We just arrived here at Valencia. And we have a very interesting interview for today.
Hello everyone. My name is Jan van der Aa and today I am here in Valencia with Benny Lewis.
Benny has a very big blog which is called Fluentin3Months.com and he has a lot of subscribers
on YouTube. How many do you have, 20 or 28,000? Well, he has more than 40,000 followers on
his Facebook site. How many followers do you have? How many people have been following
your blog?
About half a million a month.
Half a million a month, so I am going to ask Benny some interesting questions about how
he makes his living from traveling and learning languages because that is basically what he
does. So, Benny can you give us a quick introduction on about how
it started, because you went to Spain ten years ago and from there, you have been traveling
for 10 years straight. And how do you do that? Was that your plan when you went to Spain?
No, no, it wasn't my plan. I just graduated with a degree in engineering. And in Spain,
I took time settling in but eventually, I kept moving country and I would take whatever
job I could get in the country. So I worked as an English teacher, mathematics teacher,
a manager of a yoga shop. I did not even know what yoga was but I got the job, and a photographer,
youth hostel receptionist, many things that I would get on occasion.
Which of these jobs did you like the most?
The youth hostel receptionist. It was the worst paid as well. They paid me 10 Euros a day
because they gave free accommodation. But I find it the most interesting because this
was still before I discovered couchsurfing. So I felt like I was in one place and I got
to meet international people coming and it was the first time I got to switch languages.
And do you have a plan back at the time?
No. No I did. You know what Luca had just done? He did a master's in conference interpretation.
That was my plan because like Luca, I got my own graduates in engineering. And I was
just thinking okay, later I want to do this masters because that's your under graduate
combines with completely different masters. But you need to demonstrate the language skills.
And I thought okay, I will sit for the set or exams. And that is why I did my Spanish
C2, that's why I did the French. I did the B2 in French and I would like to continue
improving. And while I was sitting to do the ''chelli'' in Italian and that is why I
started looking into working online. I started working as a freelance translator. So my business
was all based in Ireland. I pay taxes in Ireland. My clients were in Ireland and I was earning in Euro.
And that was my first location, my taste in location independence. I travel the world
for four years as a freelance translator.
And then eventually you started your work. What was your plan on that? Did you have a
goal to become as big as you are now?
I did not imagine the blog would be as big as it would be. But I did have a goal when
I started the blog -- to make a difference, because for whatever it was, seven years traveling
the world until then, many people met me and they were like wow, your are a language genius.
And I was like, no, no. I did poorly in languages at school. I wanted to show them that it is
about working hard, making mistakes, speaking from day one. My usual things, I write it
many times in the blog. I want to share that with the world. And that is one of the reasons
I started a blog. At first, it was an experiment. It was just for the summer. And the fluent
in three months was just for the first project to try to learn Czech to fluency in three
months, and after two months, I ran out of money.
What did you do then, how did you earn money?
I was still a freelance translator. But then later on, eight months later, I was in Thailand.
I met a bunch of bloggers who are now friends of mine. And they came with very interesting
ideas on how to monetize a blog make some money from this without having to sell out.
What are these tips, this advice that they gave you?
What people normally think when they imagine monetizing a blog is that you have to cover
with the annoying advertisements or you have to follow sponsorships.
You don't do that?
No, never. And people ask me to advertise in my blog. I have this little question thing
to contact me and it was like do you want to advertise in the blog? If you click here
and it was like it is only $17,000,000 to really get rid of them because I do not want
any ads. And what you should do if you want to consider making more money off on your
blog is rather than promotes other people's products, other people's language products,
or other people's travel stuff, makes your own. And then rather than you getting
1 cent per click, you can set the prize that you think is fair and cut out the middle man.
And sell it directly on your site.
So that is when you started to provide us the ''Language Hacking Guide''
I took a risk because I was still in debt. And I took six weeks off in my translation
work to run on the guy into research and interview people and then my initial plan was to make
a little bit of money to help relieve my financial problems. I still work as a translator.
But I did so much research into the marketing side of things, and the presentation, and
make it useful to people. It worked out very, very well and the day I released it, I managed
to cancel my debt which is something like the week which I was crazy about.
Generally, it was a positive cash flow from that.
And then it was consistent. It wasn't just the first burst but the thing is, ever since
then, most of my work has been to write a very interesting blog. So for instance right now
I am learning Japanese in Spain. And many people are following and so my videos are
getting 20,000 views just to see me speak bad Japanese. And no one is paying me for that.
But the thing is, my job I feel is, to write good blog post, to write encouraging messages,
to make fun videos, to make inspirational videos, and if I make something that is good
enough, that people think I really like this, they share it with their friends. And if they
share it with their 300 Facebook friends—
They share as well.
They shared as well. Some of them may come to my blog. So one of my posts instead has
nothing to do with languages what's with a 29 life lessons I learned on my 29th birthday,
two years ago. That post went proper viral. It is being read over three million times,
one single article. And that brought in new readers who read my blog. And then let's say 0.01%
of those people will buy my e-book. And if you look at my sites, there is no buy my e-book.
It is amazing. There are no flashing banners. It is a very quiet and I promote my e-mail list
but if you first arrived in the site, you don't know that I have and the e-book. You
have to kick around a little bit. So I don't push it down on people's necks. So this
means, when people buy it, they really do want it.
Is that people inspire you? Are you following other bloggers as well where you learn from?
From which bloggers do you learn?
Oh, so many bloggers. We discussed Tim Ferris. I like his blogging style. He tests everything.
So he found for instance posting on Tuesdays, and Thursdays, and Saturdays. For some reason,
it gets a little better readership. And I find I have done the test. I find it when
I put my video out on a Friday it gets a few more views because it is the week ending
whereas videos at the start of the week might not do as well because a lot of people are
in their offices. And they might think, oh I will watch that later, they don't get to it
So, Tim Ferris is very good in testing. And I test many things. I have a Google analytics
on my site to see where people are coming from. And I think okay, if they are searching
for something and Google and I might be answering their question, and I look and see how that
writing. I do not do any search engine optimization to make my site work better in Google. But
I do see when people come to my site, what were they looking for? If they were asking
like how do I role my R in Spanish, and that is how I got inspiration to write a blog article.
So at first you listen to what the people want, then you will read an article on that topic?
Exactly. And I got inspiration from the emails people send me and the questions that they
write on comments on my blog, on my YouTube videos or my blog post.
So you learned from Tim Ferris. Is there any other big blogger where you learn from?
Yeah. I get inspiration from so many bloggers who have nothing to do with language learning.
So what good friend of mine, Steve Camp, he writes ''the nerd fitness''. It is a blog about getting
in shape. Nothing to do with languages but I like his ideas, and for instance he wrote
blog post: ''the worst fitness advice that you will ever read in your life'' and it
had gotten a lot of use. And I was thinking that is very clever. So I wrote a blog post,
the worst language learning advice.
And that worked as well.
And it worked very well. So I copied he is idea. And you can get inspiration from people
who write about finances from non-bloggers, from people who write about fashion. If you
look at the big blogs and see why are they big, it doesn't have to be the same theme
as you, there are some techniques that are just working for their blogs.
So, which activities are there that helped you the most reaching a bigger audience?
Writing consistently, trying to write good messages and not being afraid to share controversial
opinion. You don't want to push the controversy too much because that will get annoying. But
I do you tell people, when I have strong opinion, I would say this is really dumb, if I think
something is really dumb. I have gotten a huge amount of my traffic. My first biggest
source of traffic is Facebook because I encourage people to share my post.
Nearly all my traffic come from just so many things, oh this article is good, and they shared on
their Facebook. It is most of my traffic. My second biggest source of traffic is ''stumble upon''.
And this is a tool that you use to discover interesting websites on the Internet.
So most people who found my blog on
the life lessons post, they came from stumble upon. And my TEDx talk, the two of them, what
they did was they had a great effect on credibility because up until then, a lot of people would
see me just as a blogger. But when you have the TEDx brand, you are associated with them
and people can see you on talk, on the stage, giving a powerful presentation, and present
professionally. It is good for your credibility. And a lot of, that is how to get me into more
newspapers.
Okay. Are they also, from time to time, you visit conferences and events where bloggers
come together? Did it help for you? I mean to think it might be helpful to all the bloggers
that are not as big as you are now.
Absolutely because the greatest things that you can do can come from collaboration, that
might most of you, the video when YouTube, is the ''Skype me Maybe'' music video
because that is also collaboration. It wasn't me being amazing. It was me giving a chance
for other bloggers to be amazing, forother YouTubers or polyglots. So what happens is when you
work with other bloggers, you can guess post on their blog, and have them guest post on
yours. So I welcome did post on my blog because that because if that is really interesting
article, that would get me more traffic. But it is also a chance to have this person
says, check out my blog, and they get to a link so my readers can check them out. And
it is a great YouTube exchange. But I do come to a lot of these conferences to network and
to understand how they think and how they work together and to make new friends.
And to make new friends.
Exactly.
And now you have so many followers that follow your blog. Do you get recognized on the street
sometimes?
I do get recognized. Here in Valencia, my parents visited me for a weekend. And I was
sitting in a café somewhere and I just wanted a photo of me and my parents and my girlfriend.
And I just grabbed a random guy and I said, sorry could you take our photo?
And he said, Benny Lewis.
And he said, sure I can Benny.
[Laughter]
I am like, I was surprised. And I was like, how did you find an article in my website?
And he said the article where you wrote that you don't like Americans. I was like no!
No, I have much better articles than that. But that was another one that went viral. But
yeah, it has happened very, very regularly because one thing I do very differently to
a lot of people, it is I have my face all over my blog. Every article that I write for
the last four years or whatever I have been writing, every single article has a picture
of me. And of course, my videos and stuff but it helps a lot.
and I think that is good because people feel they can connect with you. If your blog does
not have your personal image, it feels more like it is an impersonal company writing.
Okay, Benny, I think we all think you for all the advice that you gave for us. And thanks
for having me here in Valencia.
Yeah, it is my pleasure. If anyone has any questions, you can send them on to me.
Okay, great.
Bye.