Indie Media Club

Ever wondered how to turn your travel passion into a thriving online venture?Dive into this episode with Kyle Kroeger—Founder & CEO at ViaTravelers—as he shares the secrets behind transforming a personal blog into a global travel platform. Host Ben Aston explores Kyle's content strategy, audience engagement tactics, and innovative monetization methods. As well as the art of balancing content creation with monetization, leveraging audience surveys, and embracing automation. Tune in for actionable strategies and insights into building a niche audience and monetizing your passion.

Learn from Chelsea Clarke—Founder of HerPaperRoute Media—how to successfully buy and flip niche sites for six-figure earnings. 

Ben Aston is joined by Abby Mercado—Co-Founder & CEO at Rescripted. Listen to learn how to develop ad inventory that sells and performs.

Ben Aston is joined by  Stephen Regenold—Vice President of Strategy at AllGear Digital. Listen to learn how to relaunch a media company.

Ben Aston is joined by Steve Pratt—the Founder & Lead Content Strategist at The Creativity Business. Listen to learn how to launch a world-class branded podcast. 

Ben Aston is joined by Brad Smith, CEO of 3 content companies—Wordable, uSERP, and Codeless. Listen to learn how to scale content and links like billion-dollar brands.

Ben Aston is joined by Rob Janes, Head of Product at AdButler. Listen to learn how to build your own ad server, and that's gonna help you maximize revenue, save time, and reduce costs as well.

Ben Aston is joined by Kurt Schmidt, Owner of Inside the Magic, an online media company covering theme parks, movies and more. Listen to learn how to build the world's largest theme park fan site.

Ben Aston is joined by Todd Sarouhan, Owner of GoVisitSanDiego.com. Todd has lived in San Diego for the last 25 years, and he has a deep passion for the area and everything it has to offer locals and tourists alike. Listen to learn how to create engaging content that users really love.

Ben Aston is joined by Chris Yates, Founder of Rhodium Weekend. He's also a partner with Centurica and has advised on hundreds of millions of deals for online businesses, acquisitions, and exits. Listen to learn how to create value and sell your content sites.

Ben Aston is joined by Bruno Bornsztein, founder of InfluenceKit. It's a complete toolkit for digital influencers to help them plan, collaborate, and report on their content. Listen to learn how to leverage influencer marketing and manage influencer relationships.

Ben Aston is joined by Sean McCabe, owner of seanwes Media Agency. He spent 9,000 hours practicing a skill, got to the point where he was working with large clients, charging five-figure rates, and selling physical products with his own designs, and shipping out orders every single day. Listen to learn how to effectively repurpose content to increase value.

Ben Aston is joined by Matt Inglot, founder of Tilted Pixel, an agency dedicated to helping 6 and 7 figure membership site owners to grow their business. Listen to learn how to grow and scale a successful membership site.

Ben Aston is joined by Bjork Ostrom, co-founder of TinyBit. TinyBit’s focus has always been organic growth, mostly through content. They do some limited advertising, mostly retargeting and occasionally paid Facebook campaigns. Listen to learn how to optimize your old content to drive more traffic to your site.

Ben Aston is joined by Brian Morrissey, former president, and editor-in-chief of Digiday Media and founder of The Rebooting. He is focused on the audience side of the business that included editorial memberships, product development design, multimedia, and events programming. Listen to learn how to monetize your media business effectively and sustainably.

Ben Aston is joined by Chris Fernandez, founder of Women's Health Interactive. Listen to learn how to effectively scale your content production.

Ben Aston is joined by Oliver Lindberg, former editor of Net Magazine turned independent editor, content consultant & conference curator with brands including Google, Adobe, and Shopify.In 2017, Oliver founded a community conference for front-end developers and UX/UI designers with a focus on actionable takeaways called Pixel Pioneers. Tune in to learn about Oliver's story and how to create compelling content that connects with your community. 

Ben Aston is joined by Nick Routley, designer and creative director turned managing editor at Visual Capitalist. With close to a quarter of a million subscribers Visual Capitalist one of the fastest growing online publishers globally focused on topics including markets, technology, energy, and the global economy.Tune in to learn how to make beautiful, shareable, and engaging content to keep your audience hyper-engaged and coming back for more.

Ben Aston chats with Ian Bell, founder of the successful bootstrap media company, Digital Trends Media Group. Digital Trends Media Group serves more than 125 million unique visitors each month across partners and platforms. It's an award-winning publishing company with a number of Millennial-focused media brands including Digital Trends, The Manual, and a number of other popular titles.Tune in to learn how Ian turned his bootstrapped media company into a $50m media giant without venture backing!

In this podcast episode, Ben Aston is joined by international development expert and online entrepreneur Stephen Ladek. Stephen's focus is on ed tech and eLearning with a bunch of projects on the go such as BKK Kids, LMS Pulse, and Social Enterprise Association.  Listen to learn about the eLearning Success Summit and how to create your own successful virtual summit. *Bonus* Tune in to find out how to snag a free 20 min strategy session with Stephen.

Ben Aston chats with Noele Flowers, Community Manager at Teachable, a platform that helps online entrepreneurs create and sell online courses. At Teachable, Noele created and now runs their community program which includes a private tiered forum, virtual events, product betas, and exclusive custom content. Tune in to this podcast to learn how to build a community strategy that attracts, engages, and retains your tribe. BONUS: Snag a copy of Noele's community launch framework!

Ben Aston is joined by Stephen Regenold, founder of GearJunkie, an outdoors and active-lifestyle publication with millions of monthly readers. Listen to learn how to prepare for your big exit and build a media company worth selling.

Ben Aston chats with Jon Dykstra, internet media publishing sensation and founder of JGD Media Group about building and scaling successful revenue-generating websites

Ben Aston chats with Robert Farrington, the Millenial Money Expert and Founder of College Investor about how to build and scale a successful online side hustle so you can quit your day job.

Ben chats with Deacon Hayes about models for monetizing websites, diversifying revenue streams, and scaling content production. Listen to the episode here!

Ben chats with Ewen Finser of Venture 4th Media about building, scaling, iterating on, and monetizing content-based websites. Listen to the episode here!

Ben chats with Seth Rosen about building membership and subscription-based businesses and finding members you are uniquely positioned to serve.

Ben catches up with Richard Millington from FeverBee on all the do's and don'ts for creating successful online communities. Listen to the episode here!

The Co-Founder of Market Muse shares what he's learned over two decades of researching and implementing successful content strategies.

The CEO of Musora Media—the company behind Drumeo, Guitareo, Pianote, and Recordeo—shares his ideas learned from building a successful social learning community.

Tyler's the founder of the world's largest cycling tech blog and the Peak Content Summit. In this episode, he tells the story of his entrepreneurial journey and what it took to get there.

Sofie's a content entrepreneur who turned her travel blog into a business. Hear her pointers on quitting your day job, monetization, strategy, and outsourcing to build a successful blog.

Learn about website investing from Richard Patey, who is pioneering new digital media monetization models and helping people find, vet and acquire profitable content websites.

Andrew Guttormsen, Co-Founder of the modern community platform Circle, shares his approach to creating and growing online niche communities through engagement and audience building.

Dive into the mindset of ad tech entrepreneur and revenue strategist Benjamin Ilfeld—look at models for healthy media ecosystems and how to build content-based businesses that can survive the long-term.

Ruairi's the founder of 3 successful web businesses with millions of annual unique visitors. Here's how he builds and scales evergreen information based websites and communities.

Learn about hyper-local news sites from Farhan Mohamed, Editor-in-Chief and Partner of Daily Hive, an award-winning, homegrown startup that has become one of Canada’s fastest growing news, current affairs, and lifestyle publications online.

Doug is a massively successful internet marketer and course creator—learn how he builds niche sites, does Amazon affiliate marketing and stays productive.

Bernard shares SEO techniques that you can master to create content that ranks—learn about content quality, topic clustering, and backlinking from an SEO entrepreneur.

Welcome to the first episode of the Indie Media Club Podcast, where we help independent, bootstrapped media entrepreneurs succeed.