Management & Marketing

The Transcript

Does Your Social Media Strategy Need a Mindset Shift?

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome to another episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. I am your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and this is episode No. 16 of The Digital Entrepreneur. It’s a special episode because we have a special guest.

Jason Keath, the CEO of Social Fresh, is here to discuss the report that Social Fresh recently released called The Future of Social. You can get that report at SocialFresh.com/Future. We dive into a lot of the insights that Jason and his team came up with, with that report, a lot of interesting data.

The timing of this conversation, for me, is especially interesting because I am actually in the midst right now of putting together a course inside of Digital Commerce Academy called Savvy Social Advertising. The big idea with that course is to teach you, the digital entrepreneur, the 20 percent that you need to know about social media marketing, social media advertising, to derive 80 percent of the benefits.

You are out there developing your digital product, offering your digital service, and you don’t necessarily have the time, the inclination, nor the need to become a full-fledged expert on social media. You have a lot of different things that you’re doing, and that’s not the goal of this course. Again, it’s to teach you that 20 percent that you need to get 80 percent of the results.

What’s interesting about this conversation in this episode with Jason–and why I’m excited to bring it to you–is that he talks a lot about a different way to think about social media. If you’re thinking about social media simply as a way to build awareness and put people into the top of your funnel, you’re not really thinking about social media in the way that it can have the maximum benefits.

Thinking about social media from a customer-loyalty perspective, from a lead-nurturing perspective, from an education perspective, from a customer-service perspective–all of those elements social media does really well–sometimes we overlook them simply trying to build that awareness or even trying to jump right from awareness to a sale.

There are a lot of steps that can and should happen in between there, and you’ll learn about that in this conversation today. You’ll also learn much more about it and learn some really important step-by-step tactics for how to make it work for you and to save you money so that you can make more money and have a better return on your investment in social. That will all come in the course.

As I said, the timing of the conversation is interesting because I’m developing the course, but it’s also interesting from this perspective. We are currently in the midst of our price raise promotion for Digital Commerce Academy. Currently, we’re still offering our post-pilot introductory price of $395 per year for membership at Digital Commerce Academy.

The thing is, since we offered that price the first time, the value of Digital Commerce Academy has skyrocketed. Now there aren’t two full-fledged courses in there. There are four. In addition to Brian’s course on building an online training business and Chris and Tony’s course on marketing funnels, we now have Chris Lema’s course on building WordPress products the smarter way. You have my course on Savvy Social Advertising, plus the entire library of Case Study webinars we’ve done, the entire library of Cutting Edge webinars we’ve done, plus the regular coaching Q&As, which happen every other week, and all of the upcoming ongoing education, in addition to the community.

The time was right to raise the price, and we are. On Friday, May 27th, the price is going up to $595 a year. It’s still a great value, but obviously, it’s a better value at $395. You still have the opportunity to get that. This episode comes out on Thursday, May 26th, so you’ve got about 24 to 48 hours from when this comes out to when the price is going to go up.

Go to Rainmaker.FM/DCA, you can still get that post-pilot introductory price of $395 before the price goes up. Rainmaker.FM/DCA. Again, you’ll have access to my course on social advertising. Especially if today’s episode peaks your interest, then that is a course that you’ll want to get in there and start to dig into. I’m having a lot of fun putting it together, and I really am looking forward to you getting in there, checking it out, giving me your feedback, and learning from it.

Without further ado, let’s get to my discussion with Jason Keath, a really interesting discussion. You will get a lot out of this. Definitely stay around till the end because we get into video at the end. Video is one of the fastest growing content types that is really, really big in social media, and you’re going to want to hear Jason’s tips on how you can make video work for you. We talk about all of that and much, much more here on this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

All right, so we are joined on this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur by Jason Keath, the CEO of Social Fresh. Jason, how are you? Welcome to the show.

Jason Keath: Doing great. Excited to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, yeah. We’re excited to have you here, and we’re excited to talk about your report. You guys just released this report, The Future of Social, and it has some really interesting insights that I want to get into.

I guess the first question is just an overview question about the report, because the report itself is based on surveys. You guys did over 500 surveys that you conducted of digital marketers whose responsibilities include social media marketing.

I’m just wondering, to put this in the proper context for our listeners, how big on average were the companies that these marketers worked for, and will the numbers in the report, and that we’re going to talk about, will those be applicable for digital entrepreneurs who may be solopreneurs or who have smaller teams?

Why The Future of Social Is Relevant Whether You’re a Solopreneur, a Small Team, or a Large Business

Jason Keath: Yeah, yeah. Social Fresh, in general, at our conferences, on our website, on our podcast, everything, we focus on what we call the ‘professional digital marketer,’ or the ‘professional social marketer.’ That’s everybody from solo entrepreneur running their own company, doing their own marketing, doing their own everything, all the way up to the largest companies in the world who attend our conferences. Everybody really gets value out of what we do because we focus on that person and the fundamentals to that responsibility.

The report was no different. We had two research partners, Firebrand Group, an agency out of New York, and Simply Measured, a pretty large social media software company who helped with the report. We also targeted people through some LinkedIn cold emails that we did, so we could get some job titles that we were targeting.

It’s a really well-rounded report. It’s got everybody from very small businesses to very large businesses and everything in-between. It’s really representative of the average of what’s going on in social media marketing.

Jerod Morris: Okay, and for folks who want to see the report, you can go to SocialFresh.com/Future and check it out. We’re going to dive in to some here on this episode. Obviously, we can’t get into everything. Definitely recommend that people go there–again, SocialFresh.com/Future–and check out the report.

The Disconnect Between How People Say They Are Using Social Media and How They Should Be Using Social Media

Jerod Morris: It’s interesting. One of the first observations this made in the report shows what seems to be a disconnect between what people think they’re using social for, what their goals are, and maybe what social is best for them. What I mean by that is, 76 percent of the people surveyed listed ‘awareness’ as one of their top social media goals, yet there were a number of experts that you guys quoted in the report who suggested that this might be a bit of a myopic focus.

What should people–or in our case digital entrepreneurs who are selling maybe an online course, a SaaS application, or premium WordPress product–what should folks be focusing on when it comes to maximizing the time and money that they’re investing in social media?

Jason Keath: Great question. Ten points for the word ‘myopic,’ if everybody’s keeping score at home. Great outline of that. Yeah, that’s right. Social media is great for scale. It’s set up for scale, and it’s set up for all these awareness metrics. You can measure reach really easily. You’ve got a list of followers that’s public. You’ve got ‘likes,’ comments, and Retweets–all these numbers that are thrown at us as vanity metrics.

Even if you’re smart enough to know you should be going after maybe customer loyalty, sales, or leads instead of focusing on awareness, your boss may not be as savvy, necessarily, and may want to really get those awareness numbers higher–those vanity metrics, those followers, et cetera.

Social media in general is still trying to overcome that kind of setup. I don’t know if we’ll ever really get past it, but on the base level, social media is best at people talking to each other. It’s really great at customer loyalty, customer service, really good at building community, really good at taking a smaller audience and making them go from like to love, taking your customers and making them really great word-of-mouth opportunities for you. Or taking your average customer and making them, giving them a longer customer life cycle, giving them upsells, giving them just a better feeling about the trust of your business.

The real low-hanging fruit in social media is that customer loyalty, is that word of mouth, and then building from there. I usually tell people to focus on three audiences in social media, and this is reflected in the report. All the expert advice we got from a lot of folks in the industry is to focus first on your customers in social media, then focus on your qualified leads. If you’re B2B, that could be actually, if you have a qualified lead program or if you’re a consumer business, it could be just focusing on the target audience that’s best for your product.

Then focus on your fans would be the third audience. Your fans can be people that have great word of mouth of your company00even if they’re not necessarily a customer or going to become a customer. They can be partners, et cetera. Those smaller audiences are much, much bigger reward for the business typically.

Jerod Morris: That’s interesting because a lot of people, when they think about social media, they think about filling up the top part of your funnel, but you’re saying think about social media as a way to interact with people across all the different levels of engagement that you have.

How to Use Social Media to ‘Take People Who Like You and Make Them Love You’

Jason Keath: Yeah, and there’s so much opportunity for social. We asked people to name their top two social media goals, and awareness was just by far the most popular mentioned. Awareness, you can do great awareness building using social, using advertising products that exist on social networks, using video.

There’s a lot of great tools in social networks and social media that can help you with building the top of the funnel. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s harder. It’s going to cost a little more money. It’s typically more difficult, and it’s going to cost a little bit more time.

Now, if you are good at talking to your customers, you’re good at talking to your qualified leads, and you’re good at talking to your biggest fans on social, then, yeah, build that top of the funnel. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the average social media team is very small, and the average marketer has a lot on their plate.

Typically, you’re missing the lower-hanging fruit if that’s your number one focus. If you haven’t built the bottom of your funnel to be really good–and your customer loyalty, and customer service to be really good–that’s a better opportunity for the average business.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and there’s a great quote in the report from Jay Baer, who says, “Embrace the organic social functions more like an email newsletter, and think strategically about how you can use social to make people who like you, make them love you,” which I thought was great and what you just mentioned.

Jason Keath: Yeah, Jay’s great. His new book is about customer service, so that was a great fit for his expertise with the report.

Jerod Morris: Do you think that part of the issue comes back to the fact that people don’t really understand what their goal is? Or that, if they do have a stated goal, it’s the wrong one? They don’t understand what KPIs they should be looking for. I know there was another stat in there.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was around 25 percent of people didn’t even know what the return on the investment was from the time and the money that they’re investing in social. It suggests that they don’t even know what they should be tracking. Is that a big issue that folks are having who may be struggling with what they’re doing in social media?

Why Having Clear Goals and KPIs Is So Important

Jason Keath: It’s a great question. ROI, we asked folks, 63 percent said they got a positive ROI from social media, which I think is pretty high. If you’re able to say, “These activities I’m doing on Facebook, on Twitter, et cetera are directly correlating to a return on investment for my business,” that’s typically not the easiest process to implement for your business–having the measurement system in place, having the right goals in place, and tracking people along that process, along that funnel.

I thought that was a pretty good sign for the industry, but you’re right. We did have like 24 percent, I think, were not sure, and 12 percent said they were not seeing a return. We correlated that to a few things, typically a lower experience level when it came to marketing and social in general.

For instance, when we tracked people that were using social media software versus people that were not, just the fact that, if you were using social media software versus just posting natively to Facebook and Twitter and not really monitoring it, using any analytics, using software, you saw ROI 19 out of 20 people, roughly 95 percent. If you weren’t using software, it was virtually a coin flip.

There were a lot of things that really told us that the audiences that have a better system in place, a better process, are doing really well. The folks, the marketers out there that are measuring what they’re doing have an idea of what their goals are. Even if it’s the simplest process, even if it’s just Hootsuite and Bitly, two free tools, even those folks have a much higher percentage chance of seeing a good return and seeing it work for their businesses’ bottom line.

Jerod Morris: The key, then, is to be intentional about it, to be strategic about it, not just spray and pray, but actually have a plan in place for what you’re doing.

Jason Keath: Yeah, it’s shocking, right?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Jason Keath: Yeah, basically. We just did a discussion about it when we launched the report. @jeremarketer, the co-writer for the report, mentioned there are a lot of things that are hard to measure. There are a lot of things you can measure, and you can get really intricate with your process and your plan to see what works and what doesn’t. But just simply measuring what you can and learning from that is an initial step that some marketers don’t even take, some business owners don’t take.

Being very intentional about that and learning what data really tells you useful information and what data is more just surface and doesn’t give you as much useful information for actually making more money for your business, that, in itself, is a very important step. These stats amplify that even more.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, absolutely. It won’t surprise anybody, or at least it shouldn’t surprise anybody, that Facebook continues to dominate in terms of where people are spending their money, where people are seeing ROI. I think everybody gets that, but there were a couple of insights that I thought were really interesting that digital entrepreneurs especially need to pay attention to.

Dark Social and the Future of Social Media

Jerod Morris: Like I said, I want to ask you if this is something that a digital entrepreneur should pay attention to. You mentioned, there’s actually a heading on one of the pages that says, “Is the future in dark social?” ‘Dark social’ refers to one-on-one messaging, which can be harder to track. That’s Facebook Messenger and the direct messaging that you get on any of these platforms.

It’s clear to see how this could be a challenge, especially for bigger brands who have tons and tons of fans, and that can get kind of unwieldy to manage. But for smaller online businesses, like the kind that many digital entrepreneurs are running, is this dark social, this one-to-one messaging, is this something that they should be taking more advantage of to connect one on one with customers and even prospects?–especially as we talk about connecting with folks further down the funnel with social.

Jason Keath: Yeah, it’s a hard conversation to give businesses advice on. It’s so new, and it’s so hard to really wrap your head around both tactically and strategically. At the conference this summer–we’ll have our 18th conference in Orlando, Social Fresh 2016–we’re going to have a panel that’s going to touch on at least dark social. We’ve got the CMO of HubSpot. We’ve got some folks from Simply Measured that will probably be talking about it.

Everybody I talked to recently about the future of the industry and where it’s going–everybody that I consider to be very smart in social media–mentions this to me. ‘Social messaging’ is basically what people are calling it, so it’s basic messenger. It’s WhatsApp. It’s half of Snapchat is one-to-one or one-to-many private messaging. It’s what a lot of the Millennials and younger people are focused on.

Even today, social messaging as a platform is larger than social networking. The people that are using these apps, and the amount of content they’re sending, is more content and more people than are active on public-facing social media feeds like Facebook’s feed, Twitter’s feed, Instagram, and LinkedIn, et cetera–which, in of itself, is very important fact.

But the ways to interact with people if you have a Facebook page and you have a brick-and-mortar store, you probably see messages come on Facebook Messenger. That’s important for you to respond to. That’s something that’s very easy to recommend people pay attention to. They’re probably also getting messages or reviews on Yelp, OpenTable, things like that as well.

For the average business, there’s not really a lot of actionable advice to give today that you can directly measure. Simply Measured is actually working on a system that allows businesses to measure social messaging better, but it’s hard. We’re probably years away. I would say two to three years away at a minimum before most businesses have to worry about this.

You’re going to see a lot of untrackable traffic to your website, to your landing pages that might be coming from private Facebook groups. It might be coming from direct messages in addition to the email traffic that you get that you can’t track.

One of the biggest lessons, for me, is what we just talked about, which is investing in your customer, investing in the audiences that are going to be your word-of-mouth ambassadors, and making sure those people are taken care of. If you do that, all of this conversation that happens in private, one-to-one, one-to-many messages that you can’t track, you can’t measure, you can’t see, it’s going to be better for your business if you’re investing in the right people.

Even influence or marketing would be another layer, but just taking care of your customers which are your best ambassadors would be the best, most actionable thing that I can tell people in response to social messaging right now.

Jerod Morris: I guess there are two layers to social messaging. There’s the one-on-one messaging that’s happening between other people that you can’t see, that you have no control over, that you can’t even really interject into that conversation. Then there’s the one-on-one messaging that you’re having with potential prospects, with customers, and that’s really the only one, obviously, that you participate in.

I know you said it can be one to three years. Is there any way that folks can start to open themselves up for that? Obviously, you want to respond if someone sends you a message. Is it something where people should be making themselves available on a Facebook Messenger or Twitter Direct Message, that kind of thing?

Where You Should Be Making Yourself Available (and Why) on Social Platforms

Jason Keath: Yeah. Especially if you’re a brick and mortar or a service industry that’s local, you’re already getting questions asked directly if you’re a business. If that’s already happening, then doing response in Twitter DMs, doing response in Facebook Messenger is something you should definitely look at, especially as a customer-service response tool.

If you read Jay’s book, Hug Your Haters, he talks about messaging people up to two times publicly for customer service situations, and then taking it into a direct message, an email, or a phone call. That’s great advice and really the way most businesses should be treating those opportunities.

There’s some businesses that are using these. Facebook Messenger is a platform now with an API. You can plug your store into it. You can do automated response bots in it that are customer-service based, that are transactional based. If you’re ESPN and a media company, you can send updates about the Carolina Panthers or the Arizona Diamondbacks. You can do all kinds of things in these apps, but a lot of that is very costly on the time and the budget frontend for the average business.

If you’re ESPN, it makes sense. If you’re Jet Blue, it might make sense, but if you’re a mom and pop, an entrepreneur, or even a medium-sized business with one to 25 people doing marketing and PR, it might not be a resource play that you can handle right now because it’s so new. It’s so untested, and it would take a lot of time and effort in testing to really prove the benefit.

If you are interested in that, there are people that can do that for you. There are companies that are building that kind of thing. But for the average business, it’s something to start thinking about, to start paying attention to, but acting on it is probably a little farther away than this year or next year.

Jerod Morris: So Instagram is growing as a trend that we see continue, and you say in the report, “Instagram will officially become the second most popular social network for marketers to spend their time and money in 2016.”

The numbers, the trends, they’re clearly there. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that Instagram still, at least among some groups of folks, has a perception problem of being more of a niche social media site for photographers, foodies, fashion folks, personal trainers.

I still even catch myself thinking that way sometimes. I know that’s not right. I’m just saying it’s that perception that is there. How can digital entrepreneurs who may not have an obviously visual product and who may even have this kind of bias against Instagram for that very reason tap into Instagram? Clearly it’s a place to be.

How to Approach Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter (and Which One Is Outpacing the Others)

Jason Keath: It’s interesting. You have a B2B bias against Instagram right now because it’s hard to get links out of the site. That’s an immediate barrier for most folks. Consumer brands probably see a lot more value in the platform, and that makes sense because of the visual nature of it.

However, if you are running an advertising campaign for, let’s say, a social media conference like we’re doing for Social Fresh, we use Facebook Ads. We use Facebook Ads because it’s got great targeting. It’s a really mature, the most mature, social advertising product, and now you can do all of those ads on Instagram as well.

We just talked about how you should focus on your customers first. When we’re building a sales funnel for our conference, we have a very targeted audience that we want to make sure knows about the date and time of our event. It is an awareness problem for us, and Instagram’s advertising product is really mature because it’s building on top of Facebook. That, in of itself, is going to have a lot of marketers paying attention.

These might be more lifestyle photos that represent your business or industry. You look at somebody like IBM or GE and the type of content that they’re creating that is almost more like a consumer brand. That’s the type of advertising and imagery that’s going to work on Instagram.

If you talk to Instagram, I’ve talked to them directly, one of the things that they’re trying to focus on, focus content on, is making it look more DIY. In other words, less polished, less like corporate commercial, and more just, “Here’s what’s going on at your office, your industry, your employees,” that is a little more entertaining and a lifestyle focus. It can be self-help. It can be solving your customers problems. Those are the directions that I would look.

That being said, if you’re B2B, the bigger opportunities are going to be on Facebook, are going to be on LinkedIn, Twitter, maybe even a SlideShare. If you do have a specific awareness challenge that Facebook’s Ad platform can help you achieve through Instagram ads, I think that’s something to test. The audience is clearly there. It’s bigger than Twitter now. It’s bigger than LinkedIn. It’s growing faster than both of them, and it has an amazing ad platform attached to it.

Just because it’s growing and just because it’s going to receive a lot more attention from social marketers in general, doesn’t necessarily mean that your business has to be there, and has to be investing in it. However, I think look at it, and look at that opportunity and see if there’s something you can test there on that platform.

Jerod Morris: You mentioned LinkedIn, and Facebook obviously dominates the paid advertising spend and the ROI as we talked about, with Twitter and Instagram coming in next in terms of where people are spending their time and their money. But surprisingly, at least to me, was LinkedIn is the one that ranked second in terms of ROI. Why do you think it is that LinkedIn, that people have been able to get a better return on LinkedIn despite it not being used as much as Instagram and Twitter?

Why Some People Get a Better ROI with LinkedIn and When LinkedIn Is a Good Choice

Jason Keath: Well, LinkedIn has been consistent. It hasn’t gone away. It’s bringing in revenue. They’re growing slowly compared to the other social networks, but they’re growing. They’ve got specific products for HR, for some sales folks, for hiring that are really powerful.

Then, when it came to our advertising question, what we saw there is we forced people to pick one. Facebook completely dominated. I think it was 75 percent of people said, “If I had to pick one, Facebook Ads are the best,” which is pretty representative of what the technology can do and the value of it.

LinkedIn was second. It was the only question we asked where LinkedIn showed up in the second spot. It was third or lower in everything else, and I think it’s because there’s a small, but significant audience of marketers, mostly B2B, and probably even mostly SaaS-software-focused audiences, or service focused, that see a good value from the LinkedIn Ad.

You can do things on LinkedIn Ads that you can’t do elsewhere, the biggest of which is targeting job titles–which can be very powerful. However, they’re a little more expensive, so most of the folks that are spending money on LinkedIn Ads that are seeing success, they typically have a larger price point and can stomach that kind of cost-per-lead price that’s going to be higher on the LinkedIn platform.

That being said, I’ve seen that success consistently from this smaller, yet significant audience that is mostly B2B companies on LinkedIn, and I don’t think that’s going away. They are improving their ad platform. They are consistently investing in it, so it’s still got a lot of opportunity for a certain type of business.

Jerod Morris: I have a question that I wrote down: if you could only focus on one network starting today, would it be Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn? I’m guessing based on your answers to these last few questions that it’s really going to depend, and it’s going to depend going back to your goals, going back to your budget, going back on who you’re trying to reach. Would that be an accurate guess on my part?

What Social Platform(s) You Should Be Focusing On

Jason Keath: Yeah, definitely. Instagram’s younger. LinkedIn’s older. LinkedIn’s probably better for B2B. I’d say Instagram and Twitter are better for consumer. These are all generalities. Your business mileage may vary. For us, for instance, for Social Fresh, going out to social marketers, Twitter is probably the best of those three. Although, again, we’re looking at Instagram because there’s a lot of social marketers there’s typically a majority female audience now, for us at least, for our target, and they’re more likely to be on Instagram in a lot of ways. It just depends on your specific demographic target.

Jerod Morris: Let’s turn our attention to content development here a little bit. I thought it was interesting and encouraging that you ask people where the biggest amount of their time is spent, and the biggest chunk of time was spent in content development.

Do you think that we’ve moved past this old era where content marketing and social media marketing, especially paid social media marketing, were seen as mutually exclusive? It seems, to me, that the smartest marketers realize that content and social really feed off of each other and make each other more successful.

Why Smart Social Media Advertising Has a Content-Focused Approach

Jason Keath: Yeah. At the first Social Fresh conference, which I was planning in 2008, ‘content marketing’ as a term did not exist. Nobody was using it. We were talking about social media, and there’s still people trying to debate whether it was ‘social networking’ or ‘social media’ is the term.
We talked back then about blogging. We talked about video content. We talked about creating images. All of that was what people define as content marketing in a lot of ways now. It’s a little broader, but it’s always been the same conversation.

As social networks have gotten noisier, as the competition has gotten to be louder and louder, and harder to get your message out, the focus on more quality content, on a higher-quality product when it comes to video, blog posts, images, or what not, that’s created a subsection conversation that is content marketing. I think that’s great.

For us, we’ve always discussed content and social in the same breath. Email marketing is in that conversation. It’s all digital today, and it all touches itself. It’s all hyper-connected. I don’t see them as separate discussions at all.

Jerod Morris: No, and they certainly shouldn’t be. Again, for people who are doing it right, they’re not. When it comes to content, and specifically types of content, obviously blog post content works. I think images were the one that people who responded to your survey, that they invested the most time in and that they were seeing the most success from. But the one that seems to be growing the most is video.

How can digital entrepreneurs be leveraging video more in their social media marketing? Are there suggestions that you have for creating good, quality video that will work in social media that’s not cost-prohibitive? I know that’s a big challenge for folks who want to get into video.

Why Video Is So Hot Right Now

Jason Keath: Yeah, there’s so many levels of video, and you’re right. If we look at the top three social networks, in a lot of our questions, especially where people were seeing return and where they’re investing their time and money in the future, it’s roughly Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

If you look at what all three of those are focused on, it’s video. Instagram and their newest release, they have an entire section tab dedicated to video. They’re stringing together videos now, similar to a Snapchat story. Facebook’s Ad platform and their feed are focused, hyper-focused on video. Twitter is also following suit and focusing on video, trying not to fall behind there.

Purely as an opportunity standpoint, your opportunity to stand out in this noisy system we’ve described and your opportunity to build the trust with your smaller audiences, your customers, your fans, video is something you have to be looking at. To build on top of that, you have Snapchat as a big trend, which has a lot of video content. You have live streaming platforms like Facebook Live, Periscope, and Blab that are video focused.

There’s a lot of opportunity to experiment. I don’t think you need to focus purely on the storyboarding, the classic TV-commercial-style video where you’re storyboarding something, you’re doing product features, you’re doing high-quality video shoots. That’s super time-intensive, and if you are a big company, maybe that’s important for you. You look at what Lowe’s Home Improvement is doing on Snapchat, where they’re building stories through short video clips or short stills, that’s more of a mixed media experience.

Snapchat’s a great platform for relearning what video can do, and using the Snapchat story product can really, if you start playing around with that, testing it, trying to build narratives where there’s a beginning, middle, and end, and a purpose to your story, that’s really video editing. That’s what video editing has been forever, and this is a much easier way to create things like that. That’s a great education point.

And just one more piece of advice. Look to live-stream platforms to get comfortable with video. Look to Periscope. Look to Blab. Look to Facebook Live to play around with it, to get comfortable in front of the camera, and to experiment with lighting, with microphones, with everything. Just minimum viable product–get something out there, play with it, learn about it, and test it.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’s what’s so interesting about video. It seems intimidating, yet video doesn’t need to be perfect to work. It seems like what people really want is authenticity and something useful. You can do that in a video that isn’t the highest ‘visual quality’ as long as it tells a good story. Maybe it uses text to help extenuate the visuals–as long as audio is good, which is an interesting part about video is that a lot of people judge the quality of a video by the audio quality and the lighting, of course.

What other rules of thumb do you have for people who want to dip their toes into video with Periscope or with one of those, maybe want to put it out on Facebook and even do some advertising with it? What’s the minimum that folks need to do? Any rules of thumb you have for what people need to have in those videos?

How Even Inexperienced Digital Entrepreneurs Can Leverage Video

Jason Keath: Yeah, you want to tell a story. Facebook Video Ads are great to experiment with. You can almost build a funnel with three to four videos that you try to expose the same audience to.

For our conference, for instance, we might have a 30-second spot just with highlights. Then we might have really short clips of past attendees talking about it, testimonials. Then we might have short clips of speakers from previous conferences on stage showing the product. Then we might have videos of how the conference has actually changed businesses for the better and make that kind of the hard sell at the end–and trying to get people to watch all four of those.

You can do that really easily with Facebook Ads, with Twitter Ads, with Instagram ads now. Make them short. Make the first few seconds really visually engaging because a lot of these videos are muted. The phones are muted or the computers are muted when they’re first watching them. Making them click the volume button, making them engage through a highly visual engagement–people moving around, beautiful people, smiles, action, et cetera. Making sure you have that narrative, have that purpose of your video.

We do interviews like this for our podcast. We do Blab recordings, webinars, things like that. Just taking excerpts of something like that and putting it as a video ad or something is not necessarily the most engaging, so you might have to do a little editing. You might have to do a little bit of planning, of strategy, and testing.

Another key is to test your Facebook Ads, your Instagram photos, your Twitter Ads, and things like that. Learn which visuals are hitting well, and do something that’s very similar or those exact images as your first few seconds of your video. That’s really helpful as well to get people engaged.

Then a software tip, just a really simple software tip, I use something called ScreenFlow, which is $100. I use it on my Mac. It’s as good as any editing software out there. It actually makes some things a lot easier. If you’ve never done video editing, you’re going to have a learning curve. But you have to learn it, somebody in your company has to learn it, or you have to find somebody that you can outsource it to that’s quick and can move fast with these things and learn.

Jerod Morris: Hey, when you talked about that three-, four-video sequence, like what you guys are doing for the event, obviously, you have that last video that’s more the harder sell for the event. Where are you sending people in the first few videos? If they click over, are they going over to the landing page for the event? How do you work that in as you go through the funnel?

How (and Where) You Should Work Links from Your Videos into Your Funnel

Jason Keath: A lot of these platforms, you can easily list a link. You can pop up a link at the end of almost all the videos. Typically, what we do is always have our landing page link for all of them. If you have a longer sales cycle, you may want to take people through more of an education of your product.

For us, we’re typically very narrow in our advertising targets. We’ve found ways that we can really target people that are social media marketers with our ads, so there’s not as much product education. It’s just more convincing people of the quality of what we have to offer through testimonials and excerpts, but we try to include the link all throughout.

Typically, for us, people land on our conference landing page, they’ll check out the speakers. They’ll check out the topics. They’ll realize they’re interested. They may have to go get approval. They may have to submit for budget. They’ll come back again in a couple weeks. They’ll realize they got an email from us that the price is going up in two days, and then they’ll buy it then. It’ll come back to our landing page several times, and we build the ads around that same concept.

Jerod Morris: That’s a really interesting point and a good one. It’s important to have that level of self-awareness for your product and your company, to understand what your sales cycle is. Like you said, you guys have a pretty good understanding of how you’re targeting and what your sales cycle is. You can send people directly to that sales page.

Other people who maybe do have a longer sales cycle but they send people right to the page, they bounce, and they lose that person. Whereas, maybe getting someone to opt-in, taking them through a lead-nurturing sequence might have been a better decision.

Do you find that there is sometimes, for people who struggle with social media, a disconnect between where they’re sending people, the offer they’re presenting to people, and maybe what they actually should be based on what their product is and what their sales cycle really looks like?

The ‘Commitment Curve’ and How It Helps You Build Trust

Jason Keath: Yeah, totally. I think everyone has a nurturing problem. If we all got better at understanding the 17 steps between someone knowing about your company and buying your most expensive product, it would solve all of marketing’s problems.

For me, we look at something I learned a long time ago called the ‘commitment curve,’ which is you get people to take little steps, and that builds trust between you and them. Ultimately, you try to get them to accomplish a larger step, a larger trigger, goal, et cetera. That’s typically a large purchase. This is something political campaigns do really well where they get you to sign a petition as a first step in that commitment curve.

For us, our product, it costs a decent amount of money to attend Social Fresh conference. Mostly, it’s businesses paying for that for their marketers to attend, but we get everybody. We get a really good rating on people that get value out of it and return year after year. But It’s hard to convince someone– they just learned about the company, they’ve never heard about it before–drop $1,000 or more a ticket, depending on how much they’re getting involved in the conference.

So you have to build steps in-between. Our research report is a great introduction to our company. They can spend time with that. They can hear us on podcasts like this. We also have other reports that they can purchase that are a lower price point. We have webinars and things like that, experiences that are good content marketing where they can get to know us.

You have to build those steps along the way. If you’re jumping from an introduction to trying to cram a purchase into their news feed, then it’s a much lower conversion rate for everyone.

Jerod Morris: Jason, when I’m not here hosting The Digital Entrepreneur, I’m over hosting The Showrunner, talking about podcasting, or hosting one of the other three podcasts that I do. I’m big into podcasting. In looking at the report on that list of content, I was kind of disappointed to see podcasts so low on the list of content priorities for the companies that you surveyed.

I’m just wondering your thoughts on why that was. Is that because the medium itself is still gaining traction with content consumers? The medium itself doesn’t really lend itself well to quick consumption. Or something else? Why do you think people aren’t prioritizing podcast content more? Especially when it’s proven its ability to connect so well.

The Value of Podcasts

Jason Keath: I’m a big believer in podcasting. It falls into a larger category for us that we talk about called ‘trust content,’ which is spending more time and more meaningful moments with your audience–with a smaller audience typically.

Podcasts, there’s a lot of barriers. You can’t measure it very easily. Most people are turned off by that. The biggest barrier is it’s hard. It’s hard to get a good-quality audio. It’s hard to turn out consistent content. We’re getting ready to start season two of our podcast for Social Fresh. We believe in it, but we can’t do it year round. It’s just too much of a resource drag on our small team.

But we believe in it enough that we are doing it again. When I talk to people in person, one of the number one things they mention is, “Oh yeah, we love the Social Toolkit Podcast. We love listening to that.” It’s one of the number one things people mention to me as just an ad-hoc, unrequested piece of information, so I love that.

I’d also argue that it’s not that low on the list. You’re saying it’s basically number 12 out of a list we have that’s one through 12, but we had about 20 to 25 different content that were listed for that question. It’s in the top 12.

Jerod Morris: Ah, okay.

Jason Keath: It’s seven percent of people who create podcasts at least once a month. I think it’s growing. It’s young. It’s a hard production, really draining for folks, and most folks aren’t set up to do that yet–just like video.

Jerod Morris: Good, I’m glad it was higher than I thought. That’s good.

Jason Keath: I think it’s higher than you think. Also, there’s no quick podcasting. There’s quick video with Snapchat, live streaming, and short video on Twitter and Facebook, but there’s not really any quick podcasting that does any good for anyone. That makes it a little bit more difficult.

Jerod Morris: Hey, getting back to the video real quick. What’s the ideal length of a video? Maybe that’s an impossible question to answer. It may depend. Is there a rule of thumb for how long my videos should be if I wanted to have an impact in social media?

Finding the Sweet Spot for Video Length

Jason Keath: Yeah, 43 seconds, I would say, precisely.

Jerod Morris: Oh perfect.

Jason Keath: Typically, 30 seconds to two or three minutes is what a lot of people say. I’d say keeping it between 30 and probably 100 and 120 seconds–90 seconds is a sweet spot. That really challenges you.

What you’re going to have to end up doing is taking what is in your head as a video and breaking it up, usually into two, three, or four videos. You probably have too complex of an idea of what video you want to create.

For us, it was highlight reel, testimonials, speakers on stage, examples of that, and then the last video would be simply one case study telling that hard story at the end. Think of those very simple stories you can tell with video, and then try to tell them really well in this short timeframe.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Well, again, the report is at SocialFresh.com/Future. I really, really encourage everybody to go check that out. You can dig into some of these numbers that we’ve talked about today. Jason, obviously folks will go there, and they’ll be able to check out that report.

If there’s one element or takeaway from the report that you think all the digital entrepreneurs who are listening to this should walk away from this episode from, walk away from reading that report from, what would that be?

The Importance of Focus

Jason Keath: It’s to take a close look at what you’re doing and if you’re reaching the audience you want with the content and the social network that you’re using. There’s a lot of people that are focused on Facebook only, or they went the other direction and focused on all the social networks they can get access to.

My interesting part of the report was seeing that LinkedIn Ad performance, or seeing that there’s still people that answered Pinterest or Snapchat as an ROI answer. It was much, much smaller, but there are people getting a return out of SlideShare, out of webinars, out of podcasts. People are still listening to these things, and it’s important for every business to find their niche. You don’t have to do all of this. You shouldn’t be doing webinars, podcasts, infographics, and video on Snapchat, et cetera, et cetera.

Trim it all down. Find those niche opportunities for you that work for your business. If you’re an e-commerce fashion brand, look at Instagram. If you’re a B2B SaaS company, look at LinkedIn. Really focus on getting those right. There are so many people in these social networks now, you can focus on one and find a ton of opportunity. I think that’s a bigger trend that’s going to play out for social marketers moving forward.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, excellent advice, Jason. If you want to get more from Jason, you can follow him on Twitter @JasonKeath. Jason, thank you for your time and for your insight. This has been a lot of fun.

Jason Keath: Yeah I appreciate it, and I really, really highly encourage folks to check out our conference. If you go to SocialFresh.com/Rainmaker, we’ve just put up a temporary, for the next couple of weeks, $100 off. Check it out. We’d really love to see some Rainmaker, Copyblogger fans out there at the conference this year.

Jerod Morris: Absolutely. It’s SocialFresh.com/Rainmaker. All right, Jason, thank you, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Jason Keath: Thanks, Jerod. Appreciate it.

Jerod Morris: My thanks again to Jason Keath of Social Fresh for joining us on this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. Again, the URL for the report is SocialFresh.com/Future. If you are interested in their conference, it is SocialFresh.com/Rainmaker. Go check that out. Their conference is in August.

How to Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: Again, make sure today or tomorrow that you go to Rainmaker.FM/DCA. The price of Digital Commerce Academy is going up. Even if you get to this episode after Friday, May 27th, the price of one of those courses that is in there would be $495 if we sold it individually, and you’re getting four of those courses plus everything else for $595 per year. It’s an incredible deal.

We really want you to get in there, learn as much as you can so that you can take your digital business to the next level and be as successful as you can possibly be. That is the goal with The Digital Entrepreneur podcast. That is the goal of Digital Commerce Academy. We look forward to you taking advantage of it.

Again, Rainmaker.FM/DCA. If you’re listening to this on the day the episode goes out, make sure you go there to get the best price that you can get on Digital Commerce Academy.

All right, everybody, thank you very much for listening to this episode. We will be back next week with another brand-new episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. Until then, take care. We will talk to you soon.

The Transcript

Brian Clark s Lessons From a Decade of Developing Successful WordPress Products

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I’m your host, Jerod Morris, VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and this is episode No. 15 of The Digital Entrepreneur.

In today’s episode, we are going to expound on the topic of WordPress product development that we broached back in episode 13, so two episodes ago. That episode was titled WordPress Product Development: Start with the Business Problem and featured a snippet from a Digital Commerce Academy case study that I hosted with Chris Lema.

Today, I’m going to pick Brian Clark’s brain a bit about WordPress product development because he knows a thing or two about it, having developed themes, plugins, and now, of course, a revolutionary SaaS application for WordPress called the Rainmaker Platform.

With that said, let me bring Brian in here, of course, the founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital, so we can pick his brain. Brian, how are you?

Brian Clark: Don’t pick too hard. I’m getting up there.

Jerod Morris: Getting up there, yes, but you have plenty of experience to draw on.

Brian Clark: Now, Jerod. The answer is, “No, you’re still a young and devastatingly handsome man,” is what you’re supposed to say, but that’s okay. We’ll work on it.

Jerod Morris: Okay, so let’s mine this experience of yours, limited as it may be. At what point did you realize that developing products for WordPress would be the right path for Copyblogger back when you launched Copyblogger just as a blog but that didn’t have any products attached to it in the beginning?

The Point When Brian Realized That Developing WordPress Products Was the Right Path for Copyblogger

Brian Clark: Yeah, it wasn’t our first product. That was an online course, which we’ve talked about before, but it’s really a quite interesting story because WordPress started in 2005. I started playing with WordPress with my first site in late 2005 and then launched Copyblogger in 2006, January, on WordPress, totally open source. No paid products, no anything. There was no premium market whatsoever.

All throughout 2006, basically just worked on creating content, building the audience, and all that good stuff. My right-hand man at the time was Chris Pearson, who was my designer. He designed a really cutting-edge design for Copyblogger that really made a name for him in the design community. But he really didn’t want to take clients, and of course, I didn’t blame him. At that point, I was leaving any kind of client-based business and was looking for a different business model.

You go to 2007, and of course, that’s when we launched Teaching Sells. So it was 2008, and Chris had been developing themes for another project, a video project that we had. At that time, everything was free. You would develop a theme and give it away for free, and you would have links in the footer that would go wherever you want.

At that time, you may remember those good old days, Jerod, that was a hell of an SEO strategy, so that was really how you got paid with WordPress themes. I don’t remember the name of that theme. That shows you I am getting old, but it was massively popular. That’s because we distributed it off of Copyblogger. Makes sense.

We sold a property, the video property, and included that free theme with all those links for six figures. I used that money to basically support myself to develop Teaching Sells, so I didn’t have to take side projects anymore. Pearson went off and, I think, invested heavily in hookers and blow for a while there and then kind of disappeared. I’m just joking, Chris. Maybe I’m not. I don’t know.

Then Chris comes back, and he’s like, “You know what? I’m not making free themes anymore. I want to sell themes,” and I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Is anyone doing that?” And he goes, “Yeah, there’s this guy, Brian Gardner ” For those of you who are not making the connection, he’s a partner in our company right now. Brian is, not Chris.

He’s like, “Yeah, Brian Gardner is selling themes, making $30,000 a month,” and I’m like, “Okay, I’m listening.” That was the beginning of the WordPress premium market, Brian Gardner, our guy, and then we jumped in it pretty quickly thereafter, but we didn’t build a theme.

We built a design framework, and that was called Thesis. Chris started it on his own. Then he came to me, and he said, “Look, I want to make this big. I don’t want to do marketing. I don’t want to do anything. I just want to do the development.” I said, “Okay.”

This was in 2008, I believe, coming into the fall. We formed DIYthemes and he was doing about $10,000 a month in sales. We partnered up, and pretty soon that was $10,000 a day–and there you have it. The interesting thing there is that the premium market really blossomed because people were really paying for support more than anything.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. You know what’s interesting there is, obviously, you talked about the partnership. You partnered with somebody who was really good at the development part. You were really good at the marketing part. That seems to be a pretty good formula for folks to follow, for people who want to get out there with a product and maybe feel like they don’t have the development chops. That path of partnering, do you think that that’s something that people should consider if this is an area that they want to get into?

Why Starting with the Business Problem–As Chris Lema Discussed Two Weeks Ago–Is an Absolute Must

Brian Clark: Yeah, because I think there’s an incredibly large amount of rather savvy marketing-type people from a content standpoint. Maybe they have an audience. Look at Michael Hyatt. He ended up developing his own WordPress theme. It’s not like he’s like us and StudioPress. We have the most popular design framework on the planet. It’s on so many WordPress sites it boggles the mind, but as far as Michael is concerned, getting some developers to put that together because people love Michael and want to buy his theme, that’s a good product right there.

There’s a lot of different ways you can come at it without being a developer. Reflecting a little on what Chris Lema has already said, developers know code but they don’t necessarily know business. They don’t necessarily know marketing. They don’t know how to identify the business problem. You know what I’m saying? That’s why it’s such a good marriage.

Jerod Morris: Well, that’s the other interesting part of your story. You didn’t know when you started Copyblogger that you were eventually going to be developing themes, but you got into that. Part of that is because you started with a business problem when you started Copyblogger.

Again, as Chris Lema discussed on that last episode, starting with the business problem is so important, and it’s where people need to start from. In addition to that, and you said that you agree with that, what other tips do you have for where people should start and maybe mistakes that people make as they’re thinking about getting into the WordPress premium market?

The Biggest Mistake People Make When Trying to Create a Premium WordPress Product

Brian Clark: WordPress, for me, has always been, “What’s my problem?” Now, again, there are all sorts of plugins and themes now. Frankly, if you use them, you can identify things that could be better, and that’s a business problem. That’s an opportunity right there.

When we first started, you couldn’t do anything. People that don’t remember what it was like in 2006, 2007, when you couldn’t just enter an alternate title for Google and then have a different one on the page, things we take for granted, and it was stuff like that. It went hand-in-hand with Chris and I.

Chris would look at what made me upset that I couldn’t do it, that I had to ask him. I’m very independent, if you haven’t noticed, so I get mad when I can’t just do something that I think should be easy. Chris would go do it, and he’d laugh at me because I couldn’t code. But then I’m like, “Well, Chris, other people have these problems. Most of the content creators out there are like me, not like you.” That’s what a design framework was designed to do–take the code out of these very simple business and marketing-related functions that come with publishing content, so identifying the problem.

I saw something earlier, I think it was an article about developing your own business or developing a business, and it was, “Sit down and list 10 problems that you have right now, and then figure out very concrete ways how you would solve them.” That’s all we did with WordPress. We were users of WordPress, but here’s the interesting thing. I think this is applicable today as much as it was back then.

When we developed products, the WordPress community at that time, and really, kind of now, that’s developers and designers. Just remember that you are not building for them. The problems I had are not the same thing that they would have.

That’s why we owned it. We thought like businesspeople instead of like developers. Really, I thought like myself because these were my problems. So that’s the biggest mistake, number one, starting with something like, “Oh, wouldn’t this be cool.” That’s a developer mindset. Sometimes you get lucky, and it works–but don’t mistake luck for strategy.

The worst advice I ever see given out there is someone who got lucky and then they tell people, “Well, just make whatever you want.” Come on. Just because you got lucky doesn’t mean there wasn’t an existing market desire. There was. You just didn’t know it. You got lucky. It’s much better to find an existing problem and then solve it. Easy.

Jerod Morris: Luck is not a business strategy.

Brian Clark: Luck is not a business strategy. It helps, but it’s not.

Jerod Morris: So let me ask you this. It’s interesting about WordPress. I remember when I first got into WordPress, and what was so cool about it was, obviously, that WordPress itself was free and there were tons of free themes and tons of free plugins. It felt like you could do all of this stuff for free. And obviously, you realize the limitation of these free plugins, these free themes, and you start to see this premium market crop up.

Yet paying for stuff on WordPress, there was a point there where it was still kind of weird, but there was obviously a big opportunity because there weren’t that many people doing it. You contrast that with now where people just understand that, for a good theme, for good plugins that work and are going to be supported, you’re going to pay for them.

Yet there are a lot more people out there doing it now. It might seem like the opportunity isn’t quite as great as it was before, but people are more conditioned now to paying for things. It’s an interesting balance. What do you think now of the opportunity to get in for WordPress products?

How Brian Views the Current Level of Opportunity in the Premium WordPress Marketplace

Brian Clark: I think it’s awesome. You make a good point because trailblazers can reap some big rewards. They’re the first to the goldmine. They’re also the ones who take the arrows in the back. That part is gone. An interesting illustration here is in the WordPress managed-hosting environment, which we’re part of with Synthesis.

Think about that. When we started out with WordPress, it was just install that was the selling point. “You can install WordPress with one click on blah, blah, blah,” and we always had trouble. When Copyblogger would hit the Digg homepage–that’s dating myself–and just thousands of people just stampeded us at one time, you know how I spent my day? With my hosting admin trying to keep the site up because WordPress is, without being optimized a certain way, and you know this

Jerod Morris: I remember those days.

Brian Clark: Exactly. You remember why you were part of the original team that became Synthesis?

Jerod Morris: It came into being for that reason.

Brian Clark: Exactly, because publishers who were successful would lose their minds if they succeed at their goal of getting viral traffic and then the site goes down. It used to be a real struggle–again, a business problem. That’s where Synthesis came from. That’s where WP Engine came from. Pagely was actually the first one.

It’s that, “Hey, WordPress is special,” in many senses of the word. It may power 25 percent of the Internet, but it has its own issues with its database structure and all that kind of thing. So you had to have hosting optimized for WordPress, not just whatever you want to do, GoDaddy-type stuff.

Again, it was a business problem, and hosting was our biggest problem. I never wanted to get into the hosting business, but once I realized that I wanted to do Rainmaker, I realized we got to get hosting down. I said, “Well, in the meantime, let’s host ourselves,” and that’s how we all started talking to each other. You were in the mailroom also doing server stuff, and now you’re VP of marketing. How the hell does that happen?

Jerod Morris: Yeah. I don’t know. A lot of hard work and people giving me opportunities. But yeah, that’s how that whole thing came into being. I was running sites that were just crashing nonstop, and Synthesis was developed exactly to do that–to take the idiosyncrasies of WordPress and host them in a better way so that it was more efficient, so that it was better.

Brian Clark: Yeah, so I guess to answer your actual question, there’s always going to be the next set of problems. What was good enough before is not going to be good enough now. I would say, number one, you need to have a very carefully constructed and just step-by-step approach to approaching how to come up with a viable idea, and we can help you with that.

The other thing you need, I think, is to be a participant. You have to use WordPress, and you have to use some of these free and/or premium plugins. Gravity Forms was one of the earlier other premium products because forms are hard.

When Gravity Forms came out, we were all like, “Oh, thank you, Carl.” Then I look at it now, and Gravity Forms is really hard to use–and you’ve seen how many different form companies? I think Jared Atchison has a new product. It’s a simple form builder. Look at that.

Gravity Forms has been the leader, and if you have the mindset that, “Oh, well, I can’t do that,” no, you can because there’s always things there. All you have to do is observe and then, again, have this methodology to go by in order to evaluate. “Am I on the right track? Is there a market for this? How do I get the word out?”

Jerod Morris: The other point of trepidation I think people have is just about building on WordPress itself, building a product for WordPress itself. Are we, do you think, past the point of wondering if we should trust WordPress, or should digital entrepreneurs stay skeptical and mindful that they’re building products on top of an infrastructure that they don’t control?

Whether Digital Entrepreneurs Should Feel Comfortable Building on Top of WordPress

Brian Clark: Well, number one, I’ll take open source over anything else any day. Open source has a lot of different eyes on it. It has a lot of smart people involved. It’s decentralized. Automattic does not control WordPress even though they do have influence. I’ve never even thought twice about that, really, because it’s open source.

The interesting thing about being really ambitious, of course, is if you don’t like the direction WordPress is going, you can fork it. That’s the beauty of open source. For example, WordPress is starting to disappear in Rainmaker, and that’s the goal. Not that we have anything against WordPress. It’s we’re trying to build something bigger that’s in line with our own vision.

And WordPress, by going to the API functionality and all that, is right on board with this. They want you to build these unique hosted things that were never really contemplated at the beginning of WordPress. In that sense, WordPress is entrepreneur-friendly–and more so than it’s ever been.

But if for some reason you didn’t like the direction WordPress was going and you’re heavily invested in it, you just fork it. That may seem like a radical thing, but that’s how WordPress came to be in the first place. Matt forked another CMS and created WordPress.

Jerod Morris: One of the other challenge is about developing these premium products for WordPress, and you mentioned it. People are paying for support, and there’s this ongoing maintenance that needs to happen–whether it’s security updates, whether it’s compatibility, whether it is support. What is the best way to handle the ongoing maintenance of a WordPress product?

The Best Way to Handle the Ongoing Maintenance of a WordPress Product

Brian Clark: I think it’s a business opportunity. You’ve seen a lot of these companies that, for a flat, recurring subscription fee, they’ll fix your little problems. They’ll maintain for you. They’ll make sure your plugins are updated. Rainmaker solves all of that problem from a SaaS standpoint, but you also have services providers who do that. It’s a business issue.

We just had a rash of security issues with I don’t want to name the plugins because I may get something wrong, but I know poor Chris Garrett was having a bad week last week because there were security issues. That’s the beauty of Rainmaker because we hear about it and it’s fixed for everyone right then, but I see it as a business opportunity.

It was for us. It is for these companies who’ll do this $100 a month maintenance stuff. It’s not an issue. It’s an issue of diligence, and the problem is that site owners, too often, don’t have that diligence. Therefore, you find, yet again, another business opportunity. So I guess I’m turning that around and saying, if you’re an entrepreneur and there is an issue with sites having security and maintenance issues, what can you do about that?

Jerod Morris: Well, this topic of WordPress product development is one that we’re excited about and interested in diving into more inside of Digital Commerce Academy. We actually have a course coming out about this very topic. Chris Lema who, again, was a guest two episodes ago and has been involved in a case study inside of Digital Commerce Academy as well, he’s actually teaching this course.

It’s called Themes, Plugins, and More: Building WordPress Products the Smart Way. It’s out now with lessons about ideation and business models and product development launch mistakes. A really, really good, thorough, easy-to-digest course, but that has a lot of really meaty and important material in it. I guess my first question for you, Brian, is why is Chris teaching this course instead of you?

And Why Chris Lema Is Teaching the New Digital Commerce Academy Course on Building WordPress Products, Instead of Brian

Brian Clark: I’ll tell you. It never even was a consideration for me that it wouldn’t be Chris–unless he said no, of course. Chris is a great teacher, first and foremost, and that’s important. There are lots of people who are very, very smart with WordPress, but they may not be the best person to teach. Chris is. Here’s the great thing. We’ve done design frameworks, themes, plugins, and hosting, so who’s more qualified to teach WordPress product development?

Well, Chris, actually, because he knows our business, and he’s worked with everyone out there, every major player. Actually, a lot of smaller companies, too, so Chris has, believe it or not, a wider breadth of experience than we do even in this company just from the fact that he’s out there more as an independent WordPress guy. He learns from everyone. He understands everyone’s model, not just ours, so for me it was a no-brainer.

Jerod Morris: Chris will also be speaking at Digital Commerce Summit coming up this October as well.

Brian Clark: Yup, obviously with this course, it’s the nuts and bolts of how to get started, and it’s invaluable. It would be nice to have had that in 2008, but again, it was a different time. I think in his live presentation, Chris is going to really up the ante as far as what is happening right now, so the course that he’s teaching, that’s the fundamentals. This is what you need. If you follow this process, you’re going to have a great opportunity to succeed. The overall presentation at Summit is more, “Okay, where do we go from here?

How to Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: If you listening right now, if you want to learn more about how to build a WordPress product the right way, as well as other digital products like online courses, you can always go to Rainmaker.FM/DCfree and activate your free membership to Digital Commerce Academy.

But I really want to stress that, for the next week from when this episode comes out–and this episode is coming out on Thursday, May 19th, so for the next week until Friday, May 27th–you should really consider starting your paid Digital Commerce Academy membership. The reason is that the price is going up. We’re adding Chris’ course. I have another course that I’m doing on social media advertising.

Brian Clark: Yeah, talk a little bit about that, Jerod, because I looked at the outline, and I’m pretty excited.

Jerod Morris: I’m excited about it, too. It’s something that we’ve been working a lot more on at Rainmaker Digital–using Facebook, using LinkedIn, using Twitter in combination with what we’re already doing from a content marketing perspective to really supercharge what we’re doing.

We know that we have good products. We know that we have good content to educate people about what they need to be successful with those products. That’s really where the paid advertising can pay huge dividends, is when you just need to find the exact people that you’re looking for and direct them to your content. That’s what we’re using it to do.

We’ve learned a lot. We’re continuing to learn a lot, and I’m going to use that course to distill a lot of this information that we’re using from tests that we’re running ourselves and just from conversations that we’ve had with other people who really know their stuff and what we’ve learned from them. Really, really excited about getting that out there, and that’s part of this price raise. These two courses are going to be a part of Academy.

When you have your Academy membership, you have access to all of it. Right now membership requires an investment of $395 per year. After Friday, May 27th, that price goes up to $495 per year.

Brian Clark: Nope, nope.

Jerod Morris: No? Am I wrong?

Brian Clark: It’s $595.

Jerod Morris: Oh.

Brian Clark: There’s no way. The value of what’s already in there for $395 is criminal, and my online course on building a training business, I see people out there selling for $2,000, $3,000. Guess what? These guys learned how to make courses from me in Teaching Sells–and good for them–but do you really want to pay $2,000 or $3,000 when you could pay $395? Then, on top of it, you’ve got your course coming up. You’ve got Chris Lema’s WordPress product course. No way.

We should be charging $2,000 for what’s in there right now, but we’re not. But it is going up to $595, and further, right now you can buy a ticket to the Summit and effectively get your first year of Academy for free, however you want to think about it, or you’re getting your Summit ticket for only $400. Whatever works for you. That’s going away as well.

So there’s some opportunities here to really do yourself a favor, but we’ve been warning people that, hell yeah, this is a great deal, but it’s not going to last forever because that’s not smart. It’s not smart for us, and it’s not smart for anyone when you look at the value that’s in there. So yes, it will become $595, not $395, at the end, which you said was what, May 27th?

Jerod Morris: Yep. Friday, May 27th.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and also, if you’re interested in the Summit, you need to buy that ticket before that date because why not get a free year of Academy?

Jerod Morris: Okay, well, breaking news here on The Digital Entrepreneur. Price is going up to $595, not $495. I agree with the reason why, Brian. Of course, when you lock in that lower price now you get access you lock in that price forever, just so you know, that annual investment. That is locked in forever.

Brian Clark: Which is a steal when you consider how much content we’re going to create over the years. It’s ridiculous.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, but it’s not just courses. There’s coaching, regular coaching, Q&As, case studies, all of that, so if you are interested, if you want to learn more about building digital products and selling them the right way, go to Rainmaker.FM/DCA, and again, do it before Friday, May 27th. Lock in that lower price. Get access to Chris Lema’s course, my course, Brian’s course, and everything else that is in there.

We hope to see you inside of Digital Commerce Academy, and we hope to see you next week on another brand-new episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. I’ll be here. Brian will be here. We will talk about something to enlighten you and make you a better digital entrepreneur.

Until then, have a great week, and we’ll talk to you on the next episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

Brian Clark: Take care, everyone.

The Transcript

How Virtual Reality May Shape the Future of Digital Commerce

Voiceover: You are listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/digitalcommerce. That’s Rainmaker.FM/digitalcommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. This is episode number 14 of The Digital Entrepreneur. I’m your host, Jerod Morris, VP of Marketing for Rainmaker Digital. I am joined once again this week by the founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital, Mr. Brian Clark. Brian, how are you?

Brian Clark: Not too bad. What’s going on with you?

Jerod Morris: Not much. It seems like in the time since you were with us, which is one episode ago — you missed one episode, you were here the episode before — you’ve been kind of geeking out on some virtual reality stuff. You sent me some links today that were really interesting reading, and we decided to make today’s episode about virtual reality and how virtual reality may shape the future of digital commerce. I’m excited to talk about this with you.

Our Own Personal (and Very Different) Journeys to VR Awareness

Brian Clark: Yeah. When we launched DigitalCommerce.com, Digital Commerce Institute, that was one of the “this is what’s next” type teasers. It’s been something that you can’t escape, the news about virtual reality in general. But I started looking at things in a very specific manner on accident, by listening to a podcast of all things, and got some information that I didn’t know. It got my wheels really turning. Virtual reality has been this bust thing since … Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is the consummate science fiction novel about virtual reality. It’s also hilarious. There were early attempts in the ’90s at it. There were earlier attempts in the first decade at the turn of the century, and they were disasters because it wasn’t time for it yet. I think to some people that provoked some skepticism.

I also remember that, starting in about 2001, every year was “year of mobile.” Well, guess what? It didn’t happen till the iPhone was invented. Now you can’t get away from it. People who wrote it off and say, “Oh, yeah, you said that last year,” all of a sudden mobile has become the dominant form of traffic. You’ve got major publishers without responsive design at a minimum, much less mobile first. I’m just saying you’ve got to pay attention, because this isn’t going to be like mobile adoption. There’s too much money. The technology is too good. Facebook didn’t pay 2 billion for Oculus for fun or because Mark didn’t know what to do with his piggy bank. It’s a big deal, and we’ll talk a little bit about that. I think it’s going to happen much faster than people think.

I guess that’s really what we want to talk about today. What are some of the signs? What are some of the things you need to be thinking about? Because if you want to get involved at an entrepreneurial level, it’s a good time to do so while disruption and change is happening as opposed to when it’s all figured out, the big players are set, the standards are set, and all of a sudden you feel locked out.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and I do want to let people know we’re going to talk about some links and even some examples of virtual reality, like some 360 video examples. Go to digitalcommerce.com/podcast and you’ll find the show notes for this episode, How Virtual Reality May Shape the Future of Digital Commerce. All the links and even those videos will be in the show notes. That’s where you can find those, at digitalcommerce.com/podcast.

It’s interesting, Brian, because I actually talked about this with Scott Ellis a couple of months ago. We did one of our Cutting-Edge webinars inside of Digital Commerce Academy and we talked about this, exactly what you were talking about with how you hear about virtual reality right now. Obviously, we’ve been hearing about it for a while, seeing it in movies, and it always seemed like this thing that was way out there. Maybe at some point in the future this would happen. We really are coming to that point where the future is almost now.

It’s not quite ready, because if you click on some of these examples … Like The Washington Post did this cool virtual reality online thing, I don’t even know what to call it, this presentation about Mars. I clicked in it in one web browser and it didn’t work, it didn’t load properly. It was kind of clunky. It worked a little bit better in another browser. I think sometimes people see that and think, “Oh, okay, so this isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be.” But it’s so important to remember that these are early iterations and it will continue to grow and develop and get better.

Like you said, that’s why thinking about it now is so important, because there’s still that big opportunity — not necessarily to be a first mover, but to certainly be an early mover and figure out where this is going, like you said, before everybody else stakes their claim to it.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Well, you have to realize that the first headsets that are out there are on the low end. Only 200 people in the world have an Oculus Rift at this point. This is the technology that the people at Facebook saw — invented by a teenager, believe it or not.

Jerod Morris: Oh my.

Brian Clark: They were so blown away that they paid 2 billion. Two billion for a technology. That’s because Facebook is going to turn into a virtual reality walled garden. If they can dominate it that way … Jeez, you think we have problems with Facebook now? It’s going to get worse.

The Challenges of Integrating VR With the Open Web

Here’s what really got my imagination stimulated about the possibilities: I did not realize that people over at Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, have had this project WebVR, which is a standard for the open web. Any website, with the push of a button and the headset, obviously, becomes a virtual reality experience. We talk about websites being experiences and adaptive and interactive and all that. Well, where do you think this is heading? Again, it may happen quicker than you’d think.
Here’s the key to it, the fact that the open web is a viable possibility due to the work these guys have been doing. Two years ago people thought they were insane, and now Google has adopted the WebVR standard and these guys at Mozilla have developed the A-Frame.

Jerod Morris: A-Frame.

Brian Clark: What A-Frame does is allow existing web designers to develop virtual reality. It’s a whole new mindset. Designers are about to be even more important than they’ve ever been. It’s an amazing thing. I bet Rafal’s over there playing with something like this right now.

Jerod Morris: Probably.

Why Facebook’s Metaverse Seems Inevitable — and What it Will Mean

Brian Clark: Great designers went from web design to UX design. That’s Rafal’s path. This is the next level, augmented reality and virtual reality. Here’s the key. If you don’t want Facebook to be the owner of the metaverse — VR nerd technology, again, used in Snow Crash, the science fiction novel … But that’s what they’re going to do. If we develop the web, it makes so much more sense … Remember the conversations we had about, “No, you don’t need a content app.” The trend is looking counter intuitively that apps are going to disappear, because the open web works. The open web — this is what it was designed for, linking, sharing, search, all of these things.

Right now you have this hardware coming out, and each one is tied to its own environment, like the PlayStation. I think Oculus will eventually be cross-platform, but it’s mainly probably going to work over at Facebook. If these guys and Google, which has a very highly vested interest in making this happen — if the open web gets developed properly, no one’s going to be able to control the walled garden. It’s going to have to be cross-platform, and that platform is the web. That’s exciting. That’s like the beginning of the commercial web back in the ’90s.

Jerod Morris: It is. It’ll be interesting to see how that happens, because one of the things … This is an article that we read from fastcodesign.com called “Why A Virtual Reality Web May Never Happen.” You talked about one of the challenges, which is that there’s going to be a need for designers with a new set of skills to do this. The other one is that UX challenge. It’s very simple with websites. There are hyperlinks and everything is linked together and we understand that. I think a lot of people — especially people like me who didn’t necessarily grow up reading science fiction and didn’t really get into virtual reality and 360-degree video until a couple years ago so it’s still kind of new — it’s hard to grasp what that will look like when we’re so used to a two-dimensional, hyperlinked web.

Brian Clark: Are you a gamer at all?

Jerod Morris: I’m not a gamer.

Brian Clark: I’m not either. It’s funny, because I’m so fascinated by this stuff, but I don’t play video games. I have a Galaga/Ms. Pac Man machine in my basement. That’s, to me, a video game. I’m old school. I never got into the ultra-realistic first-person shooter-type stuff. It’s probably much better now, but I just felt like the gameplay wasn’t there. Then I also grew up and quit reading comic books, so …

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: From a business standpoint, I’m fascinated by it. I think the same way you do, that perhaps I need to experience more of where gaming is at. I just shared an article, I think it was in Further, about the future of work is being developed through gaming. What they really mean is virtual reality, 3D environments. Think about our company, 65 people all over the world. We make do with Trello and Skype and whatever.

Jerod Morris: Slack.

Brian Clark: Slack. The tools that we have. But also realize how much work we get done when we’re in the same “room.” What if that’s a virtual room? It was pretty enlightening about how that could actually accelerate the pace at which the traditional “everyone in one office building” type approach is coming to an end already. The thing that’s going to bring a lot of people along is that, yes, you can really get that kind of interaction. I probably will give in to my son and get him an Xbox. Maybe I’ll figure things out that way, by being more absorbed in it. You really can’t understand how this is going to work if you’re not participating, I guess.

How VR Will Impact Online Learning and the Impact on Online Courses and Membership Sites

Brian Clark: We see the business possibilities, obviously. What’s the main one that comes to mind? I showed you a great article from Wired. Well, online education. We use learning management systems to do the best we can to create a highly-polished presentation of course materials, interactive elements, quizzes, worksheets, whatever the case may be. Forums for questions after the fact. What if you’re actually there? What if you’re teaching a class like it’s a classroom, which wouldn’t be possible unless you got everyone to travel, but now you’ve got more of that type of environment? That’s the first application that immediately comes to our minds, as obviously we are big proponents of and practitioners of online training.

Jerod Morris: This article was what really solidified it in my mind and made it make sense. Because just reading about the virtual web, okay, you can kind of start to get that. But this really made it make sense. This is an article by Brian Shuster, “Virtual Reality and Learning: The Newest Landscape for Higher Education.” I’m just going to read a paragraph from it, because this is what really solidified it for me.

“Virtual worlds promise to deliver the best aspects of both real-world classrooms and online distance learning into a single platform. With tools that provide avatars that represent the educators and the students, voice and video capabilities, PowerPoint and other collaborative whiteboard technologies and group and private messaging chat, educators are finding that the newest generation of virtual worlds can simplify the lecture and presentation process, allow students to ask/answer questions to their teacher or each other without interrupting the lecture, socialize and learn in a very streamlined manner. All of this done with the convenience and cost efficiency of distance learning.”

When you start to think about the possibilities there for online courses, for membership sites, for forums, like you said, now it starts to make sense.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s the initial killer app. Outside of gaming, I think that’s the first thing that comes to mind. You could imagine a future iteration of the Rainmaker Platform. We talk about the logged-in experience and access and all this. Well, you register and you enter, essentially, Second Life — the virtual reality platform that’s been around forever — but it’s a completely different thing. It’s almost like you’re outside the club and then you walk in and you’re like, “Whoa.” That pops to mind. That, to me — there’s a lot of room for imagination still, but that makes sense. I’m with you. That’s the first thing where I go, “I’d love to have that so I can create a more interactive environment for learning and teaching.”

Jerod Morris: Think about this. Think about you’re getting ready to prepare for a presentation. If you could walk into a virtual world that somehow approximates where you’re going to be giving a presentation and actually have an audience or get some type of feedback while you’re giving your presentation, you could really do really useful presentation prep doing that inside of a virtual world.

Brian Clark: You know what’s interesting about that? The first “serious” uses for virtual reality is overcoming phobias. One is a fear of public speaking. They actually have simulations where people go and present to a virtual audience as a way to get over it. If you have a fear of heights, you can walk across a plank over a chasm in a virtual world as a way to try to overcome your fears. Here’s the weird thing about virtual reality. I’m reading some really heady stuff about how our brains respond. Like when you’re dreaming, you think it’s real, right? Our brains aren’t very good at determining what’s “real” and what’s not. There are a lot of philosophical implications here, that once you enter a virtual word and once they’re realistic enough, that will be reality for some people. That’s kind of getting beyond the scope of this conversation, but it’s a trip.

Jerod Morris: It is. I don’t remember who exactly did it, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence of people inside of a virtual world and they have them step close to a cliff and then they say, “Jump.” In real life the person’s just standing there with a headset on, but inside of the headset they’re walking over to a cliff. They can’t, physically, in their physical room, jump, because in the virtual reality where they are they feel like they’re going to be jumping off this cliff. It totally short circuits their brain.

Brian Clark: Exactly. Yeah, it’s real to them. That’s how our brains work. Again, I think you can see some kind of staggering … That’s why it’s captured our imaginations for so long from a science fiction standpoint. But we’re here and it’s about to start happening. Again, my hunch is that development on this is going to be a little bit more rapid than people might think.

How VR is Being Used Currently, and Why it Strongly Suggests that Brands are Next

Brian Clark: Here’s a question I have for you, though. Reading the Wired article, I’m like, “Yeah, I get it, online teaching.” But then the third article was from Adweek and it’s talking about publishers — like you mentioned how you went and checked out some of these examples — are creating VR experiences. The gist of the Adweek article is that brands are next. What does that mean? That means virtual reality content marketing. Now this is getting crazy.

Jerod Morris: Yup. What the Adweek article really focuses on, too, is 360-degree storytelling. Again, for people who think about virtual reality and think that you have to be sitting there with a headset on and that that’s the only way that you can consume it, or that those are the people that you’re going to be creating it for — this is on the web. It’s like a step between, this 360-degree storytelling. If you’ve seen these videos on YouTube, and again, we’ll embed these in the show notes, but you hit play and it’s the simple, two-dimensional view that you’re used to. But up in the left-hand corner there is a little circle with some arrows. It’s basically suggesting you can click into the video and drag it around, and it’s a 360-degree video. It’s sitting there at that middle point, but you can drag around and look and see everything else that is going on within 360 degrees around that point.

I actually saw this for the first time. Mark Cuban actually donated a bunch of money to my alma mater, Indiana, and they’re one of the first schools to have this technology. For the Hoosier Hysteria earlier this year, the first basketball practice, they did an example of this 360-degree video where they put it in the arena. So you’re watching the video and you can drag it around. The video was right underneath the basketball court. Imagine you’re standing underneath a basketball court looking out onto the court as players are warming up, and imagine that’s your video view. Now click into the video, drag it to the left, and now you can see the players on the bench and then people seated in the stands. You keep dragging around. Now you can see the band behind the basket. You drag around and you can see the rest of the fans, all the way until you get back to the players on the court.

That’s out there right now, and that’s what a lot of these publishers are doing, are these 360-degree videos. Obviously, then, the next step is the completely immersive virtual reality scenes. This is a step before that. We’re seeing Huffington Post do this. The Washington Post is doing this. A lot of the big publishers are. Like you said, what that means is next the brands get into it, and it has huge implications for content marketing.

Brian Clark: It does, and you wonder if the little guy is going to be able to afford to participate. But again, I think that’s why the open web and open source tools that are being developed, are so key, and that savvy designers start to … Because the technology developed by Mozilla for existing web designers is designed to extrapolate from existing metaphors. Eventually I think we’ll transcend that, but, again, you’ve got to go step-by-step.

I think also, people, with the fiasco that was Google Glass, they’re going to say, “Yeah, whatever. I’m not wearing that on my face.” Well, maybe not walking down the street, but let’s look at the monitor metaphor. When did we just accept that you’re supposed to stare a screen? Why wouldn’t you, when you’re working at your desk, just have on a headset or whatever — that will get better, obviously — that’s augmented reality when you need to have presence in the room and it’s virtual reality when you need to go immersive? That’s going to happen.

Again, things to think about, things to start paying attention to. I know I will. I may even do my keynote at Digital Commerce Summit on this topic. It’s like when I first threw myself into the web in the late ’90s from a business standpoint, and then I immersed myself in the blogging world in 2005 before launching Copyblogger. It feels like that again, and that makes my spidey-sense tingle.

Jerod Morris: I thought you were going to say you were going to do your keynote in virtual reality.

Brian Clark: In virtual reality? Yeah, I’m going to be like Zuckerberg and hand out a headset to everyone in the audience. I don’t think so.

How You Should Be Preparing for This Inevitable Future

Jerod Morris: Let me ask you this, though, because this topic is so interesting, but it’s getting near to being here and I still think for a lot of people it seems kind of out there. If we’re trying to boil this down to action items for today someone can take …? Obviously, again, go into digitalcommerce.com/podcast, find the show notes for this episode, and read these articles, see the examples. That’s the first step so you can get an understanding of what’s happening and what’s to come. What else can people do really with this right now? How should they be preparing for this inevitable future?

Brian Clark: I think we’re going to be talking about this more on this show, so there’s that, but here’s my takeaway. Audio isn’t going anywhere. It’s not like we made a mistake moving heavily into audio. It still has advantages that other formats don’t. People still want text articles, that’s not going away either. I think what you’re seeing is important. The shift to everything from YouTube to Facebook video, that’s just a precursor to this next coming wave. The streaming video services right now that are interactive and all that … It’s not a stretch of the imagination for the technology to present, when Decker does his little Vine … it’s not Vine.

Jerod Morris: Periscope.

Brian Clark: Periscope, right, that you could feel like you’re in the room with him. Everything right now involving video is just a stepping stone to VR. I’m quite sure that everyone’s mind is on the topic of, “Sure, it’s video, it’s the most popular form of online content, but it’s only a step towards where we’re heading.” I’m not going to jump into virtual reality. What we need to do is start doing video.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. You know what’s interesting about that is even something like Snapchat is training people to communicate in more of a realistic way. It’s not video, but the way that you communicate there is certainly much more almost virtually real than you do other places.

Brian Clark: Like you’re with a person instead of the … Again, metaphors that we’ve had on the web for 25 years.

Jerod Morris: Right, exactly. It does seem like a lot of those trends and the technologies that are being adopted are going in that direction. Very interesting. We will continue talking about this here on The Digital Entrepreneur as we move forward. Not every episode, of course, but it will be a recurring topic. It’s something, as I said, that we already talked about inside of Digital Commerce Academy. Inside of Digital Commerce Academy we have —

Brian Clark: That’s a really good webinar, by the way.

Jerod Morris: Thank you. Yeah, Scott Ellis, who is the host of Technology Translated, joined me for that. It’s called How Virtual Reality Could Impact Digital Commerce in the Near Future. It’s one example of our cutting-edge webinars. These are just webinars where we try and keep you on the cutting-edge of digital commerce, talk about tools and technologies and tactics you may not have tried yet, really that you may not have even heard of yet, but that are going to influence the future of digital commerce. It’s one of the big benefits of membership to Digital Commerce Academy.

You can see an example of one of our cutting-edge webinars with a free membership. If you go to rainmaker.fm/dcfree you can activate a free membership to Digital Commerce Academy. You’ll be able to try out one of those cutting-edge webinars. Then, of course, if you upgrade to a paid membership you’ll be able to get every one of those cutting edge webinars that we put out. Go to rainmaker.fm/dcfree to get your free membership. We look forward to seeing you in there and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. Thanks for being here, Brian.

Brian Clark: Not a problem. Hey, one quick request, listeners.

Jerod Morris: Yes.

Brian Clark: If you could go over to iTunes and give us your thoughts about the show, The Digital Entrepreneur, with a review or rating at iTunes, it helps quite a bit. I thought I’d just throw that in.

Jerod Morris: I like that. Subscribe while you’re over there if you’re not subscribed already. All right, everybody. Thank you. I’ll talk to you next week.

The Transcript

WordPress Product Development: Start with the Business Problem

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I’m your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. Excited to be talking with you again this week. On this week’s episode, we’re going to talk about, as we often do here on The Digital Entrepreneur, about product creation.

Questions You Need to Be Asking During Product Creation

Jerod Morris: When it comes to creating a product, a digital product, we don’t want to start with the product. We don’t want to start even with a platform. We want to start with a problem. We want to start with a specific problem that we can solve in a specific way for a specific group of people.

Of course, here on The Digital Entrepreneur and over at DigitalCommerce.com, the specific way that we’re going to solve this problem is with a digital good or service. But what kind of digital good or service? For whom? And why? Those are the questions that we need to answer if we want to make a smart choice about what kind of product or service we are going to create and sell.

The Digital Commerce Summit (and Chris’ Role)

Jerod Morris: A guy who has plenty of experience helping people answer these questions is Chris Lema, who blogs daily about product strategy and WordPress at ChrisLema.com. Chris, of course, is also a highly sought-after public speaker, which is why we invited him to speak at Digital Commerce Summit coming up this October.

Digital Commerce Summit, if you don’t know already, is the premier live educational and networking event for people who create and sell digital products and services. I will be speaking at Digital Commerce Summit. Brian will be speaking, and he is currently hard at work, working on the curriculum for Digital Commerce Summit, working with all of the speakers, including Rand Fishkin, who will be there as a keynote, and of course, Chris Lema, as I just mentioned, will be there as well.

As of this episode, going live on May 5, 2016, early bird ticket prices are still available. Go to Rainmaker.FM/Summit to get more information, to get those early bird ticket prices. Then join us in Denver in October to really dive deep into the underlying fundamentals when it comes to creating and selling digital products and services.

Setting the Stage for the Case Study Snippet

Jerod Morris: That’s what we’re going to talk about today on this episode with Chris. Chris is my ‘guest’ on today’s episode of The Digital Entrepreneur, but he’s not actually here. He’s my guest by way of me playing you a snippet from a case study webinar that he and I did together inside of Digital Commerce Academy. This was several weeks ago, but I’ve just been waiting for an opportunity to bring you a snippet from this event. It was a great event. I learned a lot from this event.

This case study, obviously, when you have a free membership to Digital Commerce Academy, you get three case studies included, for free. Just as your free membership when you sign up, you can get those. This is not one of the case studies that is included in the free membership, so you do have to be a full paying member to see it. But it is just yet another reason why Digital Commerce Academy is such a great value.

Chris and I chatted for about an hour about the common mistakes that he sees digital entrepreneurs making when they enter the WordPress premium marketplace. The clip that I’ve pulled out to play for you today, in this episode, is from a section of the webinar in which Chris is explaining the three questions that digital entrepreneurs need to be asking themselves.

The first is, how will you achieve the necessary reach? The second is, who is your target audience?
The third is, what is the business problem?

Chris and I dive into the importance of starting with a business problem. Then we discuss three brilliant examples of companies who have succeeded by solving specific problems in specific ways for specific target markets. It is, as I mentioned, a model that we should all be following as digital entrepreneurs.

Without any further ado, here is my conversation with Chris Lema from inside of Digital Commerce Academy. Here’s a free taste of Digital Commerce Academy for you right here. My conversation with Chris Lema what is the business problem?

One quick word about the audio that you’re about to hear. It is not nearly as clear and crisp as the audio that you are hearing from me right now as you listen to this. The reason for that is we recorded this case study on GoToWebinar. There were slides associated with it as well. Obviously, if you’re inside of Digital Commerce Academy, you get the full effect.

But even though the audio quality isn’t quite as good, the conversation is really, really useful, so I wanted to play it here for you anyway. But just a quick word that it won’t be as clear and crisp as what you’re hearing now, but still plenty good enough to listen to and learn from. Okay. Here’s my conversation with Chris Lema.

What Is the Business Problem? (and Why the Answer Matters So Much)

Jerod Morris: Okay, so we talked about the first two questions. How do you achieve the necessary reach? Who is your target audience? Now, we get to the biggest key here. What is the business problem?

This is the one that can really change some perspectives. You hinted at it before. A big issue in this space is people starting with WordPress, instead of starting with a business problem. If you’re going to succeed with a plugin or a theme, you’ve got to start with the business problem, solve that first, right?

Chris Lema: Absolutely. Everybody starts with WordPress. I can’t tell you the number, even at Crowd Favorite, the number of companies that will come to us and say, “Hey, we have this solution. It worked outside of WordPress, but WordPress is so big. We think we should just come and have you build us something that works in WordPress.”

Or a customer or a prospect of a business will say, “Oh my gosh, I’m so excited because I realized WordPress doesn’t have X,” whatever X is. Like, “Slack doesn’t exist for WordPress, so I’m going to build it for WordPress.” You’re like, “Wait, wait, wait. Stop. You just said that Slack doesn’t exist for WordPress, but you know Slack exists, right?”

“Yeah, but not in WordPress.” “Right, but who cares? Why would someone switch from Slack to a version of Slack in WordPress, simply because it’s on WordPress?” “Well, because all my other WordPress friends would do it.” You’re like, “Right. That’s back to the size of your market at 16, which is the total number of friends that do WordPress. That’s not a market.”

If you want to go after a market, go after a problem that’s not being solved, especially not a problem that’s being solved well by someone else. You have to start with a business problem. When you do, oh, man, you discover there are people out there doing amazing things solving real problems.

It just so happens that, by the time they approach me to talk about how they would do it in WordPress, we’re talking about that business problem and then just using the technology as a way to get them there. WordPress is a very inexpensive and fast way to get to some things, and that’s awesome but you’ve got to start with a business problem.

Jerod Morris: Okay, so let’s walk through a few of those because you’ve got some great examples of these, and let’s start first with this one a barber for black men’s hair.

Example #1: Barber for Black Men’s Hair

Chris Lema: Yeah, oh my god. It was amazing. I do these calls on Clarity, where people can call and pay by the minute to just get advice for their specific problem. I write a lot, but my writing is generic. It’s not to them specifically.

One gentleman said, “Look, I have this business, and this business, for the longest time, has been DVDs. You should see my inventory in my apartment. I have all this pre-cut, pre-made DVDs that I ship to people, but it’s getting more and more expensive. I think that I could probably do this all online.”

Honest to god, I thought, “Oh, he has a couple DVDs, and he’s working with a couple of people. This is kind of cool.” It’s a very niche, very tight market to describe. You’re like, “Look, I only help barbers,” but then, “I only help barbers that work with men.” But then, “I only help barbers that work with men who are black.” So you’re like, “Wow. You have taken everything I’ve ever said about niche work, and you’ve applied it.”

So I said, “Well, okay, so you want to build a membership site with video tutorials for these barbers?” He’s like, “Exactly.” What got my jaw to drop was the dude makes over a million dollars a year. I’m like, “Ah, all my life choices were wrong,” in that moment because I’m like, “Why am I not doing this? This is amazing.”

It’s one thing to write about membership sites. It’s another to run one that’s generating a million dollars a year with a set of videos. Yeah, he’s doing other work. He’s writing articles, et cetera. You’re like, “That’s amazing!” But he’s solving a very specific problem. If you want to be a barber and all of a sudden, you’re cutting hair, you have to understand the nuances of that, and you don’t know it are you going to spend a little bit of money to go learn it?

Of course you are. Every single day of the week that’s not a question. He’s solving a business problem first. WordPress just happens to be the vehicle he’s using to get there.

Example #2: Vocal Enhancements for Broadway

Jerod Morris: Yeah. All right, and another one that you talked about was this guy who teaches vocal lessons or helps people with vocal enhancements, only for people who are getting ready to audition for Broadway shows.

Chris Lema: Exactly. Another person who’s making a ridiculous amount of money and has a very niche, vertical space. He just says, “Look. I’m a voice coach.” You’re like, “Yeah, but there’s a lot of voice coaches.” You’re like, “Yeah, but I’m a voice coach specifically with an online presence and online program.” You’re like, “Yeah, I get that.”

“Well, my target audience is only here in New York, and it’s for people who are auditioning on Broadway. They’re able to be actors. They’re great at acting. They’re not hitting the notes. If they’re not hitting the notes, they need very specific help. I’m giving that to them. I built a WordPress site, and I have the ability to let them even record themselves and upload the video. I review it and send them back notes.”

You’re like, “That’s brilliant.” Again, you hear how much money they’re making, and you’re like, “I should really stop advising these people and just do this.”

Remember, you have to be an expert in a particular space. You know that problem, and you know how to hit that problem. You know all the messaging for that. You know your segments. You know everything else. These are the people that should go into the space, not just a casual whim of, “Oh, I think I’d like to build this in WordPress.” You really have to be able to solve a business problem.

Example #3: Wine Membership and Festival

Chris Lema: Another example is the one that I told you about wine. They have done something really interesting, where the reality is that people want to buy wine, and people also want to go to this special wine event. What they did is took two disconnected variables–people who want to go to one, people who want to go to the other–and they combined them.

This is akin to when there was the creation of the three-point line in basketball. You’re like, “Look, I’m going to take an arbitrary variable, like the distance to the net, and I’m going to now declare that, if you’re behind this distance, you get more points. I’m going to take a second variable, which is the point total, and I’m going to combine the two. When I combine the two, I now can create something brand new and different.”

That’s what these guys did in New York. They basically said, “We know that people want to go to the festival, so what we’re going to do is make them join our membership club, which allows us to ship them wine every month, which we know they probably were going to buy anyway–but not everyone would. This way, we’re shipping wine every month to these people. We’re making money off that. Then, that’s the only way they get the gold ticket to come to the event. If you really want the event, you’ll also end up buying wine from us.”

You’re like, “Ah, that’s brilliant.” Again, they’re solving a problem first about wine and about their market. They’re solving it in an innovative way. They didn’t start with WordPress.

Helping Others Connect Two Disconnected Variables with the Right Messaging

Jerod Morris: Do you often spend time with the people that you’re consulting with and these digital entrepreneurs that you’re talking with, working with them on this, on this idea of taking two variables that are disconnected and connecting them? It’s such an interesting way to think. It can lead to such unique solutions.

Chris Lema: I do, for the ones that want additional work. We just launched a site for folks who are looking for this space of upgrading to first class. I spent about a year working with them, not just on the technology behind this launch, but also on how to think about the program.

We created some interesting dynamics where we combined both what level you bought in at and what kind of advice, tricks, and historical insights you could have access to. We were shifting things based on what you were buying. Even though everyone’s buying the same value proposition, you’re solving the same core problem, it becomes really compelling.

More important than anything, as an upsell when you combine those things, it’s a really nice upsell because people are like, “All I have to do is pay a little bit more and now I get X, which I didn’t have access to before?” It’s an easy trigger to pull if you’ve understood your segment, if you’ve put the right messaging together.

Jerod Morris: All right. Well I hope you enjoyed that brief snippet of my conversation with Chris Lema. The rest of the 50-plus minutes is just as good, if not better than that.

How to Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: If you want to get the full conversation with Chris, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce. That page will allow you to activate your free membership.

As I said, the case study with Chris Lema is not included in the free membership, but the instructions to upgrade your Academy membership to the paid membership will be right there after you join as a free member.

Again, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce. That will allow you to get your free membership started. Then you can upgrade, and you can get Chris Lema’s case study, plus all of the other great content that is inside Digital Commerce Academy, where we have case studies, cutting edge webinars, and regular coaching Q&As, the community.

Just with your free membership alone, you get access to three case studies, as well as lessons from Brian Clark’s course on building your online training business the smart way, as well as Chris and Tony’s course on marketing automation and marketing funnels. So much goodness inside of Digital Commerce Academy. We hope that you will join us inside. Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Again, if you’re free in October, the 13th and 14th, we hope that you will join us at Digital Commerce Summit. For more information on the Summit, go to Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

All right, everybody. Thank you for joining me on this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. Join us next week. Brian Clark will be back. We have a special new episode for you. We will talk to you then.

The Transcript

The Myth of Set-It-and-Forget-It Marketing

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs.

DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I’m your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and I am joined by Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital.

Brian, as we mentioned on our last episode, we were getting ready for our company meeting in Denver. We are now both home after the company meeting in Denver. As usual, it was a great experience. We got a lot done, and we got to experience that special energy that you only can get when you’re working in person with folks. All in all, a good couple of days, a productive couple of days.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and as usual, so many new ideas and just slightly different ways of thinking that come together when you get us all in a room together, as opposed to the way we normally work now. Some people might say, “Well, isn’t that an indictment of the virtual model.” I’m like, “No, because we like each other a lot.” If we were around each other all the time, who knows if that would still remain the case.

Jerod Morris: Right.

Brian Clark: It’s almost the contrast that sparks the creativity. Not, “Oh, you have to be in the same room every day.”

Jerod Morris: Right, and there’s an urgency to it when you know we only have a few days. I think that’s part of what contributes to so much of that in those times we get together.

Brian Clark: Yep, it really does. Of course, given the topic of today’s show, there was a whole lot of very complex, in some cases, and sometimes not so complex sequencing and charting of adaptive content funnels, which we’ve been talking about quite a bit on the show.

I love it, and I know you do, too. I saw you get into Lucidchart, and you were just like a kid in a candy store. But it is cool, right? You can get that thing out of your head in a visual format. I’m a Word guy. So I try to explain things to people, and I get frustrated because it’s too complex. Then you sit down with a Word document or something, and you’re trying to map it out. You’re like, “This doesn’t work. I just need some boxes, triangles, and arrows.”

That really was productive when we literally started using that charting software, sitting there next to each other. Even though we were in the same room, we were sharing charts with each other. That was easier than explaining verbally.

Jerod Morris: It was. Well, we got a chance to get up on the whiteboard. You, me, Chris Garrett, and others, we’ve been having these conversations for awhile. It was great to be in person. You draw something, and then Garrett, add a little bit here, add a little bit there. Then put it in this Lucidchart program, like you were talking about, to share it.

It was great to get some of those ideas down, stuff we’ve been talking about, get it into a format that can be executed, that can be shared among the different team members.

Here’s the thing that’s interesting about this, which leads into the topic that we’re going to talk about today. We’ve been spending a lot more time, obviously, working on these marketing funnels and starting to link it up with what we’re doing with paid advertising. That, of course, is something that we’re relatively new in, in doing and learning more about.

How Automated Marketing Funnels Work

Jerod Morris: What’s been really interesting, and you and I just got done talking about this, is you can make this mistake in thinking that your strategy for paid advertising needs to be so much different from what you’ve done before if you’ve been focused on content marketing. Yet we’re finding, the deeper into this that we get, that a lot of the standard practices of content marketing, you don’t just throw them out the window.

Actually running successful campaigns is a lot more like blogging, a lot more like email marketing even, than you would think–which is surprising and very, very comforting at the same time.

Brian Clark: Yeah, because it ultimately comes down to email. People are like, “Well that’s where the funnel starts.” With blogging, you know that it really starts out there, with our concentric circle design.

You float content out there. It gets shared on social. People discover it. They come in closer, or maybe they come through a search engine. They’re a little more intentional. But you’re bringing them closer to you until they opt-in to a list. From there, that list can be segmented. They convert to a customer. They go onto a customer list. They go onto a repeat or recurring customer list.

This is what we were teaching for years before we even started experimenting with paid traffic. Almost immediately, I was looking around at best practices, talking to people who’ve been advertising the whole time. I’m like, “You’re just doing content marketing with paid distribution.” I say ‘just’ not to belittle it. I say that because it’s more familiar than you think.

What we found is actually interesting. When you’re paying for something, you’re much more conscientious of conversion. Everything is trackable, right down from the campaign, the traffic source, etcetera. We got much more intentional that way. For the last five years, we have launched multiple, if not one huge new thing each year.

That was always a big catalyst for revenue growth. Generally, anything we launch becomes a seven-figure line of business pretty quickly. Then, once we were out of building and launching mode and more into optimization and growth mode, I thought everything had to change–and to a certain degree, it does.

I’d say, when we were in build and launch mode, we relied on brute-strength authority marketing. That’s not a bad thing. Big email list, big customer list, great new products, announce them everywhere. People buy, and you grow. It’s a little more nuanced once you’re in optimization and growth mode and not building something new to add on to revenue.

Yet what I found through the first quarter of this year with testing and whatnot, it’s a lot like what we’ve been doing all along–except more targeted. And really, we’re held more accountable for why are we creating this piece of content.

Instead of creating as much content as possible–because you know only certain parts are going to stick with certain people–you can be much more intentional and targeted. Yet ultimately, what I hope to get across today, is that it’s a lot more like the combination of blogging to email marketing that we’ve been doing since 2006 than most people think. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Why You Can t Ever Really ‘Set It And Forget It’

Jerod Morris: All right, so let’s dig into that. A lot of times, when people hear about the promises of paid advertising and what you can do with Facebook, and you hear these terms thrown around like ‘machine,’ ‘get your machine in order,’ and ‘automated marketing funnels.’

I think people feel like you can get a couple of landing pages that work, you set up some different ads and test them, and you can just set it and forget it. One of the things that we’re learning is that the set-it-and-forget-it mentality isn’t really the right mentality to go into with this, is it?

Brian Clark: It’s not. I knew that going back to, I’d say, 2003 when I created my early autoresponder courses for my real estate business. I really did have a set-it-and-forget-it type thing. In that business, the topics don’t change, but things do change overall–market conditions, etcetera–to where you want to go back and look at your content stream.

In that case, it works while you sleep. It’s automatic, all that kind of good stuff. There was no adaptive element to it. But it still dripped out according to your content marketing strategy of, “What do they need to learn before they’re going to do business with me?”

To a certain degree, even with autoresponders, it’s always been kind of a myth. Automated marketing funnels are really cool with the technology we have now because you can literally do a mini-launch to a new prospect and/or a promotion to a new prospect, like a one-time, ‘this week only’ discount or bundle, or some sort of incentive that’s not made to the general public.

With the marketing automation technology in Rainmaker and just some short codes that we give, you can basically make a time-limited offer with a page that, after whatever many days after they enter the funnel, disappears. Not just with cookies, either.

We’ve figured out how to do it with Rainmaker to where, even if you think you’re crafty and you try to bookmark the page or clear your cookies or whatever, no, the page is really gone. It’s like we’re doing a manual promotion where we change the page, delete the page, change the product offer, or whatever the case me be–what we’ve been doing for years–and that’s all automated.

Again, that leads one to believe that set it, forget it is alive and well and better than ever, to a certain degree. If you create the right kind of opt-in funnel and you adapt appropriately based on behavior within it, that can remain in place for quite awhile.

What we’ve found is, it’s what happens before they enter the beginning of the funnel. But it’s way more like blogging has been used to deliver a steady stream of content, often related by topic or whatnot. For example, I started Copyblogger, more or less, by writing Copywriting 101, a series of 10 articles. That’s a great introductory lead-in.

Each of those articles could have a so-called ‘content upgrade’ that got you to the next level, which could be, let’s say, a free workshop on the most important copywriting skill you could learn. Then that workshop leads to an offer of a paid copywriting course. That was a blogging technique. That’s our whole cornerstone content approach.

That’s good for general converting people to customers. It’s good for search when you aggregate them on a content landing page. It’s good for social because people share the aggregated pages–all of that stuff. Yet I didn’t realize that, conceptually, that’s how you treat Facebook, for example.

Jerod Morris: When you’re saying, “Treat Facebook like that,” you’re saying, to use your example, you would take each of those individual parts and pieces from that Copywriting 101 and basically run a Facebook Ad to it and expose that content to people.

Of course, you aren’t going to know which one is going to get them to click or which one is going to end up being the one that leads to a conversion. But continuously expose those ideas to people over time in a sequence, and let the content work for you on Facebook, just like it does on the blog.

Brian Clark: Yeah. There are different levels here. I don’t want to mislead people. It’s not like we don’t advertise the free trial of the Rainmaker Platform directly. Really, when you think about it, you would hope that, that would work, and you could just spend as much money as you could possibly throw at it.

We know that, when we do that, we get a very healthy return on investment about three times what we spent. You remember, of course, that Rainmaker is a recurring product. We’re making three times ROI on the initial payments. That doesn’t count next quarter’s payment, next year’s payment, or whatever the case may be. That’s very healthy.

Why don’t we just throw $100,000 a month at that? Because you can’t scale it that well. Because that very direct approach will be ignored by a lot of people. Facebook’s algorithm will say, “Look, you’re about to waste your money. I’m not going to let you spend anymore.” Which is awful gracious of them, but it can be frustrating because you’re like, “Ahhhhhhh!”

The Advertising Editorial Calendar

Brian Clark: Let me plant the idea in your head of an editorial calendar, just like you would use for blogging, for your advertising. You’re not just creating ads. You are creating content. Beyond the ROI that you can get from advertising a product directly and beyond the ROI that you can get for advertising a landing page directly, the next level is to have individual pieces of content that point to a landing page, that puts them in a sequence that eventually presents the product.

We’ve known for years of pay-per-click advertising that selling the product directly went way down in effectiveness, while getting someone on the email list boosted conversions significantly. It’s not any different now. People want and share content. That’s the fundamental basis behind content marketing.

I’m not saying with ads that you can’t advertise a product directly or the opt-in directly. You’re just not going to get as much traffic into your funnel as you’d like by stopping there. Again, it’s almost like thinking about it in terms of, “I blog to put content out there so that social sharing and search engine traffic feeds my funnel.”

Here, we think, “Oh, I don’t have to mess with that because I’m spending money.” But in order to scale the amount of people that get into your funnel and really make an impact on your growth, it really is a combination of all those things.

Some people want to buy now because they’re interested in this thing. Some people want to opt-in now because it’s very compelling to them enough at that moment. Then the rest of the people, that’s why we’ve done general blogging for 10 years.

It’s still the same thing, which is why you think of your advertising campaigns more in lines of content series as part of the mix that includes direct ads to your product or service, and direct landing-page advertising.

Treating Facebook Like an Email List

Jerod Morris: I love this idea of treating Facebook like an email list. If you think about it with maybe an email promotion you may have, and maybe you have three emails in the promotion, well, your call to action or the way that you’re going to try and relate the offer to people is going to be different with each email.

You’re not going to use, let’s say, just the direct benefit in each one. One may have scarcity. One may have urgency. One focuses more on the direct benefit. Same thing with a single email. If you have multiple calls to action, you want to try and hit people in different ways.

I think what you’re saying is that this is similar. You’re going to put the direct sale to the landing-page offer out there for the people who are ready for that, but this benefit with Facebook is that you can really get granular with your targeting.

You know you’re targeting people who are going to be interested in what you’re doing. Now you just have to find the right way to speak to them. Okay, so some people want just the direct link to the landing page. Great, you’ve got them. But now, how can you speak to the other people? How can you give them value? What topics are they going to be interested in?

Again, you put out this series of content. It’s not like whichever one draws the click, that’s the only one that worked. But continuing to expose them to different ideas to different content–maybe they’re not ready to buy, but get them into your funnel–now, you’re really allowing the work that you’re doing in Facebook, the money that you’re spending in Facebook to pay off more in the long term.

You’re allowing people to take the next step with you, wherever they are, instead of just putting out these one or two things that require people to be in this specific spot.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and I’m going to give a little credit here to Tim Mayer, who’s here in Boulder. We had lunch. Marty Weintraub of aimClear told him this a long time ago. He related it to me, and with all the work we’ve been doing, I didn’t need any explanation.

He said, “Treat Facebook like an email list.” I’ll add to that, ” like a blog,” at least the way we blog. We plan each message–like you said, coming at an issue or a different pain point, the framing of an offer or whatever in an email funnel, in an email sequence–very carefully.

We sit there, and that’s why we map these things out. Yet with advertising, for example, with Facebook, we started out thinking, “Well, we’ll try this approach. If that doesn’t work, we’ll swap out this approach, and see if that works better.”

But the reality of what Marty was saying is, no, you try all of them–not swapping things out, but in series. If you have a campaign aimed at a certain interest group, or say it’s at people who ‘like’ your page that’s a perfect example, people who like Rainmaker Digital’s Facebook Page. Our blog is posted there every day. The algorithm messes with us, but conceivably that audience would get our sequence of posts that hopefully have some thought of what the ultimate business objective is to that series of content.

Same with an email list. Like I said, if you put someone in a sequence, some emails are to get them to know, like you, and trust you. Some are to teach valuable information in order to prime them for an offer. Then you start making the offer. Then you follow up and position that offer in different ways, like you said, direct benefit, scarcity, whatever the case may be. Usually, it’s a sequence that ends with, “This is going away.”

That one statement made me realize that it’s just like blogging. It’s just like a sequence of carefully constructed messages that go in a certain order. We know, with blogging, that people don’t read every piece of content. It depends on the headline. It depends on the context. It depends on how busy they are. That’s why you take multiple shots at the apple.

Going back to advertising clichés, it takes seven messages, really, in order to get inside someone’s head and get them to notice you. Why would it be any different with Facebook Ads? The concept here is, you’re not swapping out different ideas. You’re presenting those different ideas in order. Just like we do on the blog. Just like we do in our email list.

And through the course of that sequence to that particular interest group, that particular campaign, something or other is going to catch a prospect’s attention. One or two will probably catch attention better than others, which is very valuable to know because maybe you can pare down your sequence or your series.

I’ve heard it likened to playing roulette. You don’t really take anything off the table. You just move your chips to the things that are hot.

Why the Fundamentals That Build Success Don’t Change

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I love that one. It’s interesting. Just on recent episodes, we’ve talked about digital sharecropping. We’ve talked about having an app versus a mobile-responsive website. We come across all of these topics. The tools are new, and there are these hot new strategies. Yet there are always these underlying fundamentals that it comes back to, that success is built upon.

We’re finding that exact same thing here with building funnels and using paid traffic to fill them up. It’s the exact same thing.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it can happen to anyone. You know I get on people for thinking all this is new and shiny. Really, it’s the same fundamentals that worked in 1920 at the beginning of scientific advertising as a testable and trackable discipline. Now, we’ve got more ways to do that than ever. Yet I almost let myself think that, what’s been working for us for the last 10 years, wasn’t going to work once we started trying to advertise and actually make a significant difference with that.

Hey, I’ll own up to it. There are no mistakes. What’s the saying? There’s only success in learning.

How to Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: Right, exactly. What’s interesting is, you were mentioning earlier when we were on the subject of automated marketing funnels, how especially using the Rainmaker Platform now, you get someone on your email list, and you can set up maybe a special offer on a page that will go away after a certain period of time. We’ve actually got an example of that, that people can see built on the Rainmaker Platform.

If you go to Rainmaker.FM/DCfree, that’ll be the offer page for the Digital Commerce Institute free membership, which has a bunch of lessons of Brian’s course. It’s got lessons in the course on setting up automated marketing funnels that work that Chris Garrett and Tony Clark did. When you register for that, you get on an autoresponder email list that has an offer and will give you an example, Brian, of what you talked about, that very thing, using the platform.

For folks who want to see it in action, again, we talk about these things, and a lot of what we’re talking about on here, we’re talking about right after or right before we’re implementing it ourselves–doing, showing, and telling you all at the same time. That would be a great way going and signing up. Not only will you be getting all that great information, but you’ll get to see an example of this in action.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s also an interesting point that I just realized. This podcast is an example of one ‘campaign’ or ‘channel,’ among all the other stuff. We’re not advertising it. It’s more organic. Each topic that we cover, we are covering things in series now, aren’t we?

Jerod Morris: Exactly.

Brian Clark: We’re going to do more of that. At the end, there’s a call to action that basically is what we’d like you to do. I will say that telling people to go watch your marketing is great for them. It doesn’t necessarily convert as much, but I hope you will actually sample the content over there if you’re trying to build a digital business. Ultimately, that’s what we’re trying to help you to do.

Jerod Morris: Yep, absolutely. Again, that URL, Rainmaker.FM/DCfree. Go over there, claim your free membership to Digital Commerce Institute, and keep listening to The Digital Entrepreneur. We’ll be back next week with another brand new episode, and we look forward to talking to you then.

Brian Clark: This is the easiest podcast ever because of what you said. We discover, implement, and test so many things each week. We always know what we’re going to … no, we never know what we’re going to talk about the next week, but we end up figuring it out, no problem, which is actually kind of interesting. Real-time marketing, real-time education, only here on The Digital Entrepreneur.

Jerod Morris: That is right. We’ll talk to you next week, everybody.

The Transcript

Making This Common Mistake Could Kill the Profitability of Your Online Course

Voiceover: You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a life education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information go to Rainmaker.FM/digitalcommerce. That’s Rainmaker.FM/digitalcommerce.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to another episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. I’m your host, Jerod Morris, VP of Marketing for Rainmaker Digital. I’m joined today by the founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital, Brian Clark. Brian, by the time people actually listen to this episode I will have come to Denver and come home from Denver from our company meeting which is happening this week. I’m excited to see you and to see everybody.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it’ll be good to see all the new faces that have joined the company since a year ago and also to spend some valuable white-boarding time. We’ve got more ideas than we know how to process, all for the benefit of you all out there. We’ve got to sit down, get in a room, actually. That’s the only time where it’s challenging to be a virtual company. Every once in a while you want to be in the same room with someone and just write stuff up on the wall.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I agree. There’s a special kind of energy that happens and we always get a lot out of these meetings ,so I’m really looking forward to it. Really looking forward to it. Let’s go quickly today because I’ve got to go get packed and get ready for my flight tomorrow.

What The Recent Decision by Udemy Means for Online Course Creators

Jerod Morris: I wanted to talk with you about, frankly, a topic that we have talked about a lot in a lot of different ways. You wrote about it a long time ago on Copyblogger, and it remains relevant. That is this idea of digital sharecropping. It came up again recently when Udemy decided that they were going to make a change to their pricing. I believe it was effective on April 4th. They updated their pricing and their promotions on Udemy.

Essentially, what they did is instead of allowing you to basically set your price all the way up to — I think it was about $300 — they made everybody basically pick a price between $20 and $50 in increments of $5. They had some reasons to do this, and I think some of those reasons are defensible from their standpoint. But from the standpoint of online course creators, it’s yet another example of why you really don’t want to build on rented land. Or at least you better do it very smartly with a really smart strategy, because you don’t own the land. Someone could, as Udemy did, just change the policy. Change what you can charge for your course. Which, ultimately, is something that could really kill the profitability of your course. Especially if you’re someone who was selling for $300 and now the most that you can sell for is $50. I’m sure that you have some thoughts on this. Again, just another example of digital sharecropping and why you don’t want to do that.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Since 2007 we’ve warned about Facebook. We’ve warned about Amazon. We’ve warned about Udemy even, specidfically. I’m even losing track of how many examples of this happening, but you know what? I don’t blame the platforms anymore. I don’t like them sometimes, but they’re just doing what’s in their best interest. I’m sure Udemy did an analysis that said, “How do we make the most money?” Well, we make the most money with volume that comes from this price range.

Jerod Morris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brian Clark: So what do you expect? That’s why I tried to gently but firmly say, “Look, people, be smart. It’s not yours. You do not control what’s going on.” But I saw all the gnashing of teeth and complaining from course creators over at Udemy. I’m like, “What did you expect?”

Jerod Morris: Yeah, well, that’s the lesson here. It is disappointing, and I’m sure those people were very frustrated. But don’t you have to go into it assuming that something like that could happen when you don’t own the place that you build on?

Brian Clark: Absolutely. I get that it’s a marketplace and that means there are people there who take online courses. There are people at Amazon who buy ebooks. There are a lot of people in general over at Facebook. Okay, great. There are people there. They’re qualified in a certain way. Be strategic about it.

I saw one person — I think you may have sent me this — she was just harsh. She didn’t take the gentle-but-firm approach toward the other Udemy people. She’s like, “You’re an idiot if you’re selling all your courses on Udemy. You need to treat it like ebooks over at Amazon where it’s a big search engine and people are looking for books and you have a book on a topic. They find your book, they buy it, and then you’re constantly telling them to go to your site throughout the book. “Go get the audio version for free. Get this flow chart. Get this worksheet. Get whatever.”

It’s really just a step in the proverbial funnel, because they’re being strategic about the use of Amazon. Her argument was, “Well that’s what Udemy’s for, too. There are people here that want to learn. They’re going to search and find me. They’re going to pay me money — not much, but some — to begin the first step of the relationship with me. Of course, during that course I would imagine she is constantly pushing them to a website for some reason. Her website, not anyone else’s. To sign up for something free or whatever. To get into a sequence. Or whatever the case may be for her more premium offerings.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’s what smart people do. They leverage course marketplaces to help build their own online training business.

The Difference Between Online Course Marketplaces and Learning Management Systems

Jerod Morris: I think it’s important to draw this distinction between online course marketplaces and learning management systems. Apparently there are a lot of people that get confused by this. I think maybe that’s where this issue comes up with people being disappointed by what Udemy did. If you go to Udemy and you think you can put your course up here and you own everything and you’re going to own the terms of engagement with the customer forever, well that’s just not a good understanding of where you are and what a place like Udemy is. It’s a marketplace.

Yes, there are going to be lots of people there who are looking for online courses. It will get your course out in front of those people. Maybe you’ll be featured in a Udemy newsletter. There’s different ways that you can help get some quick attention. But the difference is, when you have a learning management system and you’ve built a course on your own website and you own it, you can charge whatever you want. You can build an email list and own that email list. You can base your communications with people based on how they actually interact with your site and with your content because you own all of that.

It’s important that people understand the differences between the two. If you’re going to be very smart about it and strategic about it, there is a place for an online course marketplace in your overall online training business strategy. But you’ve got to eventually get them back to your own site. To your own learning management system. Again, so that you can own those terms of engagement with the people. So you can set your own prices. Because that’s what’s eventually going to allow you to maximize your profit in the long run.

Brian Clark: I’ve warmed up a bit to the value of an ebook at Amazon, or maybe a low price course at Udemy. But here’s something you also have to realize: you don’t create credibility and authority by teaching a course. No one’s going to select your course in Udemy when you’ve got no credentials to back up what you’re teaching. On the other hand, Brian Harris calls this the ‘Learning Out Loud’ method. Tim Farris does this. He basically experiments, he learns, and he shares, which builds an audience, which creates his authority and expertise, and which means he can teach any course he wants. Again, if you’re an established, credible authority or instructor on a topic, then sure, why not throw something into Udemy. But if you’re just starting out, that’s not going to work for you. You’ve got to learn out loud and build an audience, which is content marketing.

Even though, again, I can see the strategic benefit of it, it’s not someplace that you run to right away. When you’re further down the line, I would say, where we are — thanks to 10 years of Copyblogger. I’m not even sure that you would want to mess with that channel. But never say never. You may talk me into it.

How Smart Online Course Creators Leverage Online Course Marketplaces

Jerod Morris: Just to provide a concrete example, let’s use The Showrunner as an example. We’ve got this course. The last time we launched it was $649 for the course. Obviously, we couldn’t charge that on Udemy, but we were able to charge it ourselves because we knew what the value was and we were able to set the price because we own it. If we were going to do this, and I’m not saying we would, but if we were going to leverage an online course marketplace it wouldn’t be to put the entire Showrunner course in there.

It would be to maybe take a small piece of it — maybe a quick-start guide or a quick course on naming your show, or whatever it would be — something small in there and use that as a way to target people that we already know are taking online courses. But then we’re sending them back to The Showrunner, to listen to the podcast where we do a lot of our learning out loud like you talked about. Then get them into the course. But certainly not to put the whole thing there and bank on that as the entire revenue strategy.

Brian Clark: Yeah, you should try that. I’d be interested in seeing if that got some results. It depends on a lot of variables. Do people go to Udemy to learn something like podcasting, or is that more of an open web thing? It’s just really hard. Experimenting with that type of stuff. Especially when you’re repurposing content you already created. There’s not a whole lot of brain damage or risk involved in that you’re wasting your time. You’re just repackaging something and putting it in a marketplace and seeing what happens. That’s a decently smart strategy in my mind and I’d like to see what would happen.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. The big idea here is don’t build everything on a place that you don’t own because ultimately it could kill your profitability if you’re not able to charge what you want. If you don’t own the ability to communicate with your audience members — with your customers — on your own terms and when you want to. Because those are going to be the two big drivers of what you’re able to do on a go-forward basis. How much can you charge? And how much are you able to keep communicating so that you can turn customers into repeat customers? Because if you don’t give yourself that ability you’re chopping yourself off at the legs before you even get started.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and you have to be quite aware that with these strategies with Amazon, Udemy, whatever — some people say, “Well I’m acquiring a customer.” No you’re not. Amazon’s acquiring a customer or keeping a customer. You got your product sold by someone else if they don’t take action based on content that’s inside the product or the course, then you don’t have a customer. Never confuse that.

There’s always a benefit — even if you’re selling a low-price gateway product — to being the point of sale. That’s why content marketing and building an audience — you just can’t stop talking about how valuable it is. Because these other people are relying on someone else to bring the audience, whether it’s Facebook, Amazon, Udemy, whatever the case may be. They’re saying, “I don’t care about having a direct relationship with people.” That’s just a huge mistake but we see it happen over and over online.

Jerod Morris: We do. If you want more insight on how to build your online training business the smart way, Brian actually developed the course about this inside of Digital Commerce Academy, so we encourage you to go to Rainmaker.FM/digitalcommerce and get a free membership to Digital Commerce Academy which will give you access to the first four lessons in Brian’s course, totally free. You can also get free lessons then in the course on marketing funnels along with a bunch of other goodies that are in there. It’s at Rainmaker.FM/digitalcommerce. Go there, get started with your free membership and learn other smart strategies for building your online course the way you should do it. Brian, I think that wraps up another episode. Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow, which is really a week ago.

Jerod Morris: Yes.

Brian Clark: This time shifting always gets to me.

Jerod Morris: That’s right. We will talk to you all in a week, which is really two weeks from now, from when we record this.

Brian Clark: I think that’s right.

Jerod Morris: I think so. All right, everybody, have a great week and we’ll talk to you on the next episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.