donnie

They up their prices almost every year. People have been complaining about it for a while. My father actually used it when he was doing online marketing for a tech firm like 10+ years ago and it was expensive as heck back then too.

I have heard so many cases of this. Companies are stuck in the past relying on "standard programs" that charge too much and don't offer enough features. So many are afraid to branch out and try something new. God forbid if it is Opensource! 🤣🤣

I know this was a tool that was recommended a number of years ago for YouTubers looking to start or grow channels. Because it is a monthly paid tool, I don't want to just throw money at it and hope it is still good and relevant. It seems the entry level for basic features is $12 a month. That is likely what I would use. Is this still worth using in 2026 though?

Squarespace is another option if you are still looking. I only know about it because a few YouTubers I watch promote it monthly. They have something called a "blueprint AI builder" that helps you map out your site and get it exactly how you want. Might be worth him looking into!

This is probably the best all in one management tool I have found. I know someone that uses it. I even messed around with it a bit myself. You really do get everything you need in one place. It isn't cheap though. Unless you only want basic features. I think last I checked it was $10 a month but the actual package for businesses is like $900 a month.

Reviews tend to be good. Especially of things that are viewed as "timeless" like video games, movies, and TV series. People will always go back to look for reviews even years later. Another one is health topics. Like you mentioned, weight loss is a big one. General health and fitness, anything like that will do.

A lot of YouTubers use Printful so I would imagine there is a reason for it. I would guess this is at the top of the pile. There are tons of them out there though so you have options. Printify is another one. I have heard of Merchize too but never looked much into it.

I think you know when it is the right time when you find yourself too overworked and unable to keep up with weekly tasks. If you business starts seeing a loss because of the workload, it is usually a good sign!

Do the minimal and see what happens. You can always run more ads but you don't want to run so many at the start that it hinders people from visiting your site. I have seen people introduce them and lose a lot of traffic over it.

In my experience and from what I have gathered, it really comes down to the niche and the content involved. The more useful the better. So like a blog that is dedicated to answering questions will be easier to fix than one that is just about travel for example.

Etsy is a good platform for selling things. Even digital items. A lot of people will sell digital planners, prints, and cards for people to buy and print at home. You sell them cheap enough, you can get some decent earnings coming in. Also looking into print on demand sites that do in-house promotions. So if you post art for printables on the site, they promote it to people browsing it.

In order to review tech products, you need money to invest into them. lol I don't have spare cash to do that or I would. I do like testing new products but the stuff that would make sense to do for me would be too costly.

From what I understand, the model they used before was based on subscribers and view counts. Now what they do is look at not only viewer retention, but virality and topic scores. So yeah, it does look for videos that have higher retention for viewership and when it find some, it links them to other videos in the same niche or topic base.

There use to be a website that would compile job listings nationwide from Craigslist and it was fantastic. It also scrapped through the results and removed the scams but they seemed to have shut the site down 4 or 5 years ago. Unless they changed the URL, I'm not sure.

There are others that are self-hosted too. Plausible is a good one. I found that one to be better than Matomo for me. It is more simple and easier to set up.

I guess this all makes sense. Thanks guys. I am not sure what I could do about it at the moment as I don't sell or offer sales of things right now but I will keep this all in mind!

Yeah I used it for a bit. I was having trouble with it getting accurate analytics from 2 of my sites so I ended up stopping the use of it after a while. It worked great for my other ones when I still used it. It was a pain for me to set up though.

Yes, they have been caught actually using their AI system to comb through private e-mails. I would not trust them as a platform at all. I don't even use Google to do searches anymore, I use Brave.

This as well. Since it is a virtual space and not a physical store. I am sure there is a way around this but it would cost money upfront and you would have to rely on it becoming so popular that you can franchise locations.

When you say humor, do you mean like a meme account? If so, AI could help with that. A lot of people use AI to make memes these days and it could save you a lot of time, especially if you are in a certain niche for the humor. I seems like it depends on the platform which performs best. X obviously boosts political memes the most.

I know a lot of people still rely on e-mails and newsletters to boost sales and traffic. I am just curious what things actually work to get people to not only open the e-mails, but click on links in them. I personally seldom do this unless it is some sort of sale I am interested in.

Gmail has a host of problems. I moved away from hotmail/microsoft for the same reasons I moved away from gmail/google. I still use my gmail accounts but not for anything related to finances including shopping. I switched to an encrypted e-mail service instead.

In terms of content creation online, I know tons of people sell items and merch as well as do colabs. While most viewers don't spend any money, all these creators still seem to make good money selling merch because they have a loyal fan base that will reliably spend money on their items. How does someone go from 0 to that? Is it something that happens over time?

This is kind of what I was thinking but not hoping. I am not a vlogger type of person and wouldn't want this kind of channel but they do seem to be insanely popular. I always see "clean with me" videos being promoted on YouTube which is weird.

I had an account on Instagram blow up over night a few years back. I probably had 2 or 3 companies reaching out to me a month asking for branding deals. If you give access for people to contact you, they will because they want that reach. This is especially true on platforms like Instagram, X, and TikTok.