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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Luck is not a business strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: I remember those days.

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

Jerod Morris: It came into being for that reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether Digital Entrepreneurs Should Feel Comfortable Building on Top of WordPress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Nope, nope.

Jerod Morris: No? Am I wrong?

Brian Clark: It’s $595.

Jerod Morris: Oh.

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Yep. Friday, May 27th.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Take care, everyone.

The Transcript

How Virtual Reality May Shape the Future of Digital Commerce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Oh my.

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

The Challenges of Integrating VR With the Open Web

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

Jerod Morris: A-Frame.

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

Jerod Morris: Probably.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Are you a gamer at all?

Jerod Morris: I’m not a gamer.

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

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

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

Jerod Morris: Slack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How You Should Be Preparing for This Inevitable Future

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

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

Jerod Morris: Periscope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Yes.

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

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

The Transcript

WordPress Product Development: Start with the Business Problem

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

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

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

Questions You Need to Be Asking During Product Creation

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

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

The Digital Commerce Summit (and Chris’ Role)

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

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

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

Setting the Stage for the Case Study Snippet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example #1: Barber for Black Men’s Hair

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

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

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

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

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

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

Example #2: Vocal Enhancements for Broadway

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

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

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

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

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

Example #3: Wine Membership and Festival

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

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

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

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

Helping Others Connect Two Disconnected Variables with the Right Messaging

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

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

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

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

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

How to Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Automated Marketing Funnels Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Advertising Editorial Calendar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treating Facebook Like an Email List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the Fundamentals That Build Success Don’t Change

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

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

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

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

How to Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

What The Recent Decision by Udemy Means for Online Course Creators

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Difference Between Online Course Marketplaces and Learning Management Systems

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

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

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

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

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

How Smart Online Course Creators Leverage Online Course Marketplaces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Yes.

Brian Clark: This time shifting always gets to me.

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

Brian Clark: I think that’s right.

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

The Transcript

Why You (Still) Don’t Need a Mobile App That Is Separate from Your Website

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 another episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. I am your host today, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. I have two co-hosts with me on this episode. We have Brian Clark here, founder and CEO of Rainmaker Digital, as well as Mr. Chris Garrett, the chief digital officer for Rainmaker Digital.

Brian, Chris, welcome.

Brian Clark: Hey there. I thought we were changing Garrett’s title to chief marketing technologist? I think that’s sexy.

Jerod Morris: Oh, that’s right.

Chris Garrett: Let’s see how my performance review goes first.

Brian Clark: Yeah, let’s put it up to the audience. Leave a comment on this episode, and tell us what Garrett’s title should be. Do you even know what a chief digital officer is? I don’t. But a chief marketing technologist? That’s macho.

Jerod Morris: Okay. I like that. Leave a comment. Let us know.

Today, we want to talk about something that a lot of digital entrepreneurs are thinking about and consider. We know that so much traffic now for the web is done with our mobile devices. It’s a big decision–how you’re going to display your content. Are you going to do it with an app? Are you going to do it with a responsive website? People are kicking these ideas around and have been for awhile.

Whether Brian’s Analysis From 2013 Still Holds True

Jerod Morris: The three of us had an email conversation about this very topic earlier this week that we wanted to basically bring here to the air. Brian, to kick things off, we actually went back and found an article that you wrote in 2013. I want to read a quick excerpt from this article and see if you still agree with this as a way to launch into this discussion. Here’s the excerpt.

“The argument for content apps is the most shockingly wrong. Content of all shades depends on frictionless social sharing, and questions related to problems and desires inherently involve search engines. If your content platform impedes social and search, you’re done.

Don’t believe the hype from the non-practitioner pundits. If apps are where it’s at for content, I’d be using them as a marketer and selling them as a businessman.”

Still agree?

Brian Clark: I do agree, completely. It’s interesting that you focused on the search engine aspect of it. That’s only one argument. The main argument against apps is no one wants to download your damn app.

We’re seeing even more movement three years later into a direction that maybe suggests that the whole mobile app phase is just that–a phase. It’s not an enduring thing. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. But there have been some progress made in interlinking apps and getting some of the functionality that’s just native to the web, and always has been, between apps.

It hasn’t been completely successful. That shows you how hard a problem it is. Even though Google has tried to deal with the app universe, it’s still one of the compelling reasons why, number one, for content marketers, you don’t need an app. Number two, that mobile apps may not be an enduring thing.

Why the Future Is Without Apps

Jerod Morris: Well, that’s what was interesting about this article. We’ll link to this in the show notes. The article is called The Future Is Without Apps written by Donny Reynolds. That’s the big idea of this article is that we are moving toward this future where there will be these really blurred lines between what is an app and what happens on the web, and everything becoming as one.

Brian, how will that impact the decisions that digital entrepreneurs need to be making when it comes to A) how they’re displaying their content, and then B) how they’re building their sites and their membership sites as they move forward?

Brian Clark: Well, the key is that, to a degree, people love apps for certain functions. Now, when we say ‘apps,’ we’re talking about mobile apps. Technically, all software is an application or an app, but this is the lingo that we’re using here. We’re definitely talking about mobile, which is increasingly important.

We talk over and over again about creating an app-like experience or actually creating apps. Look at Unemployable.com. It’s a very simple site at this point, but it is a web app because it’s a membership site. Those were some of the first web apps.

With a combination of that functionality and responsive design, you’ve got an app-like experience. You’re giving people what they like about apps without cluttering up their device with another app. That’s what’s important.

We say over and over, it’s the experience that matters, not necessarily following the advice of people who were like, four years ago, saying, “Got to have an app. Got to have an app.” All these media publications were lemming-like hitting you with a ‘download our app’ as soon as you were trying to read an article until guess what? Google slapped them down and said, “Don’t do that anymore.” You don’t see it anymore because people are afraid of Google even more than they’re lemming-like.

Jerod Morris: Chris, you are the chief marketing technologist for Rainmaker Digital.

Chris Garrett: You’ve decided, have you?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Early returns are in.

Jerod Morris: Yes, yes. Yeah, they are in. What are your thoughts about this future that Donny’s talking about here without apps?

Chris Garrett: It just makes perfect sense to me. We were talking earlier about how the experience of having an app forced on you makes you look elsewhere. If you looking at restaurants and you want to know where to eat, who are you going to go with? The one that you can just go to their website on your mobile, it’s a responsive site, you can see the menu, looks great or one that says, ‘download our app.’

Now, in Canada, we have these horrible data plans. We don’t want to use our data anyway. We just want a very slimmed-down website experience. We’re certainly not going to download a big app just for your menu, for a place that you’re only going to go once. That’s an extreme example, but just think about the end-user experience of apps.

You have to have something really extra special to make me install an app, something that is going to live on my toolbar–not just something that I’m going to use once and then forget about. It’s taking up space. It’s taking up bandwidth.

How Emerging Technologies Have Changed the Game (and the Outlook for the Future)

Brian Clark: We always talk about with our StudioPress themes and with Rainmaker’s included designs, responsive? Absolutely–but also HTML5, which we really haven’t even begun to exploit the possibilities there, because that is a markup that allows you to create any kind of app functionality on a website.

Is this part of the argument that this guy’s making, that this type of advanced Hypertext Markup Language is actually going to be the thing that kills apps, or is it something bigger than that?

Chris Garrett: I think it already has to a large extent. The fact that we haven’t really had to dig that deep into what the technology can do shows that we haven’t needed to. There’s not been that demand from our customers and users.

Now, the Rainmaker Platform’s getting a lot more advanced. We’re doing a lot of stuff on there that gives the administrator of a site a lot more power. But when it comes to consuming the content, you don’t really need that advanced technology.

For content marketers, it’s nice that we have these features, but 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of what we need to do, we can already do in a normal, responsive website with a content management system. That’s the experience people want. That remaining 20 percent is advanced. You can do a lot of stuff, especially geo-targeting and all those things where you can have a really nice, rich, animated experience.

But a lot of it’s sugarcoating, and a lot of it actually slows down getting the customer to the information they want. You have to be really careful with all that.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It was interesting because the three of us were working on creating an adaptive content funnel this week, which we’ve been talking about a lot, we have a lot of fun doing. We’re about to get together for our company meeting, and there’s going to be whiteboards everywhere because we’re going to be just sitting down, mapping out these things.

I asked a question that said, “Who’s going to change this functionality?” Is this a Garrett thing or a Rafal thing–a tech thing or a design thing? Then I remembered. It is so brain-dead simple to do in Rainmaker that I could have done it myself.

That just shows you that we are using our own technology, and compared to the technology we built, say, for example, on Copyblogger, in order to get to Rainmaker. We can’t wait to move Copyblogger over to Rainmaker because we actually can do more on our Rainmaker sites than on our custom sites, at this point. Even I can do it. That’s the amazing thing. Sometimes I just forget.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Chris, you mentioned that someone would have to have something pretty great for you to install an app. For people who are listening to this and they’re thinking about what they’re going to do, are there any situations right now where someone in our audience should be thinking about an app?

Or with this future where there aren’t going to be apps and those lines are going to be blurred and what we’ve just been talking about with how much you can do with HTML5 and with an adaptive website, is that something that people really shouldn’t be thinking about, or are there some specific functionalities that lend themselves to it?

What Specific Circumstances Might Dictate the Consideration of a Separate Mobile App

Chris Garrett: If you talk about content marketing, if you talked about using this as promotion or marketing for your business, there aren’t really features that you’re going to gain from an app. What you’re losing is the attraction and retention ability.

If you think about the apps that are one-time use or very seldom used, that on the far right-hand side of your screen, you have to swipe to get to them ,and then you’re not even sure why you downloaded it. I’ve got Snapchat. I don’t use that. That would be an example of something that would be difficult to do in HTML5. But as a content marketer, you need that.

Are you an app developer? You’re creating an experience for your prospects and customers. If it’s an experience, if it’s content marketing, I would say, chances are, you want that attraction ability, that discovery ability, that shareability of your content, that having a walled-garden app would lose for you.

There are features, though, that could be really advanced and cool, but I’m struggling to think of something that can’t be done using the browser experience. A lot of apps out there are just shells for a browser anyway.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s what people don’t realize. We could introduce app functionality for Rainmaker users, but it’s really just wrapping up your website in an application. If people ask for that, we might do it. I don’t know if we put that on that on the roadmap or not, but that’s really what you’re dealing with–and probably being overcharged by an app developer.

Again, if your loyal, fanatic audience members want an app, then you should consider it, I suppose. But as Chris said, what are we talking about here? Having to download an app first is a conversion killer. It’s hard enough to get people to convert, and you’re adding another barrier.

It’s a search engine killer. It’s a sharing killer. All of these things we need in order to build more business, yet people rush to a format that actually kills that.

Why the Mobile App Phenomenon Might Just Be a Bad Blip in History

Brian Clark: Let me quote from this article, so you won’t think that this is just us spewing our opinions. The gist of the argument is that web applications will be the new apps. Of course, again, they’re both apps. But compared to a mobile app that is specifically installed on the device, he says, “Web apps don’t need to be installed. They run securely in closed browser environments. They’re web-friendly, meaning they can be indexed and surfaced by search engines. Oh, wait. Isn’t that exactly what we want today?” Right?

It’s almost like this whole mobile app phenomenon is just a bad blip in history. It started out okay because it was cool to download from the App Store and be able to do certain things, but now you look at your phones, and it’s a cluster, a mess. I have so many different folders to try to keep it organized, and I still don’t use half of what’s on there. The web is perfect.

Chris Garrett: And apps drain your battery. If you have the Facebook app, your battery gets drained. The experience of using the web browser actually saves you a resource that might be precious to you or your customer.

I also go back to my latest website that I’ve been working on. For the first time, there’s more Android users than iPhone users. I was shocked by that. I shouldn’t have been because the audience is DIY people. But it means that you have to have a cross-platform developer or development environment, which the web already is. It works on a Blackberry. It works on an old Nokia. You know?

Brian Clark: Yeah. It’s funny. It’s funny how we have everything we need, yet we lose sight of it. It reminds me of people who gave up their websites to build on Facebook. No one saw that coming–what a disaster of a train wreck that would be? It feels like the same phenomenon here–just poor thinking, following trends instead of thinking what’s actually right for your business and your audience.

Jerod Morris: Well, you have a lot of people with big platforms that are saying that kind of thing, and people are listening. I think you’re right. Part of that is a failure of critical thinking. It’s getting caught up in the hype and getting caught up in the excitement of it, to a certain extent–the status of it when it comes to apps. I think people like being in the App Store and just that idea.

Brian Clark: You mean lost in the App Store?

Jerod Morris: That’s right.

Chris Garrett: Yeah. I was just going to say, I’m not sure people do enjoy that because my parents, my in-laws, don’t like going in the App Store. They don’t like it when they’re asked to put in a credit card, even though the download is for free. Is that really true?

With the web, you can sample a lot better. See if something is for you, and then you can go deeper. You can register, you can sign up, and all those things. You can’t really sample apps as easy. It’s a commitment for somebody who’s very non-technical and maybe just giving you a slim chance.

It’s like Brian said, that conversion, there’s a big friction element to apps. There’s the daunting thing of–especially on some other platforms, mentioning no names–you’re not even sure if it’s a legitimate app. You don’t know what it’s going to do. We’ve seen these horror stories of data leaks and all those kinds of things. There is a bit of resistance there mentally of, “What is this going to do to my phone or my device?”

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Well, that’s what I mean. I think people got caught up in just the idea of being in the App Store, having an app, and being able to send that Tweet that says, “Hey, we have an app. Download it,” because it sounds cool–but it’s not really providing a lot of utility to them or to the audience that they’re actually trying to serve.

Chris Garrett: Yeah. The ego of the developer.

Brian Clark: It’s probably one of the worst and most expensive cases of shiny-object syndrome in recent history. It’s one thing to go chase after Ello and then watch it fail. Okay, you wasted a little time, but it wasn’t a big deal. But if you developed an app that really didn’t work out for you, you have my condolences.

Chris Garrett: If you really develop the app instead of just doing the MVP, that’s a lot of cost, time, resource, and energy you’re putting into the thing. You have to then spend more money to get more people to know about it. The chances of you getting on that top 10 table of popular apps in any of the app stores is slim to none now.

Possible Alternatives to the App’s Easy Access to Sites

Jerod Morris: Hey, let me ask you this question. Clearly one of the benefits of having an app and when you install it on your phone–whether it’s an iPhone or an Android–is you get that convenient little logo right there. It’s easy to access. Maybe most people know this. I don’t know. But it’s pretty easy to just create a bookmark for your site or for your web app on your Android home screen or on your iPhone home screen.

Do you think more sites should give people instructions for how to do that or tell people how to create a quick mobile shortcut on their phone or on their device to get to their site? Then you would get the big benefit of having the app, which is the easy-access icon right there on someone’s device.

Brian Clark: That is interesting. I don’t think it can hurt, especially, for example, if you’re web-based and you have people asking for an app. Maybe they just want that easy access. That’s good advice. My problem with it is, unless it’s mission critical, the apps I use every single day, I don’t see anything because I have everything put in folders to reduce clutter.

You have to be the most important thing in my life. Hopefully, for example, Copyblogger is important to people. People read it every day. But I wouldn’t presume to think it was worthy of an app, necessarily, that would be front and center. You would hope so, but think about that. Would there be a critical mass of people who would do that? I doubt it.

Chris Garrett: I think that a social login is more important as part of the experience, which is why we’re introducing it in Rainmaker. The ability to just quickly log in is the main thing that an app can do for most people over and above having that web experience.

If you can smoothly and quickly get people to log in and get the usefulness out of what you’re offering, how they get there I don’t think is as important. They’re going to have their own work flow. But the funny thing about those little icons is, I’ve got them on my phone based on just web pages that are bookmarked that way, and I never look at them. I don’t know if you do gain that much. It should be more visible, but they’re on my second page. I never swipe to them.

Brian Clark: You know what gets me to come back to a site? Email. What are in those emails? Links. Where do those links point? The web.

Chris Garrett: Yeah.

Brian Clark: We’ve come full-circle back to email, as always.

Jerod Morris: Yes.

Chris Garrett: Some perception of future value, and it’s usually indicated by an email coming in.

Jerod Morris: Yep. Good point. Very good point. Well these articles, both the article that I quoted that Brian wrote and this article, The Future Is Without Apps, those will both be in the show notes for the show. You can get those there.

Any final thoughts, guys, on this topic of apps before we close up this episode?

Chris’ and Brian’s Closing Thoughts

Brian Clark: Well, it’s just encouraging news. Over the years, since I wrote that article and even before that, there were people who were thinking very critically. Generally, these were long-time web people. Instead of being biased toward the web, they understood the idea behind the open web, what that meant, and why no walled garden–from AOL to Myspace to Facebook–has ever killed it.

And apps, it’s the same thing. You’re seeing very, very bright people more and more say, “You know, this is probably just a phase we went through. We’re going to return to web apps because it makes so much more sense on so many levels.”

If you’re out there and thinking, “Oh my gosh, we didn’t get an app. We’ve missed the wagon,” no, you didn’t miss anything. That’s the important thing. You’re always safe on the web. Any time a link can be followed, it’s the quickest and easiest way for people to get to you.

Chris Garrett: I’m looking at the potential for us to develop apps, but as yet, I’ve not had a compelling reason to do that. Do let us know if you can think of a compelling reason why we need an app. I’ve yet to find the reason.

That said, if you’ve decided to do an app, you have to support it and maintain it. How are you going to get people to upgrade to the latest version? You’re creating a lot of marketing problems by creating this marketing solution. It’s not a one-and-done deal. You have to then support it and maintain it. You know what it’s like? Having a baby. That baby’s going to become an 18 year old. What are you going to do then?

Brian Clark: Spoken like a true marketing technologist.

Jerod Morris: Yes, yes.

Brian Clark: I’m not biased at all on how you vote on Chris’s title.

Chris Garrett: Make Chris great again.

How to Take Your Digital Commerce Education to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: That’s right. Go vote for Chris’ title. Go, of course, create your mobile shortcut to The Digital Entrepreneur podcast, and for more insight on this and many other topics, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce. That’s where you can activate your free membership to Digital Commerce Institute.

When you do that, you will actually have free access to the courses developed by both of these gentlemen. Brian has a course in there called Build Your Online Training Business the Smarter Way, and Chris was part of the team with Tony Clark that developed a course on building automated marketing funnels that work. You can get free lessons in each one of those courses plus case studies and more when you go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce. It is free, so go get your free registration today.

All right, guys. Thank you for being here. We will talk to you next week on another episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

Brian Clark: Take care, everyone.