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How to Start a Blog and Make Money in 2021
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Jun 1, 2024
Looking to start a blog and turn it into a money-making venture in 2021? This comprehensive guide covers everything you need to know. From choosing the right niche and platform to setting up your blog and creating compelling content, we'll walk you through the steps. Discover effective strategies for monetization, including affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, selling digital products, and more. Whether you're a beginner or looking to take your blogging game to the next level, this blog post will help you achieve your goals in the ever-evolving world of online entrepreneurship.
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0:00
So it's time to build a blog
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I'm going to walk you to do step by step everything you need to do to get your blog up and running
0:05
start creating content, and make money from your efforts. If you stick around until the end of the video, I'll go through four different ways that you can make money from your blog
0:13
Step number one, choose a niche. So if you're already an expert in a certain area or have an existing business
0:19
maybe you don't have to spend a ton of effort here. You already kind of know what your blog's going to be about
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If you just want to create a blog and have a bunch of very diverse interests
0:27
here's the time to narrow down to what this blog is going to be about
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You want to build an audience that comes back. You want to think about your niche is something where if I find a person interested
0:37
in this, they're going to want to consume all of my content. That's building a very loyal audience in a particular area
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If you're just all over the place with your content, people may find one article
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but they're never going to come back again. And so it's much more work and much more difficult to do that versus choosing a niche
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and just creating content that they're going to love. Step number two, create a long list of topic ideas for your blog
1:00
So the thing is, it's important to consistently be creating content. Don't put all this effort in, get your blog up, and write two articles
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Part of the thing of being consistent is never starting from scratch. So if you make a list right now of 100 potential topics for your blog
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when you go to write article 10 or 20, you're going to have a bunch of ideas already ready
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so it'll be easier to write those articles. So where do you come up with content ideas
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you are thinking about your audience, what questions do they ask? So type some of those questions into Google and see what happens
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So type in keto diet. And so it's keto diet for beginners, keto diet, meal prep, keto diet, breakfast
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So whatever the niches that you're thinking about, whatever that audience is interested in
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start typing into Google and see what Google auto fills. Also, if you scroll down further on Google, you're going to see people also ask
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and there's a whole bunch of other questions. There's also a bunch of free and paid SEO tools
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So Uber suggests we use ATRFs. We have the paid version, but the free version will give you a bunch of topic ideas
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You can type something into the search. And they give you the search volume and a bunch of other related topics
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So you can use different tools like that to come up with your long list of, you know
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I'd recommend coming up with 50 or 100 ideas. This is going to help you with future articles
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If you're not able to come up with a long list of ideas, maybe you chose the wrong niche
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After you have a bunch of content ideas, the next step, step number three, is choosing a name
2:25
and purchasing your domain. So the name could be Jeff Thalen, so I own jeffhthalen.com
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If someone else is named Jeff Thalen, maybe they have to choose, you know, Jeffrey Thalen
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something. Dot net, who knows? But the important thing is, what's the name going to be? Is it your name
2:40
It's your personal brand. The FIGCO is just a made-up name of our, my business partner and I's names kind of
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smushed together. Could be marketing with Jeff or yoga with Jeff or whatever
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it is. So it could be your niche and your name or it could be just something, you know
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random like Google. So the important thing is here is just choose something, get the domain for it
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and run with all the rest of the stuff we're going to talk about. Don't get caught up
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hung up on spending months thinking about what is the name of this going to be. And so for purchasing
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a domain, we end up buying our domains from Name Cheap. I did a whole video about a bunch of options
3:13
for purchasing your domain. I'll link to that video up above right here. Step number four, choose a website
3:18
builder. So a lot of people are going to recommend you build your website with WordPress. WordPress is the most common platform for building websites but with WordPress it not for a beginner So you get your website set up to the best of your ability a plugin breaks or just something you can figure out to do Who are you going to call The issue is you going to have to hire a developer
3:38
hire a designer, someone who's not very cheap to help you fix the problem. If you build your website with a website builder
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with such as Squarespace, Wix, or Weebley, you have customer service that you can talk to
3:48
Also, all of the platform is much more integrated, works better together so you don't have stuff that just breaks all of a sudden
3:55
And so that's why we recommend, especially for beginners, using one of the website builders that I just mentioned
4:00
Our website is built with Squarespace. Wix and Weebley are also really good options
4:04
At a minimum, with Squarespace, you can get a two-week free trial. With Weebley and Wix, there is an option to build a free website and then upgrade to a paid plan later on
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And so you can test it out, see how it works, see if it's something that's intuitive and easy to use and works for the blog you're looking to set up
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We have a free five-day email course for building your website. goes through the website builder, creating the content, and a bunch of other stuff in more
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detail. If you're interested in signing up, I'll put a link down below in the description
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Moving on to step number five, which is create the basic website pages before you start creating
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blog content. So what I mean by that is the home, the about me or about us, the contact page
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And then if you offer any products or services, there should be pages for that. So if you create
4:49
an amazing blog post and all of a sudden, thousands of people come to your website, you want
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them to know who you are and any products or services that you might sell or how they could
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get in touch with you. So we recommend getting that set up, then creating your blog post content
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Step number six, create your blog. So you have the basic pages all set up. Now you can create
5:06
the blog. So this is really easy. And any of the platforms that I mentioned, create a new blog
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A lot of them will have a few different layout options. So do you want, say, one article and
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then scroll down to see the next article to scroll down to see the next article. And then you
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can also click on and view an article at a time. Other ones are more
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much more visual. So you might see like three or four blog post articles along the top
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And there's like a few rows of content. And then you can actually click on and view the
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content. So it's basically choosing the format of your blog and then actually start writing your
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blog post content. And from earlier on, you have a whole bunch of ideas so you can start creating
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content for your blog. So it's time to choose the format. Get your first article up. Then step number
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seven is actually maintain a constant rhythm of some sort of like consistently putting out content
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The thing is, your blog isn't going to get tons of traffic from anywhere if there's like two
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articles up. And so we recommend trying to have some type of rhythm, not that it's totally
6:03
necessary for your blog, but if you're building an audience, building an email list, creating
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traffic from different sources, having new updated content is good for a whole bunch of reason
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What I like to do just with anything is put it on my calendar. So to say, hey, on Tuesday evenings or Sunday mornings or whenever it is, put it on the calendar
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however much time you think you need to write an article. And that way, every single week, or if it's 10 minutes a day, whatever it is, you have
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something scheduled so that you are consistently working on this. If you make the commitment to build all this out, buy a domain, pay to have your website
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built or pay for the website builder and everything else, you know, make the most
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out of it. So if you put the time in your calendar every week to be creating content
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you'll little by little start building out content and building an audience. Step number
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eight is time to get people to your blog So how are we going to do that Well when you came up with the topic ideas obviously we were looking at what are topics that people are searching for and creating content within your niche around those topics The thing is SEO is going to take months or years
7:10
before you actually start getting real traffic. So you need to create stuff that people are searching for
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You need to build backlinks and a whole bunch of other things. I'm happy to create a video about SEO
7:19
but I think there is an easier way when you're getting started with your blog, which is Pinterest
7:25
So I have a video that I'll link to right here that talks about how I got started, creating
7:29
content on Pinterest and generating traffic in basically no time. Also for our Spanish website, we started a Pinterest account in August and we're
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getting over a million impressions a month. And I think last month there were 14,000 clicks from Pinterest to either our
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blog or our YouTube channel. So it's something where you don't have to wait months or years to start seeing results
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in traffic. Pinterest, honestly, in a matter of weeks, you can start to be generating traffic to
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your blog. To stay consistent on Pinterest, you kind of have to be pretty active. So I think for our Spanish content, we put up around 15 pins a day
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Some of it is our content and some of it is third party content. And then we use an app called
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Tailwind where we essentially schedule it all out. And so that's one of the most popular apps
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for Pinterest. If you're interested in checking out, I'll put a link to it down below in the description
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But honestly, I think if you're just getting started with your blog, yes, you want SEO and to start
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showing up in search and other things. But one of the quickest, easiest ways to get traffic
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early on is Pinterest. So you have your blog, you have your articles, you're starting to get an audience
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people coming to visit your website. Now what? So to stay in touch with this audience, the best way
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by far, is email. So anything else is essentially rented space. So Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube
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whatever it is, they could disappear tomorrow. They could stop showing stuff to your audience
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and what are you going to do? But if you have an email list, you can take that with you
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No one can take that away from you. And so we recommend from, day one, start collecting emails
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But for someone to give you their email address, you need to give
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them something. So don't just say, sign up for my newsletter. No one's going to
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sign up. But if you can give someone something of value in exchange for their email
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they will sign up. So for example, we have a bunch of content on how to build a website
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So someone could be reading one of those articles. And then there's a form that says
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hey, do you want our free build your website court, or our free five-day build your website
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course. And so they see that and they say, yeah, I want help building my website. Here's my name and email
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And so we send them the five-day course on how to build our website in exchange for their email
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And so we can do that in two places. So we have forms that are basically in line
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Someone is reading the blog post. In the middle of the blog post says, hey, sign up for the Build Your Website course
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And so they sign up there. Or what we use is called an exit intent
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So this is a pop-up. There's different times you have the pop-ups, you know, show up on screen
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We like to do it when people are leaving the website. So someone is reading about building a website
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So they're about to scroll up and close a browser. And at that moment, a pop-up comes up and says
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hey, sign up for a free course on how to build your website
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And so those are the two ways that we recommend getting started with email marketing
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So the inline form when someone's reading your blog or the pop-up or the exit intent pop-up
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if you're getting trafficked your blog every single day, some percent of that audience is going to sign up if you have an interesting offer
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something you're giving away for free in exchange for their ectrine. email That is the best way to stay in touch with your audience If you doing what we recommended earlier and having a niche and creating a bunch of content around that they going like what you gonna be creating in the future So they going to be people that come back and consume a lot of your blog post content
10:44
Okay, so now the fun part. So you have a blog, you have your audience
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you stay in touch with the audience, how can you actually make money from this? So the very first way is through ads
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So you could sign up for something like AdSense or there's more kind of niche programs as well
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So you can put up banners and other things on your website. This, if you have a big audience, maybe can create a lot of money for you
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But the thing is for me and for our clients and other people we talk to
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we don't generally recommend it because there's better ways to make money
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And so you get just cents on the dollar for all of your visitors
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And it kind of distracts people from signing up for your email list or your content
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Yes, that is a way that you can make money through AdSense and other kind of banner ads on your website
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but not the most effective. The second way to make money in our website is through affiliate marketing
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So what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is essentially making recommendations of products or services
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If someone clicks on a link from your website and makes a purchase, you make a commission
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So think of anything related to your niche. So if it's about yoga, it could be the yoga mat, yoga blocks, Lulu Lemon Gear, whatever it is
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If you create articles and link to those websites and then someone goes, it makes a purchase, you make a commission
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So for our content, it could be the camera. the microphone, the email marketing software
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any of those different things that we could talk about on our blog, make recommendations
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If someone makes a purchase, we make a commission. So I have a video on how we made money from affiliate marketing primarily through YouTube
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where we generated $20,000 last year through affiliate marketing alone. If you're interested in learning more about that, I'll link to the video up above
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So the third way is by offering some type of digital product. So that could be an ebook, a course, some type of thing where you can create once
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and then just sell an infinite amount of time. So we have a course on YouTube, on Instagram
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on how to use Canva for graphic design, but creating digital products
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is something that can be really, really profitable. So it could be something where you have a membership for yoga
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the example we're just running with, where, hey, you put out new videos every week
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and it's only for your members area. So someone pays a monthly membership
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and you put up videos on your private membership area, and people pay a subscription
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The fourth way to make money is any other type of product or service
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So if you have a clothing brand and you give people style advice, so they see the style advice
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they buy your clothes, or let's say you're a real estate agent, you have all this great advice
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on purchasing homes, investing in real estate. And then you just ask people, hey, sign up for a call and I'll give you a free consultation
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a free home estimate, whatever it is. And so any product or service, you can take people from your blog, they consume
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information, learn something, and then they either purchase something or maybe signed up to have a
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conversation with you. And so those are really the four ways. So ads on your website, affiliate
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marketing, digital products, or selling a product or service. But honestly, blogging is a phenomenal way
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still in 2021 to create an audience, consistently create traffic, and find a way to actually
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you know, converse with people about something that's important to you, you know, become a thought
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leader in a particular space and also make some money while doing it if you're interested in checking out
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all of other videos on creating a website and making money from it check out the playlist right here
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hope to see you in those and future videos bye
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