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The Transcript

5 Benefits of the ‘Access’ Approach to Online Marketing

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.

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

Brian, when people hear this episode, at least the day that it goes live, you’re going to be over in the Philippines. Right now as we record it, you are preparing for an excruciatingly long airplane flight. How do you prepare for a flight that long?

Brian Clark: I don’t know. I’ve never been on a plane that long, so it’s going to be a new adventure. I’m in business class. That’s all I can say. I’ve heard that’s much better than economy, so we’ll see.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Do you just have work back to back to back, ready to go? I know we’ve talked about this before. I get about as much work done on an airplane as I get done anywhere else.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It’s the recording stuff that I have to get done before I get on the plane because we’ll not have our nice setup of recording equipment, acoustics, and all of that good stuff. I’ve got a whole stack of reading and writing that I hope will keep me engaged so that it’s not too painful. I will report back. Everyone keeps asking me this, and I’m like, “I don’t have any idea.”

Jerod Morris: Yes, yes. I’ll be very interested to know how that goes. Speaking of recording, we’ve got to get this episode in here before you go. We’re continuing on talking about the elements of the modern marketing website. We’ve talked about email, and last week we talked about how adaptive websites deliver exceptional experiences while accelerating profit.

Why Creating an Experience Is So Important

Jerod Morris: We’re going to go, now, to the next level. We’re going to talk about the ‘access’ approach to online marketing and talk about the importance of experiences. It’s interesting. It struck me as I was thinking about this episode. I had the good fortune a couple of weeks ago to go to a workshop out in LA. The workshop was about presentations. If you look at the headline, actually, on the website for that workshop, Rock the Room, it says, “Creating an experience is more important than delivering information.”

One of the biggest reasons why I had so much fun at that workshop and learned so much is because what we were learning about presentations was so applicable to so many different areas of my life and my work, including what we’re talking about right now–this idea of how creating an experience is so important, even more so than just delivering the information that you have.

Brian Clark: Yeah. If you look at the evolution of the web, you cannot escape hearing about creating experiences–whether it be customer experience, customer lifetime-value experiences, and most importantly, from this standpoint, is the experience a prospect has when they’re evaluating you as an option to solve the problem or satisfy the desire.

If you look back in the old days with the static ‘brochure site,’ it was just static information. It didn’t change. It was just about the company, and it wasn’t really oriented toward the prospect at all really.

Then, of course, we had the content marketing revolution where static sites were basically invisible. Let’s face it. Without content, you weren’t showing up in search. You weren’t getting shared in social.

Dynamic-content-based sites, that was a big change. We’re evolving to the next level where the web itself is pushing us to give the kind of interactive access experience that we’re talking about here today.

Jerod Morris: What strikes me about access–and especially since we think about it from a website perspective because I know that I’ve done this–at least before maybe a year, year and a half ago, it didn’t seem like something that I needed to do on my website, that I could do, or even perhaps that I should do.

It felt like this, “Wait a minute. You’re going to make people have to register or have a login to get to your site?” Then you step back, and you think, “Well, wait a minute. All the most popular sites online– Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, every other site–these big sites we go to, they require access. Why would we think that same thing couldn’t or shouldn’t apply to what we’re building with our sites?”

Why ‘Access’ Is Just One Component of an Experience

Brian Clark: Everything good online requires registration and access. That’s the mentality we have. We were early on this. We did our first access approach back in 2013. You’ll remember that was based on Brian’s hypothesis of what was happening online and what would work better. It turned out to work really, really well, as we’ll get into.

It’s important to remember that all of these elements are interrelated. We require registration to get access, but we’re also doing that to build an email list. Once we have that email list coordinating with the site, that’s how we deliver adaptive content.

These aren’t mutually exclusive when we talk about an experience, but access is an important component, like you said. Facebook and Twitter, until you log in, you’re not having the experience. Even Amazon, Apple, Google, Gmail–all of the good stuff that we all use–it requires this concept. There’s a pretty strong psychological mechanism going on here just when it comes to perceived value, but there’s a whole lot of other benefits to this access approach as well.

Jerod Morris: With this access that people give us comes a responsibility, too. We have to make sure that we’re delivering a good and useful experience. People do get leery of opting-in due to bad experiences, due to spam, all of that. We’ve got to make sure that the experience that we’re delivering is good, that it’s useful, and that it’s not going to fall into some of those traps that others have that give people, sometimes, a bad impression of logging in or registering.

Brian Clark: Oh yeah. That’s rule number one. If you don’t have an audience-focused value proposition, you’re just not even in the game. But you’re right, you mentioned that we’re leery of the concept of opting-in to a newsletter that we consider just to be a thinly disguised marketing vehicle. There’s got to be something more here.

So we are dealing with human psychology, the usability of the internet, and how it works. We’re mirroring that in a way that used to be cost prohibited, but now it’s not. Remember, the original web app was the membership site, and that dates way back. It’s just much easier to build them now.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, so let’s start talking about the benefits of doing this and why you, the digital entrepreneur who is listening to this, why this access approach is going to be so important to you. Let’s start, Brian, with what you talked about with the app experience. Why is this such a big benefit of the access experience?

Why the Future Is HTML5, Not Apps

Brian Clark: Well, the rise of the mobile app is an important thing, as you know. It gave a lot of people the wrong idea–that somehow they had to get people to download their app and clutter up their phone just to visit and consume content. That was a mistake. It’s been expressed very loudly in various different ways.

It’s just a conversion killer. You’re putting up an impediment in front of what they want. You’re actually impeding the experiencing instead of enhancing it. It’s completely unnecessary. The way search works, the way sharing works, we have something called the open web that works incredibly well for allowing people to get where we want them to go.

The new thing really is, like we’ve talked about, responsive design. Whether they’re on a phone, a tablet, a desktop, or a laptop, the site is going to adapt to them as if it were a mobile app. Then we’ve got, of course, just basic membership capabilities that we say, “Okay, if you want this, it’s protected here. It’s valuable. That’s why we don’t just put it out there for everyone.” That sends a message–again, that whole perceived value aspect of it.

Of course, with HTML5 a webpage can now do anything an app can do. That’s really where we’re going to see things push forward with this app-like experience, but the very beginning part of a web-app experience is simply gating off something valuable and exchanging access to that for the right to email them.

How Access Helps You Build Your Email List Faster

Jerod Morris: Yeah, this is so interesting. The second benefit we talk about is building your email list faster. I’ve experienced this firsthand with one of my side projects, The Assembly Call, which I’ve talked about a lot on The Showrunner and some other shows. It’s a postgame show for Indiana basketball games.

What we did differently this year is our show has always been freely available, that’s the big hook of our content. We kept it that way, but I wanted to basically try out some of these things that I was learning and create a membership component to it since the site is built on Rainmaker.

What I love is the mindset I went into, which is thinking, “Okay, if I’m going to do this and I’m going to make people have to log in, I need to give them something worthwhile.” So we created a halftime show and made it membership only. We added a chat that was only for people who were logged in, and then we actually used the course component of Rainmaker to build this huge 50 Greatest Hoosiers of All Time content series.

What’s amazing is how much our email list, how much our audience has grown, and how much more connected people are now that they actually have to log in to get the extras. They can still go to the live page. They can get the postgame show for free. We won’t change that, and we keep that up, doesn’t require any login.

To take that next step, to become part of the community, to get on the other side of that velvet rope and really connect with the host and with the other audience members, you have to log in. It hasn’t turned people away. It has made our audience growth accelerate because now those people who were in their part of the community are so much more connected. The sharing and telling of other people has just gone through the roof.

It’s really amazing how, when you add this to your site, how it can just make everything, the perceived and real value of what you’re doing, just skyrocket.

Brian Clark: Yeah, because you’re creating a more tangible experience. We’re going to keep coming back to that word because that’s what it is. You’re giving the right value to the right people, and of course, their raising their hands in greatest numbers.

Now, remember the original hypothesis back in 2013 and the experiment was My Copyblogger–400 percent increase in email signups. It even shocked me. Now, you’ve noticed that we did it again with the New Rainmaker course that launched the Rainmaker Platform. Our flagship product was launched using this very access concept.

Now we’re doing it again over at Digital Commerce with the free registration. You get access to select lessons from our paid courses, along with some other stuff. It’s a great value proposition. That list went from zero to thousands faster than probably most. That’s pretty awesome. You match up value with access, and more people will sign up. That’s just what we’ve seen over and over again.

Jerod Morris: We’re talking about these benefits of the access approach to online marketing. We’ve talked about the app experience and building your email list faster. The third one, and I love this one, is the ability to identify people across devices for a true adaptive content experience.

Why It’s So Important to Overcome the ‘Fallacy of Cookies’

Jerod Morris: If people don’t log in, you don’t really have a great way of differentiating or knowing if this person who’s visiting right now on the desktop, did they just visit before on their phone? Are these two separate people, or are they the same person? How do you adapt an experience if you don’t know that?

That’s such a huge benefit of doing this. When people are logged in, you can track their movements, track what they’re doing, track what they’re consuming across different devices so that you can give them the experience that they need and want.

Brian Clark: Yeah. You’re talking about the cookie problem that marketing automation has historically faced. A cookie’s planted on the desktop. Then they come back on the phone, and it’s like they just started over. You have no way of connecting those dots.

Identity is something that’s really being talked a lot about at the enterprise-marketing tech level. Again, we’ve been talking about this for quite awhile, but you’re seeing it really catch on. It’s a big problem when you don’t really have a relationship with someone in the sense that, if we’re going to deliver this adaptive, custom, one-of-a-kind experience based on who you are and what you do, then we have to have this identity component.

I read an interesting white paper of someone selling an outrageously expensive solution to solve the identity problem, and I’m like, “Hey, I’ve got one of those, and it’s not that extensive. It’s called Rainmaker Platform.”

How Access Gives You the Opportunity for True Communities

Jerod Morris: Yeah, exactly. Then what that allows you to do, when you give people this great experience and you’re building your email list and you’re able to identify people across devices, now you can do what I talked about that we’ve done this year with The Assembly Call–which is taking everything to the next level, really build a true community, a branded community, create these velvet-rope environments. When people get past them, they really feel like they’ve got to the next level.

They connect more with you. They can connect with the other people who are in there. Again, when we talk about experience, when we talk about standing out in a crowded field, that can really, really separate you. Obviously, when it comes to turning visitors into audience members and audience members into customers, that’s huge.

Brian Clark: Yeah, this is another thing happening at the enterprise level. Forester started talking about this last year–how after the social media swindle and the fallacy of trying to sell to people at the social level, and then, of course, the bait and switch with Facebook and all of that, there was this movement for brands to create communities back at their sites, essentially membership sites.

Again, I’m sure the implementation over there is going to cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it doesn’t need to be. That’s kind of cool. We little guys can create these branded communities as well–and should.

Let’s face it, a Facebook ‘like’ does not mean someone’s part of your community. A Facebook group even is a poor excuse for these access-driven, branded communities that you can build. You just gave us a perfect example with Assembly Call.

It really kills me because you’ll have people say, “Well, it’s just easier to stay over there at Facebook where they are.” It’s easy to spew offers and egocentric pitches to people, too, but that’s not going to work. I really don’t like it when people say, “It’s easier at Facebook.” That’s a fallacy, and it’s kind of lazy.

Jerod Morris: Oh, it totally is. Just because it’s easy, that certainly doesn’t mean that it’s what you should be doing. It certainly doesn’t mean that it’s rewarding in any way. Ever since we’ve started to really develop the community, everything with that site and with the content has taken off.

It’s not just there. There’s so many people that we talk to in our Digital Commerce Academy Q&A’s and just that we interact with that are experiencing this very same thing. The other benefit that you really get here is, you’re able to uncover the intent of the buyer’s journey.

We talked about, in our last episode, how every buyer’s journey is different, yet we make the mistake of treating them the same.

When you have this access experience and when you’re really giving someone a great experience so they continue to consume your content, you can actually see what they’re consuming, understand them better, and deliver more relevant content to them–you’re actually able to treat them like an individual, which has myriad benefits.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Something we did back in 2013 was create multiple access points. Meaning, if you came in from search looking for content marketing, you were treated slightly differently than if you came in for searching for landing pages.

With the recent redesign of Copyblogger, we took that intent aspect to the next level. “What do you want to learn about?” Asking specifically, “What journey do you want to go on?” That’s a big step forward for us, but also think about what we’re doing with the free content at Digital Commerce Academy.

Right now, there’s this one kind of access point, the free registration. As you well know, we’ve been plotting all the different access points that show what’s the top-of-mind intent. Are they most interested in online courses? What persona are we dealing with here? What part of the funnel are they in? That’s just something you can’t do with a normal opt-in email newsletter. It’s just not the same experience whatsoever.

Using the right type of content and providing access points to that content based on where they’re at in the journey, this is really the magic of all of this stuff of adaptive content. It’s access and selective access–the way we can turn certain things on and certain things off inside the membership area based on your access point. That’s pretty exciting stuff.

Why You No Longer Need an Enterprise-Level War Chest

Jerod Morris: It is. It’s really exciting stuff. What’s especially exciting, Brian, is what we’re talking about right now. We’ve been talking about that at Copyblogger for a while. Like you said, we started doing this at My Copyblogger several years ago.

If I remove myself from the job that I have and if I’m just Jerod Morris over here creating a site, as I was before I joined Copyblogger–when you look at sites like Facebook, Amazon, and these really big sites where you have to log in and they create these great experiences–for someone like me, I look at it, and it just seems so intimidating from a technology perspective that it doesn’t really seem like something that’s attainable to me.

Yet that’s probably been one of the biggest shifts. It’s one of the reasons why this is so important to talk about now. As you mentioned earlier, with something like the Rainmaker Platform, it doesn’t need to be so intimidating. You don’t need to have some huge bank roll or these crazy technical skills to do this. It’s actually become pretty simple to create this kind of experience that we’re talking about.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it’s interesting. If you’re a digital entrepreneur–which we hope you are since that’s the name of this show–you need these type of capabilities anyways to sell stuff. Whether you’re selling plugins, themes, courses, ebooks–you need a way to gate your intellectual property until someone pays you for it.

It’s already part of the game plan, but a lot of people’s minds open up when they understand how you can use this level of sophisticated permissions and what not that we have on the back-end, combined with marketing automation, to truly create an experience–not just to pay lip service to it.

Up Next Using Online Courses As Lead Magnets

Jerod Morris: Yeah. We talked about the access experience today. It won’t be next week, but when we resume this series, we’re going to talk about using online courses as lead magnets. Again, as you said, all of these elements are interrelated.

When we talk about the access experience, and we mentioned at the beginning, the importance of really giving people something worthwhile, giving them a reason to log in, well, this is where really delivering a good, a useful online course can be a great lead magnet as you start to build your membership site and create this access experience that can deliver you all of the benefits that we’ve talked about today.

Brian Clark: Yes. We’re talking about access, but access to what? Now we’re talking about, where are they on the journey? What’s the access point? What’s the intent? Mix that in with identity. You have to remember that great content marketing is giving people something worth paying for. People will pay for online education. We know that for sure.

Also, the best way to sell online education is to give them a free sample of that education. We’re going to talk about specifically why courses are the best way to determine that intent at the access point and then bring them along on their journey inside our environment–which is very powerful psychologically–then get them to the point where they realize that we’re the solution that they’re looking for.

Jerod Morris: Yep. Brian, since you can’t make it, I actually booked Donald Trump to discuss how he’s going to transition Trump University into a tremendous free online course next week.

Brian Clark: That should be very, very entertaining. Good luck.

How to Take Your Digital Commerce Education to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: Thank you. Real quick, as we close up here, you listening, if you want to take your digital commerce education to the next level, I really suggest that you go get your free taste of Digital Commerce Academy.

Not only do you get seven free lessons of Brian’s course on building an online training business the smart way and Tony and Chris’ course on building automated marketing funnels, but you also get access to three incredible case study webinars with Nathan Barry, Danny Margulies, and Brian Gardner that really are must watch for any current or aspiring digital entrepreneur like you.

You’ll also get our weekly email newsletter as well, and as I said, it’s a free taste. Go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register, get activated, and get your free membership today. With that, Brian, I wish you a wonderful trip to the Philippines.

Brian Clark: I’m going to the airport. Hold down the fort for me.

Jerod Morris: I will do my best. We will talk to you next week on another episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

The Transcript

How Adaptive Websites Deliver an Exceptional Experience While Accelerating Profit

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 DigitalCommerce.com.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur, everybody. I am Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and I am joined on this episode by Rainmaker Digital founder and CEO Brian Clark. Brian, welcome.

Brian Clark: Thank you, Jerod. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, which we do every day, day in and day out, but sometimes we record it.

Jerod Morris: That’s right. I feel like we should have been recording for the last half hour.

Brian Clark: Could have been good. Could have been bad. Who knows.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Last week on The Digital Entrepreneur we talked about email and were going through the five elements of the modern marketing website. In today’s episode, we’re going to hit the second one. We’re going to talk about adaptive content and how websites that can adapt their content are able to deliver an exceptional experience for an audience while also having a big impact on revenue and on profit as well.

‘Adaptive Content’ Defined

Jerod Morris: It’s probably useful to begin just by making sure everyone is on the same page with ‘adaptive content,’ what the term means, what it is. I think most people are, but just to be sure. It is the right piece of content at the right time for the right person.

One thing that you and I have discussed and debated a little bit is where the idea of responsive design fits into this idea of adaptive content. Obviously, there are differing opinions on this. When we talk about adaptive content, where do you see responsive design fitting into it?

Why Responsive Design Is the Bare Minimum

Brian Clark: So we led with email because email is still the transaction engine, the profit engine, for online marketing–specifically for digital entrepreneurs, but also across the board. Then, now, we’re coming to, what are you doing with email? What is its function?

When we talk about adaptive content, people may think, in one way, that we’re using that terminology, but you and I had a discussion where I was originally separating responsive design from other forms of serving up the right content at the right time. Ultimately, you had the better way of thinking about it, but maybe it helps to talk about an adaptive website.

What is a website, really? It’s delivering up information that people want. The adaptive aspect of it is those people need to get that information when, where, and how they want it. ‘Responsive design,’ in case anyone is not familiar with the term, means that the design–the layout of your site, of a page, of a post, whatever the case may be–adapts to the device that it is being viewed with.

The example that I always like here’s a great one because it was so ironic. I was invited to be on a radio show that’s about online marketing. I originally got the invitation on my phone, by email, clicked on the link, and it’s a disaster. I can’t read anything. Everyone has experienced this.

Everyone out there is probably using your smartphone. You’ve gone to a site, and it’s either a disaster or the print is just so tiny you have to use your fingers to stretch out a little bit of one area so you can read that part. That’s a lot of work. It has to be the beginning with the design, the wrapper, that your pages, posts, and other content is wrapped in.

If people can’t even show up for the first time on the device of their choice and have that site design, that website be smart enough to know, “Oh, you’re on an iPad,” “Oh, you’re on an Android phone,” and then adapt itself accordingly so that that content can be consumed, that desire, that intent that person had when they clicked–whether it be in search, social, email, whatever the case may be.

So you’re right. It really is the beginning of what we’re talking about with adaptive websites or adaptive content. Often, you don’t get past the first step if your design is not responsive.

Jerod Morris: Right. Again, this bare minimum, it ensures that whoever comes to your website will get it in a format that they can consume. If it was the same person coming to your website every single time or the same type of person with the same needs, you could have the same content for every person–but we know that’s not true.

There are different people, different buyers, different personas, that come to your website that need to be taken on a different journey–if you want to truly engage them. The issue, though, and where this idea of adaptive content on an adaptive website comes into play, is that too many folks make the mistake of treating everybody the same when we know that the buyer journey–every buyer journey-is unique.

How Every Buyer Journey Is Unique (Yet We Often Treat It As the Same)

Brian Clark: That’s absolutely the truth, and you broke it down into different personas. But we know from usability data and observation that even similar personas will take different steps on the pathway. It’s not even uniform in that way, so we often talk about personas, archetypes, or avatars in order to craft the right words–yet we’re still eliminating behavioral dynamics from the whole equation.

We have the technology to do this, and that’s why we are stressing that what looks cutting edge now is just going to flat-out be the norm. This is a huge shift in websites. Just like I’m telling you, responsive design is the bare minimum, and we still have people who aren’t doing that.

I’m saying that your competition who is employing these principles is going to kick your butt. I’m sorry. There’s no other way to put it. The experience will be so personalized, and this isn’t a treat. It shouldn’t be a treat. As you said, every buyer’s journey is unique, yet historically, and a lot of people presently, are treating it like it’s all the same path.

Jerod Morris: I think most people get that idea, and of course, an idea is nothing without the execution of it. That’s where actually being able to go in, map these journeys, start to plot it out, and put it together with content becomes so important. Let’s talk about some different aspects of journey mapping, the first one being conditional pathways.

The Three Aspects of Journey Mapping

Brian Clark: Yeah. Just to back up a second there, there is a discipline called ‘customer experience mapping,’ which really maps things from problem and desire, to prospect, to customer, to repeat customer or recurring customer, all of these things. It’s a broad discipline, but at the very base level what you’re trying to do is strategically map out the steps that are involved–as opposed to one linear step-by-step progression.

For example, marketing automation, old school, is just an autoresponder. We’d set up a sequence. People enter it. They all get the same message. It converts at X. But it does not take into account behavior whatsoever, and that’s fine. But it’s no longer going to be even minimally acceptable as far as what we’re doing.

There are really three aspects when we’re talking about adaptive content from a journey-mapping standpoint. Like you said, the first one is conditional pathways. You have a sequence of messages, links to content, or whatever the case may be with the hopes that, at the point when you make an offer, more people than not are going to accept it.

Yet like I said, the path is not linear. What do you do if you get someone involved in some sort of access opt-in that we’ve talked about–and we’ll talk about in more detail in the next episode–yet you find that only 50 percent of those people take the first step?

That’s a different journey right there for half of your people, yet you’re treating them as if they’re all on the same path. Well, the people who didn’t do anything at first are on a different path. That’s a different conditional dynamic that you need to think, “Okay, what kind of message does this person need?” We’ll talk in more detail with an example in a little bit, but you get what I’m saying here, right?

There’s not one path. There’s all sorts of paths that they can go by and still become your customer, yet you have to address okay, this is a good time for one of our favorite metaphors: the content marketer as mentor. They’re on a journey. They’re the hero. We’re the mentor. We’re the guide–and this, yes indeed, ties right back to the more mythical hero’s journey.

You’re not being a good guide if you give everyone the same directions even though some people are off in the woods. There’s a condition where you need to go hunt them down, pull them out by the hand with the right message, the right content, whatever the case may be, and bring them back in line with the destination you’re trying to get them to.

Jerod Morris: Right, so it meets what they need at that time. You can’t do that if you’re just giving the same thing to everybody. To get this right requires the leg work of just sitting down at a desk and charting out, “The person goes here. They make Choice A. They make Choice B. You’ve got a fork in the road, and they’re going in different directions now,” and then creating content that will meet them at the step where they need it.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It really is a choose-your-own-adventure-type exercise. It can feel a little daunting until you get into it. Then it’s cool, really cool, because you get really excited about the experience you’re able to create for people.

So first of all, you have to understand that there are conditional pathways. Then you have to do what we’ll call ‘dynamic mentoring,’ which is what I mentioned as far as steering them in the right way based on their actual behavior. Where do you get the ammunition to do this strategic exercise? Well, it’s good old-fashioned research. The thing we harp on over and over again.

Know your audience. Know your prospect better than they know themselves. You have access to a whole diverse group of people who go on these journeys. You probably do know them a little better than they know themselves–which some people can find spooky–but if you’re enhancing their journey, you’re enhancing their experience to help them meet their objectives. That also helps you meet your business objectives. That’s a win-win.

That’s the spirit in which we need to think about these elements because the third aspect of journey mapping is just recognizing that these are individuals, and this is an individual experience. Just about every one of them should be unique in the sense that the way they actually behave dictated the experience. Things worked out just like they needed them to based on reality and not your ‘funnel sequence’–which is some sort of static pathway that doesn’t exist as reality in any place other than in an optimistic marketer’s mind.

Putting the Pieces Together and Doing the Work

Jerod Morris: The other thing to keep in mind, too–because you mentioned this whole process can sound a little bit daunting, and it’s not like we want to sugarcoat it and say that it’s not–it’s going to require work. You’ve got to really get in there, do the research, do the work.

But the thing you find–and that I’m finding, certainly, doing it–is that, if you’ve been serving this audience for a while, then a lot of times–when we talk about this fork in the road where the person can either accept your offer or they don’t–the reason why they don’t accept your offer, you may have content already in your archive that you can use. That may be what that person needs right now. Them not taking that offer almost identifies, “Okay, which content that I’ve already created can I now get to this person?”

It’s not like each of these decision points and each of these moments where the content needs to adapt you have to create something new. You may have done a lot of that work. Now, it’s just putting together the pieces of this journey and figuring out what goes where. You’ll have to create some new stuff, but a lot of it you may already have.

Brian Clark: Oh, absolutely. Without a doubt. The interesting thing that you mentioned there is directly on point–if someone’s not engaging, you either re-engage or you lose them. You don’t just plow through to your offer with a disengaged prospect. That makes no sense whatsoever. Not only does it kill your conversion rate, it annoys the person.

Why not send them on a path of realizing that they need a little bit more know, like, and trust? We talk about that all the time, but being able to actually know based on their behavior what their temperature is with our concentric circles that go from cold to warm to hot–literally, taking that person’s temperature based on their behavior and then warming them appropriately instead of just saying, “Ah, you’re all getting the same offer,” hammer-over-the-head-type situation.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, so let’s run through a few examples of this, then. Let’s talk about how this works in practice.

How You Start the Process with a Free Course

Brian Clark: Yeah. The variables and the possibilities are as only limited by your own creativity and your knowledge of your audience, as you said. Now, the great thing about this is, the technology is not the hard part.

To do this stuff in the past was very, very, very expensive, and most marketing automation software is still at the enterprise level, costing thousands and thousands of dollars a month. That’s a big problem that we’re trying to solve with the Rainmaker Platform–same power, less hassle, way less expense–so don’t let that part of it intimidate you.

Here’s a very, very simple scenario that I know you’ll appreciate. We’re going to talk later in this series about why free courses are the best access-type opt-in or registration generator. Briefly, that’s because it gives you a very systematic and strategic way to concisely educate people into what they need to know to make their first purchase with you. Now, of course, it could be a subsequent purchase, too, but let’s use that scenario.

Person is a prospect. They’re qualified, but they’ve never done business with you before. You put them in your sequence–and, of course, with Rainmaker, you can drip out lessons with the LMS, tie that to email to make this a very carefully spaced out and delivered course–but what happens if they don’t take the first lesson? You’ll be able to see that.

What if they don’t take the second lesson? Should you just go ahead and plow through and keep delivering lessons and then make an offer? No, because you can tell that person went off path. They did not receive the education that they need to do business with you, yet you’re treating them like you did.

If you know that someone didn’t take the first lesson–again, you’re on a different conditional pathway–you need to bring them back, if at all possible, to actually experience that course. They asked for it. They registered for it, but things happen. Life happens.

So that’s just a very simple way of, instead of delivering lesson two when they haven’t watched lesson one, sending them a message that prompts them gently to take lesson one. You can do that however many times you strategically develop is necessary in order to get them back on the path.

Again, there are much more complex and creative variations of this, but just think about it from that very simple scenario. You understand your audience. You know they need to know A, B, C, and D, and then they’re likely to buy. But they don’t even get started, or they leave out a middle lesson or something. Stop. Quit forcing them on lessons that don’t make any sense because they didn’t do the first one.

Jerod Morris: That’s why pulling it out of online where it’s so easy to feel like, “Okay, we’re sending this email out to this group of 1,000 people,” instead of thinking, “We’re sending it out to 1,000 individuals.” When you think about it in that sense and when you think about yourself as the mentor for 1,000 different people instead of just the mentor for this big group where you’re trying to herd a group, you’re trying to bring individuals through the journey.

If someone doesn’t get the information they need to take the next step with you, like you said before, you’re not going to just yank them through and keep force-feeding them stuff they’re not ready for. Really thinking about your audience in terms of individuals and adapting this experience for individuals, but doing it in an automated way so that it’s scalable is so important and, really, is kind of a subtle mindset shift people need to make to be successful with this.

Brian Clark: Yeah, the individual experience is the whole thing. That’s how you bring people back in line with again, they expressed an intent to learn something or to solve a problem. It’s your job as the dynamic mentor to do your best to get as many of those people in that position. Maybe they don’t all buy from you, but that’s the process by which more people do.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Did you have another example that you wanted to cover in this episode, or save for next week when we talk about the access experience?

How You Accelerate the Profit Engine with Perpetual Promotion

Brian Clark: Yeah, this is some stuff that we’re working on ourselves, and it’s very fascinating. Again, remember the whole choose-your-own adventure. Well, they always choose their own adventure. It’s whether or not you’re staying in the adventure, or they’re going off to someone else.

But think about it. Let’s say, going back to the free course example, we have our conditional pathways, the dynamic mentoring messages that get more people where they want to go. Really, it’s not even back in line because there is no line. It’s the path that they’re going to follow.

Let’s say you’ve mapped that out, and it’s working more. You’re retaining and engaging more people, and they are educated to a point when you can do business with them. At that point, we generally will make an offer, but what do you know is the number one rule of promotions, Jerod, that they have to begin and they have to end, or people do not take action, correct?

Jerod Morris: Right, exactly.

Brian Clark: You’ve seen this. You’ve seen it upfront, live and center, for years now.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. You’ve got to have urgency and scarcity.

Brian Clark: Yeah, but it’s got to be real. The quickest way to ruin your reputation is to use fake scarcity and gimmicky timers and countdowns when it’s not real. There have been creative technological solutions with cookies and whatnot, but if you’re lying, people are going to stumble upon that. It’s just not going to do well for you, so we never fake scarcity.

If we say it’s ending at 5:00 on Friday, which we often do, then that’s when it ends, but that’s old thinking in the sense that you’ve got to send that promo basically to your entire audience to get the impact that you want. You can’t just necessarily do that every month.

You could automate the promotion so that when people come to you, they’ve gone through the steps you think are necessary to educate them, and it’s time to make an offer, why not say, “Hey, we’re about to do a special promotion on this product”? It could be a gateway product, or it could be your main thing, depending on your upsell strategy.

You get someone to click on that and say, “Yes, I am interested in seeing what this promotion is.” You’re not making the offer yet. You’re actually building a launch list, a mini launch list, but remember that this is automated. When you do a typical product launch, Jeff Walker calls it a two-week ‘sideways sales letter,’ and we’ve taken that and know that content marketing itself is a perpetual sideways sales letter.

You get people to get on board, take the offer at various times, but when you think about it and this is, of course, the conventional wisdom in content marketing. That is, you show up every day with a new angle on the topic hoping to connect and resonate. Well, that can work, but what would work better without creating all that content where you get people into a certain funnel and you educate them?

Again, you know your prospect. You know your audience. You’re giving them great value, great education, but why not be able to do a promo as part of that funnel that truly does expire in five days like we typically do with our hands-on promotions? Then the technology truly makes it stop. It truly is taken away. Now, we take away things manually. There’s no difference, though, so you can create this perpetual promotion cycle.

Let’s say you’re using Facebook Ads. You’ve got your targeting down, you’ve got your ads optimized, and you’re getting a great opt-in conversion rate for your money. Then once they get into the funnel, you’re able to sell them, make that offer–at the appropriate time–but you’re able to add the incentive of a promotion that is not publicly advertised. It’s not the normal pricing.

It doesn’t even have to be priced. It could be a bundle. It could be some other hybrid offer that provides more value than the traditional out-there model. But we know that if you just leave it out there forever, you’re not going to convert as many–and why would you? Why would you leave an offer out there that is substantially better than your normal offer and just leave it out there?

It can’t, but in order to do that manually, you would be constantly overwhelmed by trying to manage the process of where are they in the funnel, this, that, and the other.

This allows you to automate the entire progress, the entire journey, culminate with a true scarce offer, and have it end if they don’t act, so you’re telling the truth. But you’re creating a very dynamic, testable, and scalable, as you mentioned, funnel to where it just runs–no matter when they start.
Here’s an example of what this type of adaptive content can do. Someone clicks on that link–this is just an example–that says, “Yes, I’m interested in hearing about this promotion.” Then the day they do that sets a trigger that says two days later the offer is presented. Then there’s another trigger that hits then that kills that offer in four days.

All the dates are dynamically inserted, and the offer ends automatically at the time you’ve designated. You can see the power we’re talking about here, and these two examples are really just scratching the surface.

Putting It All Together: A Scalable System to Grow Your Business

Jerod Morris: Yeah. In summary, you use the concepts of adaptive content and responsive design to create an adaptive website. Then you go in and use the journey mapping that you talked about–with conditional pathways, dynamic mentoring, creating this individual experience–to create an exceptional experience for the individuals who are engaging with you. Then you use this idea of perpetual promotion to accelerate profit.

The combination of those three really creates this scalable system, machine, whatever you want to call it, that not only gives people an exceptional experience when they engage with you, but gives you something exceptional, too. You’re making offers to people at the right time when they’re going to be more likely to take them–which is how you grow your business.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and the irony to me is that the hands-on, post-everyday-type approach is deemed to be more authentic, yet it’s not. It doesn’t deliver as good an experience. It doesn’t solve the problem as well for the person this all matters to, so you think about automation in terms of laziness or some sort of less-than-scrupulous behavior.

Yet if you are truly interested in creating the right experience for people–and again, it’s not going to be an option for much longer–then you should look at it this way. When you take that time to really map out the different conditional pathways and then coming up with those mentoring responses, you are being a better, I would say, just in general, citizen, certainly businessperson, certainly marketer.

If you can use technology and some upfront strategy to give people an experience that is quantifiably better than anyone else, isn’t that what we’re here to do?

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and you’re saving people time, and you’re giving them something of value when they need it.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and the fact that you make more money is just because it’s good business. It’s as simple as that.

How to Learn More About How Adaptive Content and Responsive Design

Jerod Morris: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. If you want more information on this, about all of the topics that we’re talking about on The Digital Entrepreneur, a great way to do it is to go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register, and you can actually get a free registration to Digital Commerce Academy.

For those of you who have been listening to the show, two weeks ago right here on The Digital Entrepreneur, we had Danny Margulies of Freelance to Win on the show. He told us this really great story of how he transitioned from this job that he couldn’t stand into becoming a six-figure freelancer and then how he leveraged that experience into building a powerhouse online course that made over $25,000 in revenue just in January of 2016. It’s a great story.

Danny is a wonderful guy, so you’ll really enjoy it from that aspect. More importantly than that, you’ll learn a lot and get some real insights into how he managed his digital business. You can watch that case study as part of the free membership at Digital Commerce Academy. That and you get some lessons in Brian’s course, some lessons in Chris and Tony’s course on marketing automation–all as part of this free registration, so go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register.

It takes you about 10 seconds to sign up. Once you’ve signed up, go in there, and you can start accessing your free content. As we move forward, you’ll start to see some examples of what we’ve talked about today with adaptive content and creating this experience and some of the mapping that we’ve done and continue to do. You’ll get to see some of it in action as part of that registration, part of that membership.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and again, the pre-taste that you’re getting over there hits on all the stuff we’re talking about–creating marketing funnels, creating online courses, how knowing your audience relates to all of that–but we’re really looking forward to putting together our own sequences, doing our own mapping based on our interactions with the people inside Digital Commerce Academy.

Then, of course, we’re going to pull back the curtain. We’re going to talk exactly what we did, how did it work, why do we think it worked, and how can you use it in your business.

Jerod Morris: Yep, absolutely. So next week, Brian, we are moving on to the third element of the modern marketing website, which is access experience–which will be a fun one.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it’s interesting how much access is pivotal. It makes sense that it’s the middle element because it highly impacts the two topics we’ve already discussed, and of course, it highly impacts the last two–so good stuff.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for listening, and join us next week on another brand-new episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. Talk to you then.

The Transcript

How Email (Still) Creates the Profit Engine of Your Digital Business

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 DigitalCommerce.com.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I am Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. Brian Clark is back with us today on this episode. Brian, how you doing?

Brian Clark: I’m doing okay. I had a nice little tropical break, and apparently, you held down the fort while I was gone. That’s a good sign because I wouldn’t want things to fall apart or anything.

Jerod Morris: No, no. It was good. Danny Margulies joined us. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, go back and listen to it. It’s a fantastic episode that we did where Danny offered some more insight into what he talked about in his case study in Digital Commerce Academy. It was good. With his help, we held down the fort pretty well.

Brian Clark: Excellent.

Jerod Morris: What we did there is we subbed that episode in with Danny because, in episode two of The Digital Entrepreneur, you and I introduced this idea of the five elements of the modern marketing website. We broke down those five elements and then mentioned that we would be breaking them down individually on future episodes of The Digital Entrepreneur.

That is what you and I are going to start doing today. Again, just as a quick review, those five elements are email, adaptive content, the logged-in experience, online courses as lead magnet, and then test everything. We’re going to spend some time now, over the next few episodes of The Digital Entrepreneur, going through these one by one and breaking them down in-depth. We want to start with email.

It’s interesting, Brian, I did a webinar last week. It was about how to use a podcast to build an email list. We did a poll at the beginning. I was just trying to see who was building an email list already, who had started a podcast, who was doing both, and who was doing neither. Over 50 percent of the respondents were not yet building an email list, which really surprised me.

I feel like sometimes we come on here, and we talk about email is not dead, all those clichés, and take it for granted that people get that, but it still seems like there’s a lot of people out there who don’t get it or don’t trust email for whatever reason. That’s not a good mindset to have.

Some Impressive Stats to Remind You of Email’s Omnipotence

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it’s interesting to me that some of our colleagues in the content marketing space really had an epiphany that, no, email’s not dead. Email is the thing. It is the first and foremost thing that should be on your mind when you’re creating content, when you’re thinking about traffic–well before you should be thinking about sales.

But here’s the thing. One of our favorite statistics when people try to say social media has or will kill email is that email remains the transactional engine of online sales. It’s not even close. The McKinsey report stated that email is 40 times more effective at converting prospects to buyers than any form of social media, specifically Twitter and Facebook. Those are the two big ones.

Not 40 percent, Jerod, 40 times. That’s astronomical. The other humorous thing that I always like to point out when people talk about social killing email or even the idea of that, which was never valid. But it’s really kind of laughable when you think about how much the social networks do email marketing themselves to get you back to the site.

If you’re not a believer, if you just happen not to like email yourself, you got to step aside from that and look at reality. This is the key thing that you should be focusing on–before sales–because this is what leads to sales.

Jerod Morris: The other thing, too, is that people seem to have this notion that, as more and more people started using their mobile devices to use the Internet, that email would start to go down and start to be less effective. That hasn’t happened.

Email is still very relevant in a mobile world. No one needs me to tell them stats on mobile proliferation. We know how quickly mobile phones are growing, both in the United States, even in third-world countries. Smartphones are growing.

The thing is, people use their phones for checking email. If you look at some of the stats just on email usage, and this one’s from Pew, it said 87 percent of people in the US use their smartphones at least once per week to check email–which actually sounds low to me, but it’s still a really high number.

But the one that really gets me is that 80 percent of smartphone users check their phones within the first 15 minutes of waking up. Four out of five check them before doing anything else.

Brian Clark: I know that’s me.

Jerod Morris: I know. And a lot of those people are going first to email. One of the things that people cited as why they use their smartphones so much is this sense of connectedness–some of the other ones: excitement, curiosity, productivity–and email remains one of the primary drivers of smartphone connectedness and productivity. It’s not killing email by any means. In fact, it’s making it easier to check email, and people are getting into their email even more.

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I also want to bring up that I did an episode of New Rainmaker last year talking about the myth that Millennials had abandoned email. It’s just not true. It is absolutely not true. Now, they are very, very tough customers when it comes to giving up their email address and about the value that you need to provide to keep them on your list.

That’s a big part of our point here in this episode of talking about, not just the importance of email, but how do you make it work? What is it that is going to get someone to trust you with that email address? What’s going to keep them sticking with you? That’s really what it comes down to.

Jerod Morris: Let’s talk about that then. Let’s talk about using email as the centerpiece of your content marketing. Because when we talk about content marketing and we talk about building an audience, you want your email to be the centerpiece of it.

Why Email Is the Missing Element That Creates the Profit Engine

Brian Clark: Yeah. You know that meme–it was big on Digg, and it’s probably still big on Reddit–where you have two items, a question mark, and then the last thing is profit? It’s kind of a way to exemplify that you’ve got a hair-brained scheme because you don’t understand the thing that comes in the middle.

It’s like content marketing is thought of as content, then traffic, then question mark, and then profit. Well, email is the missing element that creates that profit engine. That’s why it’s really the centerpiece of any smart content marketing strategy.

When we talk about content marketing, when we talk about the type of content that you need to create, what we’re talking about is information that has so much value to the intended prospect that it’s worth paying for. The other function of that content, beyond just value, is that it meshes with your business objective. It educates people in a way that makes them more likely to do business with you– plus all the know, like, and trust aspects that comes with it.

So you’ve got your content. Now you’ve got to get traffic to that content. How many times have we heard people have this ‘build it, and they’ll come’ mentality? No. Content needs distribution. It’s either going to be from search, it’s going to be from social, or you’re going to pay for your traffic.

That’s when you really start thinking about, “Okay, is this content the right content for the people that I’m trying to reach, and is it tied sufficiently to my business objectives?”

You can get all the traffic in the world and if they just stop by, then bounce, and go somewhere else–like people do–you’re done, especially if you’re paying for that traffic. You can retarget and all those kind of things, but the goal of all of that is to create a relationship based on permission, based on someone raises their hand.

This goes all the way back to the best and first marketing book I ever read, Permission Marketing, back in 1999 from Seth Godin. That’s the key to everything. The only thing we’re really trying to say here today is, the context is very different. It’s harder than it was in 1999. Trust me, that’s when I got started. People would sign up for anything. They would forward every email that was interesting to all their friends.

We live in a very different environment now, but fundamentally, everything is the same. It’s just the context and the mindset. The web has shifted to what is perceived as value and what’s perceived as likely to be spam. We really need to talk about in what context are we building an email list and how are we going to keep people on board.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Obviously, as things shift, then our mindset needs to shift. One of the biggest shifts, it seems to me, is this change from thinking about getting someone to opt-in to now where you’re really trying to get people to register. Of course, the difference is that, when someone opts-in, they’re on your list, and they get your emails. Okay, that’s fine. But if you can actually get someone to register, now it opens up a whole new world of an experience that you can give them.

The Importance of Going Beyond the Opt-In

Brian Clark: Yeah. This is a hypothesis that I had years ago from watching the mainstreaming of social media and watching how expectations and perception of value had really shifted. When you think about everything that’s really cool, everything that’s really valuable–it could be Google, Amazon, Apple, iTunes, all of these things, but especially Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn–what do you have to do? What defines your experience?

If you don’t register, you don’t get access to whatever that is. It could be Gmail. It could be Facebook, whatever the case may be. Then you have to log in in order to experience the benefits of whatever it is.

It was that observation years ago that changed my thinking. We eventually implemented this ourselves to test it out–and we’ll talk a little bit about that–but here’s the fundamental thing to think about: registration and access. This is the way the web works.

When people really want something, they’re going to register to gain access to the experience. What can you glean from that, in the context of email that makes people more likely to sign up? Every time you gain access to anything, all those examples I gave you, they’re going to email you. Again, going back to the social networks, they’re some of the biggest email marketers in the world. It’s the way that we access things of value on the web.

Going back to the other perception, the opposite perception, ‘opt-in to my marketing newsletter,’ is just perceived as, “Yeah, right. I’m either giving you a dummy email or one I don’t check, or I’m just leaving,” because people have been burned too often. Here’s the shift in context that I’m talking about from just a simple opt-in box on your site.

How the ‘Logged-In’ Experience Helps You Create Less, Convert More

Brian Clark: The other thing that’s going to permeate this entire series that we’re doing here is the importance of identity and that adaptive content. That’s one of our later lessons. On one hand, you want to be able to create less and convert more by having a higher impact experience for people–delivering the right information at the right time and all of that stuff.

But the identity piece is crucial. Again, Facebook knows who you are when you’re logged in. Google knows who you are. Identity. And when you start talking about adaptive content, which is a form of marketing automation and you’re talking about a mobile and cross-device world, the cookie approach to knowing that someone’s been there before is really flawed.

But with a registration-and-access concept, you’re able to use more advanced automation techniques. When they log in to the experience, you also know who they are, and you’re able to best deliver the right information to them based on their behavior.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. And it’s important to realize how big of a win-win this is. Whereas just going for a simple opt-in is easier, really on both ends of the transaction, it’s not nearly as high value. When you have someone register and you can learn more about them, as you said, you can create less, convert more.

Instead of having to throw 10 pieces of content at them and hoping that three stick, based on what they do, you know what three pieces of content to give them. It’s better for you, more efficient, more impactful, and it’s better for them. They’re getting exactly what they need based on what they’re doing, who they are, all of that. That’s why that registration–the ‘logged-in experience’–is such a better option than just doing the simple opt-in.

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. We’re going to explore this idea of adaptive content as one of our future elements. We’ll also talk about what we–after doing this for three years with the concept of access over opt-in and subscription–is the best thing to give access to.

It’s important not to confuse the distinction. Access can be an app. It can be a social network. It can be a content library. It can be a design template–all of these things that you can give people that provide value.

But later on, we’ll talk about why we are using free online courses. Remember, the content has to have value, but it also has to educate them to the point that they do business with. We know that the $15 billion online education industry is something people are worth paying for, but it also educates people.

That’s what good content marketing does. Having that sort of lead magnet is what allows you to really think through, “What do they need to know?” We’ll talk about that more later. Let’s stick just with the fundamental concepts of email using an access concept.

Three Illustrative Case Studies from Our Own Experience

Brian Clark: We first tried this in 2013. Before that time, we had a newsletter. It was standard opt-in, and it was called Internet Marketing for Smart People. Then we shifted that to a content library concept where we re-purposed. This was not new content creation.

A lot of content that we created over the years, we turned them into ebooks. We really upped the perceived value by formatting it for different e-readers and things like that. But it was fundamentally stuff that we had created before and was bringing in search traffic on these very highly targeted terms.

I’m going to put a link to the MarketingSherpa case study that was done on My Copyblogger a little bit after we had launched it. But the short story, shifting from an opt-in concept to an access concept raised our opt-in rate by 400 percent, and it persisted–and people stayed on the list. Having a hypothesis and seeing it come true that much is actually kind of surprising.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Well, and then, that was followed up with what you and Robert did with the New Rainmaker course. This was the precursor to launching the Rainmaker Platform where you guys started with the New Rainmaker podcast. Those episodes had really high production value in terms of the planning that it took, the script that you guys put together, and just everything that went into those episodes.

They weren’t just episodes that went out and then faded into obscurity in the archive of the podcast. There was a plan there to take those episodes, turn that into a free course, re-purpose that audio into a free course, add on a few webinars. Now that becomes the free course that is going to compel people to register and, with that, build a huge email list of people who had registered for this free course–which, ultimately, helped us launch the Rainmaker Platform.

Brian Clark: Yeah. And it still remains one of our primary sources of new customers for Rainmaker even a couple years later. That was the evolution of the access hypothesis–that it’s cool to give people all those ebooks, but it’s kind of unstructured. You don’t know if people actually consume them or not and those kind of things.

You’re right, though. Again, it was re-purposing content. Yes, we started a new podcast, but it served double duty. I knew that those first eight episodes were going to end up being a course.

What that forced me to do, going into a podcast with that understanding, forced me to say, “What do they need to know? How’s the best way to explain this content marketing thing?” That was where the whole ‘media not marketing’ thing came in. I got a lot of gratification out of that because a lot of people said the light bulb went off thanks to that course. If the light bulb didn’t go off, we’re not selling the platform right.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Even with Unemployable, which is a podcast, it’s also now a curated email newsletter, so the email is the feature there. It’s one of the main reasons, in itself, that you want people to sign up. But what I did was, while I was doing the initial six months of the whole project, just did three simple webinars.

Again, thought through, “What do I need to accomplish here? What do these people need to learn to take either their freelancing business or their entrepreneurial business to the next level?”–mapped it out, found other people to be my guests.

So I did the webinars. Then I re-purposed them into a course. You’re getting a theme here–never create content just once, if you can help it.

Jerod Morris: And we might be doing that right now.

Brian Clark: Oh, yeah, we may be doing that right now in a different way.

Jerod Morris: How meta is that?

Brian Clark: It’s interesting because we’re taking a slightly different approach here that I don’t want to talk too much about. It’s not as highly scripted as New Rainmaker was, but this is really a way of talking about core concepts in a way that we will continue to do over time and in different formats. As you said, all we have to do is get it down cold.

Jerod Morris: Exactly. Absolutely. So that’s email. Next week, on the next episode of The Digital Entrepreneur, we’re going to talk about adaptive content–which has comes up a few times in this, and as you see, going over these next few episodes, there is overlap between these. But that will be what we’ll talk about next week.

Brian Clark: People have to realize that these are not things that just live in isolation. Everything is integrated. Everything has to work together. So there’s always overlap if you’re doing something right, but at each step, you’ll expand on the core premise and really get to a broader understanding of what you need to do.

The Registration Idea in Action: The Digital Commerce Academy

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Speaking of this idea of registration, we just so happen to have something for folks to register for–which I mentioned on the last episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

Again, on that episode we had Danny Margulies from Freelance to Win on the show, and he explained to us this transition that he went on from this soul-crushing job to becoming a six-figure freelancer and then how he leveraged that experience into building this powerhouse online course that just made him $25,000 in revenue in January of 2016.

It’s a great story–both for the human element because he’s just a really great guy and because of what you learn. What’s cool is that you can actually watch that entire case study that I did with Danny. It’s about 90 minutes, and it’s chock full of great stuff. Doing it, it went by so much faster than that.

But it’s part of the free membership option that we just launched at Digital Commerce Academy. To find out what that membership entails and to register in about 10 seconds, go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register.

Then you can get Danny’s complete story by watching the case study, which is called How Danny Margulies Turned His Freelancing Success into a Powerhouse Paid Course. Once you’re done with that, perhaps inspired to create your own course, you can navigate over to Brian’s course on building your own online training business, where you actually have several lessons available to you as part of the free membership as well.

Brian Clark: And don’t forget there are some free lessons on creating marketing funnels, which is very much tied to how you drive traffic onto lists. This is another example of the registration concept. In this case, you’re getting a free taste. That’s something that we really haven’t tried before. So we continue to experience, and we continue to report the results to you. That’s really the idea specifically behind this podcast, The Digital Entrepreneur.

Jerod Morris: So go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register, check that out. Then come back next week, and join us for another brand new episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

Brian Clark: Take care, everyone.

The Transcript

Secrets of a Six-Figure Online Course Builder

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 DigitalCommerce.com.

Jerod Morris: Welcome back, everybody, to The Digital Entrepreneur. I’m Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and I have a very, very special guest with me today.

I had the good pleasure, actually, of producing a case study for Digital Commerce Academy with this individual just last week. It was so interesting, so educational, and so inspiring that I had to bring him here on the podcast as well. Before I introduce this guest, let me set the stage for you real quick.

In 2012, my guest quit his ‘soul-crushing job’ because he wanted something new. He wanted to be a professional writer, but with his first child and a pregnant wife at home, his back was against the wall, as you can imagine. So he rolled up his sleeves, and he got to work. He taught himself how to succeed as a freelancer on Upwork, previously Elance, and then turned those lessons that he learned into a basic online course that taught others how to succeed as well.

In January of 2016, his online course, which is smart and highly useful, but won’t blow you away with fancy design or all these bells and whistles, generated over $25,000 in revenue–just in the month of January. That’s in one month, and that’s not even the best month that he’s had. The course is called Secrets of a Six-Figure Upworker, and my guest is Danny Margulies.

Danny, welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur.

Danny Margulies: Thanks. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Jerod Morris: For sure. Like I said, I enjoyed our conversation for the case study so much. I really wanted you to come on here and share your story with our listeners on The Digital Entrepreneur. You can’t share all of it. That case study was about a 90-minute-long case study. It was great, and the questions at the end were fantastic.

But there are a couple parts in particular that are especially relevant for this show that I want to dig into a bit here in this episode. To fast-forward your story a bit and lead into this first question, you made one transition when you quit your job, taught yourself how to be a successful copywriter, and then started earning a six-figure income on Elance, with a lot of hard work along the way.

Eventually, you had to make another transition from successful freelancer to starting all over again as a digital entrepreneur creating courses. Take me back to that decision, and talk about why you decided starting a course, and eventually doubling down on it, was the best idea for you.

Why Danny Walked Away from a Six-Figure Freelancing Business to Create His Online Course

Danny Margulies: I nicknamed my younger self ‘want-to-preneur number one’ because that’s where I was at a few years ago. I had a lot of energy, and I always wanted to do something. But it was really hard to figure out how. Freelancing was the first step towards that. I don’t think that that’s a necessary step, by any means. Some people say, “You should start freelancing first.” I think you could jump right into being a digital entrepreneur.

For me, it didn’t happen that way. I just didn’t know how to do it or what to do. I started freelancing serendipitously right after I had typed in ‘how to make money writing’ into Google. That was a serendipitous thing. Then, freelancing was great, but I wanted to take that next step and say, “Okay, I want to be a real entrepreneur in terms of having something scalable.”

Being a freelancer is sort of entrepreneurial, but it’s not a real business. It’s more like working for yourself, but it’s not exactly like having a business. I wanted to have a business, and I loved the accessibility of having an online business. We’ve gotten to a point where anyone can publish a blog. Anyone can put out a course, especially with Rainmaker.

That was also a lucky thing. While I was thinking about this, you guys were launching Rainmaker at that exact time. All of these questions about, “How am I going to sell this course? I’m going to have to figure out all the technology. I’m going to have to have a website built and designed and all this stuff”–all of that was quelled with the release of Rainmaker.

You guys were like, “Hey, look. This will do all of that for you. All you have to do is make something good. Just give people good information.” I thought to myself, “I can do that.” You know what I mean?

Jerod Morris: Yeah, totally. There’s something else that you mentioned in the case study–and you kind of alluded to it here–that I thought was interesting. Your quote was, I believe, “That is the beauty of having something scalable. I just have to feed the machine.”

Obviously, that’s the big difference between your digital business and your freelance business. With your freelance business, there are only so many hours in the day where you can do work and make money. With a digital business, you can scale it so much better.

Talk a little bit about this idea of ‘feeding the machine’ and some of the ways you went about doing that once you had the course up.

How Danny ‘Feeds the Machine’ to Leverage the Scalability of His Digital Business

Danny Margulies: The best way that I found to feed the machine–and it’s super simple–it’s just guest blogging. It obviously doesn’t cost any money. As a matter of fact, some people offer to pay for it. I’ve never taken a payment for guest blogging because I feel like, for me, it’s just better to keep the payment out of it. It’s a different kind of transaction. It’s just so simple.

So many blogs really want great content, and they need it every day. Also, people set their sights a little too low, maybe, with the guest posting. They think like, “Oh, well, all I can do is just post on one small blog at a time.” I think people would be surprised to find out that even bigger blogs really want your ideas if they’re good.

I’ve contributed to Business Insider twice. It really wasn’t that hard, if you just pitch them with a good idea. It doesn’t have to be a earth-shattering idea of ‘how I made a million dollars’ or whatever. I saw the other day on Huffington Post, somebody wrote an article called Why I Didn’t Finish a Marathon. It got thousands, maybe tens of thousands of views and shares because it was an interesting story.

I’ve been telling people ever since–what could be more underwhelming as an idea than, “I didn’t finish a marathon”? The person had an interesting perspective on why she didn’t finish the marathon, so it was a great post.

I think that focusing on that one thing everybody I talk to, they’re like, “I’ve got Facebook Ads. I got Google Ads. I got Bing Ads. I’ve got affiliate stuff.” They’re trying to do 18 million different things, and they just end up getting frazzled and confused, whereas I just picked that one thing and just focused the hell out of it.

Jerod Morris: Again, that’s feeding the machine. It’s so important to have the something scalable so that you can then feed the machine. You can do all this guest blogging, run all these ads, like you’re talking about, but if you don’t have something really good at the core, at the heart, that you’re directing people to, it’s not going to work. That’s what you did.

You developed this course. Went from your MVP course, which I think you were selling for $49, and then raised it up to $200. We’re going to talk in a minute about when you raised the price up again because I love that part of your story.

But even before you were ‘feeding this machine,’ getting people on your email list and getting them into this funnel that would then lead them to the course, was there any particular challenge that stands out in your mind as you think back to creating and launching that first course?

Danny’s Biggest Challenge When Creating and Launching His First Course

Danny Margulies: The biggest challenge was just mental. It was just thinking that it wasn’t going to be good enough. “It’s my first course. Nobody knows me.” It’s all BS, though. If you have a good piece of information, then it’s a good piece of information. It doesn’t matter how you deliver it. Would it be nicer if you could deliver it gold-plated and all this pretty stuff? Sure, but I remember, and I told you this when we talked, I had ‘splurged’ on the $200 mic.

Looking back, I shouldn’t have even done that. I just did it because, when I listened to my first iteration of my voice using my laptop mic, I was like, “Ah, it doesn’t sound good.” Then I showed it to my wife, and my wife was like, “It’s fine. Nobody’s going to care. It’s totally fine.” I was so in my head about it. I guess that’s the metaphor.

The mic is the metaphor for the biggest challenge–which is just being in your own head about and just thinking everything is not going to be good enough. When looking back, even if I had hired a crew and done all this stuff to make it ‘perfect,’ I still would’ve had that voice.

Now I’m gearing up to do another course. It’s going to be much different, much more sophisticated, and all this stuff, but I still have that stupid voice in my head. That will never go away. That’s the biggest challenge–the mental block of thinking that everything kind of has to be perfect.

Jerod Morris: Moving ahead now in your story, jumping ahead again. This is, again, one of my favorite parts of your story. Again, you started at $49 when you went out the door with the MVP and then eventually bumped it up to $200 for the full launch. There’s a great story within that, that you tell within the case study.

Then, you get to this point where sales have grown to between $8,000 to $12,000 a month for, I think, a good four or five months in a row there. Then you decide to raise the price. Take us back to that time. Why raise the price, and what happened when you did?

What Happened When Danny Decided to Raise the Price of His Course

Danny Margulies: A few months before that and maybe it’s quite a few months at this point or maybe even a year. I don’t know. Time has just been flying. I remember hearing Brian I can’t remember who he was talking with. I don’t remember if he was talking with Seth Godin on the podcast, but I remember hearing him say that it’s been his policy in life, when something scares him, to use that as a signal that that’s what he needs to be going towards instead of away from.

I was scared to raise the price. People would tell me, “Raise the price. It’s too cheap.” Colleagues would tell me. Students of the course would tell me. Random people. My wife would tell me. Everyone was saying, “Raise the price.” I was like, “You know what? It’s bringing in like $10,000 a month. Why mess with a good thing?” Then Brian’s voice was echoing in my head there, and I just said, “I got to do this.”

I woke up one morning. It was a Monday. I called my one team member. I had, at this point, one part-time team member, so I have a few freelancers helping me now with the course. I just called her up and said, “We’re raising the price. I’m going to send out an email today.” We kicked around a few ideas, like should we do a big email series over it.

Then we both came to the conclusion, “No, let’s just send out two very short emails. One today and one on Friday as a reminder.” That was it. We didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I didn’t feel the need to convince people that there was a reason why we were doing it. We felt like the results were self-evident. They spoke for themselves.

The price, we were just going to raise it, and that was it. This is a big thing that I think a lot of people need to get over is, again, a mental block. I was scared because I was thinking about it in a logical sense like, “Oh, if it’s $300, then fewer people will buy it than if it’s $200,” because that’s the laws of economics. It doesn’t really work that way.

When people are thinking about buying your course, it’s not like cabbage at Walmart where they’re like, “Should I buy the cheap one, or should I buy the more expensive one?” It’s something that people want, they’re connecting with emotionally if you made something good. They’re not tied to it in this logical, bean-counting sense. What we found is, the sales have literally stayed exactly the same. Actually, they’ve grown. Just to show you people don’t think about it in that logical way.

Jerod Morris: The next part of that story is you doubled-down, and you fed the machine even more–and I love this. Right after you raised the price, you turned around and wrote an article called How I Made $30,000 in One Month Selling an Online Course. That’s the little detail. I forgot about this. In the month where you raised the price, you had what I believe to this day is still your record for sales which was $31,738 in October of 2015.

You wrote this article, How I Made $30,000 in One Month Selling an Online Course, and then you got another 800 subscribers to your email list and kept getting sales. This has kind of been a theme for you. Something works. You double-down on it. You expand it into another area, and again, you just keep feeding that machine.

The Important Role That Guest Blogging Has Played in Danny’s Success

Danny Margulies: When you’re having success, this is when everyone wants to celebrate. “Okay, we just had a $31,000 month. Let me take a vacation. Let me whatever.” That’s the exact time when things are hot. That’s when you have momentum, so I said to myself, “I had this big success.” Literally, people were emailing me, “I hope you’re going to take a few days off now.” I’m sitting there, and I’m like, “If everyone’s telling me to take a few days off, that’s probably a sign that that’s not the best business move.”

I thought about it and said, “How can I leverage this?” Then it’s like, “Wait a minute. Of course, Business Insider would love to hear this story”–versus a random month when $10,000 came in. It’s not quite as interesting. You have to seize those moments when they happen.

For people listening, it doesn’t have to be a big win. It could’ve been how I made $2,000 on the side while working a full-time job. It could’ve been how I launched my first course and made $600. They’re interested in that, too, so it doesn’t have to be this grandiose number.

Jerod Morris: Fortunately, in this case, it wasn’t about quitting like the marathon article.

Danny Margulies: No, but if I did write an article about running a marathon, it would definitely be about quitting as opposed to finishing–probably quitting very early. Maybe that would be my next article: How I Quit Before the Race Even Started.

Jerod Morris: There you go. I’m right there with you. I’ll co-author that one with you. Okay. Danny, last question here for you. What do you think has been the single biggest contributor to your success as a digital entrepreneur that other aspiring digital entrepreneurs that are listening to this episode could apply to their own journeys?

What Danny Thinks Has Been the Single Biggest Contributor to His Success That Other Digital Entrepreneurs Can Apply to Their Daily Work

Danny Margulies: Without a doubt, I was going to say not being afraid to fail, but I want to reframe that and say, be afraid to fail–but do it anyway. It’s like they say with technology. I hear Mark Cuban on Shark Tank say this all the time. He’ll point to a piece of technology someone’s pitching, and he’ll go, “Look, the one thing we know for sure about that technology is that, at some point, it’s going to fail.”

That’s what I feel about becoming a digital entrepreneur–the one thing that you’re literally guaranteed to do. If anyone’s listening to this podcast or listening to the other material that you guys are putting out and thinking, “I’m going to get it. I’m going to absorb all this information, so I won’t have to make these mistakes.” That is just not ever going to work.

You may avoid some mistakes, but you’re going to make other mistakes. Some of them are going to be awkward. I sent out an email to 7,000 people with a blog post that was half complete. Even worse than that, it had my notes in it. I had somehow just ended up saving an earlier draft. It was a mess. I’m honestly surprised that 1,000 people didn’t unsubscribe from my list that day.

We’ve had bloopers you wouldn’t even believe. I’ve had posts that people hated. I mean crazy emails from people, whatever. There’s just going to be unpredictable stuff, and the key to this whole thing is having a mentality where you go, “Okay, I’m going to screw up. I’m going to screw up a lot, but every time I do, I’m going to try and take something away from that.” You’re getting better over time.

I think about the airplane system that we have. Every time an airplane crashes, the entire airline industry gets safer as a whole. They learn from that mistake, then they implement fixes, and the whole system gets better. As horrible as it is when an airplane crashes, overall, it’s actually better. Even though that’s a morbid analogy, I’m realizing now, but you have to think of it like that.

You have to say, “Every time I screw up, I’m not … ” What people do is, they screw up, and they’re like, “You see. I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a digital entrepreneur. If I was, I totally never would have made this stupid mistake.” It’s the opposite. The people who are doing the best have just screwed up the most. That’s something everyone needs to keep in mind. You will mess up. Just keep going.

Jerod Morris: That’s great advice. Actually, Tony and Chris over at The Mainframe did a great episode about that called Why Failure Is Always an Option. We’ll link it in the show notes. That’s such an important mindset for any entrepreneur, especially digital entrepreneurs, to have. Thank you for sharing that, Danny.

How to Learn More About Danny’s Story

Jerod Morris: There are two great ways to get more from Danny, to learn more about his story. One is to go FreelanceToWin.com, which is his site, and the other is you can actually watch the entire case study that I did with Danny as part of the free membership option that we just launched at Digital Commerce Academy.

To find out what you’re membership will entail–because there’s a lot that is included in the free membership–and to register in about 10 seconds, go to DigitalCommerce.com/Register. Then, once you register, to get Danny’s complete story, watch his case study, How Danny Margulies Turned His Freelancing Success into a Powerhouse Paid Course. It’ll be there ready for you to watch.

Danny, thank you, my friend. This was great. I’ve really, really enjoyed getting to know your story, getting to know you through this whole process. It’s been a lot of fun.

Danny Margulies: Thank you. Same here. It’s great to be here.

Jerod Morris: Thank you all very much for listening to this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. We will be back next week with another brand new episode.

The Transcript

The 5 Elements of the Modern Marketing Website

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 DigitalCommerce.com.

Jerod Morris: Brian, typically when you and I record, I’m actually pretty jealous because you’re somewhere beautiful like Colorado, and I’m usually stuck recording from my home office in Dallas. Today, I’m actually recording in San Diego, overlooking the ocean, and I’m not going to lie. It’s pretty sweet. I get finally now why people move out here.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I generally don’t turn down opportunities to speak at conferences in San Diego, yet that’s exactly what I had to do and sent you and Caroline in my stead. Now, I got a little nervous when I saw a Tweet from Caroline saying, “Why don’t I live here?” She’s one of the few people that actually lives here in Boulder. I’m like, “Oh great, what did I do?”

Jerod Morris: I don’t want to break any confidences or anything, but she’s been talking about it quite a bit. You might be careful.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Well, all right. If you move, you’re moving to Boulder. I don’t care what you say.

Jerod Morris: Yes. There’s no disputing that, not at all. Okay, in our last episode, which was the first of The Digital Entrepreneur, we defined that term, and we discussed who actually is a digital entrepreneur. Today, you and I are going to transition into a five-part series that we have planned that will discuss the website, the online presence that a digital entrepreneur needs to succeed.

This is an idea that you’ve been kicking around for a while. What was the genesis of it? Take me back to the beginning, to where you started thinking about this, talking about this.

The Why Behind This Episode

Brian Clark: If you really want to go back to the beginning, it would be 2010 when we formed the company and decided we wanted to build an all-in-one solution. Now, in 2010, it was literally a different world compared to now.

Yet along the way, we saw things changing. The cool thing about the way we develop products, but specifically software, is that, if it’s not something that we would use, then you don’t build it. First and foremost, it’s got to be up to the level of stuff that we would actually use.

Over time, it took us a while to build it, obviously, being a bootstrapped company without the war chest of funds to draw from. But it was a great thing. Number one, the picture of what Rainmaker Platform should be became much clearer as time went on.

Number two, the type of people we’re trying to help, the small businesses and the very small businesses, have finally come to the point where they’re willing to look again at technology investment coming out of the recession of 2008. That really clamped things down.

You saw that all the marketing automation activity out there went upstream to the enterprise. Eloqua marketing, or even HubSpot, went after the bigger companies. That left a bunch of people hanging dry to a certain degree, but that’s changing.

When we talk about digital entrepreneurs, though, this is a specific use-case because that’s the kind of company that we are. The platform reflects a lot of that functionality for purely digital businesses–even though it’s, obviously, very useful for professional services or other types of traditional businesses.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. That’s what the Rainmaker Platform allows you to do–build this modern marketing website, which we’re going to talk about. Let’s discuss these five elements that you’ve come up with for a modern marketing website. The first one is email, right?

Why Email Still Isn’t Dead

Brian Clark: Yeah. This is not a commercial for Rainmaker Platform, don’t worry. Literally, you’ll find that these are the bedrock elements that you have to have. I don’t think anyone is arguing that email is dead anymore. The fact that we had that conversation over and over and over, over just the 10 years that Copyblogger’s been around, is somewhat humorous–but also somewhat annoying.

It shows a fundamental lack of understanding about how things work by well-intentioned, but somewhat naive social media pundits. They didn’t ever really have any chops in the digital world. They didn’t build real businesses. They were pontificating about the impact of social media, which has been, of course, huge.

It’s hard to even quantify how much things are different now that social media’s gone mainstream–but it did not kill email. We have our favorite statistic, which still holds true. Email converts to sales 40 times greater than social media promotions–40 times, not 40 percent. Some people get confused, 40 times. That’s a gigantic ratio there.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. I believe that’s a McKinsey number that you’re citing right there.

Brian Clark: It is.

Jerod Morris: Okay, that’s email. What’s interesting as we go into the second element of a modern marketing website you and I talked about this actually last week. You originally had these two in separate ones, and we talked about it and combined it, which is adaptive content–which includes a website being mobile responsive.

The Important Benefits of Adaptive Content (and Why Mobile Responsive Is No Longer a ‘Nice to Have’)

Brian Clark: Yeah, I almost wanted to carve those out. We jumped on responsive design very early from a mainstream perspective with StudioPress. That was important because, to this day, Jerod, if you go to a site on your phone and you get hit with that tiny little text, you have to really want it not to hit the back button. It has to be mission critical.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: But when you think about this concept of adaptive content, first and foremost, the site itself has to display the content. It has to adapt to the device you’re on, first and foremost. We’re not even talking about choosing amongst the best content to serve up to someone, which is the more sophisticated definition.

First and foremost, if someone wants to read an article or check out your homepage or your sales page and they can’t because they’re on a phone, or even a tablet where the experience is substandard, you’re going to lose that sale. You’re going to lose that visitor. You’re going to lose that audience. Really, it wasn’t too long ago that responsive design was considered cutting edge. It’s mandatory now. Even Google will designate whether your site is mobile friendly or not. It’s a must have.

The fact that I still run across this many sites, day in and day out, on a mobile device that I can’t consume the content is just shocking to me. These are major sites, too. It’s not just mom and pop.

Beyond that, though, the next step when we talk about an adaptive experience is, how do we give people the logical and best next step for where they are on the journey that they’re on? How do you become the choice, ultimately, for the product or service?

Well, if you’re the one who serves up the next step in an uninterrupted fashion, then you’re going to win. If you’ve got someone at a certain point in the journey and then they go find the next step somewhere else because you couldn’t deliver it, that’s another way to lose the sale.

So ‘adaptive’ sounds kind of neat, cool, and cutting edge, but it’s really one of those necessary elements of modern website survival–getting to more of your prospects with the right information at the right time, no matter what device they’re on, and then closing that sale.

Jerod Morris: Yep. In other words, the right piece of content at the right time for the right person in a format that fits the device that they’re on. That’s what we’re talking about.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s really been the melding that you and I came to not long ago. It seems like design and content are two different things, but it’s really one thing when we talk about a website.

Jerod Morris: Yep. We’ve got email. We’ve got adaptive content. The next is the ‘access experience.’ Talk about that.

Why the ‘Access Experience’ Has Become a Must

Brian Clark: There’s a lot of things here. One, if the definition of content marketing is giving away content that you could have sold, that it’s so good that people would have paid money for it, then one thing you’ve really got to look at is offering up online education, a course, in a proper learning management system, and all of that as your lead magnet.

The cheesy free ebook or just ‘sign up for our newsletter’–things that have worked in the past–it’s getting tougher out there. That, of course, is something that you would have to register as a protected form of content.

It really goes to, what are our most valued experiences online? You have to register for it, and you have to log in to experience it–Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Apple. It’s important psychologically that you emulate that–that you are a login-worthy destination for people.

Then the final point here, which we’ll talk in more detail, it solves the cookie problem that marketing automation has. Again, when people are accessing you on different devices, you need an identity point that allows you to understand, “Oh, this is the person who was here before on their Mac, and now they’re here on their iPad or their iPhone.”

The logging-in aspect of that, it’s no mistake that Facebook and all of these other big web properties want you to log in. It’s a functional thing. We don’t think about it, but it’s also an identity thing. I’m not trying to be creepy here. I’m trying to say use the ability to know who’s there to provide a greater experience. That’s what people are looking for.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and that allows you to smartly adapt the content, as we talked about before. You’ve talked about this a lot–the importance of the ‘logged-in experience’ and getting people to register to log in with you. Then you need something valuable to compel them to join, to log in. You actually mentioned this already talking about courses, and that is a lead magnet. Why is that such a good way, a good offer to get people to log in and have that access experience with you?

How to Create Courses That Serve As the Perfect Lead Magnet

Brian Clark: This is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to solve a problem and/or satisfy a desire that go hand-in-hand. Online education is a $15 billion a year industry and growing fast. What kind of experience are people willing to pay for? That has always been, to me, the guiding principle of, “What is it that I need to offer? What kind of experience can I give someone?”

And I’m eating my own dog food even on my personal project over at Unemployable. I set out to record those three webinars as a bonus–no pitches, not selling anything–for the early audience, but I knew I was going to group that together and turn it into a course going forward as I try to attract a larger audience–because it has value.

It’s not some shoddy, half-attempt at getting your email address out of you. It’s like over-deliver, over-deliver, and maybe you’ll listen when I do have something to sell, if ever, at Unemployable.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. That very same model was followed with the original New Rainmaker podcast, where you and Robert took those initial episodes, put that into a course with some webinars on there. It worked great and built that list, got people to log in. That’s exactly what you’re looking for.

Brian Clark: It was. We launched our biggest product, or service really, with what was essentially a reformatted podcast into a course. That was more of an experimental thing. I didn’t know how it was going to work out, but it was definitely instructive in our go-for-it strategy because we did say, “Oh my goodness, this really worked well.” The old adage of educating people enough to do business with you, you saw that in spades.

Jerod Morris: Well, and those are really useful examples. Just for people that I’ve talked to, creating a course, brand new out of nothing, can seem intimidating sometimes, and that’s where you don’t have to do that. Both of these courses that you’ve just talked about, they came from free content that you were going to create for projects.

Brian Clark: They were both repurposed.

Jerod Morris: Exactly.

Brian Clark: So I’m doing a podcast, but I know that I want a course eventually. I’m doing some webinars a couple of years later, but I know that I want it to be a course. So you plan with the end in mind. I knew the theme each time, but I was doing the work for another reason anyway.

To me, it’s so much easier a pill to swallow, than sitting down and going, “I’ve got to do this work in addition to the other work I’m doing.” No, make it your work. Just be strategic.

Jerod Morris: All right, we’ve talked about email, adaptive content, the access experience, and then courses as lead magnets. Now, tying all of this together is testing. You’ve got to test everything.

Why You Need to Test Everything

Brian Clark: Yeah. We’ve definitely done our share of testing over the years, but I don’t think we can say we had a culture of testing. We were always building. We were always launching. We were always trying to maintain our regular content flow. Sometimes, something’s got to give, and that was the thing that we so often said, “We should test this but … ”

As you know, and you’re neck deep in it, Joanna Wiebe is on board helping us out. I’m so excited about all of it right now–being able to take what you’ve built and put it out there. You shipped, but now you get to optimize. I just want to impress upon people that this is where the magic actually happens. You discover things that you really didn’t realize, or you had an intuitive hunch.

We’re right a lot of times, but I guarantee you we’re going to find some things we’ve been wrong about–and, hey, great. I’m happy about that.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. It’s been great. I’ve learned so much just in the last month. And It does. It’s energizing. It really is, so I can’t wait to move forward with it.

Why This Episode Is Just the Appetizer Sampler

Jerod Morris: Okay, this episode, Brian, it was like an appetizer sampler where you get a bite of each one of these. Over the next five episodes, now, we’ll dive into each one of these, go into more depth, really get into how all the digital entrepreneurs out there can use these concepts and these ideas to help further their businesses.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I want to share a combination of best practices in each area, mixed in with our own experiences, our own case studies as a digital commerce company. To a certain degree, these elements are universal–regardless of the type of business that you have. But this podcast gives us an opportunity to be very specific about, “This is what it’s like in this context of selling digital products and services.” That specificity is going to be very helpful.

Jerod Morris: Yes. Brian, it’s beautiful outside. I’m thinking I may go take a walk by the water before my next appointment for the day.

Brian Clark: You go to the beach. I’m going to go skiing. Well I don’t ski, actually, anymore. I’m just saying that to sound cool, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve got a great view. You’ve got a great view. That’s all that matters.

Jerod Morris: Yes. Let’s go enjoy it. We will talk to you next week on the next episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

Brian Clark: All right, Jerod, take care. Take care, everyone.

The Transcript

Who Is a Digital Entrepreneur?

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 DigitalCommerce.com.

Jerod Morris: Welcome, everybody, to the first episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. I am Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital and a digital entrepreneur myself, and I’m excited to be joined today by a name and a voice that you know well, serial digital entrepreneur Brian Clark, the founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital. Brian, how do you like the new digs here at The Digital Entrepreneur?

Brian Clark: Oh yeah, I’m loving it. What we need now is another podcast for sure.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, it’s new show art, new music. You even got a new co-host here.

Brian Clark: New year, although it’s already February. How did that happen?

Jerod Morris: I don’t know. I really don’t. I looked up, and all of a sudden a month was gone. By the way, we have new intro music for the show. I don’t know if you know the title of the intro song, but its called ‘Men on a Mission,’ which I thought was appropriate since we are, in a sense, men on a mission here to teach people how to more effectively do digital commerce. So I thought that was a good name for …

Brian Clark: Yeah, I did notice that. Now, did Mr. Bruce pick out this music like he usually does?

Jerod Morris: He didn’t, actually. Jessica was the one who came with the ideas. She had a whole list. I made the final choice, and I think she did a good job.

Brian Clark: Cool.

Jerod Morris: Yes, yes. Let’s transition into our topic today. This is the first episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. In our last episode of New Rainmaker, we talked about what digital commerce is. I thought it would be appropriate to begin this episode by basically just talking about who is a digital entrepreneur.

Why Every Entrepreneur Is Now a Digital Entrepreneur

Jerod Morris: To kick the discussion off, you and I exchanged a few thoughts on an article that we read. It’s a ZDNet article that was talking about some research that Accenture did that basically found that new and emerging technology has the potential to help create up to 10 million new jobs for young people as entrepreneurs around the world step into the role of ‘digital entrepreneur.’

One of the statements in this article was, “Every entrepreneur is now a digital entrepreneur”–which I found interesting and I wanted to get your thoughts on to see if you agree with that or if you think that’s too broad of a statement.

Brian Clark: Both. I think there’s a lot of truth to that. As we move forward, that statement will become more and more literally true. Now, I don’t know any entrepreneur these days who isn’t using digital technology in some form–so in that sense, sure.

The flip side of that being too broad is the way we talk about digital commerce, we really are trying to limit it and delineate away from e-commerce or physical products by talking about products and services that literally exist online. They’re marketed, sold, delivered, supported–everything is basically a digital-environment transaction. There’s a range here of stuff that qualifies as that.

Obviously, one of the easiest or, I should say, lower-barrier-to-entry products is the self-published ebook business where entrepreneurs are sidestepping traditional publications, or publishers I should say, because it is a product that you can completely fulfill, market, and sell online and also create and put into digital format with minimal trouble, hassle, technical expertise.

Whether Airbnb and Uber Fit within Our Definition of Digital Commerce

Brian Clark: Then, if you really think about the outer reaches in the other direction, we like to talk about online courses, plug-ins, themes, software as a service, but if you look at Airbnb and Uber, these are not software as a service. They are software that facilitate services in the real world, but that is digital commerce.

For example, Uber made this point before. If you extrapolated Uber and replaced the entire taxi industry, that software app kills about 300,000 jobs. So it’s basically software platforms that are doing things in very disruptive ways through the ability to connect people. That is an outlier type of situation.

I don’t think I would ever represent to someone that I could teach them how to start the next Uber, but we can talk about software as a service. We can certainly talk about online courses, themes, plug-ins, downloadable software, all of this kind of stuff. I’d say, today, the truth of the matter is, digital technology is a huge part of any entrepreneurial effort whatsoever, whether it just be marketing, but its rarely ever just marketing anymore

I can think back to my real estate brokerage businesses. I never thought about it in this context, but it was all digital, even infrastructure. I never thought of it as a digital commerce company, but it set the stage for me to move into that, which, of course, I did in 2006. When you think about what I was doing at that time and then you look at what came after, like Zillow, that is a digital commerce platform.

I think we all get our feet wet, but the platforms and the technology that’s available to any entrepreneur, you’d have to be crazy not to take advantage of every digital technology that you can in order to be more efficient, to lower costs, to reach a larger market share, reach the right market share– whatever the case might be.

The Big Idea for This New Show

Jerod Morris: But our goal on The Digital Entrepreneur and, for example, our goal inside of Digital Commerce Academy isn’t necessarily to teach someone how to launch the next Airbnb or how to launch the next Uber, right?

Brian Clark: No. And honestly, quite a few of the people that are onboard with this have a digital business, and they’re really looking to find out more about how to grow. Then there is another subset of students who are getting their feet wet, so they are the ones thinking about leading with a gateway product, such as an ebook or developing their first course.

The bulk, if you look at the dollars spent on ebooks, the billions of dollars on online education, and billions of dollars on downloadable software and software as a service, it’s so much opportunity right there where you don’t have to be this person who’s trying to disrupt the whole world with this amazing platform. Interesting thing to me is, Airbnb didn’t start that way, either. They didn’t get really ambitious with their plans until they saw how they had developed something that could scale.

Jerod Morris: Okay. We’re going to spend some time on this show, obviously, diving in to the details and really giving people some tips that they can use to go out and execute effective digital commerce, but let’s think big here for a little bit. Where’s this going?

You and I talked the other day about virtual reality. We talked about how it’s the future of viewing sports, but you even mentioned something to me that that’s going to change how we interact online, different environments that are going to be created. Where is that going to potentially take us in the future?

How Emerging Technologies Like Virtual Reality Might Change Everything

Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s very interesting because you really can’t escape the buzz about virtual reality this year. 2016 will be the year that it kicks off. Now, what does that mean for how fast it matures, how fast it’s adopted, how well it takes over our lives?

As you and I discussed when we were riding to the airport the other day, you could imagine a scenario where people stay jacked in all day long and didn’t travel anymore because they could visit virtual destinations without expense or terrorism or whatever. It’s kind of mind boggling. It’s fascinating to me, but things aren’t going to move quite that fast.

But something that you can start thinking about is virtual environments where business is transacted in new and different ways that could possibly be done with the evolving and more powerful websites that we have these days. We’ll talk about that in just a minute, but I’m really interested in it. I’m not sure I have all the answers, but it is something that I’m intellectually attuned to and paying attention to.

I was just thinking about my audience over at Unemployable and was reading an article about digital contracts, effectively where you don’t have to trust the other person to do what’s on the paper. It’s almost like a digital escrow system where things happen, and if they happen, money is released. Could you imagine that when you’re a freelancer trying to get paid? There’s all sorts of business applications for adopting greater use of digital technology that are either just ideas at this point or they just don’t have the momentum yet.

Right now, this podcast is very nuts and bolts. If you haven’t created your first digital product yet, we want to get you there. If you’ve already got products but you’re just trying to grow and then maybe take it to the next level–product category, service category–we want to help you get there.

At the same time, we’re going to keep our eye on the cutting edge, and that’s why, of course, you’ve been putting on those Cutting Edge webinars inside Digital Commerce Academy. Those are going to be a lot of fun because that’s where we get to explore the edges.

Jerod Morris: So I can buy some virtual-reality goggles? That’s not even the right word. What would be the right term for virtual reality?

Brian Clark: It’s a headset.

Jerod Morris: A headset. Okay. So I can buy a virtual-reality headset and demo it?

Brian Clark: Someday it will be goggles, and hopefully it’ll be like contact lenses. It’s going to be interesting to see how it evolves, but for right now, it’s a big, clunky helmet.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, so we will all look really cool while we do it.

Brian Clark: Yeah, you don’t want to have guests over when you are in the metaverse or whatever.

Jerod Morris: No–unless everybody’s in there.

Brian Clark: Right.

Defining the Term ‘Digital Entrepreneur’

Jerod Morris: Okay. Getting back to the initial question for this episode before we move forward, just so we’re clear on who is the digital entrepreneur, who’s the person that we’re talking to. Is it as simple as saying that the digital entrepreneur that we’re talking to is someone who has created or has the desire to create a digital product or service that is marketed, delivered, and supported completely online? That’s our definition of digital commerce. That’s the person that we are talking to here.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s the working definition. I think it’s pretty solid. That doesn’t stop us from exploring hybrid situations or maybe expanding the definition as things change, but it actually is fundamentally sound. Any definition broader than that is really just stepping over into other terminology that we have had for decades, like e-commerce.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. So that’s who a digital entrepreneur is.

What Digital Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed in Digital Commerce

Jerod Morris: We’re going to move forward now in future episodes talking about what you need to succeed in digital commerce. Obviously, it’s going to start with creating a great product–whether that be a course, a SaaS product, an ebook, a theme, anything like that–which is what we’re working with folks inside of Digital Commerce Academy to do.

The next step once you then have that great product is understanding the fundamentals of marketing in the modern age. That great product that you have still is going to have to find a market, and that market is going to have to be compelled into taking action. That’s why we’re going to be talking about, in these future episodes, elements of the modern marketing website.

Do you want to tease that a little bit? This is an idea that you’ve been talking about that you and I worked on a little bit recently, and I’m excited to start exploring these ideas further.

Teaser: Upcoming Series to Kick Off The Digital Entrepreneur

Brian Clark: Yeah, I want to save the meat of this for upcoming episodes. In addition to creating the digital website experience, we’re obviously going to have people on–real-life practitioners, case studies–giving you ideas about how they developed their first products. It really comes down to two things, Jerod. It’s create and sell.

If you haven’t created yet, that doesn’t mean you can’t start the process that’s going to lead to sales, which we call ‘audience building.’ This is a big overlap with what we talk about on Copyblogger and content marketing in general, but there is even a more specific argument to be made.

Now, going back to our geeky extrapolations about virtual reality, there is no doubt in your mind, right, Jerod, that if you put on that clunky helmet, that you are there having this virtual-reality experience. Weren’t you the one who told me that there are some simulations where they tried to get people to walk off a cliff, and they could not do it because their brain just said, “No, I can’t do that”?

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Someone was telling me that. At CES, I think, they were doing a demonstration, and people were wearing the headset. It was a big nature scene that they were in, and it was so real that, when they told them to jump–they had reached a cliff–they couldn’t do it. Something had just happened in their brain that made it feel so real.

Brian Clark: Yeah, so no one would argue that isn’t a viable experience. Yet we hear the buzz terminology applied that ‘your website has to be an experience.’ Of course, all websites are an experience, but are they one that’s transformative? Are they one that provides value in a unique and evocative way that’s also helping you meet your business objectives?

That’s the way I want to frame these upcoming episodes when we’re talking about the elements. I’ve said this a couple times now, but the switch going on now in what constitutes a minimum viable digital website is shifting–just like it did from brochure sites to content-rich sites.

We’re not in the post-content era–content is more important than ever. But the actual way the site is constructed has to be thought out in a way that provides an overarching experience, not just a blog or whatever the case may be.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. We’ll spend some time on future episodes talking about that–what that means, what the elements are.

Brian Clark: I think we could kick off the very next episode with that topic.

Jerod Morris: I think we could.

Brian Clark: Why don’t we plan on that?

Jerod Morris: Lets do it.

Brian Clark: Also, see what else we can get lined up for people to get going. That’s the key here–again, whether it’s creating your first thing or accelerating the thing you’ve got.

Jerod Morris: And like you mentioned earlier, that’s what we’re doing with folks in Digital Commerce Academy. Hey, I wanted to ask you a real quick question here in closing. Obviously, you developed one of the first courses in Digital Commerce Academy, your course on courses. It was the first time that you had dug into that material in a while and put it into a course. How’s that experience been for you putting that course together and working with that material again?

The True Value of the Digital Commerce Academy

Brian Clark: The interesting thing about it is that a lot of the fundamentals from Teaching Sells that was our first product back in the day when people didn’t believe that people would pay for online education. Now it’s what, 15 billion a year?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: But the interesting thing about that course is it’s not really about making courses. It’s not just an instructional design course. If you look at the title, it’s really about the business of online courses, and that’s where people get lost. That’s where they make mistakes because they’re not understanding the market research and what people are actually looking for when they create a course.

I’ll admit that I could send you to Amazon to read a book on instructional design if you just want to make a course. That doesn’t mean anyone’s going to buy it. That’s the fundamental difference of that course. It truly is a business education that involves online education as opposed to, “Here’s what you do first to make a course ,” that kind of thing.

That’s the important distinction. You’ll find, throughout all our instruction, all our Q&As, all our case studies, all the webinars in Digital Commerce Academy, that it is nuts and bolts business-focused. We are not here and you are not there to do things that are not pursuing your dreams, your business objectives. The goal of an entrepreneur is to bring a product to market successfully, and that’s our focus.

Jerod Morris: Yep. Absolutely. If you want more information on that to check out that course, you can go to DigitalCommerce.com. To learn more about everything else that we talked about in this episode, stick with us. We’re going to have some fun over these next few weeks and well beyond for The Digital Entrepreneur, very excited about it. And, Brian, jump off the cliff.

Brian Clark: I have no choice. It’s daily.

Jerod Morris: All right. We will talk to you next week, everybody.