I usually don’t mix entertainment with digital marketing but a few days ago I saw something unique and interesting.

On the Joe Budden Podcast, the star of the podcast had a major announcement. A MAJOR partnership with Spotify.

The New York Times describes him well.

Joe Budden has the No. 1 podcast on the iTunes music podcast chart — five slots ahead of the NPR standard-bearer “All Songs Considered.” The Joe Budden Podcast With Rory and Mal is produced at a friend’s house in Queens.

Mr. Budden had a brief taste of mainstream success as a rapper with a Top 40 hit in 2003 before his career stalled. Now he has become a kind of volatile elder statesman of hip-hop, holding forth on his podcast, social media and YouTube before an audience of millions.

His soliloquies and tirades, whether a careful examination of a rap diss or a nuanced defense of XXXTentacion, the controversial young rapper who was murdered in June, lend him a credibility he never quite had as an artist.

Mr. Budden is now banking on a new partnership with Spotify to expand on his success. Starting this fall, his podcast will stream exclusively on that platform. (He plans on still uploading videos of the show on YouTube.)

The goal, according to Courtney Holt, head of studios and video at Spotify, is to “develop out not just this show, but other shows in the future.” When asked why he thought Spotify was the best home for his show, Mr. Budden said simply, “They weren’t afraid of me.”

Now as interesting as all that is, the really interesting part to me was his podcast from a few days ago.

Joe talks extensively about how the music industry had metrics about his value as an artist and that value was $250,000. He chose to walk away from the traditional music industry and start a podcast.

He talks about the challenges he and his friends had with starting a podcast for FREE with no guaranteed listeners and how they had to do episode after episode in faith that something would happen.

He talks about the persistence that is needed as a digital entrepreneur and even more importantly, the power of saying NO even when it’s not easy.

It’s a rare discussion about the persistence needed to be a digital entrepreneur, how to avoid bad deals, to understand how new technologies affect your industry and adapt accordingly and finally how to win.

He and his team now have a multi-million dollar deal with Spotify. Inspiring.

If you want to learn about how hard work and persistence online can pay off for you and your business, watch the episode below.

I have started the video below at the relevant sections. He is an entertainer so there will be some profanity and it might not be safe for work language wise.

Enjoy.

Today I want to talk about vigilance. The vigilance you need to have as an online business owner if you plan to be successful.

The truth is, if you run an online business, you have to be open to new opportunities to grow your business. Sometimes you may even need to change or tweak your business entirely to take advantage of those new opportunities.

The following is a true story about how a 2am email totally changed the course of my business and life. It shows how powerful the internet is and how you are always one piece away from solving the jigsaw puzzle.

Let me get started…

I’m a night owl and I love staying up late.

Even though I do it less these days, I am usually super focused and productive from 10pm through 3am. I have no idea why my mind works this way but it just does.

It’s probably because I have spent 15 years working on online businesses and in the beginning, I did it part time every day AFTER I was done with my day job.

About 10 years ago I was running a high traffic technology blog that I had built and monetized myself.

I was getting about 30,000 unique visitors a day and was still struggling to find the right mix of goods and services to sell to this endless wave of eyeballs coming to my site.

The site was awesome because all my traffic was 100% organic and I had no advertising costs.

The site was making a good deal of money but my gut told me that I could make more. A lot more.

For months and months, I did research on different forms of monetization and tried different ad networks but I couldn’t seem to make that much more.

Then one night, at 2am, I got an email from a vendor in Europe who sold a very specific software product that they swore was extremely profitable if I sold to my audience.

They offered me a 40% affiliate fee if I joined their program so ON A WHIM, I joined their program and installed the ad code that morning.

Here’s the fun part:

That vendor and their product made me between $150 to $400 EVERY DAY for the next 5 years. On autopilot. With very little maintenance. Every day.

Here’s the moral of the story.

Never settle, trust your gut and keep looking. The cool thing about this business is that it’s really all about finding missing pieces to the puzzle.

We got tired of manual html, WordPress came along.

We got tired of making crappy landing pages, Leadpages and Thrive Themes came along.

There’s always a solution for your problem on the web, you just have to be vigilant and pay attention.

I have asked myself why I paid attention to that email that night and why I didn’t just send it to junk mail.

I think the reason for that is, I really kept myself open to new opportunities and that literally made me several hundred thousand dollars.

Bottom line people, keep your eyes open and test as many new things as possible.

Covfefe.

An absolutely RIDICULOUS tweet typo from the President of the United States created worldwide memes and entertainment for a couple of weeks.

Here’s the thing though, if you’re running any type of digital business, you need to recondition your mind to see those events differently – not as entertainment – but as an opportunity. A big one.

What is Covfefe?

I can’t believe I just wrote that title – anyway, here goes.

On May 31, 2017, President Trump sent out a tweet that read, in its entirety, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”. Now he deleted the tweet only hours after its posting but it immediately went viral, becoming an Internet meme and a source of widespread jokes.

That notorious tweet was liked and retweeted over a hundred thousand times, making it one of the most popular tweets of 2017 to that date, as people speculated on the meaning of the word.

The opportunity

This absolutely ridiculous word was created (by accident) by the President of the United States and will be part of the world’s history forever.

The easy thing to do (mea culpa) was to laugh about it, watch the news and make fun of the story with friends and family.

The SMART thing to do would have been to rush out to Bluehost and BUY the domain.

Immediately.

As most of you should know by now, the hardest part of creating an online business is getting traffic for your idea. When you see unconventional words that garner worldwide interest, you need to recondition your mind about exploiting those potential opportunities.

Options for Covfefe.com

Covfefe.com is an awesome domain for a political blog. It’s an awesome domain for political products. It’s an awesome domain for a quirky fun website about trivia or lighthearted items like memes. It’s an awesome domain for a new software product that will change the world.

Heck it would have been an awesome domain to hold and sell.

It ended up being used by someone to sell products and depending upon their ability to build a profitable online business, they may or may not be doing well with it.

All they had to do was create a simple logo and cute graphics, head to Shopify/Merchify, slap the logo on products and a storefront and there you go – a fully functional online business.

The bottom line

Think asymmetrically and stay alert. These opportunities come along every once in a while and the great thing about the internet is, the fastest one to pull the trigger wins.

The next time you see something really funny that trends worldwide, think about how to leverage that idea in your business, your content, your domain etc.

It literally could make you millions of dollars.