to the people that are reading it, that it’s not meshed. Oh, okay. Here’s an article about Ashley Madison, who is 20 or 10 years old, but it provides relevant insights to them currently so they can find more about the data. In my case, Ashley Madison, they can find out more about the data breach. What can they do about it? They can actually take some actions based on reading that article.

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Right. By incorporating a bunch of new information about the documentary, answering questions that the viewer of the documentary might have about an existing article, and perhaps even writing a new article or multiple new articles about the documentary specifically, you can start ranking for some of the documentary-related keywords.

And that was one of the interesting things. We did write some additional content around that documentary, but none ranked as well as the original article we had written. So we went back and reincorporated a bunch of the new content from those new articles in that one article that was ranking well.

Yeah. And where does the podcast fit into this equation? Because I worked on you for a while to get you to start podcasts, and you’ve been gung-ho ever since. I’m really happy to see that and actually quite grateful because I thought you had much wisdom and light to share with the world through a podcast. Not everybody takes that kind of advice because it means putting yourself out there and committing to it consistently and continuously. It’s not just like, “Oh, I’m going to try this out for six months and see if I like it.” Once you have an audience, they expect you to be around forever. Podcasting every single week.

Yeah, I think that was probably some of the hardest-to-swallow or hardest-to-follow-through advice I got from you. It was difficult enough to go out and start being interviewed because I could turn it on or off whenever I wanted to. Actually, starting the podcast required that the commitment I made at the beginning was, “Okay, I’m going to do this for at least a year. I’m going to do 52 episodes. I won’t do the obligatory eight episodes and then fade away. But okay, I’m going to do 52 and see where it goes from there.” It’s really been a great experience.

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from people. With this attitude, I think of going in and saying, “How can I make the world a better place? How can I help one person a year not fall victim to a scam?” Then it’s worth the effort, and maintaining four years is a challenge. I think we’re at. I think I just recorded an episode of about 230 this past week, 240, or something like that. It takes a lot of persistence. I think it’s helped in that I’ve been able to outsource a lot of the work behind the podcast.

Yes. So, for example, you have a transcriptionist. You’re not just relying on AI, so it’s a higher-quality transcript, and you turn that into something that’s much more readable than a big wall of text.

Yeah.

I’m interviewing a diverse group of people to make sure that I’m bringing a wide range of viewpoints.

So, let’s talk a bit about that. So, what’s your process there?

So I’ll talk about the big process. Technically, I have one employee, Deb. She does an amazing job. So you and I talk together. Deb and I talk together and come up with ideas for episodes, and she goes out, either based on some of our suggestions or just to start looking for people. Looking at who’s been on another podcast, who has a successful YouTube channel, and who’s got a big social media following? Have they done TED talks? All sorts of ways.

I’ll take a little segue in the last two years that we’ve really tried to make sure that you and I, old white men, is to make sure that the people that I’m interviewing have a really diverse group of people on that we have men and women and different ethnicities, and intentionally trying to make sure that I’m bringing a wide range of people, viewpoints, and not just viewpoints that would be familiar to me or from my perspective.

I think that’s been really good to do that. I know that personally if I were the one who had to do all the outreach to the guests, it would be an absolute flop because I don’t deal with rejection well. Deb goes out and is just amazingly persistent about following up with people. If someone says, “No, I don’t want to do it, we honor that one. Don’t harass them. But if they say, “Yeah, I’d like to come on,” she’ll just keep following up with them until they come on. If they say not right now, she’ll follow up a couple of months later, six months later, a year later. And we’ve had people come on a year after the first agreement to come on the podcast.

So she does that, records an episode, and I upload it. My work is done. For the most part, she works with and gets the recording from the audio editors. She gets the recording off to the person who does the transcription. I will have someone write a summary article when we get the transcription back. So we have a transcription on one side, the summary article. 

We outsource a video editor who then produces the YouTube video for us. All this comes back together with enough time to get it up on the website, schedule it in advance on YouTube, and that’s kind of the flow. We will promote the episodes once they go live.

Yeah. One thing that I recommend doing if our listener owns an agency or a consultancy is being generous and open about things like resources that your client could go directly to and save some money. And you don’t clip the ticket. But that’s okay. You don’t need to. So, I referred you, Chris, to my transcriptionist.

Yep.

You’ve been working with her for years now, right? And I haven’t made a dime off of that.

Yep. Four years later, she’s still doing all the transcripts. Yeah.

Also, I was using the audio editor that you were using at the time. And you’re still using them. How many years later?

Four years later, still working with them.

Same transcription, the same audio editor since the beginning. So, yeah, just be generous because business karma is real. Like, give without expectation to receive, and you’ll get it from above. But that’s not why you do it. No, because that’s the right thing to do.

Just be generous because business karma is real. Give without expectation of receiving, and you’ll get it from above.

Yes, I agree, and I appreciate that. It’s allowed us to funnel more resources towards what your team is experts at, as opposed to getting a markup on a service that is tangential to what you do. I want you to spend my money on stuff I can’t find anyone else to do.

Yeah, but even if you can find somebody directly, you have a video editor. One thing we’re doing for you is YouTube shorts.

Yep.

That is something that is kind of a specialty because if you get the right kind of video editor for shorts, and you have a strategist overseeing that video editor to make sure it’s super punchy at the beginning, it kind of leaves the viewer on a cliffhanger, so there’s some foreshadowing. There’s a hook there in the beginning, so the audience retention rate stays high through the first 10 seconds of the YouTube short. Then you got them. It’s not just 1 second, and they scroll away, and that doesn’t even count as a view.

Yeah, I mean, definitely the stuff that we produced in-house or tried to do; I think we would average 100, 150 views. And your team has produced a couple of home runs where we’ve gotten 15 or 20,000 views. And for us, that’s an absolute home run on that type of content.

Yeah. And you were paying for some YouTube advertising. Tell us about that. What were you doing, what was the impetus for it, and what were the results?

So, part of the goal was I’ve always kind of gone back and forth on whether or not the podcast should generate any revenue whatsoever. When I started the podcast, I knew that just from reading about podcasts, the time it takes a podcast to get traction and whatnot. If I were looking at ensuring I got an ROI in three months or six months, the likelihood of that happening was slim to none. And so, why even have that as part of my mindset? So, if I just from the beginning decide there’s no revenue from this thing, I’m going to make sure that my motives are right, that I’m doing it for the right reasons, that I’m not trying to make this purely to make money. 

My mission is to help people be safe and create awareness.

After a few years, we decided, I wonder if we could start getting, at least start recovering some of our costs. It’s not a profit center, but maybe we can start recovering some costs. I know that to get monetization enabled on their platform through YouTube, you have to have 100,000 subscribers. So, we ran promotions of the videos for one week at a time with the methodology to increase the number of subscribers to the channel so that we could hit that threshold at the time, which was 100,000.I think it’s still probably about 100,000. That also helped us by having more subscribers and got us up to the requisite watch hours.

Right. So, did you get any other value than increasing your subscriber counts? Did you get more engagement on the videos that you boosted than on the videos that you didn’t boost?

Yeah, absolutely. It would get more traction on the videos that were boosted. In the back of my mind, I was really wondering if Google was about making money along the way. Would these subscribers continue to watch the videos after they subscribe to a promotion? The reality is it has absolutely helped with kind of the organic side of things on YouTube. 

We haven’t hit the home run of a million watch hours or a million views of an episode or anything like that yet, but definitely, we’ve had a couple of the interviews that I thought would do particularly poorly. I just recently recorded and published an episode with Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI agent, on sex trafficking, murder and serial killers. It’s not the sort of content that Google likes to promote, but despite all that, it’s recently been featured in some of the better-performing organic episodes. So, it definitely works to allow that content to be further distributed.

Yeah. And what’s your motivation to put out content that is perhaps a little disturbing, shocking, worrying, or fear-inducing for some people? What are you trying to accomplish? What’s your mission statement?

My mission is to help people be safe and create awareness. I’m not doing episodes purely for the purpose of shock, but these are real. Unfortunately, bad things happen to good people, and if we’re not cognizant of some of our behavior’s risks, we’re leaving ourselves pardoned upon easy prey.

Right. Before we jump into other strategies, I just want to close out this idea of podcasting as a marketing strategy. So, would you say that it’s given you a platform to get on other podcasts? More so than if you were just a business owner and a subject matter expert and maybe even TV appearances because of this podcasting you’re doing?

Yeah, definitely. I’ve had people invite me on their podcast directly as a result, or at least they claim, so I’ll take them at their word directly because they saw me on another podcast. It’s also helped me connect with people who are guests and build relationships that I don’t think I would have otherwise been able to build. If I had just emailed Frank and said, “Hey, you want to be my friend?” I don’t think I would have gotten a response from him, but it’s been interesting to see some of the relationships, not with Frank.

If we’re not cognizant of some of our behavior’s risks, we’re leaving ourselves pardoned upon easy prey.

Can I take you to coffee and pick your brain? Does that work?

Yeah. No, I’ve never asked anyone that.

Oh, good.

But I think it really has helped build my network in this space to be able to connect with people, and there are definitely some people who have been. Oh, I saw that you had so and so on, and so I don’t know who you are, but I trust so, and so’s the vetting process, so I’ll do it because they’ve done it. So I think it’s definitely helped.

Yeah. Who have been some of the most notable guests that you’ve had?

Chris Voss is pretty notable if you’re in the cybersecurity space. Troy Hunt from Have I Been Pwned has been on twice. As you know, I struggle with names. Scott Stratten from Unmarketing was one of those people who, when we reached out to him, said, “I don’t do podcasts, but I know your website, so I want to have a conversation with you.”

Yeah, that’s awesome.

That was a really neat one, as well.

Yeah. And I think I connected you with Scott, right? Because I had him on my podcast first.

Dr. Ramani Durvasula. Yeah. Maybe he does a few of them, then.

Yeah, he’s a cool guy. I actually met him in person. I think it was actually Pubcon that he keynoted at. So I approached him afterward and asked him to be on my show. I was like, 2018 or.

He’s an absolutely great guy.

Yeah, he’s awesome. Chris Voss, I know through the Metal Mastermind that I’m in. Did I introduce you to Chris?

You introduced me to Chris, and I think you also introduced me to Doctor Ramani.

Oh, yeah. Doctor Ramani Durvasula.

You’ve had some very good recommendations.

Yeah, she is phenomenal. She just came out with a new book. It’s Not You, is the name of it. She is the world expert on narcissism. Yeah.

Even though I was just publishing audio of that episode on YouTube at the time, it’s still one of the fan-favorite episodes.

How about John McAfee?

We had John McAfee on before he passed away. He was definitely a very unique individual. Very unique interview. That was also a lot of. Yeah, I forgot that I interviewed John.

Another person I knew through the Metal Mastermind. 

That was a really interesting one because this guy’s world-renowned. He’s not going to say yes to appearing on a podcast. We emailed him, and I think he was booked about 15 minutes later.

Yeah. He was one of those folks who actually was very pro podcasting.

Yeah.

He would say yes in pretty much every circumstance. So I persuaded him and passed him on to you, and he was ready to go now.

Yeah. That was a blast of an interview.

Now, there’s this concept you and I have spoken about; I shared with you a Dream 100 list. Do you want to talk about that?

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For whatever reason, I have fought back against it tooth and nail, and now, and I don’t know why, we’re going to get into psychology here on this episode as well. Apparently, it’s something I have worked on. Definitely not up to 100 people. We have not gotten anyone from that list on the podcast yet, but there’s still hope.

How many people do you have on your dream 100 list?

I think I’m up to a measly 30 on that list at this point.

Okay. But that’s pretty good. A dream 30 is better than a zero.

Yes. It is better than dream two.

Yeah. What’s the quote? Like? Whatever you believe you can achieve or something like that. Do you know that quote?

If you believe it, you can achieve it, or something like that.

Yeah. Part of believing it is actually putting it on your list. Like, I could have Oprah on my show. Why not?

Again, honestly, we’re having the conversation here. Ultimately, I have a bit of a fear of rejection that if we don’t go after them, I can’t fail. And that’s something I’m working on. So, having the list started is definitely an achievement in and of itself.

Yeah. Cool. Another thing that happened since our podcast interview in 2020 was that you went live with the site redesign because we didn’t talk about that in the first episode.

Have we just done it? It was probably right around the time that we did that.

Yeah, I think it might have been in the process of going live because it’s no small task to redesign a site and push it all live on a site that’s getting 6 million unique visits. A little bit risky.

It was definitely a mindset shift for me to trust access to another platform, but ultimately, it ended up being very free.

I don’t remember if we talked about it; I hand-coded everything on the website prior to the site redesign. So, every time we wanted to roll out new content, someone had to send it to me. I had to do the HTML for it. I had to push it live onto the servers. So, it was definitely a mindset change for me to trust access to another platform that could do that. But also, it ultimately ended up being very free. But the process of rolling out the switch was to close the eyes, cover the ears, flip the switch, go to bed, and see what happens in the morning.

Yeah. You don’t regret the redesign, right?

Absolutely not. If I look backward, there are things that I probably would have done differently and focused more on, but absolutely not just the visual redesign but the back end, the infrastructure. Doing all of that was absolutely the right move for the business. Absolutely. Without question.

Yeah. So now, you don’t have to be involved when an article gets posted to the site. You can just leave it in our hands. We write the content for you. We have meetings to discuss topic ideas and article ideas, but my team also liaises directly with you and gives you a list of article ideas. And then you give us the go-ahead, and we have the keys to the back end to go in and just push that stuff in there.

Yep. And it worked out really well. It allows me to sleep better at night and not be the bottleneck for my own business; for many years, I was the bottleneck.

Yeah, there have been a lot of changes. What would you say is the biggest enhancement to the site in terms of the user experience, the functionality, or the content because of the redesign process?

The mobile experience previously was absolutely atrocious. I designed the graphics prior to that, which was not great, or at least previous iterations. But me being the bottleneck was absolutely just a horrific thing. When Google announced that we were going to switch to a mobile-first index, it made me really nervous that these are desktop users; these are people sitting in their cubicles coming to my website. These are IT guys. They’re all sitting there with monitors. They’re not accessing my site on the phone. At the time, it was 3% or 4% mobile traffic, about half of what the industry was seeing.

Now, I think my site is actually higher, not more mobile than desktop, but way more mobile than it used to be. It’s getting close to that 50-50 parity now.

I never would have thought that I would have end-mobile users accessing the site on their phones. That was probably one of the short sightings on my side, but I did not realize what the audience could be. But again, having the ability to have other people update content, fix things, and add things is just a massive shift in the way I look at my business.

And it’s not a mobile site. It is a responsive design approach to coding so that when someone changes their screen size, it adapts as if you’re on a tablet and then smaller. Now, it looks like a mobile layout and is very elegant and seamless, so you don’t have to worry about a separate mobile site. It’s just a cohesive experience.

Yeah. At the point that I decided I needed to handle mobile before this layout, it was, here’s the CSS for mobile, here’s the CSS for desktop. And the two were fundamentally independent from one another in terms of how they worked.

Yeah, awesome. The redesign, including all the beautiful graphics and user interface, came from Studio 1 Design, a company I referred to you. I’m glad it worked out, and you were happy with the results.

Yeah, Greg and his team were awesome. We had them do the Easy Prey website as well.

Studio 1 Design, it’s one of my secret weapons. I’ve had Greg Merrilees as the founder of this show a couple of times. I highly recommend listening to those episodes. Also, if you want to have a site redesigned or built from scratch. Absolutely. At least talk to Studio 1. They really get conversion-focused design. It’s not just a pretty contemporary-looking design but one that really gets more conversions.

They were a great team to work with. They were very responsive and had lots of good insights. When I suggested things, they had no problems saying no. Our experience is that that doesn’t work. So, if there’s a different way to do that, let’s do it differently. I appreciate people who are experts who are willing to push back against their clients appropriately.

Let’s talk for a moment about some of the innovations they added to your site from a design and content perspective. One of my favorites is your About page, which has this beautiful timeline that allows people to follow your hero’s journey, starting essentially at your kitchen table.

Yep.

In January 2000, you hit all these different milestones. In May 2008, you got your first million monthly visitors. What a cool hero’s journey.

Was it really only 2008?

Have you considered having a timeline prior to going through that redesign with Studio 1?

I had. Prior to working with you in Studio 1, I had, for the most part, tried to stay behind the curtain. I don’t know that my name was anywhere on the site whatsoever. There was no who we were because I was just trying to remain. If nobody knows who I am, all the better.

Were you hiding?

It’s not just the website brand, but the history behind it can have some impact.

I was hiding, absolutely. I have no qualms about saying that.

What changed for you?

Part of that was seeing that, like Chris Parker, it can have some impact, that it’s not just the website brand but the history behind it. My experiences led to a more personal experience with the users, but it also gave me the opportunity to do things like the podcast that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.

Right. I would guess that a number of your listeners are not really familiar with My IP Address.

Yeah, correct.

They might be searching for information on catfishing, spear phishing, scams, VPNs, and other things. They just completely bypassed your What Is My IP Address website. They just did a search on Apple podcasts or something and found you.

Yeah, definitely. All the podcast growth has been organic.

Yeah. Your media page is also something special, I think. Let’s talk about the strategy behind that.

So, on the media page, we kind of broke it down into a variety of different places where I or the website has been seen. Luckily, because the website has been around for 24 years, we’ve been mentioned in a lot of forums, not just on Bob’s tech website. In the forum comments, someone mentioned the website. Still, we’ve had references on CNN, the Daily Mail, and many well-known publications. So, it’s really nice to be able to throw in those well-known publications and their logos. Here’s an actual link to the article, not just saying, “hey, we were there, but we actually are there.” I’ve had a television appearance where I talked a little bit about Romance Scams on there as well, along with a whole bunch of podcast appearances. So I think it provides this nice, colorful support of all my history and what the site has done over the years.

Yeah, it’s great social proof for a visitor that you’re legit, a real resource. But it’s also great social proof for a TV producer, a journalist, a blogger, or another podcaster who’s potentially interested in bringing you on as a subject matter expert. But they want to see that you come vetted and pre-selected, that you’ve been on TV before, and that you’ve been on several podcasts before, and that it’s right there for them to quickly verify. 

It was definitely before the media page existed. I don’t know if anyone ever contacted me saying, “Hey, we’d like a few thoughts on this topic. Can you give us some thoughts on foreign articles?” So that definitely is something that happens not on a regular basis now but definitely periodically.

That’s actually how you got your TV appearance. You didn’t pitch. You got pitched.

Yeah.

It wasn’t one of those paid advertorial things. It was a legit TV producer of a news program who wanted you on the TV, a news program to talk about romance scams.

It was a nationally syndicated piece on romance scams. I’d like to share the story if you don’t mind.

Yeah, please.

It was; I got up in the morning and checked my email at 05:30 a.m., I checked my email, and it was, “Hey, are you available within the next couple of hours to do this?” And I think at the time, I didn’t know if I asked you if I should do this or not. But maybe I did. But it was one of those very quickly like, “Okay, I got to change my morning schedule. I’ve got to make sure I shave, get a clean shirt,” and I think within 15 minutes of saying, “Yeah, I’m available, yeah, I can do this.” They said, “Okay, we’d like to set up the call for 07:00 a.m. an interview with the producer  and be on the air within an hour or two after that.” So it was an amazingly, startlingly quick turnaround where I didn’t have much time to think in advance of what I would say. So it was a good thing that It was a topic that I was familiar with 

Yes, and kudos to you for saying yes. It’s a little bit nerve-wracking to be on TV in front of a large audience. And maybe you choke. Maybe you don’t say the right things, or you bumble your words, and then you end up looking silly. You took that leap of faith. You took that chance, and you did fantastic.

Yeah, there was definitely the fear of making a fool of myself, but I said yes anyway.

Yeah, Super cool. You’re also working on a book, speaking of leadership and expert positioning.

Yep.

Do you want to talk about that?

You and I have been discussing and working on putting together a book on data rights and privacy and all the things we do that scare us. We want to have some privacy in our lives, but we don’t want to be a hermit.

Yeah, there’s a balance that you have to navigate. If you knowingly give up some of your privacy in order to get some discount or whatever, at least you’re making a conscious choice to do that. A lot of people unconsciously do these things. They don’t read the fine print. They hit the I agree button. They install some free tools, and they install a bunch of other free tools along with it. Or they go to a coffee shop and then agree to use the free public wifi with some fish hooks. What are some of the things that you want people to be most street-smart about?

I think it’s always trying to think in your mind, what will they do with this information? And not only what are they going to do it? If someone else gains access to it inappropriately, what can they do with it? So, before they went out of business, my favorite Banh Mi restaurant had a clipboard next to the cash register with your name, email address, phone number, and date of birth. That way, they could send you a coupon for 10% off on your birthday or something like that.

Maybe you won’t become a millionaire because of the book, but you’ll have a positive impact on people’s lives because of it.

In the back of my mind, I was always wondering, like, “Okay, yeah, people can get that information relatively easily, but this clipboard’s just kind of sitting out here in public. Someone could pretend to be from the Banh Mi shop and try to get me into a scam or something.” It’s always on my mind. What information are they collecting? What are they going to do with it? What if they don’t handle it right? And what’s my benefit? $0.60 off a sandwich. I don’t think it’s worth it.

Before we started working together, you weren’t thinking of publishing a book, being an author, or being on Amazon as an actual author. I appreciate that you took my advice on board. Do you want to share what that process was like for you?

Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the things I appreciate about a relationship. It is that you have challenged me; you have not been afraid to try to push me out of my comfort zone. I think a lot of the growth that I’ve had and a lot of the reason for the business growing the way it has is that you have respectfully nudged, and maybe sometimes pushed a little bit more than I would have liked, but not inappropriately, to get me out of my comfort zone to do things and to think about. 

You can have a bigger impact. Maybe you’re not going to become a millionaire because of the book, but you’re going to have a positive impact on people’s lives because of it. And that in and of itself has value to it. I’m fortunate enough that the website is doing well. That cost of producing there are some costs involved in producing a book, but if I don’t make my money back, that’s fine. But again, kind of like the podcast, if it helps someone make better decisions, to make more informed decisions about what they’re doing with their information, where, what and who they’re sharing it with, they will have a better life as a result of that. They’ll have more control over what happens in their life.

Yeah, I’m so bullish about this book. I know in my bones that this is going to have a really big impact, a ripple effect. It’s going to be amazing.

The goal is not to make people a hermit. It’s not designed to scare people out of living their lives. One of the things that I was talking about with John McAfee was that because he was on the run from the US government, he was very careful about what he disclosed to whom. I don’t know if he would say it was a regret. Still, one of his biggest challenges was that to protect himself and have the level of privacy that he wanted, he had to lie to his friends and family. He would lie about where he was because he knew people would be listening or people would be asking, and he was afraid to inadvertently share something that might get him caught. I don’t think we want to live to that extreme. His situation was different, but the goal is to find that balance works for each individual person.

It’s tragic what happened to him, but he knew he was taking a risk by being out there in the world, appearing on podcasts and sharing his message. Now, he’s no longer with us—not in physical form, at least. 

Let’s talk for a moment about ad platforms. You were using Google AdSense, and then you switched to different platforms, like Mediavine and Raptive. Let’s talk about that for a second.

Yeah, so I think when I started running ads on the site, I had an obligatory go-to-my-PC ad that paid one cent per lead. Google AdSense came about, and it was a game changer for me. It allowed me to start earning revenue off the site. The display ad space has undergone many changes over the years. At the high point of my work in that space was when this concept called header bidding came around, where when the page loads, this request would go off to, depending on how many people you were working with, a dozen different advertisers.

They would all bid against each other and against AdSense to display that impression. And that was all done through Google Ad Manager. It’s a really complicated setup. You have to work with a particular header bidding company and then plugins for all these different partners and how it works, and it really became this.

There was a lot of work creep in that every time, I still got a new potential ad network who came out and said, “Hey, we want to advertise on your site.” Okay, so how do I figure out if they will be worthwhile? Do they pay their bills? How do I integrate with them? Every rep from every ad network wants to talk with you for at least a 30-minute appointment with once a month to see how things are going and see if they can increase their placement and get higher up in the ad stack. At some point, it turned out that I was probably spending 20 hours a week on ad platform management. It was not a pleasurable 20 hours a week. Maybe I would get a 1% increase in ad revenue for all that work or half a percent. 

The relationship management and the overhead of it got to a point where it was brutal. I probably lost some good opportunities just because I was trying to figure out who was worth working with and who wasn’t worth working with, based on my own experiences. And so we had talked about you, and I had talked about a couple of different platforms that I went to and ultimately ended up doing with Freestar, where they manage all those relationships and just write me a check at the end of the month. Do they take a little piece of the pie? Absolutely.

But it’s saving me 80 hours a month of work on stuff I was in over my head and didn’t want to do. That was frustrating and annoying, and they took that off my plate and helped me make more money. That has been a very pleasurable experience. I’m very happy with the team over there at Freestar. 

I actually introduced you to Lindsay Fulton at Freestar.

They have been, I think, probably five or six years now. They’ve been an absolutely great partner. Their team has been phenomenal. They’ve been super responsive. Whenever there have been weird little issues, they’ve helped work them out. Sometimes, it was something on their side, something that was on my side, but they’ve always been very proactive and helpful. What can we do to help you make more money?

Yeah. Cool. We’ve been working together for a while now, since January of 2017 

2017. Almost been ten years. We’re getting close.

Not ten years yet.

Yeah, 2024.

We’re still in 2024. But I would say this idea of spending all these years with the same vendor partner is unusual. And so I’m so grateful to be a partner with you. I’m not a vendor; I’m a partner. I see myself as a partner in your success, and I think it’s more common for an SEO agency, which we are, to be in a long-term relationship like that. But I’d say it’s pretty unusual for a coach to be coaching somebody for that length of time. And we actually started in a coaching engagement in January 2017, it evolved into SEO services, content creation, YouTube and all this other stuff.

So, what makes you want to keep working with me on a coaching basis? Years later, we’re still doing coaching together, as well as all the agency stuff. 

Yeah. Part of it is, I think, with any of the things that I try to do, either personally or for my business, whether these long-yearlong-terminable relationships? I try. not to look at people that I work with as vendors. There are definitely platforms that I use that are, I feel, more interchangeable, but that’s always been part of my decision-making process in evaluating cost versus the relationship a little bit more for a service where I trust the people, where I can work with the team or make a little bit less money from an ad platform because I know how they work. I’ve met them, I trust them. When there have been challenges, things have worked out that have been dealt with appropriately, and they’ve treated me right. I’ve treated them right. I’ve always tried to look for in all the things that I do. These should be long-term relationships, and that’s the decision I’ve made in it. It helps me on a coaching basis. Well, he’s going to give me an idea, and then I won’t be working with him in three months.

So it’s on me. You follow up, and you push me. You figured out what my level of comfort is. You figured out where you can push me, and you’ll see results, and where you can push me, and there won’t be results. I think there’s value in that because if we’re constantly shifting the people we work with, those things aren’t learned in a month or two. Those things are learned from lots of conversations and lots of experiences together doing stuff. And so I value that. You’ve had great insight.

You’ve challenged me where I need to be challenged. As a result, I’ve grown a lot on the business side, but I’ve also grown on the personal side. We’ve had a number of calls over the years where it’s like, “Hey, let’s turn off the recording and just have a conversation.” And those have always been very fruitful.

Oh, I appreciate that. And I appreciate you, Chris. I appreciate our relationship and our friendship, not just our business.

Thank you.

What a great way to end this episode. So, if our listener or viewer were to leave with just one next action, one nugget, what would it be?

Okay, so just one. Can I do a couple?

You can do a couple of.

If you only have the bandwidth to do one thing in your life, start using two-factor authentication on everything that you do that you can.

I think, as the privacy safety side of me says, if you only have the bandwidth to do one thing in your life, start using two-factor authentication on everything that you do that you can. There’ll be lots of arguments about whether it should be SMS, a hardware token, an authenticator app, or whatever you’re comfortable with doing. If it’s not enabled, turn it on. It will, at some point or another, save you financially; it will prevent someone from getting into a bank account; it’ll prevent someone from taking over your WordPress account; it’ll prevent someone from getting into your domain registrar. It will save you a ton, a ton of work. So I think if there’s one thing, I could be the little self-serving saying, “Hey, listen to the easy pray podcast, and then you can get lots of ideas.”

That’s a great, self-serving thing to say. I think it’s awesome because your podcast, your guests, your production quality, your attention to detail, and your show notes are awesome. And the website—it’s just super legit. 

Easyprey.com 

So easypray.com is your website for that.

Super simple.

Yep. And just Google or use whatever the search tool is if you’re going to be on Apple podcasts or YouTube music or whatever, listening to it. Yeah. It’s just Easy Prey.

Yep. Subscribe and listen to an episode. If you like it, leave a positive review.

Yeah, smash that like button. Notification bell.

Smash that like button. I don’t know why smashing. 

My eyes will roll when I hear that in a YouTube video. Smash that like button or the notification bell or whatever. 

I don’t believe I have ever asked anyone to smash a like button, hit the notification bell or do any of those things in our podcast videos. But please do those things anyway.

We need to find the right balance between protecting our personal information and reaping the benefits of sharing data in an increasingly connected world. Share on X

Where can they find you on social media? What’s your what’s an active platform? Also, give us your main website.

The easiest place to find me, and we’re probably going to be most responsive to communicating, would be on LinkedIn. Look for Chris Parker and What Is My IP Address. It’ll be easy to find. The main website is whatismyipaddress.com.

Also, subscribe to your YouTube channel and join the other 100,000 awesome people who have already done that.

Yep.

Awesome. All right, well, thank you, Chris. And yeah, thank you, listener. I’m grateful for I’m Chris. I’m grateful for my listeners, subscribers and viewers. And I’m just grateful I’m alive. It is such a joy to be doing this kind of work and helping people. And you’re one of my clients.

Yes, 

Thank you, Chris.

Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate the longevity of our friendship, which will continue for many years.

Yeah, amen. All right, well, thank you, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. In the meantime, make it a fantastic week. I am your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Invest time and effort in building strong, mutually beneficial connections that stand the test of time.

Seek insights and guidance from experienced mentors to achieve personal and business growth.

Implement two-factor authentication for all online accounts to safeguard my business and protect customers’ sensitive data. Stay proactive in maintaining a secure digital environment to build trust and credibility.

Update existing content to incorporate trending topics and provide valuable insights and answers. Capitalize on current events and popular discussions to attract organic traffic and establish my expertise.

Delegate tasks like transcription, video editing, and other specialized services to experienced professionals. Focus on my core competencies while saving time and ensuring high-quality results.

Share resources and make referrals without expecting direct benefits in return. Build goodwill, strengthen relationships, and create a positive reputation within my industry by being generous and supportive.

Create engaging, mobile-optimized content that retains viewer interest and adapts to changing user preferences.

Utilize targeted YouTube advertising to increase subscribers and watch hours, gaining traction and organic distribution. Implement a strategic advertising plan to expand my reach and grow my audience.

Feature media appearances, interviews, and mentions in reputable publications on my website to increase credibility and social proof.

Connect with Chris Parker by visiting his website, whatismyipaddress.com, and explore potential collaboration opportunities.

About Chris Parker

Chris Parker is the founder of WhatIsMyIPAddress.com, a tech-friendly website attracting a remarkable 6,000,000 visitors a month. In 2000, Chris created WhatIsMyIPAddress.com as a solution to finding his employer’s office IP address. Today, WhatIsMyIPAddress.com is among the top 3,000 websites in the U.S.