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The Transcript

6 Steps to Building an Audience That Builds a Business

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Brian Clark: Hey there, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Rainmaker. I’m your host, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media.

Today, we have yet another very special guest, Joe Pulizzi, or as I refer to him, the guy who I can’t outrank for the term ‘content marketing.’ I’ve been trying, Joe. You know I’ve been trying. Did you make up that word? Did you make up the term ‘content marketing?’ Was you it?

Joe Pulizzi: And I love you. It excites me that you tried so hard to get down first. I really dig that about you, actually.

Brian Clark: I do have a competitive streak. I can’t help it.

Joe Pulizzi: Did I make up the term? I started using it when I was running custom media at Penton Media in 2001. Actually, the backstory about that is, we were in the custom publishing industry, and we were called Penton Custom Media, two very boring terms. You go with custom publishing at Custom Media, nobody wants to buy anything from you.

So I was like, How can I get these chief marketing officers at least interested in what I’m talking about? I tried everything. I tried branded content, custom content, and I’m throwing it all at them, and then I started using content marketing in the pitch, and I could see the reaction change. Like they were, “Oh, hey. I’m a marketer. We do content-y type stuff. Maybe that’s what we’re doing.”

If you’re targeting marketers in every way — and you know this, because you and I both work with a lot of marketers — they’re very simple people. You have to keep things simple, and things resonate with them around the term marketing. I saw that, and I said, “Hey, look. This thing that we’re doing, this building audiences thing through relevant, valuable content on a consistent basis — we better call it something like content marketing because that’s what’s resonating with these folks.”

Yeah. I can’t prove it. I can’t prove that I was the first one, probably as much as you were responsible for popularizing it, because you didn’t like the term, but then you started using it. I said, “Thank Jesus for that.” It helped us.

Brian Clark: Well, maybe I just didn’t like it because I didn’t come up with it. I don’t know. So yeah, I talk about now, In 1999, I started doing this thing we now call content marketing, and then in 2006, I started a blog talking about this thing we now call content marketing.

But it was you who convinced me, and grudgingly, I guess, and I don’t know what my issue was with it. I don’t even think it occurred to me that it needed to be called something. But for those of you who don’t know who Joe is — you probably do — he is the founder of Content Marketing Institute, the world’s leading enterprise solution provider. No, I’m trying to come up with a tagline for you.

Joe Pulizzi: Leading training and education company for enterprise marketers, something like that.

Brian Clark: Exactly. According to Google.

Joe Pulizzi: Hey. If Google said it, it must be true.

Brian Clark: It must be true.

Joe Pulizzi: Absolutely.

Brian Clark: Also, more impressively, is that Content Marketing World, without doubt, is the largest and the finest content marketing conference out there. It s something I’ve been involved with every year since the beginning.

Joe Pulizzi: Every year, that’s right.

Brian Clark: It’s so aimed at the enterprise. Why am I there every year?

Joe Pulizzi: Because everybody aspires to be a big company. It’s interesting. You know this, because I think we’ve had some conversations on when you target the enterprise, you can’t target the mid market. You actually have to say enterprise, and you get the mid market.

Then you get small companies that actually want to aspire to be big, so then we got a lot of really high-growth small businesses. That’s what we target. So you get mostly marketers at large businesses, and because of that you get the mid market, and then you get the small businesses that want to be big.

It’s just interesting. That’s why you fit in. You probably target what, the growing small business, mid-market audience? Would you say that that’s your target?

Brian Clark: I think a lot of our customers fall into the biggest group of the small business market, which is the very small business, but it does move up from there.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I think, again, a lot of the work you have done has made what we talk about relevant to even larger companies. I think our hearts are with the small companies, because that’s our affinity. But the information percolates all over the place, which is fascinating to me.

Let’s get to the issue here, because historically, an enterprise-focused institute and conference, and now you’ve written Content Inc., which is squarely aimed at the startup and small business world, the whole audience-first theme that we’ve been talking about for years. I was fortunate enough that you allowed me to write the foreword to the book. As long as I get in somewhere.

Joe Pulizzi: Allowed is a good way to put it. It defaulted to you. You had to write that because it’s your story. Thank you for that, by the way.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It’s a great book. It’s going to be out in just a few weeks here. It’s available for pre-order, called Content Inc. There’s also an excellent podcast that Joe’s been running called Content Inc. also.

How do you like that? Let’s talk about podcasting. Everyone is doing podcasting now. You’ve taken to it. I love your show with Robert, This Old Marketing. How has it been reaching out to this new audience with a podcast? Because it seems like that’s your primary engine.

Joe Pulizzi: This is all a big experiment. Actually, everything is, even writing the book to this audience. Because as you said, we’ve never targeted the small business, startup, entrepreneurial audience, so to start with that was completely selfish on my part, because I wanted to write this book.

I literally said, This book needs to be written. What we’ve done at CMI, what Brian’s done at Copyblogger Media, and dozens and dozens of other examples, they need to be told, because we have to get away from this idea that you have to be a big company to do this thing called content marketing.

I think there’s actually a better way to launch a business, and it’s the way that you and I launched the business. I said, Okay, I’m going to do this book, but I’m not going to make it about me. We’re going to talk about some examples, but let’s talk about what all these companies did and how they went audience-first and then built products and services on the back of that. I said, Okay, well, what’s the best way to do this?

With Epic Content Marketing, which I wrote in 2013 and is squarely for enterprises, I started to release blog posts ahead of time. That was the thing: “Okay. I want to tease it out. We’re going to give pieces of the book out ahead of time.” I said, “Let’s do something different with Content Inc.,” and I said “Whoa. Let’s just share everything ahead of time but do it in a podcast form.”

So far, it s seemed to work. Every week, we get more subscribers, more listeners to the show. People have started to talk about it more, and honestly, we haven’t really marketed that much at all. It’s just sort of there. It just sort of happened, and we’re letting people know about it. I like the fact that it’s almost like we had the blog-to-book idea. I would say “Hey, if I’m going to write a book, do a blog-the-book. Just plan out six months of content, write your chapter outline, start blogging, and then in six months, you’ve got 80 percent of a book, and you’re done.

I started to do the same thing with podcasting. So I started to write episodes of the podcast, which became chapters of the book. I started to release those, edited them down, and then we’ve got part of the book done. As I’ve been going through and doing this podcasts — two a week, and they’re really short, like five to seven minutes long — then okay, I’ve got more content for the book.

It seemed to have worked out well, and it just takes a lot of the burden off me from a content production standpoint. At the same time, I can build an audience. I think that that’s a smarter thing to do than everybody just saying, “Wait. We’re not going to send any content out. Here comes the book, and now it’s ready.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: I think you just give it all out as much as possible. Build some anticipation over it. Build your audience so that when you release the book, it’s already there. The audience is basically your customer list for buying the book or the audio book. It’s all ready to go.

Brian Clark: You’re demonstrating the principle of the book in a way that you’re building an audience to sell the book. I like that. You’re getting very meta, Joe. That’s been our thing for years.

Joe Pulizzi: My life is meta.

Brian Clark: Exactly, right.

Joe Pulizzi: We’ll see if it works out. So far, it looks like We’ll know right away. September 8th, the book comes out. It comes out at Content Marketing World. I think we’ll know within the first two weeks if that strategy has paid off. Fingers crossed, it looks like it will work.

Brian Clark: Well, I m certainly going to help, because again, my foreword cannot be unseen. I mean, I must have spent 20 or 30 minutes on that Joe, and you had to write the whole rest of the book.

Joe Pulizzi: It could go down as the greatest foreword in business history.

Why Startups Are More Innovative Than Large Companies at Content

Brian Clark: Let me ask you this: I had your partner in crime, Robert Rose, on last week. We were kind of dancing around this thing, but I’m not sure we ever just came right out and said it, but I almost came out and said, “Don’t you think the real innovation in content marketing really comes from the startups who build the audience first and all that?

I never came out and said it, and then right after I asked you to be on the show, I see you’ve written an article saying Why Startups Basically Beat the Pants off the Enterprise at Content Marketing. I mean, the headline was something to that effect. Tell me what you think about that.

Joe Pulizzi: I totally agree with that. It’s the premise of the book. I’ve spent too long — 16 years now — working with these large companies. There are so many politics, red tape, fiefdoms that you have to deal with, meeting after meeting to get something done.

Culture change has to happen of some nature, or you have to have a content champion that’s so strong that it s actually willing to risk their job, at least doing it the way that it’s been done, to make some of these decisions to say, “Look, we’re not going to market the way we’ve always marketed. We’re going to go out and build an audience that knows, likes, and trusts us, and if we do that, we believe in our heart of hearts that it’s going to help our business, and here’s how. Basically, that’s the approach.

There are very, very few large businesses that can do that, because they’re so set in, We have these products to sell. That’s what marketing’s for. Get the darn brochure done, set it, and make sure the sales people have what they need. Marketing, get out of my way, and I’ll sell. Especially in large B2B companies.

Now what we notice is, if you have a belief structure around the practice of content marketing, that you really believe that this is the way that you can go to market, you have one person that could make that decision. And you have such other focus on a content niche, which is also another issue with large companies. They want to target every one of their buyer personas, audience personas, and in a B2B company, that could be seven to nine people, and then their content becomes so irrelevant, it doesn’t do anything.

But if you’re a startup, you’re focusing on that audience — building that audience, focusing on that person and that audience that you’re building — that becomes your future customer database.

It takes time, and it takes patience. Large companies have no patience. Large companies — usually the ones that we work with — are public companies. They’re on some kind of a quarterly fiscal financial release schedule. Nobody has patience for anything.

If you go in to a chief marketer’s office and say, “Hey. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to target this audience, which is not a large audience but it’s a particular audience that we could be the leading informational expert for, and we’re going to distribute content to them. We’re going to build them. They’re going to know us more, like us. It’s going to lead to this. We’re going to build subscribers. We think this is going to happen — that’s the hypothesis, but we don’t know for sure. We might have to change it. And I need 15 to 17 months to make that happen.

The next two words are — with a contraction in there — “You’re fired.” That s basically what it is. Get out of here. Let’s do some advertising. Let’s drop some demand right now.

Brian Clark: It’s amazing, the short-term thinking at the largest institutions on the planet, because it’s this quarterly mentality. I know there’s so much money at the enterprise level, but I’ve never wanted to deal with what you described, that mire of entrenched silos and infighting and the inability to move quickly.

That’s also why I refer to myself as unemployable. Could you imagine me in that environment? I’m on the evening news at some point.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. I wouldn t even start to imagine that crisis. I don’t think any large company would imagine that. “Let’s go and get that Brian Clark. He’s going to really disrupt

Brian Clark: No one’s in the history of the world have ever said, “I wonder if we could get Clark to come on board.

Joe Pulizzi: We just had our team meeting, and we were talking about it being a noble effort. This is a mission that we can really get behind, because who’s going to do this? Who really cares about this? There’s a lot of really good people and marketers in these large companies that are struggling, and that’s our job to support them and to give them the air cover so they can go in and make change happen.

If you can make change happen — a good example is Julie Fleisher of Kraft. The change that she’s made happen in Kraft has been phenomenal. I don’t even know how much they respect it inside Kraft, but she’s so respected outside, and she’s an inspiration for marketers at large companies all over the place. Because we know it can be done, and we know that that is a real asset inside that organization that’s valued.

We need more of that, because it’s the large companies that have large access to these large audiences that can actually help the world communicate better. Because we all know that we don’t need another ad. Do we need more advertising campaigns? For that matter, do we need more content campaigns?

I hate that term. I hate content campaigns.

Brian Clark: No, it’s not a campaign. It’s a shift in thinking.

Joe Pulizzi: What is a content campaign? I didn’t even know what that is. Is that a short-term content viral burst?

Brian Clark: Do magazine publishers have magazine campaigns? No, they produce a magazines. It s more that type of thinking than it is a campaign.

Joe Pulizzi: Well, yeah. We’re going to go do a blog. What the hell? What does that mean? We need, “Oh. Somebody get content for the blog today. Today we have to do a post. What?

The Coming Exodus of Talent Leaving the Enterprise for Startups

Brian Clark: You know what occurred to me, when I heard you were writing a book and thinking about the audience you have? A lot of the enterprise people will send certain designated people from the marketing department or corporate communications or what have you to events like Content Marketing World. They’re in charge of figuring out this content thing.

Then these people come back, and they’re inspired. They re fired up. They know what to do, and they know what will work if they can get internal buy-in, and it doesn’t come.

Has it occurred to you that some of those people in the existing audience may be looking at Content Inc. and thinking, “You know what? I know how to do this. I’m going out on my own. To me, that would be fantastic. Some of the enterprise companies out there may not think that s so great, but have you thought about that?

Joe Pulizzi: The dirty little secret that’s going on in our industry right now is you have a lot of really smart people in big companies that understand how to build audiences, that don’t get quite the respect they deserve or need or even support.

And yes, frankly, I’ve never seen — and I’m not saying any names, because we won’t do that, no names please — there are a lot of people that you and I know right now that are dissatisfied at their corporate job, and they want to do something for the greater good. They want to do something for themselves, and they want to do something for their families. And they know that they can go build an audience if they have the level of patience and determination and passion. They’re going to get there.

To answer you, that’s a long answer to your question, but yes, absolutely yes.

Brian Clark: But I mean, how could it not be?

Joe Pulizzi: This is our future entrepreneurs. And they are going to Content Marketing World. That’s why Robert Rose and I, we ve kicked around, “Hey. You know what, are we going to do like this startup thing around, because we see so many of these possibilities of companies launching from these corporate marketers that really want to be entrepreneurial. Because they’re already entrepreneurial. If you’re a content marketer, you probably have that entrepreneurial spirit already, because you have to in order to survive in a large company atmosphere.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s why my new project is aimed at the power of the small, the power that a media producer mindset could bring to a startup or even a production-style environment.

And you hear all the things that are threatening or radically changing the future of work, including automation, robotics, computerization. But it’s also just the dissatisfaction with how large companies work, and I think there’s a big movement coming. I think content may be the catalyst in a lot of ways, because the light bulb has gone off, as you’ve mentioned, for a lot of these people that are like, “Wait. I can do something here without a lot of money, with all these tools that are out there and just the freedom to do it correctly. I think that’s awesome.

Joe Pulizzi: It’s the golden age for entrepreneurship. Right now. And I think that the whole content movement and the no barriers to entry in the technology area and we’re all publishers. It’s all the same thing. We can all do it.

Just a quick story, because I think it’s interesting. I was speaking at a startup event, a bunch of venture capitalists in the audience — it was around the Cleveland area — and they were all talking, “We need more investment. We’ve got some group. We got this great momentum going on with these companies that are launching, and they’re creating these differentiated products and going to market. I heard the same old spiel or whatever: “You created a great, unique product. Put a lot of money behind it. Get that investment. Get your series A. Blah blah blah.

Of course, there’s me, the content guy, I’m like, I don’t even know why I’m on this panel, but hey, I’ll answer your question. I basically said, “You know what? We’re all doing it wrong. We are all launching businesses the wrong way thinking that our idea is so good that we’ll be able to figure out our audience s needs right now — that we’ve got it. That doesn’t work that way, even if you look at maybe the most famous accelerator on the planet. Y-Combinator has a 10 percent success rate. That’s pitiful.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to say, You know what? Let s go out and build an audience first. Let’s understand them better than anyone else in the world, and then we will know — just like you did. You’ll inherently start to figure out what products and services they need and when we’re ready to sell, we will have our buyers, because they’re going to buy anything we offer them because they trust us. I just think that’s a better way for startups to go today but nobody does this.

Everybody talked — even Peter Thiel in Zero to One, the book. Even though I love what he’s done: investor in Facebook, co-founder of PayPal, and he wrote a great book called Zero to One. But it starts the same as every other startup book. You have to create a product that’s different than anyone else … You know how hard that is to do?

Brian Clark: I know, and what we were talking about last week with Robert was that content, media, is the last way to truly differentiate. I can manufacture anything I want in China. I can copy any service model. It’s this unicorn thinking that drives me crazy.

Joe Pulizzi: It’s not a new concept either. I mean, Don Schultz, who is one of my heroes, the father of integrated marketing. I read an article that he wrote in 2003 in B2B Magazine. B2B is no longer around well, it s part of Ad Age, but the magazine’s gone now.

He wrote and said, “Look. Everything that you are creating as a business, as a commerce-backed business, can be duplicated except for how you communicate. He said it, and here we are. You’re talking about it. I’m talking, Robert — we talk about that all the time. But now, the difference is that you actually have more power to make change happen through content, because you can communicate directly. You don’t have that power 20 years ago. You had to have some kind of budget behind you. You don’t have to have that today.

Brian Clark: Yup. Preach, brother. This is the choir over here. Amen.

Joe Pulizzi: Preach it. Amen.

Multiple Examples of Successful Companies That Were ‘Audience First’

Brian Clark: All right. Let’s talk about some examples of companies who have done this. Now, there are a lot of companies that are really well-known to my audience. I think we do owe them acknowledgement here, because a lot of our peers have done what you’ve done and what I’ve done. We all have different businesses, and maybe we ended up with a different answer about, What problem or desire am I going to solve? and yet fundamentally, the mechanism that you lay out in Content Inc. is the same.

Joe Pulizzi: It’s the same thing. It’s basically, focus on who that audience is going to be. Figure out what your passion area is, mixed with what is something that you actually have authority — you like to use the word authority — to communicate on? What’s that content differentiation area? We call that the content tilt. Then build that base. Build that audience over time.

Some of the examples, of course we use the Copyblogger Media example throughout the book. We use the Content Marketing Institute example. We basically did the same thing, but we monetized it through different ways. You monetize that through the products that you sell. We monetize that through mostly our events, like Content Marketing World.

You ve got Moz, Rand Fishkin, who did the same thing. He built 100,000 email subscribers and made the pivot from the consulting business to selling products. We know the folks at Social Media Examiner have done the same type of model, where he monetizes his through mostly online products and services.

So there’s the ones I think we know about. The ones that we talk about in the book that we don’t know about, which I think are so interesting. If you look at somebody like Michelle Phan, who was a designer online, started a blog in 2005, started to build an audience, launched her books in 2010, launched her Pinterest page in 2011. She has now something like 13 million followers on Pinterest when it comes to all the designs she shares. I actually get her email newsletter, believe it or not. Now she’s got licensing, merchandising deals with Target, with Microsoft — a multi-millionaire. It’s just amazing what has happened by building an audience.

One that you may not have heard of that I think is good for the people listening to this who are trying to figure out, “Hey, I want to sell products,” is Trish Witkowski over at Fold Factory. Basically, what she’s selling is direct mail templates. Like If you want to put a mailing together, here’s some templates you could use.

So she created — and Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping, tipped me off to this one — a video show, a regular video show, called The 60-Second Super-cool Fold of the Week. Just to think that you don’t have to have a lot of audience or subscribers to do this, she built her subscribership up to 3,100. So you might be thinking, “That’s not that much. For a B2B audience, that’s a good, solid audience. She’s been able to get about a million views of her videos over that time, and she’s been able to rack up well over $500,000 in direct revenue because of the videos.

By the way, that was an existing business, so she’s trying to figure, “Okay. How do I take an existing business concept and add in what we know as the Content Inc. model to that?” And that’s worked really well for her. I ve got a lot of good ones.

I love what Ann Reardon’s done, the baking queen of Sydney, Australia. Basically, in 2012, she was up late at night. She had a baby, and she was doing night feedings. She got bored. She was a qualified dietitian at the same time, and she created a blog called How to Cook That, and she did regular videos. But her content niche, or her content tilt, was around impossible food creations.

I don’t know if you remember, did you see the video of the Instagram cake? Brian, did you see this?

Brian Clark: No. I didn’t see that.

Joe Pulizzi: You are the only one that didn’t see it.

Brian Clark: You know me. I have to work for a living.

Joe Pulizzi: Basically, the outside looks like a chocolate cake, and you cut into it, and it was a replica of the Instagram logo. She did that inside the cake. It got millions and millions of views, so she went from 100 subscribers in 2012, to now, she’s got 1.7 million or something like that subscribers. Sixteen million views. I think her monthly view level is 16 million. It’s unbelievable, and Ann has been able to transform her business. She’s got licensing deals going on, promotional deals, merchandising deals. It’s just amazing.

The other thing you don’t think about when we talk about the examples — and you’re probably the best example of this, but I do a little bit on this as well — is the number of different ways you can monetize the platform. The average is like five to six different ways that people do.

It’s like “Oh hey, I’m selling this product. Well if you have a Content Inc. model, and you create a platform and an audience that knows and loves you, you could sell lots of different stuff. That’s what we see on all the examples we cover in the book. It’s like an average of four or five or six different ways. Like at Content Marketing Institute, we monetize in like 10, 11 different ways with different products we have. I think you guys probably have what? Four or five?

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: When you look at it with the event, and the sponsorship, and the products that you sell, and the affiliate stuff. I mean, you ve got a little bit of everything going on.

Brian Clark: Yeah. We actually built the Rainmaker Platform by building each part and selling it, the classic bootstrapping strategy. Then we end up with, “Wow. We ve got a lot of stuff here.

You almost think about consolidation at some point, but as long as this thing is something that satisfies the problem or desire of the audience, they’re going to be inclined to work for us hosting. We got into that really to build the hosting component of the Rainmaker Platform, but that was the hosting that Copyblogger uses for its own site. Some people are like, “Sign me up. You know, we didn’t even push it hard, so yeah. It’s amazing.

Joe Pulizzi: It really is. The most amazing thing, just to kind of wrap up all examples and I think there’s a total of well over 50 examples in the book, and I love them, because most of them started with nothing. They started to create amazing content consistently over a platform.

But the one thing that we did, is when we did the interviews for the book and we look at each of the models, every one — and I’m not kidding you every one followed the same six steps. They did it in different time frames, but basically, the same six steps.

What’s the passion area? Define that first. What’s the content tilt? How are we going to build the base over time? How do we then harvest the audience? Then we move in to the diversification of, once the minimum viable audience is attained, we diversify into books or events or into social media channels or whatever. Then monetization.

The same thing. And that’s why I believe that if somebody reads the book, they could take this model and actually replicate it. Learn from you and I and everyone else and do this if you follow these steps. It just blew me away.

Actually, the most exciting for me is the simplicity of the model. It’s actually not complex at all. Like, if you go to building the base, it’s pick one main content type in one main content channel. Consistently distribute content over time. That’s like mind-blowing. But that’s what it is. That’s what everybody did. It just blows me away.

When Content Inc. Is Available for Purchase

Brian Clark: Yeah, I know. We’ve both been talking this for so long. I think sometimes, What’s not to get? But I will say that the way you boiled it down in Content Inc., over time, you find ways to explain things slightly differently, and you’ll see the light bulb go up.

So Content Inc. is released on September 8th. It is available for pre-order right now on Amazon. I think everyone who listens to this show needs a copy of this on their shelf. Other than my foreword, it’s a really good book. I ve got to do the false humility here.

The Inspiration behind the Content Inc. Summit

Brian Clark: Let’s talk a little bit about the Content Inc. Summit. So we ve got the big enterprise event, and companies big and small show up to Content Marketing World. But on the following day, September 11th, will be the Content Inc. Summit.

I want to talk about an example, and this is a guy who’s going to be there along with me and you, John Lee Dumas, the podcasting mad man. I mean, literally, this guy’s story amazes me. Not because of where he’s at, necessarily, although that’s impressive, but just how he attacked the world of podcasting as his content channel. Maybe you can run through a little bit of how John exemplifies some of these six steps or maybe the early ones.

Joe Pulizzi: Basically, he said, “We re going to focus on the entrepreneur, and we are going to solve entrepreneur’s problems and help them build their businesses. Specifically, we’re going to do this through this channel called podcasting, and we’re going to consistently deliver that message over time. He basically built that audience. He didn’t really have a revenue line or an idea of, How do we consistently build revenue?

I think what I love about John more than everyone else is that he does those monthly podcasts where he shares all of his financials. I dig that. Talk about some pure authenticity. It’s giving everything up.

Brian Clark: Yeah. At Moz, Rand was the first one I remember who had that kind of ultra-transparency. We try to do it to a certain degree, but it’s hard. I think we’re a little more old-school. Buffer does that really well. But John, yeah. He just lays it all out there.

Joe Pulizzi: Basically, he built an audience, and then once he built that minimum viable audience, he was able to sell.

The root for Content Inc., for the summit, it s the same thing, right? I had the last book — Epic Content Marketing — great for enterprise marketers. I wanted to have something for that small business, that entrepreneur, to say, “Hey. Here. This is for you. Just do this. Like they would say, “Hey, Joe, can I hire you for consulting? I’m like, “No. Save your money. Just read this, and then do it, and you’ll be fine.

And then we re going after the same thing at Content Marketing World. I mean, we ve got 11 concurrent sessions at Content Marketing World, mostly really shaped for — there are some SMB sessions, but most of them are shaped for the big boys. So we’re like, Okay. Well, I want that same thing for small businesses. Hey. This is for you.

You’re going to be talking. I’m talking. We ve got Matthew Patrick coming in, who — I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work on Game Theorists. He s got 4.8 million subscribers and has built an amazing business. He’s like YouTube’s number-one go-to guy or go-to to figure out analytics for YouTube. He’s going to be on there.

John Lee Dumas is going to be there. Andrew Davis, of course, is going to be kicking it off. It’s going to be fantastic, and I love it. You can be a small business startup entrepreneur in that room, and you will get nothing but six hours of value. You will come out of there inspired, but you will have enough that you will be able to say, “Look, I can do this for my business,” or “I can add this on to my existing business.

That was the hope. We’ll see. I think we’re going to get a really good crowd for it, but again, it’s a different audience that we’ve targeted. It’s on the back of Content Marketing World on Friday, 9 to 3.

Brian Clark: Yes. I’m attending both, but tell us how this works. If you want to go to the Content Inc. Summit alone, is that possible?

Joe Pulizzi: Yes. If you want to go to the Content Inc. Summit alone, actually, the easiest way to do it is just to go to the book site. Go to Content-Inc.com, and that’ll take you to the book site, and there’s a link right at the top for Content Inc. Summit. Just click there, and you’ll just go to the Summit site instead of having to go to Content Marketing World and go through all the other hoops. You don t have to do that. Just go to Content-Inc.com, and you’ll go directly to that page, and it’s going to be a blast.

Right now, of course, that’s where my passion is at, because I love to see these smaller businesses or entrepreneurs actually feel like they have a chance, and you and I both saying the same thing. You actually have a better chance in some cases that the one with all the budget money, because it’s so much more difficult in a large enterprise to do this.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Okay, we’re going to link that up in the show notes as well for easy access. Joe, my friend, you know, every year, I give you a hard time about Cleveland, which you love. You love your city.

Joe Pulizzi: I do.

Brian Clark: I’m looking forward to being there, and I’m really excited. I don’t know, after all these years, I still get fired up, and that’s a good sign, because if I don’t, I need to retire.

Joe Pulizzi: Hey, man, you’ve been along for this ride. It’s hard to believe. Remember the first year, we were just hoping for a couple hundred, and I said, “Brian, would you please speak? I need your help,” and we had 600 show up that year. Now we’re going to be over 3,000 this year.

Brian Clark: I know. That’s amazing.

Joe Pulizzi: It’s hard to believe.

Brian Clark: You put on amazing show. Every year I m just like, This is huge, and yet — no names on this side either — I’ve been to a few shows where they were just horrible. I mean, everything was wrong. The speakers are not treated well. But you really put on a class show. It’s amazing. I know you work hard to do it, but you make it look effortless while wearing orange, I should mention.

Joe Pulizzi: You know what, if you wore a little bit more orange, I think the world would be a better place as well.

Brian Clark: I’m a Broncos fan now. Can I wear just a Broncos jersey, or is that going to offend your Browns sensibility?

Joe Pulizzi: You know what, you’re fine in the convention center, but if you wear it around downtown Cleveland, you may be lost.

Brian Clark: I don’t mess around in downtown Cleveland. I just keep eyes forward.

Joe Pulizzi: We still remember the drive and the fumble.

Brian Clark: I know. You never get over that stuff.

Joe Pulizzi: Oh no. We can’t get over it because we haven’t won a championship in over 50 years.

Brian Clark: If LeBron could bring it home, I think it might ease some pain, but …

Joe Pulizzi: It will ease all the pain. It’ll all be forgotten. So hopefully soon, because people are dying here.

Brian Clark: I was going for the Cavs. God, I just want you guys to win something. Anything.

Joe Pulizzi: It’ll happen. It s certainly not going to be the Browns this year. But it could be the Cavs.

Brian Clark: All right, my friend, thank you again. I will see you shortly. Everyone out there, seriously, for the price of the book, I think you’re going to be over-delivered with inspiration but also methodology, and I think that’s important. So Content Inc. Check it out. Joe, take care.

Joe Pulizzi: See you soon, bro. Thanks for all your support.

The Transcript

How the Integration of Content and Commerce Creates a Winning Difference

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by The Showrunner Podcasting Course, your step-by-step guide to developing, launching, and running a remarkable show. Registration for the course is open August 3rd through the 14th, 2015. Go to ShowrunnerCourse.com to learn more. That’s ShowrunnerCourse.com.

Brian Clark: Hey, Rainmakers. Welcome to another episode of the show designed for all you digital entrepreneurs out there. I’m Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media.

Today, we’ve got another very special guest, and hopefully this turns out to be the perfect follow-up episode to last week’s show. Let me briefly introduce him before we get into what that was all about. Robert Rose, many of you may know him. He is one of the other big personas over at Content Marketing Institute along with the ineffable Joe Pulizzi. Ineffable — you think he’d like that one, Robert?

Robert Rose: I think it depends on how you spell ineffable.

Brian Clark: I didn’t even catch that. Very nice. Very quick. You Californians — you ve got to look out for them.

Anyway, he’s the chief strategy officer over at the Content Marketing Institute. He’s also the co-host on This Old Marketing Podcast with Joe. He’s a senior contributing consultant for Digital Clarity Group. In particular, we’re going to talk about Robert’s second book today, which is called Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing. We may touch a little bit on Joe Pulizzi’s upcoming book, Content Inc.

Of course we will all be in Cleveland, wonderful Cleveland, in September for the big show, Content Marketing World, the biggest show. Robert, thank you so much for joining me.

Robert Rose: Thank you, Brian. This is super fun. I’m super-happy to be here.

Brian Clark: A little behind the scenes here — I hit Robert up on a Friday afternoon. This show will be out on a Thursday, and we record on Monday, so lots of warning, right? You just sit around basically waiting for podcast interview requests?

Robert Rose: When Brian Clark calls, you jump. That’s the rule that all marketers should have.

Brian Clark: Thanks. Check. Mail.

Robert Rose: You got it.

The Audience-First Model That s Becoming Increasingly Popular among Startups and Why It Works

Brian Clark: It occurred to me on Friday, as I was revisiting last week’s show and having read Robert’s newest book, Experiences, that he was the perfect next guest. It was a long shot, actually, despite what he says, that I was able to get him, and I appreciate him being here on short notice.

Quickly, for those of you who may not have caught the last episode , and also for Robert’s edification, last week we talked about this maybe new buzzword or phrase, native commerce. Robert, are you familiar with Thrillist?

Robert Rose: I am. Sure. Yeah.

Brian Clark: It’s a great story. They obviously built the audience first, had an advertising business model, and discovered that one particular advertiser, JackThreads, a clothing line for hipsters — which is a good match for Thrillist, let’s face it — they were advertising over and over and over again. Anyone with any kind of marketing background or advertising background, especially in direct marketing, if you see the same junk mail over and over again, pay attention. It’s working, because someone is spending money to keep showing up.

Thrillist basically said, Let’s look into this closer. They do the due diligence and see the revenue that’s being generated from the channel. They acquire JackThreads, and in five years, they go from $8 million in annual revenue to $100 million and become contact marketers, right? Much more lucrative model. I think that’s one of the best just dollar-to-dollar ads-versus-commerce type spends ever.

Last week’s guest was Ryan Deiss, and he explained that to me. I hadn’t actually heard that story. I said, “Okay, it’s content marketing.” He said, “No, it’s something more, because there’s such an integration between product and media in the content.” I’m sitting over here going, That’s content marketing. This is what I want to kick over to you, to begin with. I realize that he’s seeing a disconnect, because content marketing done well, that s what I think of. That’s how our business was built. You build the audience first.

That’s why I mentioned Joe’s new book, Content Inc., coming out in September. He’s basically talking about this model that is becoming more and more the norm at the startup level, which is, you start with the audience. You figure out what they want to buy, or in Thrillist’s case, you acquire what they are buying, and then you’ve got a successful business, as opposed to the old product-first model, where you build it and then you pray that someone wants to buy it.

The disconnect that I’m seeing is that the way we think about integrated product/content marketing is the way it should be done, and I think Ryan was saying, But that’s not how it’s being done. You’re doing content marketing if you write some articles for your website or you start a podcast. That doesn’t mean it’s effective content marketing. He went on and on to talk about creating experiences, like why Bass Pro Shop will never get killed by Walmart or Amazon, as the case may be.

That was when I said, “I’m taking for granted that you’re creating the right form of experience,” because let’s face it, it’s all an experience. It’s just not a good one, very often. So I’m going to kick it over to you right there.

Robert Rose: Sure. What a great team-up point. Ultimately, what we’re talking about here is really a chicken-and-egg sort of idea, right? If you’re looking at this as a startup company or as a company that has just introduced a product into the market, building that audience first is an easy perspective to have. Maybe not one that can get executed well and maybe one that’s extraordinarily difficult, depending on your product or the value you’re trying to create.

But it’s different than if you’re a business that’s been in business for 25 years or 10 years or five years, and you’ve already got a product out into the market and you’re looking to, How do we evolve our marketing to actually address this exact issue?

You’ve got a really interesting situation with JackThreads getting acquired there. We’re starting to see that more and more, where instead of trying to actually organically build something from the ground up — because there’s nothing saying that Thrillist couldn’t have said, “You know what? We could build our own JackThreads and take years to do that and duplicate the success and editorial strategy that they’ve got and build our own audience so that we don’t have to advertise there any longer, or quite frankly, we could just acquire them.”

Layering Products, Content, and Experience as a Differentiation Strategy

Robert Rose: We’re starting to see that more and more, especially from e-commerce companies, especially from those companies that have products out there that are sort of being threatened by the Amazons or big boxes of the world and where they can actually create a more compelling, integrated experience in its totality.

That doesn’t mean just an editorial experience. That could mean a physical experience. It could mean events. It could mean all manner of things that cross over the boundaries of physical and digital, but to create something that’s differentiated, that, quite frankly, an Amazon or somebody that’s competing with us and threatening with us can’t duplicate.

That’s really the value of acquiring something like JackThreads. The editorial is great. The experience itself is great. And we can layer over this idea of an e-commerce layer to it. They are not the only ones out there. This just happened with a publishing company in Australia that actually did the exact opposite. They were a publishing company that then acquired a product company to do the exact polar opposite of this, where they’re now layering products into their editorial strategy to differentiate themselves as a publisher.

We’re starting to see this real merger — Joe has talked about this for a long time — this real integration of product and media to become different types of content-driven experiences. Of course, this is what we talk about a lot in the book.

Brian Clark: You just nailed it right there: integration. Yeah, it’s an integrated process. It was a light-bulb moment for me in the sense that maybe people aren’t getting the integration, and I’m taking it for granted, the old curse of knowledge thing.

Let’s unpack this a little. If I hear what you’re saying, that it’s a different process, I agree when you’re starting as an existing company or maybe even an existing line of business, something that you know people want, and the only thing you’re being innovative about is your marketing and creating a better experience than Joe Blow, okay? To me — and of course I’m a big advocate of what we’ve done since 2006 and how we built our company — the easiest companies I’ve started were legal services and real estate brokerage services. I knew people wanted them. All I had to do was create a better experience.

If you’ve ever seen, for example, most broker or realtor marketing with the Glamour Shot on the bus-stop bench, I was like, This is shooting fish in a barrel. This was 2002, and I had, over the previous three years, figured out a lot of stuff. But to me, that wasn’t hard at all. Yet I think I hear you saying that a lot of enterprise-level companies or even mid-level or small businesses, they’re doing business. They just need to catch up to the 21st century, and they’re struggling. I found that easier than creating something new, feeding off an audience.

Why Smaller Companies Have an Advantage over Larger Companies in Creating Innovative Experiences

Robert Rose: It’s exactly right. You just nailed it. Joe and I have talked about this, where this is truly the advantage that smaller companies these days have over larger enterprises. The larger enterprises, I can tell you from my own experience that they are having a real problem unwinding the classic purpose of marketing, which of course has been to describe the value, in ever-cleverer ways, of the product or service we put into the marketplace.

They do the bus ad. They do — whatever industry they’re in — their version of the bus ad or the Sunday circular or the TV advertisement or the banner ad or the email or whatever collateral-driven approach they have. That is their purpose, and unwinding that to get to what you’re really talking about, which is, How do I create something that is beyond the product or service I’m putting into the marketplace but that adds value to the experience for the consumer?

It’s one of those things where — and you understand this better than most, honestly — How can I add value to that consumer’s life? Maybe they buy from me, and maybe they don’t. Maybe they purchase something from me down the road. Maybe they purchase something from me today. Ultimately, my goal is that I can differentiate against everybody else that’s out there with the bus ad or the circular or whatever they’re putting out there by creating a more valuable experience.

Content is a great way to do that. There are certainly others. Uber has disrupted an entire industry by simply having a different interface and a better experience into taking a car from Point A to Point B. Airbnb has created a completely disruptive experience by making it a better experience to actually go stay in a remote location.

You start to really cross a boundary, especially in businesses that have those traditional approaches. Is that marketing, or is that product development?

That’s where the big companies really struggle with this, because quite frankly, it hasn’t been the remit of marketing to do this, historically. But for startup companies, it’s everything. There is no separation between those. There are no siloes that have been built up over time, so it seems completely natural to say, “What we’re going to do is we’re going to create a better content-driven experience that differentiates us in the marketplace,” and that is your shooting fish in a barrel, because quite frankly, none of the competitors are doing it.

The Big Difference between Traditional Marketing and Content Marketing

Brian Clark: I’ve been think a lot, even before your book came out, but you said the struggle between traditional marketing and what you’re supposed to be doing now. To me, traditional marketing was a promise of an experience, and content marketing begins the experience.

Robert Rose: That s exactly it.

Brian Clark: That’s the simplest way I can put it. On the last episode, we had this real-world analogy where someone comes into a place. They’re having an experience. And then they exit through the gift shop. I love that, because think about how well certain companies — not the traditional company, but certain companies, everything from theme parks to the Bass Pro Shop or whatever the case may be — they’ve designed that entire space in this experiential mode.

I remember there was a book. Do you remember this book? Fifteen years ago I think, The Experience Economy? People were talking about this forever. I think this was very much pre-content marketing. To me, again, as a scrappy entrepreneur type as opposed to the enterprise budget, content is the best differentiator, what marketing and advertising were supposed to do. Back in the good old days where you actually could have a USP: My toothpaste has … Wait, what did Ultra Fresh have? Remember that?

Robert Rose: The stripe, right?

Brian Clark: The stripe, yeah. It’s meaningless, but it was a differentiator. I think that content is the differentiator now, because everyone can replicate everything. Go to China. You can get it done. Look at someone’s service model. You can copy that. But content and the voices, that’s what’s unique. That’s all we have left. But it matters, because it does a better job at traditional marketing.

Robert Rose: That’s exactly right. It is, in fact, the only differentiator that’s left. The experience that we can create, the content that we can create that surrounds the product or service, is really the only differentiator because, quite frankly, just as you said, the product, especially in today’s technology-driven world, can be replicated. If it can’t be replicated by your neighbor, it can certainly be replicated in another country, maybe in a digital disruptive way.

Those relying on your product differentiation to scale and to provide for continuous competitive advantage is just a flawed strategy, and there are companies that are washing up against the shore of that every single day, that have said, We can’t be disrupted because we have first-mover advantage or We have a better product.

A better product does not necessarily mean success, and today, especially, with the sort of world flattening and all that kind of stuff, the idea of creating a content-driven experience … I use that word a lot, because certainly, just as you were saying, the experience economy has been out for 15 or 20 years.

Customer experience management, or CEM as an acronym, has been around just as long, 30 years in fact. Customer experience management in its totality takes everything into account. If I’m selling shirts, the difference between wool or cotton or whether I’m going to have a hang-tag off the collar or the hang tag is going off the sleeve, those are all part of the customer experience as a practice and a product development mode.

Even in the book, Carla and I draw a boundary around this. We say, We’re not here to tell you how to develop your product. What we’re here to talk about is how do we, marketers, create an additional valuable experience — content-driven or otherwise — around the product, separate and distinct from the product, that differentiates your approach to solving that consumer’s need or want? That’s the real difference here, is that what you’re doing, what people buy these days, is that approach.

Every single step along the way — from the first time they meet your brand till the time that they’re getting nurtured as a lead to the time they become a customer to the time they become loyal and evangelistic, and quite frankly, will share our story across all the platforms that we’ll never have the capacity to be on — that’s the brass ring here. If we can create great experiences at each one of those layers, then we win and ultimately have a shot at getting to that evangelistic mode where the customer is sharing how wonderful we are at solving their problem.

INBOUND this year, HubSpot, they’re going to have 10,000 people show up to that thing. They’ve created an experience with the idea of INBOUND that has differentiated them across so many different ideas.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s excellent. You and I were chatting briefly before we got on the recording about Sally Hogshead, who is fantastic.

Robert Rose: Fantastic.

Brian Clark: Different is better than better.

Robert Rose: I love that. I’m so annoyed that she came up with that line. It’s such a great line, and it’s so true, and it’s so wonderful. Yes, different is better than better. There’s a wonderful book, by the way, called Different by Youngme Moon, who is a professor at the Harvard Business School.

Brian Clark: I have that book. Yeah. It’s good.

Robert Rose: It’s just a delightful book.

Why It s Important to Think Like a Media Producer to Create Value

Brian Clark: Your book, start with your book, obviously. I think once you get it, from the things you explore and experiences, you go back and you look at positioning in a whole new way. I’ve been trying to teach people positioning for a decade, because it’s so important. I think the battle is won or lost right there, and with a content brand as opposed to product or service, again, to me, it seems easier.

You have to think like a media producer. Friends was different in its way and became a huge hit. But when you start thinking about, How can I make a different radio show or TV show or magazine? it’s almost like it makes more sense, because we’re all immersed in the popular culture, and therefore, all these examples, once you realize that they’re actually relevant to you, might help. I don’t know. What do you think about that?

Robert Rose: I think that’s exactly right. Even a slightly higher look at that is, What value can we add to that consumer’s life that nobody else can? Of course it should align.

I’ll give you a concrete example of this. I worked with a small financial services company, and this is not a big sort of Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch type of company. They’re eight people. They are consultants, but basically their job is the same as a Goldman Sachs or a Merrill Lynch. They teach people how to buy low and sell high. That is their remit, that they are offering their service to their customers as consultants and managers of a fund.

How do you differentiate against all of the huge, huge ocean of content and facts and everything that’s out there that’s commoditized in that business? What they recognized was, their mission — their why, if you want to go the Simon Sinek way — was not to help their customers be better investors. They understood that it was bigger than that. What they were really trying to do was help their customers be better people, and if they could help their customers be better people, it opened up a whole new world of opportunity for them to create value for those customers. It didn’t mean that they stopped doing the core thing that made them money. That’s what they’re really good at.

What they could do is wrap around all of these things. They started to do things like something as simple as a book club. They recognized that their customers didn’t have time to really understand what they should be reading, not from a thought-leadership perspective, but just the classics and Shakespeare and comedy and what they should be reading. They started this book club service that they offered out. It’s the number-three reason that their clients renew every year now.

Then they parlayed that and created this whole physical event now where they have a customer event, not to exhibit how thought-leadershipy they are and why they’re such smart investors, but they invite poets and musicians and people who are doing great work in South America and all this kind of stuff and letting these people interact with them. Of course the conversations turn to things like economies, and What’s going to be the future of technology? and all this kind of stuff, but it’s wrapped like a TED conference, to help you be a better person. That’s the number-two reason that their customers now renew every single year.

The number one, of course, is the wonderful information they get. Now, those are the top three reasons that their clients are renewing every single year. That’s something that Goldman Sachs just is not going to duplicate. Their competitors are not going to duplicate that. It’s just something totally innately valuable to their customers that they can deliver that nobody else can.

Brian Clark: I love it. I love it. Target aspirations: who do they want to be? What’s the life they want to lead?

Robert Rose: What’s the emotional connection we can have? Why do they care about us, right?

Brian Clark: It’s the old copywriting thing at its essence: benefits, not features. Yet we all tend to fall back into what you want is a mutual fund. No, I don’t want a mutual fund. What I want is enough money to hang out with my grandchildren and watch them grow up.

Robert Rose: It’s the classic Ted Levitt. People aren’t buying a nail or a hammer. They’re buying a hole in the wall. That’s what you’re really trying to deliver value against.

Brian Clark: Think about how J. Peterman sells a sweater. It’s not the sweater. It’s the lifestyle that surrounds the sweater. My compatriot here, Robert Bruce, once bought this sweater, and he had to share with me the paragraph that got him to buy it, because it was him. They nailed Robert. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and he was standing on a craggy cliff overlooking the frigid water. He’s like, I had to buy it, man. It was me.

Robert Rose: Reading his copy of Wuthering Heights.

Brian Clark: Exactly. Exactly. It’s always been that to some degree. I love the fact that you guys call your podcast This Old Marketing Show, because another theme that we’ve had for the last 10 years is, don’t listen to everyone saying the sky is falling. Fundamentally, human beings are still the same. The context has changed radically, and their sophistication and entitlement has changed radically, and you have to go with them, right?

Robert Rose: I love that line.

Robert s 4-Step Process for Defining a Content Mission

Brian Clark: I’m going to put you on the spot here. If we accept that we’re all creating experience of some kind, just most of them aren’t that good, and they’re not that tied to our actual business objectives when dealing with actual human beings, give us the Robert Rose three steps, five steps — give me a listicle.

Where do you begin when you need to take that step back and say, What’s the right desirable, valuable experience that I have to begin to initiate here?

Robert Rose: I’ll put it this way. It’s in my workshop. It’s a four-step process, actually, and it gets to a content mission or a differentiation, if you will.

First of all is understanding, what is it we want to do? What is our goal? I live in Los Angeles. This isn’t show business. This is not the show Friends. This is content marketing. This is trying to drive a business goal. What are we trying to do?

In many cases, I find that businesses don’t really understand. Are we trying to become more aware? Are we trying to put more butts in the seat? Are we trying to close more, better leads? High-quality leads? Are we trying to create more loyalty? What is the problem we’re solving? What is our goal?

Secondly, who is the person that can help us satisfy that goal? That might be a customer, but quite frankly, it might be an influencer. It might be an influencer to that purchase decision, not the actual buyer of the product or service itself. You said it well: who are they as people? Not as a target demographic or a segment, but who are they as people? What are their needs, their wants? What do they long for in the day? What does their day look like? Who are they as people?

Then third, what unique value proposition, what unique value, can we deliver to them separate and distinct from our product or service? What do they need? What value can we deliver to them at that stage that would satisfy that original goal that we have? In other words, what value can we deliver to them?

In the case of the financial services company, we can deliver them the value of a highly curated, educational stream of books that they should be reading. What value can we deliver to them? Inherent in that, it has nothing to do whether it’s a website or a social media track or a blog or a printed magazine or whatever. It’s what value? What is the story? What value can we deliver to them?

Finally, four, what makes that different than anything else they can get? If you start to look at that, you go, Wow, that really looks like a product-development methodology if we really start to look at that.

I would really encourage people to look at the product development methodologies that are out there, because that, to me, is what marketing is starting to more resemble. It s the agile, lean startup idea of a media product that we can create that differentiates us in the marketplace and ultimately drives to a profitable business action: either selling more of our stuff, differentiating us in the market for awareness purposes, creating more loyalty to our product or service, or creating an evangelistic state where they’re out there sharing their story with their friends and family.

It all starts with those four things, which is really understanding what it is we’re going to develop, what unique value we’re going to develop for those consumers.

Brian Clark: Excellent. Excellent. This is a true story. It still amazes me to this day. I was doing Copyblogger for about a year and a half before I hooked up with Tony Clark — no relation — who is now our COO, but he was my first business partner. We created the first Copyblogger product together.

We started a conversation by him coming to me and going, “You’re doing what I would call agile or lean content development.” I’m like, What is this guy talking about? He’s a software developer, so he was well steeped in agile and lean. This is before The Lean Startup came out. I was doing it intuitively because I didn’t know what the audience wanted. It s a real-time environment, so I had to depend on them to tell what they liked and what they didn’t, not by asking, but by watching.

Of course, our product development is exactly the same process. It’s weird that you brought that up, because I don’t think I’ve heard you say that before. It’s very close to the same process, because you can start with your best guess, but you’re going to find out what reality is pretty quickly. If you choose to ignore it, you do so at your own peril.

Why Assets Must Be Tied Together by a Strong Editorial Strategy

Robert Rose: That’s a great point, even in its simplest sense. If we take that all the way down to its simplest expression, because when I talk about this … The second half of the book is really the methodology that we prescribe that looks at that. I say, Let’s pretend you’re a business-to-business small company, and your idea of content marketing is to build a resource. We’re going to build a resource center. This stuff is going to be gated with a landing page. Great. I get it.

The way that that resource center typically gets built, from a marketing lens, from a campaign-oriented lens, is we say, We’re going to run a campaign, and we’re going to create an asset to support that. We’re going to run another campaign, and we’re going to create an asset to support that, and on and so forth. Rinse and repeat all throughout the year.

What ends up happening, and I can tell you that this is what I mostly fix when I talk with companies these days, is that they look back over their 12 months or 24 months of content production, and some of the assets that they created were great. Some of them were, Ah, they’re fine. Some of them were not great. Some of them were created in too rushed a manner. The overwhelming thing is, none of them are connected. It’s just 24 different kinds of assets.

There’s no connection. There’s no reason that the twenty-third makes the eighteenth more valuable or that the first made the eighteenth more valuable or anything like that. Instead, I say, If that’s your goal, to create this resource center, what does that resource center represent? What unique value to the consumer does that resource center offer? Is it a university? Is it an academy? Is it a path of training? If everybody read everything in your resource center, would they be a more valuable profession? Would they be a better person? What valuable thing would that resource center represent?

Then, if you start working backwards — very much like in an agile, lean startup What are all the component pieces that that would need to encompass? Now you’ve got yourself a pretty interesting editorial strategy.

I guarantee you, if you create those assets in that connection, and if they’re really focused on delivering value to that consumer, they will inherently be wonderful direct marketing pieces. They will inherently be very valuable and support all the lead-generation and awareness-building and all that stuff you want to do as part of a campaign-oriented approach, but you’ll be building toward this wonderful, valuable thing, so when you look back in 24 months, you’ll go, We’ve built this amazing thing here that’s really valuable in and of itself. That’s the real magic.

Brian Clark: Okay, two things here. If that’s not the best reason to go pick up Experiences … I think a lot of people. They’re getting it conceptually, but it’s more of, Okay, now what? Like you said, the second half of the book does a bit of a deep dive on that.

Robert Rose: Full caveat there: my books tend to be focused more on larger companies.

Brian Clark: I was going to say, it’s written for the enterprise reader. I picked up on that right away, but Robert and his co-writer are excellent writers, so you’re not going to get lost by that. At least I don’t think so.

Robert Rose: I hope not. I hope not. But I do want to throw in that caveat because it’s been mentioned to me a couple of times that it feels very big business.

Brian Clark: When I started reading it, I was like, Man, I know all the money that’s at the enterprise level. I know why everyone goes upstream. My passion is to work with smaller businesses, so for me reading, I’m like, God, I’m glad I don’t have Robert’s job. He’s really good at it, though, but I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to have to convince corporate people to do anything, because it’s a whole different world, right?

Robert Rose: It is a different world, but it’s a fun one. I enjoy it, I have to say. It’s a fun one for me. Trying to untangle that ball of twine is really an interesting challenge for sure.

Brian Clark: That’s putting it generously.

Robert Rose: Yes.

Brian Clark: The second thing, I’ll let the audience decide, but I think my hypothesis that you were the perfect follow-up guest is correct. We’ll have to wait and see. So again, thanks for the short-notice appearance. I appreciate it. If Pulizzi’s not treating you well, you can always come over here, okay?

Robert Rose: That’s a very kind offer. Thanks for that. I’m going to go use that for leverage right now.

Brian Clark: I’m going to get some sort of threatening email from Joe later. If he wants to go to war, tell him he can be Biggie, but I’m Tupac, all right?

Robert Rose: There you go. I like it. I like that very much. That’s awesome. We’ll showdown in Vegas.

Brian Clark: That’s right. All right, everyone. Thanks again for joining us. I hope this was informative. I learned a few things. I learned some different frames around which to think about the right experience. Again, I recommend the book Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing. Thanks, Robert. Enjoy the rest of the week, and I will see you in Cleveland shortly.

The Transcript

Native Commerce: Media That Makes Real Money

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by The Showrunner Podcasting Course, your step-by-step guide to developing, launching and running a remarkable show. Registration for the course is open August 3rd through the 14th 2015. Go to ShowrunnerCourse.com to learn more.

Brian Clark: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Rainmaker. I am your host, Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media.

Today’s special co-host is kind of a character, Mr. Ryan Deiss, DigitalMarketer.com. Smart guy, he does a lot of very smart, lucrative things. Ryan, why don’t you tell us a little bit about this collection of businesses built on media websites that fuels the Deiss empire, if you will?

Ryan Deiss: I’m just excited that I’m a co-host. I didn’t realize. Are we going to interview somebody else, too?

Brian Clark: No, no.

Ryan Deiss: Do I have to be prepared and stuff?

Brian Clark: No. I’m going to make you do all the work. If I said, “Here’s our host, Ryan Deiss, who’s doing all the work, and I’m just kind of here,” that’s not going to go very well.

Ryan Deiss: I thought I was the very special guest or the talent.

Brian Clark: We can edit this to be very special guest.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, but let’s edit it in somebody else’s voice that way it’s not going to seem as dumb.

Brian Clark: You’re the kind of guy who would want your name not in alphabetical order. It would have to be and Ryan Deiss?

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, absolutely.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Ryan Deiss: Let’s make sure we get that in post, please.

Brian Clark: Got you. Got you. As far as you know, we’re going to take care of that.

Ryan Deiss: Exactly. By the time you find out about it, it will be too late.

No, really, I’ve been listening to this podcast since the very first one, so — and I say this through gritted teeth because I never like to compliment a friend, certainly not with them around — this is easily in the top three of my favorite podcasts, so thank you for having me.

Why Advertising Alone Won t Support Media

Ryan Deiss: No, to answer the question about, as you’ve referred to it, the Deiss empire, which is very gracious, I have a lot of people on the team and partners, stuff like that, that have as much and in many cases more of a role to play in the success of the empire. We’re really fortunate that we’re in a lot of different markets.

You and I have the same perspective to this, this whole media first attitude, right? Like, Let’s go out there and build media properties and gather the crowd and aggregate the attention and do that first. That’s the way that my business has always been, and now we’re in I really don’t know how many different markets. But there’s obviously Digital Marketer, which I think I’m best-known for. Some of the more lucrative things that we’re in, we own MakeupTutorials.com, SurvivalLife.com, DIYReady.com, and PioneerSettler.com.

So we re in all these different, really cool markets where we get to play and dabble in a lot of different areas and then share and report on all the stuff at Digital Marketer. It’s a lot of fun. It keeps it interesting.

I don’t know, are you like me? I think most entrepreneurs are like this. If you’re forced to do the same thing every day, you will break it just so you can fix it. Right?

Brian Clark: Yes, yes, which is why I’ve started distracting myself with new projects so that I don’t break the thing that actually pays the bills.

Ryan Deiss: Bingo. There. And that’s how the empire happens. There you go.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s cool. Yes, I remember when we finally met, or maybe it was the second time we saw each other in Austin. But it was after we started this podcast, and you were like, “I’m completely down with your media not marketing approach.” That’s where we really started geeking out about things.

Now, it doesn’t take a genius in this day and age to realize that traditional media models are broken. I’ve also heard you say that e-commerce models are in trouble. What do you mean by that?

How to Deal with the Threat of the Walmarts of the Internet

Ryan Deiss: I mean, everybody is screwed, right? With the e-commerce companies that are out there, they are getting commoditized left and right by — I don’t know if you’ve heard of this little company called Amazon. They are going out there, and now most people, when they want to buy something, they just go to Amazon. I mean, Amazon has really become the search engine, so if you’re out there trying to launch your e-commerce site and we used to do this.

My business partner, he had a number of sites, the little e-commerce sites that sold dry-erase boards and different things, because people used to go to Google if they wanted to find something to buy. Now, they realize, “If I want to buy something, I’ll just go straight to Amazon.” Right? Their members have Prime.

The small e-commerce sites really can’t compete, and now you’ve got Alibaba coming over to the top on Amazon. And they are going to further commoditize it, because now Alibaba is going to allow the consumer to go directly to the manufacturer. Another piece of that supply chain is getting removed, which is great if you’re a consumer. It’s not so great if you’re an e-commerce player, because how do you get found anymore these days?

E-commerce sites are getting commoditized by the Walmarts of the Internet just the same way that local mom-and-pop shops on Main Street got commoditized and eventually pushed out of business by Walmart. At the same time, you’ve got these four media companies that can’t make any money either.

Brian Clark: Yeah, here’s a guilty admission on my part. I don’t even think it’s about getting found with the Amazon thing in that I forget what it was. A guy put out a great article about a certain supplement and gave me the information that I needed, and he’s got the little shop attached to his site so you can order supplements from him. Of course, I then copied the exact bottle and everything into Amazon so I could one-click it. They’ve got my credit card information, and they’ve got my delivery information. It’s pure laziness more than anything, because I actually did find it through this poor guy. He was doing everything right. My number-one rule is never sell anything that Amazon sells.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, I think that’s a big part of it. I mean there are ways to get around it. There are ways to win even if you’re selling something that Amazon is, but you’ve got to completely change the model. I know for us, we spent a couple of years trying to figure out, How can we beat Amazon? How can we win? How do we make this happen? How do you beat, Walmart? Right? The answer is you can’t.

Brian Clark: That’s what I thought the answer was.

Ryan Deiss: You can’t. Right, that’s exactly the truth. You can’t, but here’s the other reality: you can’t beat them at their own game. But the other thing is, you really don’t want to. You don’t really even want to compete with them at what they are doing. You don’t want to be Walmart. Let me ask you: have you ever shopped at a Walmart?

Brian Clark: I try not to, but sometimes …

Ryan Deiss: Sometimes you have to, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Ryan Deiss: You try not to, but sometimes you have to. That’s the general response that I hear from people, like, “Yeah, I go there because they have the best price.” I don’t think the web needs more Walmarts, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Ryan Deiss: Another question, have you ever been to a Bass Pro Shop? Do they have those in your area?

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. It’s just a big outdoorsperson, outdoorsman. Is that gender neutral? No it’s not, but you know what I m saying. You go in there, and it’s just like sports and fishing and boats and guns …

Ryan Deiss: With man, so no. Outdoorspeople.

If you’re outside of the States or if you’re in an area where they don’t have one of these Bass Pro Shops or Outdoor Worlds, let me describe it to you. I mean, you walk in, and it is about the size of a Walmart, maybe even bigger. But it’s just outdoor stuff. They literally — some of them — have a pond in the middle. You’re going around, and you’re picking up a fishing rod, and you’re saying, “I wonder if this is a good fishing rod.” The dude says, “Why don’t you just go try it right now? We’ve got a stocked pond in the middle of our freaking store.”

You have people fishing in the store. I went to one to see What is this whole thing about? I don’t like camping. I like hotels, room service, and stuff like that. I went because I wanted to see. This is a retail model that is working. This is a retail model that’s actually working, that is winning. What are they doing so well? I’m walking around and there’s people that showed up at this place wearing camo. They are not going hunting there. They showed up wearing camo. They showed up with duck calls around their necks, right?

It’s not like they bought shoes at a shoe store, and they re wearing them out. No, no, no. They showed up with the duck call. So what Bass Pro Shop has done is they’ve created this environment. They’ve created this movement. They’ve aggregated this audience.

Then a buddy of mine, who really gets e-commerce — his name is Ezra Firestone — he said, “Yeah, in the future, if e-commerce stores want to succeed — I think this is really profound, and I think this is any online seller — you need to have your property, your site, a whole lot less like Walmart and a whole lot more like Disney World.

If you think about Disney World, you go there for the rides, and you go there for the experience and for the fun and for just the whole package — but you exit through the gift shop. That’s when it hit. That’s when this whole reality struck, and that’s when I said, “Okay, what you’ve got to do is you have to combine the two.” Media and commerce shouldn’t be these separate things.

Media should be used to create the environment, to aggregate the audience, to gather the crowd of like-minded people who are excited to be there. Then you have the opportunity to sell them your stuff. They want to do it because they love you and they love your brand.

I mean, that’s what you’ve done with this podcast. You start out with the Rainmaker podcast, and then you come out with the Rainmaker Platform. The media, the gathering of the content, that’s what came first, so that’s our whole model. Everything that we do, it’s Let’s go out there, and let’s gather the audience.

Brian Clark: You’re a man after my own heart, obviously, in that regard. But you’re using a little bit different terminology, and this is what really caught my eye. Native commerce — where did that come from?

The Story behind the Term Native Commerce

Ryan Deiss: Native commerce is the new hipster-approved phrase for this thing that you and I have been doing and just didn’t give it a cool name. That is the new thing. Don’t confuse native commerce with native advertising. Native advertising is advertising that’s designed to look like content, which really, that’s just the hipster-approved name for an advertorial.

Brian Clark: Exactly. This is the hipster name for content marketing?

Ryan Deiss: I think this is about more than content marketing, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Ryan Deiss: This is bigger. This is about creating community, right? It really is about establishing, in your world, the theme park. It’s about building your own private little Disneyland, your own private little Bass Pro Shop. Another area — do you have a Harley-Davidson dealership in your area?

Brian Clark: Yeah. Another cult brand. All right.

Ryan Deiss: They just show up. Another one would be the Apple Store. People go to the Apple Store just to hang out. I look at all these different companies, and I say, These are media companies. What they are doing is they have built media, and now they are selling them stuff. Yeah, the big phrase that’s out there right now — and you’re going to start hearing it a lot more — is this concept of native commerce.

The selling that is going on is directly aligned to the media property, which historically, those two things were kept separate. You had your editorial team, and you had your advertising team, and they didn’t talk. You had the wall up between them. Now, what’s happening is they are merging. It has to be done right, and it has to be very, very transparent, but when it’s done right, it’s powerful. Where I first heard this phrase — have you ever heard of Ben Lerer of Thrillist?

Brian Clark: Yeah. Thrillist, I actually subscribed to that in Denver for a while until I got beaten down by the frequency, but it’s really a well-done media property for local if you’re in the right demographic, which I think they are going after the 18-to-34 male. Right?

Ryan Deiss: Again, I’m using the word hipster a lot because it’s very appropriate, but it’s basically Esquire magazine for hipsters. I mean, that’s the whole thing. For the young guys, Esquire magazine skews a little bit older. They are really going for the 18 to maybe 24, but when you get up to in your 30s, they are like, “Ew, you re old, gross.”

Thrillist, which is definitely a property worth checking out, in 2009 — all right, check this out — did $8 million in revenues from ad sales, from advertising almost exclusively, which is pretty impressive. Right? They had this giant staff, this giant editorial team, all these people producing all this content, and it wasn t working. In 2010, they acquired JackThreads.com. Are you familiar with JackThreads?

Brian Clark: I remember when they did this transaction and turned effectively into, again, what we used to call a content marketing company, but I’m digging this native commerce thing, even if it is a hipster term.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, I think it’s an important distinction, right? I think a lot of people who are doing content marketing see it as a separate activity. This is something that we do. This is the marketing component. It’s not built-in and really inbred into the actual I think it’s actually a part of the product.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Ryan Deiss: You wouldn’t say that Disney is doing content marketing. No, the experience is all an aspect of their product and an aspect of what they deliver as a company. I think that’s a crucial distinction of really bringing these two together, fusing them, that makes it work. Thrillist did it. They acquired JackThreads. They made a big deal, and they said, “Hey, we now own this company.” Very transparent. They didn’t just start like, “We bought this company, and therefore, we’ve improved our margins in one of our top advertisers.”

No, they were very, very transparent about it, which, if you are a follower of Thrillist and you believed them and you really loved what they were about, you were totally cool with. They acquired JackThreads in 2010. Remember, I said in 2009, they did $8 million in revenue. In 2014, they grew to $100 million in revenue. From $8 million to $100 million in about five years, and 80 percent of that revenue was e-commerce, e-commerce sales for JackThreads.

How to Intelligently Aggregate Attention

Brian Clark: You know, it’s interesting about this, and we’ve touched on this in past conversations. The whole reason I tried to explain content and audience-building in terms of media not marketing is I saw a lot of light bulbs go off. I think what you just said is another light-bulb moment that I have taken for granted: that it’s an integrated thing.

We’ve always integrated. There is not marketing versus product development. We’ve always preached it s one seamless thing that the audience drives, and that’s exactly what Thrillist did when they made that acquisition. I think they had a pretty damn good idea what their audience was going to respond to.

Ryan Deiss: They knew because they’d already done the hard work. They had already gathered the crowd. And this is the thing. I just got back from a big podcasting conference. I know you weren’t there, but a lot of members of your team were there. I’m walking around talking to these podcasters who have a lot of downloads. They have a good following, and they are not making any money. I’m telling them, “You’ve already done the hard work. You’ve already gathered the crowd.” Companies don’t ordinarily go from $8 million to $100 million in five years. That’s big.

People were like, “I can’t believe they grew so fast.” It’s because they’d already gathered the crowd. The hard work was done. If you’re out there and you’ve got a blog property you’ve been posting to for a while or a podcast, and you have listeners and you have readers, and you’re just not making what you want to make, just know: don t stop doing what you’re doing. You’re doing the hard work. You’re doing the important work.

Brian Clark: Yeah, this is such a common story of the audience without the revenue. I think it’s a lack of integration thinking, frankly. All right.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, it’s integration thinking. But also — I heard this because I went to this conference — they were talking about Midroll. You know Midroll, the podcasts?

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan Deiss: I don’t want to dive too much into podcasts. There’s a lot of parallels between podcasting and blogging because it’s all just media. What they were saying, one of the questions was, “Where do I need to be before you’ll consider selling space on my podcast?” talking to Midroll. I think their number was something like, “We really want to see you getting at least 50,000 downloads a month.” Fifty thousand. And you just heard, in that room, everybody went, Ohhhh. Right? Because that’s the problem with advertising.

Brian Clark: It’s always been a problem.

Ryan Deiss: Advertising, it only works at critical mass, but the problem is now, even when you get critical mass, it still doesn’t work.

Brian Clark: That’s why I gave up right from the beginning in ’98 when I was building audiences — the classic case you were just talking about and not making any money. It s because the numbers you need to make money from advertising are immense, but the amount of money I had to make when I figured out that the Internet was a direct marketing medium You could have an audience of 1,000 and make a fortune if you’re selling the right thing. That was the beginning of my entire career, and I still find that it s somewhat odd that we’re still struggling with getting people to understand that at this point.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah. I think you go back to the article — I’m sure you’ve read it — but if some of the listeners haven’t, Google 1,000 True Fans.

Brian Clark: It’s a classic.

Ryan Deiss: It makes a point that if you ve got 1,000 people that really love you, congratulations. You re set. You’re maybe not popping champagne bottles for breakfast — not that you should do that anyway. I don’t know why I even went straight to that, but if it s mimosas, I guess it s appropriate. But you’re doing well. It shows the math of how 1,000 true fans can really support you if you’re not just reliant upon advertising.

Brian Clark: Yeah, okay. I’m going to put you on the spot here. Give me the Deiss three-step process for making this happen. Can you do it?

Ryan Deiss: Yeah. We’ve been looking, because it’s actually quite simple. It really is. So the first thing that you ve got to do, which, this is why I love talking to content marketers, because they get this. They get that this is step one. Content marketers and podcasters. Just anybody out there. Bloggers. This first step is to aggregate the attention. Start building the audience, but you don’t have to start building the audience to a point of critical mass.

I think people don’t realize, if you get 100 people that come and read your blog or that subscribe to your newsletter, people will look at that and be like, “That’s nothing.” If you are offered a speaking opportunity to come and speak in front of 100 people, most people would jump at that. We forget that these numbers that we’re talking about online, those are all still people. You can do well for that. Start and do that. But here’s the key: when you’re aggregating that attention, it must be market-centric.

This is why you hear a lot of people saying, “Media is in trouble.” Usually, what they mean is, when you dig into the articles, they are talking about some news site. This news site isn’t making it. I think the reason is because most news sites are not market-centric. They don’t advocate for a particular market, for a particular avatar. You look at political news sites, and typically, most of those are doing a little bit better. Why? Because they are advocating for a particular market: people who are politics junkies.

A lot of celebrity news sites, they do, because they are entertainment junkies. You’ve got to be able to — when you’re building your audience — say, “Okay, this is my person. This is who they are.” Going back to it, like for Disney. Disney can say, “This is who our market is. It s, for the most part, families.” You get people who are Disney buffs. They have additional market of the people who just love Disney, and they are just Disney nuts. But their market is families.

You look at Apple. Apple has always been about the crazy ones, the technology nerds. Part of Apple’s problem as they are growing is when it’s everyone, the nerds start to go elsewhere. Whether the watch is a big success or not I think has more to do with the product, but if Apple were to come out with a car — I know there were some mutterings that they were talking about it — would that be successful? Yeah, because if you define yourself as an Apple person, you want Apple stuff. Harley-Davidson is the same way. They are media. They advocate for a specific person, for a specific market.

That’s why I think we need to start thinking about, if you can’t say, “Okay, this is who my person is. This is who I’m advocating for. This is who I’m talking to, then I don’t think this is going to work very well for you. You need to know specifically, “Yup, this is who I got, right here.” That’s the first step. Knowing your who and starting to really advocate and to serve that particular market.

Brian Clark: It’s interesting. The hard problem of saving journalism, I think, boils down to exactly what you’re saying, because the idealism of objectivity, which we can argue about whether it was ever there or not, is what keeps news companies from becoming Fox News, which is what? Still the most lucrative news organization in the world, even though a good chunk of the world can’t stand it. They know exactly who they are talking to. Flip side, go to MSNBC, and it’s the other side of that very broad right and left dichotomy.

Ryan Deiss: Exactly. So when you’re aggregating this attention, you’re not selling information, even if what you’re giving is content. I think I’ve heard you say this before: content comes in two categories. It s information and entertainment. You must be entertainment. Okay? You must be entertainment. Now, does that mean that you need to get on there and start singing and stuff like that? No.

Brian Clark: No.

Ryan Deiss: Of course not.

Brian Clark: It’s coming up with the interesting analogy. I became notorious for using pop-culture references to try to teach people everything from copywriting to email marketing, right? Then, that became a thing, so I stopped doing it. But that was the principle at the time. Make it educational, but also bring a smile to someone’s face so that they actually make it through the article.

Ryan Deiss: Of course. Let them find someone who says, “Yeah, that’s my person.” You’re right. Fox News is a great example of that. Fox News is not information. I’m not saying this in a political sense. It’s entertainment. MSNBC, when you go and tune in — if you’re a liberal and you watch Rachel Maddow I don’t want to make this overly Americanized, because I know you ve got listeners all over the world, but this is the case for all aspects of politics. People find their person. It’s the case for business people.

You’ve got folks that really love Richard Branson, and you ve got people who really love Trump still. And you ve got all these people who have their person that they want to follow, and it’s because they find them not merely informative, but also entertaining. Offering a unique perspective, right?

That’s how you’re going to aggregate attention for your people. You’re not trying to do it for everyone. All right, there’s people I know for an absolutely fact who do not like me, but they love you, Brian. Now, maybe we can start to share them. There’s people who they think that I’m a douchebag or whatever, but they think that you’re really nice. Little do they know

Brian Clark: When I suggested that we lead with the question of whether or not you truly were a douchebag, you didn’t seem to be fond of that.

Ryan Deiss: No, the answer is yes.

Brian Clark: I’m your spin doctor.

Ryan Deiss: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.

Brian Clark: I know you’re solid.

Ryan Deiss: He’s my PR guy.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Ryan Deiss: No, but you get around. There’s people that like me, and there’s people that don’t. There’s people that like you, and there’s people that don’t. At the best, all you can be is you, and I know that sounds cliché, but it’s true.

Brian Clark: No, it’s true.

Ryan Deiss: When you’re aggregating that attention, remember that you’re an entertainer. You’re not an informer. The people in the evening reading the national news, I’m sure they get paid well. If they are on ABC or whatever, they don’t get paid anywhere near as well as entertainers at the top of their game and get paid. You’re an entertainer. You’re a story teller.

You have perspective, and you have opinion, and that s why people are going to tune in and continue tune in. That s step one, to start aggregating that attention, whether you aggregate it through a blog or through a podcast or whatever medium you re most comfortable with. And you shouldn t limit it to just one. Wherever you start, though, just remember that s what you re doing. Have that market.

Why Advertising Is Market Research More Than Monetization

Brian Clark: The next step, which is the one people struggle with, is figuring out what people want to buy, and you have a very interesting perspective on this. We both believe in building audiences, the warm relationship, the know, like, and trust, yet you advocate using advertising or cold traffic to actually figure out what people want to buy. Am I getting that right?

Ryan Deiss: Specifically advertising on your site to figure out what they want to buy. I think that you should advertise. Really, the big mistake that a lot of content marketers run into is — and I hear them brag about it. They re like, We don t allow any advertising on our site. That s fine. We don t really allow any outside advertising on Digital Marketer either. And others are saying, We don t really do any promotions or anything like that. We don t allow any third-party offerings.

It s okay. It s just that you re limited. You re limited to what you can guess the market wants to buy. While I don t believe that advertising is a great monetization strategy long-term for a media property, I do think that advertising, whether you re doing it by just opening it up and allowing advertisers to come in or whether you re advertising stuff as an affiliate, I think that advertising it s great for market research.

Brian Clark: I got you now, okay.

Ryan Deiss: This is how you figure it out. How did Thrillist know that JackThreads would be a good acquisition?

Brian Clark: Right.

Ryan Deiss: JackThreads had advertised on their site and kept renewing.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Ryan Deiss: That was always my point. If they keep buying, then clearly they re making more off of this than I m charging. Maybe I should be them. Maybe I should do that. And I love advertising for market research. I love advertising for figuring out what people want to buy over surveys, for example. I ve heard a lot of people say, Oh, survey your list and ask them, but there s two big problems with that. Number one, surveys give you the opinion of people who are willing to take surveys.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Ryan Deiss: Me? If somebody is like, Oh, take a survey, I m like, Oh, that s okay, I have

Brian Clark: Never. I don t have time.

Ryan Deiss: I have a life, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it s interesting. I just had Darren Rowse, who comes firmly from the blogging world, but he was talking about making affiliate offers. And that s something I did in the early days of Copyblogger, too. Because you re right. It s not until they actually buy. I ve never surveyed my audience one time, ever, to figure out what they buy. I do a lot of weird observational stuff, and then I see if they buy things.

Ryan Deiss: We have surveyed, and some of our biggest flops have come because we gave people what they wanted, what they thought they wanted. And the second way I said it was actually more accurate. The reality is, most people don t know what they want. The more important reality is that it s not their job to figure that out. It s yours.

Brian Clark: Right.

Ryan Deiss: That s the value that you provide. You re the expert. You re the authority. You tell them, Hey, you should want this. Even if you don t realize it right now, we ve done the research. We ve done the testing. We figured it out. You re going to like this if you buy it.

Now, a lot of people are very uncomfortable with that positioning, and they re like, Oh, no, let them tell you what they want.

I think that s one of those logical lies. That s one of those things where I get accused of being douchey, in the, You re selling people stuff and they haven t asked for it yet. I was like, I know. That s also what every great product and business has done. They ve given people something ahead of when they knew they needed it. There s always a place for filling those. There s obvious stuff. You know you should be doing this because it s working, but I would just be very leery of just putting it back on your customers and saying, You tell me what you want. It s like, Are you going to do some of the work, Mr. Website Owner? Would you do some of that?

I think people vote with their wallets. If you have a media property right now and you re not taking advertising and you re not monetizing through other ways but you ve got this just staunch approach that, No, we re ad free, you re missing your greatest market research opportunity.

If just the idea of accepting money does it, then I guess place ads for free. At least get some data from it or run it as an affiliate. Go out there. Find offers. If you re in a market worth being in, there will be someone selling something to your people. If you truly can t find anyone else out there serving the market, then you ve unfortunately chosen very poorly, or you re just not looking hard enough, because it s out there.

How to Develop Proven Products and Services

Brian Clark: This reminds me of, remember the old copywriters advice that If you see the same piece of direct mail in your mailbox month after month after month, study it, because it s working?

Ryan Deiss: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that s where copywriters would draw some of their inspiration, because they knew it was actually being paid to be mailed over and over and over again. Therefore, it s probably a control, which means there s good stuff in there. It s the same concept, but this is even more direct. Your exact audience is, for example, buying from JackThreads enough to make it worth advertising over and over and over again. Thrillist says, Why don t we acquire that company? It s simple, but it s brilliant.

Ryan Deiss: You re a student of copywriting and marketing. You ll really appreciate the story. Have you heard of Troy-Bilt?

Brian Clark: No.

Ryan Deiss: They sell rototillers and gardening things.

Brian Clark: Okay, yeah.

Ryan Deiss: They ve run short-form infomercials and have been in catalogs forever. You ve got the Troy-Bilt tiller. Here you are, and you ve got this land, and you want to plant a garden. So you buy this rototiller thing, and you go out there, and you chunk it all up. The owner, I think he s long since passed away, but the eventual owner of Troy-Bilt: do you know how he made his riches the first time around?

Brian Clark: No.

Ryan Deiss: Selling rabbits feet.

Brian Clark: Really?

Ryan Deiss: Check this out. The original offer for the rabbit s foot — it s like the scammiest thing in the world. It was basically, This is a magical rabbit s foot, if you wish I mean, you remember rabbits feet, right, when we were kids.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Ryan Deiss: You could buy them. They were real feet of rabbits. Disgusting. No one would even come close to accepting this. Back in the day, everybody was like, Yeah, sure, I m going to walk around with a rabbit s foot on my keys. This makes tons of sense, apparently.

The original rabbit s foot offer was basically just, If you wish upon this rabbit s foot, all your wildest dreams will come true right now. Understandably, the government stepped in and said, Hey, homie. Um, you can t say that. Now, he tried to get around it, being like, It s a religion, and then this and that, but it was like, No, dude. You re just lying to people. Stop.

His business, appropriately so, was done. But he was able to rent his mailing list. He found that there was this person who had this rototiller that kept renting the list over and over and over and over again. He reached out to that person and acquired the company. Reached out to the person, acquired the company, and the Troy-Bilt company — which is now a gigantic company who employs hundreds if not thousands of people, giant, giant company — was built on the back of that one offer.

Now, again, I don t suggest that you go out there and sell a bunch of scammy stuff to build an audience.

Brian Clark: No, but the principle is, though, that he determined something that was selling off an audience he already had.

All right, step three — and this is another place that other people get stuck — we ve talked in a couple of different contexts just now about acquiring companies, obviously not something that is open to everyone right out of the gate. I ve talked a lot about how I used partnerships and collaboration to get products done, and we build a few here and there.

What s your favorite approach? I know you guys create your original courses and membership sites. What do you do for your more physical-oriented companies to get those products to exist?

Ryan Deiss: If it s an individual product, we would always rather acquire if we can get it. If we find that this particular thing is selling really, really well, then we ll try to acquire it. But like you said, that could be expensive. To go to somebody and say, Hey, I want to buy your company can be tough.

I ll also say this: don t assume that you can t do it. If it s a good company, if it is a good company with good financials — solid financials that a banker would look at and say, Okay, and it has good cash flows — what we ve been able to do in the past is purchase companies with a fairly small down payment and using debt, bank debt or from a high-net-worth individual and just paying them interest on it.

Brian Clark: Right.

Ryan Deiss: We ve been able to acquire companies on the cash flow that is currently coming out of that company.

Brian Clark: Right, makes sense.

Ryan Deiss: You go, and you buy the company for a little bit down, and then the cash flow that the company is creating today is basically what pays for the company. As soon as you turn your media toward it, it s going to go up.

And there are some other things, so that works out well. Not every company is for sale. It could take a while. It could be really difficult. Joint venturing is another way to do it, and I know you ve done that a lot. You go to somebody who s got it, and you say, Hey, let s get in this thing together. I ll put my media muscle behind it, and you handle this part.

Maybe your partners or maybe you just get a preferred royalty or commission or something like that. The other thing that you do is just create it or source it. So we ll go, if we know something is selling really well, and get it sourced. We ll go to China if we need to, and we ll source something. Or if it s an information-based product, which we sell a lot of those in the crafting space.

We have a product on how to make cheese. We don t know how to make cheese. We found someone who knows how to make a cheese and do other types of crafting. We just put out a casting call: Hey, who knows how to make cheese? We found somebody that does, hired a production company. The whole thing cost us I think between $15,000 and $20,000 to put together. A lot of people would say, Oh my gosh! How could you spend that much? Because we know it would work. We had already tested it. We already knew it would convert. It was already there.

When you no longer are guessing, when you re no longer saying, Well, I guess I m going to create this product and hoped that people buy it, when that s no longer what you re doing, you can make investments like that in these different products with great confidence. The idea is just get it, and then when you have it, be transparent that it s yours. A lot of people say, Don t you have to disclose? whereas if it s advertising you don t really have to disclose. But if it s yours, you re receiving commission, and you have to disclose it?

My thing is yes, you do, and you should. If you ve done a good job aggregating the attention, gathering the crowd, and they know, like, and trust you, then they re going to be excited that you have it.

One of my favorite examples is this: we do a big event every year called Traffic and Conversion Summit. It s a bunch of small business owners talking about traffic and conversion, as the name would suggest. Last year at Traffic and Conversion Summit, we gave a booth to a company that we had started called Hong Kong Tailors, and Hong Kong Tailors makes custom suits.

I get up on stage, and I say, Hey, by the way, one of our sponsors isn t so much a sponsor. We actually own them: it s Hong Kong Tailors. If you want to go out there and get fitted for a suit, you can. By the way, if when your suit comes you ve got three arms, hey, my bad. Please don t be mad at me or anything like that. People laughed and rushed out, but they wanted to get the suit, even though what do I know about suits? Nothing. They know me. They know Digital Marketer. They like it, and they trust it, that no matter what, we were going to do right by them.

And we kept hearing that again and again and again and again. The same was true with Thrillist and JackThreads. If you love Thrillist, you d wanted to now buy from JackThreads. They had created Disney World.

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you ve done it correctly, not only should you be proud to announce that it s yours, but you should get that type of reception. And again, you re way safer. If we re still in the realm of any sort of guesswork, it s about as highly educated a guess as you can get when you re actually serving an audience of real people as opposed to some idea you had that you ran out and built and then try to figure out how to sell.

Ryan Deiss: Yup, and we ve done it in, like I said, the crafting space. We ve done it in the makeup space, all these different markets that we know nothing about, because the market tells us, This is what we want. Okay, we ll get it for you. We ll get it for you.

Brian Clark: You may be infallible, but I ve made about 100,000 mistakes over the last 17 years. If you can find that you have made a few, could you share them with us?

Mistakes and Misconceptions to Avoid

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, this one time I thought I made a mistake, but it turned out I didn t.

Brian Clark: Ba-dum-bum.

Ryan Deiss: Now, we ve screwed up a lot, tons, tons and tons and tons, in fact. Yeah, here are some of the things that we ve figured out along the way. We were really successful early on when we were doing this in having a subscription component as one of the things that we are offering. Whether it was a higher level of the property or an association or a thing-of-the-month that you re going to get. We tried to force-feed that into every market that we went into, and we found that it just flat-out it didn t work in a lot of them.

I think that not every market is going to lend itself to subscription, and that s the thing that a lot of people in the media space want to do. They want to create, Oh, we ve got this club, or this higher level. We ve got this pay wall for the stuff in there. We have it with Digital Marketer Lab, which is the higher level of Digital Marketer. You have it with Authority, which is the higher level of Copyblogger.

It works in a lot of markets. It doesn t work in a lot of markets, too. Don t necessarily try to force that. Don t necessarily try to force the subscription side of it. Just figure out what they want.

And that s the thing. In a lot of these markets, if we had gone out and tested or just acknowledged why there s no really other subscription offerings in the space, maybe there s a reason for that. They re just buying a lot of stuff. Let s just give them what they want. That s the first thing that we learned. We wasted so much time and money really trying to force subscription.

Brian Clark: Yeah, let me share something on that, because you re about to see the next ridiculous VC and private equity bubble. We went out and talked to a few people, and again, we ended up going with debt. We took out a couple million bucks instead of taking someone else s money, because we have a good relationship with our bank, and we re highly profitable, all those things that investors apparently hate. But all they want is recurring revenue. Like every company in the world is going to be recurring. I m just like, Oh, Lord, but that how it works. It s the next trend, and then there s nothing but that.

Ryan Deiss: Yup, and what you re starting to see is people not wanting it, not wanting to sign up for it, and when they re in it, canceling like crazy because they look at their credit card statement, and they re just inundated with all the subscription offerings. I don t need a subscription service for toilet paper and a different one for razor blades and a different one for this. It s just kind of like, God dang, guys. I think you re still going to have it in premium areas and associations.

Brian Clark: It makes a lot of sense. Like your site and Authority, these are continuing education for professionals, and they re reasonably priced. The return you get on that it makes absolute sense. And maybe the razor thing. I ve actually contemplated that because the razors in the store are outrageously expensive. Maybe that kind of recurring commodity thing when you don t want to think about it and you don t want to go shopping and you don t want to run out, maybe. I don t know.

There is a limit to it, especially when you start seeing your credit card statement, and you re like, I don t need all this stuff.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, I m not saying, Don t do it, but don t force it. If it s not there, if you re not seeing it, don t force it. We had that in the beauty space, because we re like, Oh, Birchbox.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Ryan Deiss: What we found is that type of thing, people really aren t wanting that. Now, in some other aspects of beauty, we can pull it off, but when it came to makeup samples and stuff like that, it wasn t jiving.

The other thing I would say is, Don t overvalue product. People spend so much time creating their product. People will spend years working on their products. People will invest lots of money, or they ll try to buy a business that has a product that they think is really, really cool, but without aggregating the attention first.

It s just so exhausting. I ve seen this happen to friends of mine, where they ve just spent a lot of time creating a product, creating a product, creating a product. Now it s done, and they re like, Okay, it s done. Now what do I do? It s like, Well, now the hard work starts, so yeah. And it s going to be a while. Whereas when you aggregated the audience and you know what you re doing then you go and you create the product, it s exciting, because when it launches, boom: you just announce it to the audience that you already have, and you don t have to wait.

Just remember: for us, and I think this is important, a product does not a business make. For us, the market defines our business not the product. You have these people that are here and then they re gone. They re one-hit wonders. That s like a singer that had their one great song. That was their one product. That s the piano key tie.

I want to be Chanel. I want to know, Okay, this is the Chanel woman. We need to make her this type of person, this type of dress. And as long we re always advocating for this type of woman, the styles may change, but we ll always be here.

That s the other thing. I think if you re media-first, then that s kind of innate. You never get tied to a product. But just be careful: no sacred cows out there with the products. Then finally, don t limit yourself to what you know or to what you are passionate about.

I see people all the time doing this. They re like, I m really passionate about this. I m like, That s really adorable. Do you know that other people are, too? Are they willing to pay? Like, Do you have a reason to exist there? Think like a publisher. Think like a producer.

I mentioned before, I m not really into outdoors. One of our markets is Survival Life, right? We re in the survival and preparedness space, which now, it s really more outdoors. We sell a lot more camping gear and stuff like that. We actually have one of the top-selling tactical knife brands in the U.S. because of the media that we own. I m not passionate about that, but I don t have to be passionate about that, because I m the publisher. Publishers aren t passionate about everything they put out. I m certainly not passionate about makeup.

Brian Clark: It s the producer mentality. But eventually, producers make all the money if you think in terms of the Hollywood model, and they re not necessarily passionate about every film. They are definitely following that methodology.

I think it s hard when people start because if you re the content creator, it takes something to get you to show up every day. If you change your model, then it s much easier not to have to need that subject matter passion in order to show up at work. That again, it goes full circle to what we said, which is that entrepreneurs tend to get bored, and you re going to break the thing if you re in it too closely. Maybe step back a little bit, and think about more of a business/producer mentality.

Ryan Deiss: I m not saying there shouldn t be passion on the team. I m not passionate about makeup, but we have somebody on the team who is. There needs to be that passion there.

What I m suggesting is, if you re content marketing about content marketing because you love content marketing and all you want to do is talk about content marketing, then maybe and it s not working out and you re having a hard time breaking through because of jerkfaces like Brian Clark who are gobbling up all the content marketing real estate. Maybe what you should do is deploy your content marketing expertise and skills as a publisher, as the — what I would argue — more important half of a business partnership with someone who is passionate about a subject, who can be the expert, who can bring that passion, who can bring that enthusiasm.

What you bring is the enthusiasm for the thing that you re great at, which is content marketing, which is publishing. Just don t limit yourself and your market to what you know. There s so many out there and so many that are underserved that want to be served. Certainly, they want to be served in this model where you re giving them that one-stop-shop, Disney-World experience.

Brian Clark: Well said, and a great place to stop, I think. Tell people where they can find you. And I just found out that you have finally entered the world of podcasting. Tell us a little bit about that.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, you can find me you want me to just give them my home address so they can just come and swing by?

Brian Clark: Yeah, I m parked out in front of your house right now.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, 1439 Elm Street. No, I m just kidding.

DigitalMarketer.com is where we do that voodoo that we do, and hopefully you go to Digital Marketer and read some stuff that we ve got on our blog there. Maybe you like it and you want to sign up so we can inundate you with email and offers unapologetically. DigitalMarketer.com is where you can definitely find us.

And yeah, Digital Marketer just launched its first podcast. It s called Perpetual Traffic. We debuted at number one in business. I think we got up to like number seven in all podcasts. We were able to hang out there for a good little bit.

We re still doing really well on the business and the marketing categories, but everyone s like, How did you do that? Simple. We own media, and so when we launched it, we were just able to tell all of our 500,000 closest friends that we just launched a podcast. That s the power of already gathering the crowd. When you own media, and not only can you do native commerce, but you can also birth other media. That s why I think everybody who s here, we re totally preaching to the choir if you re listening to this, but just know that you re starting at the right place.

Be thankful that you found this world when you did, because you re doing it the right way. You re definitely starting at the right place. Once you ve aggregated the attention, then you can go out to all those people who started at the product phase and are weeping and gnashing teeth because they spent all their time on their product and they don t know how to sell it, and you can go and really help them out one day.

Brian Clark: Yup, in its early days. Everyone wants to say, Well, if I would have started 10 years ago. It s still early, I think, in this particular transition, if you will, from the way media used to work. And it s kind of falling apart in front of our eyes. We re inventing the future, which, not to be grandiose, but it feels pretty good.

Ryan Deiss: We were born in a wonderful place and time because yeah, I agree. The fact that no one can agree even on what to call certain things tells you that we re early — really, really early — but it s going to happen fast, so I wouldn t hang around too long.

Brian Clark: Yup. Ryan, thanks for stopping by today. This has been a fairly substantial conversation, but it s also right up my alley. I love your perspectives. I m going to kick around this native commerce term a little bit. I m always really slow to adopt new terminology, but it makes sense.

Ryan Deiss: It does, and I agree. Thank you so much for having me. Really, that means a lot.

Brian Clark: Yeah, no problem at all. All right everyone, we will be back next week with more, but hang in there, keep going, and we ll talk soon.

The Transcript

Behind the Scenes: The Reimagining of Copyblogger.com

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Brian Clark: Hey, rainmakers. Welcome to another episode of the show that talks all about creating digital products and services for growing your own online empire. I’m your host, Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media, and as has been the case lately, I have a co-host, a new voice to listen to, a very smart person, Pamela Wilson.

Many of you may know Pamela as, I think, the longest running guest poster on Copyblogger. She contributed from the outside, had her own business for many, many years, and I’m proud to say that now she is on the inside. Pamela, how are you doing?

Pamela Wilson: I’m doing great. I’m happy to be here.

Brian Clark: I’m happy you’re here, too. All right. Tell everyone what your official title is. I’m actually losing track. We’re growing so fast lately.

Pamela Wilson: My official title at the moment is vice president of educational content. It’s specific enough to sound really interesting, but not specific enough to tell you exactly all the little pies I have my fingers in.

Brian Clark: You do. When you first came on with us, you were very, very much entrenched helping us out with Rainmaker and getting the onboarding into a better process, and then knowledge base, the video — all of that great stuff. Then you shifted over.

Now, that title actually makes sense. We just got together last week in Nashville and had a great meeting. At some point, I think that’s a very descriptive job title for you, but right now, I think it’s easiest to say that Pamela runs Copyblogger.com. She’s the latest in a long line of people.

First there was me. Then there was me and Sonia. Then there was Sonia, then Robert. Then Jerod did a year before he transitioned, and now Pamela has taken over that role. The best thing that I could say about this, Pamela, is that everyone who has run Copyblogger is still with the company and in upper management. So congratulations, or don’t screw up — which one do you prefer?

Pamela Wilson: That’s a relief that people are sticking around after they’ve gone through what I’m going through right now.

Brian Clark: Trial by fire?

Pamela Wilson: That’s right. That’s a good sign.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the things we covered at the meeting. It was super productive and, for me, at least, super exciting. Copyblogger’s nine and half years old now. It’s kind of crazy to think about it. We’ve always been good about evolving, both in terms of content, types of content, design especially. We’ve had the same one for a while. We’ll talk about that. I just feel like this one is a really big one. There’s been a lot of things that I’ve wanted to see done over at Copyblogger.com that we just didn’t have time for, so they got put to the side a little bit.

Then you came on board, and you said, “I want to do this, this, this, this, and this.” I’m like, “Yes.” You’re like, “Wait a minute. I was expecting more feedback than that.” I’m like, “No, it’s like you read my mind.” It’s so funny that you complain that you would have an idea, you’ll send it to me, I’ll say, “Sounds good,” and then you’re like, “I don’t think he’s even paying attention to me.” But no, you’re on target.

Then the funny story here is that we had a little bit of a screw up. You got a three-paragraph email from me, and you’re like, “Okay, he’s paying attention, number one, and number two, I think I like those two-word answers better.”

Pamela Wilson: Right. I was giving you a hard time. This was last week. We were all sitting at a big table eating dinner. I said, “If you get an email from Brian that has two or three words, that’s great. If it has two or three paragraphs, you need to sit down and take a deep breath before you start reading it.”

Brian Clark: It wasn’t that bad.

Pamela Wilson: No, it wasn’t bad at all.

Brian Clark: I think I ended with a smiley face. Come on now.

Pamela Wilson: No, and honestly, it was well-deserved. It was something we should have caught. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of ideas, and the interesting thing is, having been a reader for so many years, it feels like a tremendous honor to be in a position to make some of the changes that I would have loved to have experienced as a reader. It’s a wonderful position to be in. I’m excited about all the things we’re talking about doing going forward.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I think that’s the perspective that matters and why you were so on point. I don’t know that these things were obvious to everyone, but that’s why they were gnawing at me. The fact that you keyed in on them was just a good sign for me. It just validated that we both were on the same path.

Our Multi-Content Platform Future

Brian Clark: Talking about Copyblogger just a bit, Copyblogger is what started it all, Copyblogger.com. It’s the mother ship of the company and has been. It’s interesting because it’s more important than ever, yet we’re really trying to balance things out between Rainmaker.FM, Copyblogger, and StudioPress going forward, which might lead some to believe that, “Okay, so Copyblogger’s less important.” No, it just means the other two sites need to become as important. Copyblogger will continue to set the standard.

That’s really how I view the work you’re about to do. In some sense, we’re trying to take some of that load off of Copyblogger and let it become what it is at its core. Sometimes people don’t realize it, because we talk about StudioPress, Synthesis, and Rainmaker Platform, but at its heart, Copyblogger is a membership site.

It’s a particular model that we started two years ago and then we let stay while we worked on other things. This is an overarching membership model site approach that we’ll be talking about more in the future. It is something that scales, and you can replicate this model. So more on that later.

Coming in to Copyblogger, you had to think about even more than that. Any good membership site has its attraction content. It’s got its email capture process, which is in place. It’s got the back-end sale and all that. You’re able to come with some infrastructure built in, yet still have to reimagine how that all works.

Let’s talk about content. I think people have been noticing that Copyblogger has rejuvenated a bit in many ways — images, the content, different types of posts that we’ve never done before. I’ll shut up, and you tell us a little bit about what you’ve implemented so far.

Re-Focusing on Copyblogger s Core Audience

Pamela Wilson: The first thing to know is that my background is publication design. I’ve done that for decades, publication design and putting together publications. I very much see Copyblogger as a publication. It doesn’t have pages that you turn with your fingers, but it’s definitely a publication. I approach it that way in terms of the content that we put on the blog and the way we treat our images. All the elements, in my opinion, are elements of a really good publication. That’s my angle. That’s my approach to everything.

The one thing that we have been trying to do lately is to become very clear about the audience that we’re serving. As a business, we’re seeing that the Rainmaker Platform and Rainmaker.FM serve one specific audience, StudioPress serves a slightly different audience, and then Copyblogger serves its own audience.

Our audience is people who identify themselves as professional content marketers. They either identify themselves as professional content marketers because 1) they have that as their business and they offer that as a service, 2) they identify themselves as professional content marketers because they are business people who use content marketing in their businesses, or 3) maybe they’re in a large organization and they’re working in the content marketing field.

They self-identify as someone who takes content marketing seriously and who uses it within a business context. Those are the people we’re really trying to serve with our content.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s dead-on. I think that’s been the case, yet we meandered a little. We got a little fuzzy on that. Also, with your background, when I started Copyblogger, it quickly was one of the first people to ever take outside writers, which wasn’t done in blogging at that time. I saw it as a magazine, not a blog, despite the name, yet I had no magazine experience whatsoever.

I think that’s part of the reason why we just seem to see eye to eye on this. You have the specific philosophical and conceptual understanding of what I’m struggling with all along, which is, “Yeah, it’s a magazine.”

Why a History in Print Magazines Helps

Pamela Wilson: It is. It’s a magazine. There are elements from the magazine world that we can use when we talk about how we put content on Copyblogger. For example, one thing that you see in magazines is, typically toward the front of the magazine, you have columnists. These are people who write for the magazine every month. They have specific voices that people cue into, they relate to, and they enjoy reading.

That’s one of the things that we’re trying to feature on Copyblogger — these specific voices. This is our new philosophy about guest posting. We are going away from this model of just taking guest posts from anyone. Instead, we’re trying to develop specific voices that people get to know over time.

We’re helping those people to develop voices around topics that they really have expertise in, topics that they’re known for. We’re working with them personally so that we can feature their best knowledge on the blog and develop those voices so that people get to know them over time.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. We’ve always been selective about guest posting. Again, going back to that magazine style, not only did I accept them early on, I edited every one myself. Sometimes — dirty little secret — I rewrote certain people’s complete post. These are really well-known people, but they were just a little off.

Pamela Wilson: I know.

Brian Clark: That’s not a scalable solution.

Pamela Wilson: No.

Brian Clark: So you’ve got to have an editorial approach that says, “Okay, if it’s that far off the mark, then we can’t do it,” right?

Pamela Wilson: Right. There’s a style to Copyblogger posts that does well, and that’s what we’re always aiming for. There are times that, if you’re just accepting guest posts from anywhere, you end up with this post that you do so much more work on than if you’d just written it yourself from scratch. We need to figure out how to best use our resources.

When we thought about it, it seemed to work better to just develop a small group of writers whose work we knew and who had expertise in specific areas that we wanted to be able to share with our readers. Then just work with those people, put them on a schedule so that they knew when they would need to get their piece in. That’s worked really well.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about the new images that we’re using. You weren’t involved in this conversation until it came to execution, I guess, but I was grumping out at Robert, saying, “We need better images.” Robert’s been complaining about image. He knew that, but I kept saying, “Okay, it’s not that big a deal with the talent we have in this company to produce these images.”

He pushed back a little bit, and he said, “Well, this, that,” and I’m like, “No, we got to do something.” I think that was the last I was in it. Then you showed up. Tell us the story. Once it gets turned over and I see that something great happened, I’m happy. I don’t necessarily know how the sausage was made to get to that point.

The Power of the Right Images and Colors

Pamela Wilson: It was interesting because we decided early on that, if we’re going to do these images, we wanted to make them look very custom. The thing that happens with blogs occasionally, especially if it’s a big site like Copyblogger, is you’ll buy an image, you put it up on your site, and then people just pull it off your site. It’s not branded with your name or anything like that. People just pull the image and use it on their own sites or grab the URL to the image if you’re not doing it right and put it on their own sites. It’s not a good idea.

We wanted to do something branded. We also wanted those images to be able to stand by themselves in social media and always look like they came from Copyblogger. From a visual standpoint, the way that sausage is made is you choose a set of brand colors. You choose from the colors that you’ve always used on your site, and you choose specific fonts. You do not stray from those two choices. You stick to those colors. You stick to those fonts.

It’s just a matter of working within those limitations. When you do that, everything that you put together looks like it came from the same organization. It’s amazing actually.

Brian Clark: Branding 101, on one hand, yet not a lot of people were doing it for many, many years.

Pamela Wilson: Yes, and that’s something I talked about all the time on Big Brand System. Those are basic building blocks of putting together a visual brand that’s recognizable. We made that decision early on. We have the Copyblogger red, the Copyblogger green, and the Copyblogger blue. We do not vary from those three colors. Then we have our font that we’ve used very consistently. Then, it’s just a matter of picking images that add shades of meaning to the words that are already on the page.

You’ll see occasionally we go for humor. You can’t do that every single time, but we go for humor once in a while just to keep them interesting. We try to make them visually interesting and try to get the reader to think a little bit by looking at the image. For example, the one we ran just this past week was talking about landing pages. We have this big jet coming in for a landing. It’s just like a slight shade of meaning that you’re adding to the words. It makes it interesting.

Then the other thing that we do — this part I’m doing basically — I’m coming up with text for those images. It’s an opportunity to almost have a second headline at the top of the post. You know how it is. When you choose a headline, you’re choosing a headline, but there are all these other headlines that you’ve had to eliminate. That can be kind of painful.

You look at some of these alternate headlines that you didn’t run, and you think, “You know, I wish I’d been able to use that word or that phrase.” This is an opportunity to use an alternate headline and give an additional shade of meaning to the post as well. You’re just adding a little extra text at the top.

Brian Clark: Yeah. When I adopted a similar image strategy in the early days of my newsletter, Further, I figured out that I was using these quotes in the content, and then I had my headline. Then I went back to old school with David Ogilvy and then made the image complement the headline with a quote that was relevant. It’s amazing how better it did on social media. It’s not even close. Sometimes 50 times better. That’s crazy. Images matter. I’m a word guy. I tend to neglect that, but I’m definitely being convinced.

Let me ask you this before we move on. It’s a natural segue to the site redesign. I noticed that you are using images and maybe the headline, but no link. You’ve got a hashtag that says ‘seen on Copyblogger’ or something like that. You got to tell me about this. Honestly, this is the first time I’m asking her this even though I noticed it. I’m like, “You always have to have a link.” What’s the thinking behind that?

Pamela Wilson: Okay. I think what you’re seeing is something that I just started doing recently, and it’s on my personal Instagram account.

Brian Clark: Oh, and it’s also posting to Twitter. I got it. Okay.

Pamela Wilson: And it’s posting to Twitter, and it’s posting to Facebook, your favorite place. That’s just something I’m doing on my personal account. The thing about Instagram is, on Instagram, you cannot put a link. It’s not an active link. I’m doing those from my phone, so I developed this hashtag, #readitoncopyblogger.

What I’m trying to do when I post those is to train people to go to the Copyblogger blog every day to read that day’s fresh posts. That’s a completely separate stream of images that I’m just doing for fun. I apparently can’t get enough of images, so I have to create an extra one. Those are not the post images. That’s a separate thing.

The post images go out on Twitter. They look great on social media because we’ve developed a size that crosses all the different social media platforms, doesn’t get chopped up, doesn’t look cropped off, or anything like that. That size seems to work pretty well, and those images stand by themselves. They do have the Copyblogger logo on them. Those always go out with a link.

When to Functionally Restructure Your Site

Brian Clark: Okay, makes perfect sense. Okay, design. I would say that the other thing Copyblogger has been known for throughout the years, other than content, obviously, has been design because it’s really important to me. I’m not a designer. I can’t do it, but I can spot it. When I see it, I know it’s good.

Back to 2006, with Chris Pearson’s first Copyblogger design, which kind of made his career — and that’s credit to him — it was not like anything else that was being seen in the blogging space. That set a standard. Of course, every design Rafal has done has been amazing and right there at the edge. Maybe not with the coolest hipster designers, but for the rest of us, it’s cutting edge.

This is the first time that you took over this project, along with Lauren Mancke. Rafal’s working with me on the Rainmaker side, and we’re redesigning those sites as well. We’ve got our hands full.

I got to admit, I saw the mock-ups, and we went through the why and how it all works. Copyblogger’s a complex site. You have Copyblogger, which is the outside. Then you have My Copyblogger, which is the free member area. Then you have Authority, which is the paid member area. It’s not an easy task. We had more mock-ups than I think most ‘blog redesigns’ would ever have.

Pamela Wilson: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Give us just a feel for what you’re thinking. What were the challenges that you saw with where we’re at and how you decided to try to fix them?

Pamela Wilson: First of all, the current design is amazing. I think most people would be very happy to have a site that looked as good as Copyblogger looks now. That’s the initial challenge –taking a site that is not terrible and then trying to improve on it. The new site is going to be super clean. One of the things that we were trying to accomplish was to make it a really nice reading experience. Rainmaker.FM is all about audio. Copyblogger is all about text.

We want our readers to be happy and to have a really good online reading experience. It’s going to be a beautiful online reading experience. I can’t wait for that to go live. One change from what we’re doing now is that Copyblogger content is going to have its own page, and then Rainmaker.FM audio content is going to have its own page.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I was about to say, we’re publishing more content by far than we’ve ever published, but that’s because we added in audio. The way that the site infrastructure is now, we do have some mechanisms to keep the article at the top of the stream and this other kind of stuff.

Trust me, going back to that mother ship comment, it’s been very good for Rainmaker.FM to get that kind of exposure from an established site like Copyblogger, but even I was getting a little stressed out about the flow of it. Separate audio channel, separate article channel. Very simple fix, but it’s all in the execution.

Pamela Wilson: Right. I just think that’s going to be a nice reader experience. There are some people who like both. God bless them. I don’t know how they have time to consume both, but there are some people who like both the audio content and the reading, text content. For the most part, people prefer one or the other.

This is going to make it very easy for them to find whatever kind of content they want to consume on Copyblogger and just go directly to it. There’s going to be a lot to love about the new design. There’s going to be an easy way to filter through our content and learn about something that you’re specifically interested in.

If you’re interested in conversion, for example, you can sign up for materials that we are going to put together for you that are all about conversion, that will teach you about conversion, give you all the information you need from our archives, basically to help you understand everything you need to know about conversion. We’ll have segmented information so that people can grab what they need and what they’re most interested in. It’s going to allow us to serve up more targeted content.

The one thing I hear from people all the time when I talk to them is, “I went into Copyblogger, and you can tell there’s so much information there. It’s just amazing, but I don’t know how to find it.” It’s like being lost in the New York Public Library and not having a Dewey Decimal System or something. You just know there’s a lot there, but you really don’t know where to find what you’re looking for. That’s one of the things that we’re trying to improve on, to make that experience better.

Brian Clark: Yeah, two years ago, we did some pretty meticulous planning. We had all these different pathways into My Copyblogger, which is the content library of ebooks, a course, and all this high-value stuff. We had all these content landing pages that were drawing in search traffic, and then we had sidebar navigation. It worked. It was a vast improvement over before. Our email opt-in rate went up 400 percent, so yeah, “Yay!”

But the approach we’re going with now is just so smart on the topical pathway. Ultimately, you may end up in that vast library of great stuff, but it’s also a pathway that allows us to tailor the experience better for you. That’s something we’ve been talking about a lot — the logged in experience, adaptive content, all of that stuff. There is no doubt that we are drinking our own Kool-Aid here.

Pamela Wilson: Right. It’s just a better user experience. One of the things that we would like to be able to do is, for example, if somebody raises their hand on the frontend of Copyblogger and says, “I want to learn more about design,” and they give us their email address, we will send them targeted information about design. If, for example, they decide to join our community, Authority, we will give them a targeted experience with all of the paid content that we have inside Authority.

When they first log into Authority, we’ll have a lot of audio and webinar content lined up and waiting for them about this topic that they are most interested in. That doesn’t mean that they can’t access the rest of it. It’s just we’re going to create this nice silver platter and hand them over the content that they’ve said they most want to learn.

The Beauty of Abundant White Space

Brian Clark: Yeah. As you can tell, this is going to be a big project. It’s got marketing intelligence, automation involved on the backend, but I just can’t wait to see the new site. It’s beautiful.

Pamela Wilson: I know. I can’t wait either.

Brian Clark: If only we could just have that first and then work on it. But, I know, we need to do it all at once.

Pamela Wilson: Yeah.

Brian Clark: It’s interesting because I don’t know if Rafal saw what Lauren and you had done, but his new designs for Rainmaker.FM and Rainmaker Platform, they’re not the same. But that use of white space, oh my gosh, it’s just striking.

Pamela Wilson: Yeah, it’s like they’re speaking the same design language. I don’t know if they saw it either. I don’t think that they did, though.

Brian Clark: I don’t think so. That’s what’s amazing to me because it’s kind of like parallel thinking without talking.

Pamela Wilson: We got some design telepathy happening here.

Brian Clark: Exactly.

Pamela Wilson: Good stuff.

Brian Clark: As a business unit, separate from everything else, again, Copyblogger is effectively a membership site. There are free open materials. There’s free behind-the-wall materials, and then there’s 250 hours now of training inside Authority. Plus we do two new webinars every month, and we do Q&As every month. It’s always growing. I know you have some ideas for Authority. We kicked around quite a bit. I’m not going to put you too much on the spot, but give us a general idea. What’s going on with Authority?

The Evolution of Our Authority Training Program

Pamela Wilson: I have a lot of ideas, and we’ll have to see how we can implement them over time. They involve having maybe slightly more compact information — so easier to digest, faster to digest, more targeted content. Maybe doing things like member hot seats. Every time we do anything that is remotely like a website review or really focus on one person’s business, I notice that people get a lot out of it — not just the person whose business you’re focusing on, but everyone else who’s watching.

They always take some kind of nugget of information from what that person’s business is going through, or what they’re asking about, and what they’re confused about. I’ve thought about ideas like that. I have a lot of ideas kicking around. I’ve spent a lot of time in mastermind groups. There are elements to those groups that I think that we might be able to apply to Authority that I would love to have a chance to explore.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Absolutely. Good closing note here. Pamela lives in Nashville, but I was there for Donald Miller’s StoryBrand workshop, which is fantastic, by the way. We’ll talk about that in the future. Maybe have Donald on the show.

But I just launched Unemployable with basically the most basic one-page website in the world. I just threw it up there for the site critiques in a room full of digital marketers just because I love to hear that kind of stuff. Lots of great ideas. Listening to all those website critiques, just to talk about what you just mentioned, about how everyone gets something out of it, it’s true, absolutely. I don’t know if you’ve looked, but I already redesigned the site with Rafal.

Pamela Wilson: Oh, I haven’t looked again. That’s great.

Brian Clark: I didn’t waste a day until I got started on that. Good stuff. All right, Pamela. Maybe people didn’t even know exactly what you were up to because you’ve been head down since you started working. Obviously, you would have to be to come up with this much output so far, but I think people have a little bit better idea of what you’re up to. When all of this goes fantastically well, make sure you take all the credit.

Pamela Wilson: I will. Thanks for giving me a chance to talk about it.

Brian Clark: Oh, I’m excited. We had a great meeting, and I just figured there’s a lot of stuff in here that I think, just like a site review of someone else’s site, it just gives people ideas about, “Oh yeah, maybe that’s something I need to look at.” I think it was a good discussion.

All right, everyone. Thank you for joining us again this week. We will be back with more soon. Until then, leave us a comment if you have anything to add or ask. Otherwise, Pamela, thank you so much.

Pamela Wilson: Thank you.

Brian Clark: All right, everyone, take care.