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The Transcript

Will Millennials Kill Email Marketing?

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

How to Be in Two Places at Once

Brian Clark: Robert, you realize as this show goes live, you’re probably standing on a magnificent stage in Denver, Colorado. Dan Pink just left, and you’re introducing Scott Brinker. Yet, here we are in your ear.

Robert Bruce: Don’t you want to know how I’ve accomplished this amazing feat?

Brian Clark: Well, I know how.

Robert Bruce: How? No, it is extraordinary. It’s an extraordinary thing, Brian. We’re in Denver, and we’re also in your ear.

Brian Clark: On the air.

Robert Bruce: On the air.

Brian Clark: It s the magic of on-demand content. Who knows when we recorded this?

Robert Bruce: You think there’s some appointment viewing going on?

Brian Clark: Appointment viewing?

Robert Bruce: Listening, rather?

Brian Clark: I don’t know. I do know that as soon as it hits the feed, there are listeners, but usually the big chunk of people come when we send out an email. The conference will be long over by that time.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Speaking of appointment viewing, listening, and things like that, you sent me an article this morning, and it has to do with one of my favorite people groups, which is our dear Millennials, and their email habits.

The Key to Email Success with Millennials

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I saw I think Ann Handley, another one of our conference speakers — this is all getting quite congruent — but she Tweeted this. It’s a Marketing Profs article, and the title is Your Email Marketing Campaign Isn’t Attracting Millennials (for Good Reasons).

Now, I click over, hoping that this isn’t one of those silly pieces about how Millennials don’t use email. Thankfully, that is not even addressed, because that’s ridiculous. Millennials do use email, and they are power users, actually, of email compared to older generations. I think our habits as online people, publishers, and marketers, are more similar to Millennials than, say, some of our peers. Does that make sense?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: We’re constantly plugged in, and of course, we’ve been talking about lately how that’s probably not even a good idea for us. Anyway, so I Retweeted this article, and it got a lot of interest, but like clockwork, someone responded with, They don’t use email.

But it’s not true. They do use email. They’re checking their email constantly throughout the day. Here’s an interesting, fascinating statistic: 38 percent of all Millennials are freelancers. Is that amazing or what? Are you telling me that these people are doing business as freelancers of whatever stripe over WhatsApp, or text messages?

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: No. Email is the medium of business, which I offer is the reason why it remains and will remain the primary sales channel for online. Because that’s where people go to do business.

Why the Logged-in Experience Is the Answer

Robert Bruce: Yeah. That’s not just some abstract philosophy. Think about it. What is the one thing you need to sign up for WhatsApp? Certainly, there’s some different login options now. Sometimes, you’ll run into something where it’s only by Twitter or Facebook login, but the vast majority of services and products and business services that we use, you need an email to log in. Those services, those hot social services, all are run on email.

By the way, for those who think that Millennials are lost down the rabbit hole of the app economy forever and email marketing is irrelevant, just remember that email, on the phone, is an app.

Brian Clark: Email s always been a software application.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: On the phone, you’re right. It is an app. You can use whatever one is standard with your iPhone or your Android, or there are other email apps out there. Yes, it is an app, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not using email messaging. Because again, to interact with the world to any degree, but especially in a business sense, you have to use email.

The difference, or at least different from perhaps other generations for the most part, is that Millennials are constantly checking email as part of their daily life workflow. It’s more of a mash-up than a segregation between life and work. I think you and I probably resemble that, again, just because of the type of business that we’re in.

The Absolute Necessity of Mobile-Friendliness

Brian Clark: One of the primary reasons that’s pointed out in this article that people are not being affected by email marketing among other things, is that they’re not mobile responsive. We’ve talked about this before — that Google had to swing the big bat of Your rankings are going to drop in mobile if you don’t become mobile-friendly. Again, what is the actual point? The point is user-friendly so that people can actually consume your content and your messages. The fact that you had to be threatened with a ranking penalty doesn’t make any sense. The problem is that people can’t interact with your content in their preferred way.

Email Marketing 101

Brian Clark: According to the article, the Millennials are constantly on their phone. They’re constantly plugged in looking for relevant messages to them — not to you — to them: Marketing 101. Yet there are a lot of people that are still doing the spam-and-jam thing. They’re buying email lists. They’re sending unsolicited messages.

One thing that the article talked about that I don’t know is as crucial as they’re making it — and you kind of alluded to it — is consistent delivery, always showing up at the same time or scheduling an appointment.

Do Consistent Email Delivery Times Make a Difference?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: How do you feel about that?

Robert Bruce: I may be too old for this because now, all this talk of appointment viewing and the reality of the world we live in with Netflix and Amazon and iTunes and being able to watch what I want when I want, maybe just kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I have no evidence of this.

Rachel Burger, who wrote this article, is saying — back to your point, 38 percent of Millennials are freelancers — but of those working regular hours, 89 percent check their email long after the workday has ended. They’re practicing what she calls work-life blending, mixing play and work, so they become almost indistinguishable.

She makes a connection there that Millennials would prefer to have their emails delivered, that they have signed up for, consistently at a specific time. I don’t know about this. Consistently, obviously, is huge in anything you’re doing, but the specific time thing I guess I could see it, so I’m not going to rage against it.

Brian Clark: I know we aim for it. Of course, sometimes messages come when they come because that’s what needs to be communicated at that time. As far as content, for example, with the Further newsletter, I’ve never missed a Monday. I aim for around 10:00 a.m. Mountain time. But, for example, the last issue was a little bit later than that just because I’m abnormally busy right now in the run-up to the event and a lot of other stuff that we’ve got going on. I haven’t received any complaints if there is a window of time. I would imagine if I just totally missed a week or showed up on another day, people might start to wonder. I’m not convinced, necessarily, if I think that’s a good sign.

This is really going to get to the heart of the matter. If your content, your email, whatever the case may be, is anticipated, that is a damn good thing. It’s when something keeps showing up and it never gets read and finally they’re like, Uh, I’ve got to get off this list. It happens. You’re never going to connect 100 percent with people, but by and large, you know if your unsubscribe rate, your open rates, et cetera are healthy or not. That’s the key. What are you sending to people, Millennials or not, but especially, I think, Millennials? It’s interesting reading this article because I feel like it could be speaking about me.

We are digital natives of the first generation, even though we are older people now. Millennials are digital natives by birth, and that’s the difference. I don’t feel alien or very different from a Millennial in my online practices. It’s the same thing. If I’m seeing messages that I consider to be spam, or just not useful to me, yeah, I’m unsubscribing. That’s how it works. We people who have spent a lot of time online are very savvy about avoiding or routing around the damage of the Internet, which has been referred to in terms of censorship, but it’s also in terms of spam. We know how to avoid it.

Going back to the theme that we’ve had about creating an experience, specifically a registration and access, logged-in experience, which lends itself to all these great personalization techniques that Millennials also appreciate. People appreciate a more targeted one-on-one, feeling type message, right? Isn’t that just human nature, Robert?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and this goes to one of the core issues of business and life in general. It s Ms. Burger’s number three. Don’t assume you know someone, right? When we make assumptions about somebody’s life or somebody’s story, we are prone to make grave errors, both in business and in life.

Brian Clark: Has there been a more stereotyped generation than the Millennials since Generation X was stereotyped?

Robert Bruce: Right, slacker.

Why Millennials and Gen X Aren t So Different

Brian Clark: We were stereotyped. It happens to every generation, but I think more than anyone, the Millennials have been unfairly characterized in a stereotypical fashion. You’re right –that is the death of audience. That is the death of business, when you think someone is, some very shallow transparent stereotype, instead of a richly nuanced human being. We have generational characteristics. I argued that the Millennials are more like Gen X than people would like to admit — or is that the right word? I don’t know. All I know is that we went through a recession, and we were all upset and angry, and that’s where grunge came from. Then the Millennials have a recession that makes ours look like a day at the beach.

They should be the ones who are angry. I admire them because they’re optimistic to a degree, but they’re savvy, too. You know what I’m saying? They’re not going to put up with your BS, but they’re not necessarily raging angry about everything either. I think serving any generation, but especially the Millennial generation, well is just truly understanding who you’re trying to talk to and providing real value and experience. Whether it’s an educational, Here let me teach you this and I’m going to need you to register for it and you’re going to come back here into this training area, which is becoming ubiquitous with these larger learning programs.

I’m going to deliver you something that you value, that you look forward to. I’ll do my damnedest to be consistent and show up on the same day and time or whatever the case may be. I think if they’re anticipating hearing from me, or the organization as it would be, I think that’s the win.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

Brian Clark: If someone is looking forward to getting your email and you’re a few minutes late, I don’t think they’re going to get mad at you, but I think when you show up randomly with a message that isn’t anticipated or desired, that’s when you get marked as spam because it’s just easier.

Robert Bruce: The newsletters that I want to get, trust me — I always read them. It doesn’t matter what time, what place. But I think this is a good point: consistency, scheduled time, and specifically within the context of talking to Millennials. You’re right. If it’s something that I want, I’m going to read it, no question.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and that’s the secret. I don’t know how many times lately I’ve said it: It’s simple, maybe just not easy. It is simple. Everyone wants to take shortcuts, or they just want to send as many unsolicited spam messages as possible and hope something sticks.

Robert Bruce: It’s all about relevance.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I talk to a lot of people that are in more traditional business sectors, and they don’t understand. They understand the concept of, if you have a bunch of people that you can reach by email, that’s a good promotional tool, but what they don’t get is actually how valuable that audience is and how much you should be focused on delivering value to get the sign-up in the first place. Being consistent with value is more important than being consistent on time. Isn’t that really what we’re both saying here? You’ve got to nurture that list. You’ve got to earn the right to send that offer.

Robert Bruce: No, it’s real simple. You’re right. It is simple, but it’s not easy. You’re sending really great education or entertainment, or whatever your thing is, to people that want to receive it. You know what? That can be a long, fruitful relationship for both sides, but then as you mentioned before, when the unsubscribes do come, you look at that as feedback, really.

Unsubscribes are a great thing because it tells you something, sometimes. You’ve got to look at the context of why and how and who. Don’t fear the unsubscribe because that person has decided at this point in time to take off. Well, they weren’t going to do any kind of business with you anyway, so it’s a good thing.

Brian Clark: Unsubscribes are a natural part of the process. What you look for is an alarming rate of people marking you as spam instead of scrolling down and hitting unsubscribe.

You may say that people just don’t care and they’ll just mark it as spam to get rid of it faster. But I’ve found that when a complaint happens, I’m always shocked. Like Really? Come on now. That was a pure content email. But it’s so rare that you don’t even think about it. That was just a person taking a shortcut. If you saw a lot of that behavior, that’s feedback you need to pay attention to, but unsubscribes in the normal course, as long as you’re not losing half your audience every time you mail, it should be a tiny percentage. But the bigger your list gets, the bigger that number is. It’s okay. It’s normal.

Let me leave you with this. Think about what kind of experience — educational, motivational, what have you — can you offer that is above and beyond just Sign-up for my newsletter. Even something like Further would benefit from me creating a front-end experience, a goal, a challenge of some sort that, Oh, and also you will continue to receive this great content weekly.

That’s the way to do it, and that’s the next step. If I make it through this conference alive, I may have some time this summer to do some projects, and we do have some stuff coming? Right.

Robert Bruce: Yeah we do. Let’s do this. Go to NewRainmaker.FM. Sign up for the email list there. You won’t miss a thing in terms of what’s coming.

Brian Clark: All right everyone, thanks for tuning in, and if you did happen to make it to Denver, you’re not listening to this right now.

Robert Bruce: You better not be.

Brian Clark: I will be talking to you in another context.

The Transcript

Does Audio Create Authority Faster Than Text?

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

Robert Bruce: I’m recording this, Brian. Are you going to cough? Do you have a cough button?

Brian Clark: No.

Robert Bruce: Because if you cough, I mean, I can edit it out later.

Brian Clark: Wait, is this the opening of the show?

Robert Bruce: This is the opening of the show. Because here’s the thing.

Brian Clark: That’s wonderful.

Robert Bruce: We’re a week away from Denver, from Authority Rainmaker, and you’re sitting here coughing on this recording. It’s making me a little nervous.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I’m not sure what’s going on. You know, I got a Tweet last week. Someone said he didn’t like all the chitchat that you and I engage in. This is probably going to really impress that guy.

Robert Bruce: Wow.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Robert Bruce: It s like a minute, compared to other things. Let’s just keep chit … No, we won’t keep chitchatting.

All right. Does audio create authority faster than text? Interesting question you’ve brought up here. What are you getting at with this question?

Brian Clark: When I write the Further newsletter, I’m constantly reading geeky psychological articles, which I enjoy quite a bit. I came across this article that said that the human brain detects confidence in the voice of a speaker in less than a blink of a eye — like two-tenths of a second, that fast. It was really interesting to me because basically, in this research study, they taped 64 electrodes to each subject’s head, and then they had people make statements. They were designed to either be neutral or unconfident, mostly confident, and then confident, and the brain activity spiked, just lit up, when confident speech was heard.

It was almost instantaneous. Nearly confident speech took a little bit longer to process. If you’re not quite as confident, it’s harder for people to assess. It was something like 130 milliseconds later. It’s just kind of fascinating to me that we’re hardwired to give our attention and to attribute influence to people who speak confidently, even though there may be plenty of people out there who know their stuff, but they don’t have that level of confidence. I can certainly see that coming in to play with podcasting.

The flip side to this is coming from a medium that’s been text-heavy since the beginning of the Internet, a lot of people don’t write with a voice of authority or confidence, even if they are. It made me think. Is podcasting or audio content really the cure or an enhancer of authority if in fact you know what you’re talking about and you can deliver it confidently? It’s an interesting question.

The Maddening Path to Mastery and Confidence

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Very interesting. It’s a tough one because — we ve talked about this a lot — the idea of turning on, sitting in front of a microphone, hitting record, is a completely unnatural act. Therefore, it can erode any confidence that you may have in the subject, even when you are an expert and when you are working on these things day in and day out over a period of years and talking about them.

Brian Clark: Yeah. In the research I did subsequently to finding this article — how do people become more confident — it s kind of like this chicken-and-egg situation. Become confident to do things that you’re not confident about. The only way to become confident is to do them anyway, which I think drives everyone crazy, but it’s true. For example, I was deathly afraid of public speaking before I started doing it about seven years ago, and you know from our private conversations, I dread it every time. I was like, “Why did agree to do this again?” Then you said, That’s what you said last year and the year before that.

I still get nervous but here’s how I get over it. Number one, I stick to topics that I know, obviously. No one wants to hear me talk about something I don’t know what I’m talking about. Even the minutia or the anecdotes or music references, I will go and research to make sure that I don’t get even the smallest thing wrong, because I don’t like it. I don’t like to make mistakes, even though they happen to everyone.

Finally, the finally component, if I can refer to our friend, Mr. Henry Rollins and his Writer Files interview, you remember the two words that he said were his favorite quote?

Robert Bruce: Oh yeah, right. No. Can we say it? I’ll have to bleep it out, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah, well, Eff it. That’s ultimately what I say in my head when I go up on stage. What’s the worst that could happen? Do your best. It’s always fun. When I get off stage, I’m exhilarated and I feel good, but what I found looking through the research is that you kind of just have to say, if not eff it, then What’s the worst that can happen? In making mistakes, it’s feedback. Right? You tried something. You fail. You learn. You try again. But if you can’t take that mindset, then confidence never really develops, because you’re always afraid of failure as if it’s going to physically hurt you, and in most cases, that’s not what’s going to happen at all.

Robert Bruce: It’s the old thing with podcasting in particular. How to get better, how to become comfortable, and yes, confident behind the microphone is to do 100 episodes. It s just to keep doing it, as painful as it may be. The question, too, becomes, though, is it something that you want to do, versus something that you think might help — whatever — your goals or anything? Because if it’s something that you’re not too sure about, obviously that’s going to affect how you do the thing. Maybe commitment is a part of that, as well. If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it, and then that becomes the long-haul-over-100-episodes thing.

How to Learn Any Topic at a Deeper Level

Brian Clark: Right, and the process of doing it, that’s so important. You’ve always said — go back to our first episodes of the podcast back in 2010 — we were terrible, and I take your word for it because I’m not going back and listening at this point.

Here’s something else that’s really amazing: when you are expanding your knowledge on a topic, let’s say you’ve got some baseline knowledge because you’re in this particular industry, in which you’re always learning new things. The best strategy for a podcast or a blog or whatever is to share what you know as you’re learning. You don’t have to hold yourself out as, I’m the premier expert on this.

No. Here’s what I know, and I’m sharing it with you so you know it. But there’s an interesting thing about that process. The process of learning and then explaining it to people means that you internalize that information at a much higher rate. It’s called elaboration. It’s a retrieval process. If you really want to learn something, you need to force yourself to retrieve the information. One way to do that is through quizzes and testing. We think about the test as determining what you know, but it’s actually a learning aid. The act of being tested and retrieving tells you what you don’t know, what you do know, and it solidifies the material for you at a higher level, which is pretty cool.

Through the years of Copyblogger and explaining deeper copywriting principles and content marketing, thinking deeply, and trying to learn more, I realized a long time ago that that was what made my game elevate much faster than if I were just a practitioner. The act of explaining forces you to understand the material at a higher level. You truly do become an expert, and your confidence level goes up. It’s maddening, but you’ve got to do it in order to increase your confidence, which increases your authority all in one big package. It’s kind of amazing, but the only way to get by it is to do it.

Now Robert, beyond this — just showing up and doing the work, which is simple but not always easy — you’re a trained actor. You’ve done voice work. You’ve done all sorts of stuff that perhaps the average person who’s thinking about getting into podcasting hasn’t done. Do you have any tips in that arena where you can enhance the confidence that comes across in your voice, or is that even possible?

4 Quick Tips for More Confident Speaking

Robert Bruce: Oh yeah, it definitely is, and I think it s my former life as an actor. There’s a couple of things. I’ll list off a couple of things and describe them briefly. The best thing to do is to go to NewRainmaker.FM, and I’ll leave a bunch of stuff in the show notes for this episode. The episode is titled, Does Audio Create Authority Faster than Text? Four quick things.

One is preparation. All of these are going to be obvious — I think relatively obvious, anyway — but in the context of podcasting and doing content — audio, video, whatever it is — preparation. Yes, in terms of the content itself, either making notes, or sometimes you want to script something out completely. The general idea here is know what you’re talking about. If you’re not an expert, necessarily, know the subject that you’re interviewing, which is another way to approach all of these topics and to slowly gain confidence in front of the mic or in front of the camera. Preparation, that’s number one.

Number two is to breathe. We’re not going to get into yoga and all of that stuff, of which I know nothing, but there are some basic breathing techniques that can be surprisingly helpful in terms of how it affects the voice. The one quick thing is you may have heard, Breathe from your diaphragm. What the hell does that mean? It’s this kind of weird statement that you hear every once in a while. The thing that helped me understand it was, as someone once told me, as babies, we breathe properly from our diaphragm. If you look at a baby in a crib sleeping, naturally their stomach is going to be going up and down, up and down.

If you don’t think about it, which is impossible now that I mentioned it, as adults, somewhere we transition to this idea of breathing more shallow and breathing from our chest. Our chest goes up and down as you take a breath in and take a breath out. When you’re on stage in front of the microphone, in front of the video, breathing obviously is the mechanism by which your words are delivered in that sense. You want to breathe from the diaphragm. One quick cheat on this is the next couple of breaths you take, when you inhale, expand your stomach. Inhale through the nose, expand your stomach, force it, even fake it, exhale. The stomach goes down. That is breathing, essentially, from the diaphragm. Again, I’ll leave a few notes on here.

It s kind of a weird deal, but it’s a physical act that enhances the speaking ability, and this is going back forever.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I had issues with proper breathing and too-shallow breathing. It’s kind of strange. You have to train yourself to pay attention to the breath, which I suppose meditation helps with to a certain degree. But it’s really when you’re in the act of your day-to-day life that you need to make sure that you’re properly breathing, and that can be challenging.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and you’ll notice in the context of this conversation, that your voice will become deeper and stronger in a sense when you’re breathing from the diaphragm. Again, more on that in the show notes.

One quick thing in terms of enunciation and pronouncing words properly and clearly. This one is a little bit of a catch-22 in the modern age. It’s Demosthenes’ stones. No, not those stones. It was — how far back are we going, back to ancient Athens? Demosthenes was a gentleman who grew up with a speech impediment, and through a series of events, he wanted to learn how to speak better. It’s a great story, I won’t tell the whole thing right here.

He put into his mouth a number of stones. Of course, if you’re going to try this, be very careful. You could easily get in to trouble swallowing stones. He spoke with these stones in his mouth, forcing his mouth to speak through them, and this helps with — over the long term — enunciation. You can use a cork from a wine bottle, any number of things that kind of obstruct the mouth and force it to work harder as you speak. Simple things like that can really help.

The one thing you want to be careful about this, though, is that we are in an age where the Shakespearean actor, though alive and well on stages around the world, in popular culture really does not hold the weight that it once did. A great example is Orson Welles. If I were to come on here and talk like Orson Welles — not like I’m talking like him now, I sound nothing like him — you would be disturbed and probably click off and run away. Now, you can see it.

Brian Clark: It’s more like, you have to be confident but you also have to be authentic. That s the balancing act.

Robert Bruce: Just look at television. Acting is a great corollary here because if you look at television these days, actors are more subtle. They’re micced, so they do not have to project to the back of a theater, but that is also affected the style of acting, which we’ve all become accustomed to and love in these shows. It’s very low-key, a lot of times, and sometimes you can’t even see their mouth moving in some cases, or understand the words they’re saying, I ve found recently. You want to be careful with using techniques like putting rocks or a cork in your mouth or something.

The last thing, number four, I’ll say, is mic technique. There are ways to approach a microphone that are very helpful in terms of sounding good. I’m still working with this. We all are. But I’ll drop a few notes in on that, but just simple things like talking around or over your microphone, not directly into it, speaking at a certain distance or distances, depending on what it is you’re trying to affect with the microphone.

That’s four things: preparation, breathing, Demosthenes’ stones, and mic technique.

Brian Clark: Just try saying Demosthenes over and over.

Robert Bruce: I know. That’s bad enough.

Brian Clark: Tough enough. That’s probably all you need to do.

Robert Bruce: Let me add a fifth one real quick here, Brian, which is the biggest one of all, which is editing.

Brian Clark: Yes.

Robert Bruce: You can take out all those screw-ups – ums, uhs — you don’t hear all this stuff because we take a lot of that out for your benefit, dear listener, but editing is a great benefit in confidence, as well. It helps to know that while you’re talking, while you’re recording, Oh, okay, this sucks. This whole section that I just spoke was horrible. I can take that out, which can help with confidence, as well.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That took me a long time to really realize that the magic happens in editing, and you can just completely screw up. You just can’t let it shake you, and start over again. Just pause, take a breath, and start over. The final product is really all that matters. No one has to know how many things ended up on the floor, metaphorically.

Robert Bruce: That old cutting room floor.

Brian Clark: All right. Well, this is an interesting topic. This is kind of fun to geek out about, but podcasting — as we’ve discussed over and over in the New Rainmaker free training — it’s the perfect source content because you get it out there. You get your expertise out there. It can be repurposed in to other formats as desired or applicable, and it’s completely doable.

But we had Jerod talking about the connection that you make with people when they can hear your voice and the nuance that can come across or gets lost in writing, or just, again, that a lot of people are not confident in their writing, and they tend to just slip into the passive voice and then come across as wishy-washy when they’re not at all. It’s just that not everyone is writer.

Anyway. If you’re on the fence about starting your own podcast, don’t let a lack of confidence stop you because the only way you’re going to get there is like us, maybe doing 20 terrible episodes. Who cares?

Robert Bruce: And twenty terrible more.

Brian Clark: What’s the worst that could happen?

Robert Bruce: No more chitchat.

Brian Clark: That’s right.

The Transcript

A Much Better Revenue Model for Podcasting

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

Robert Bruce: Jerod, are you there?

Jerod Morris: I am here.

Robert Bruce: The last time you and I met — this was on this show, which is New Rainmaker with Brian Clark — he was not here, and we kind of made a thing of it. So it’s New Rainmaker with Brian Clark, with Robert Bruce, and with Jerod Morris. Now, he’s here. Queue the Empire Strikes Back music, right?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Do we have a license for that because that would be awesome? Every time you introduce me, Imperial March.

Robert Bruce: Yes.

Brian Clark: That would be awesome.

Robert Bruce: Jerod Morris, VP of Rainmaker.FM. Brian Clark, Founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media. I’m Robert Bruce, also VP of Rainmaker.FM. You see, here’s the other thing. I’ve been thinking about titles.

Brian Clark: Yeah, both of your titles are stupid.

Robert Bruce: Well I found something. I don’t know where this came from — Silicon Valley Job Title Generator.

Brian Clark: Oh boy. This is going to get worse, real fast.

Robert Bruce: It’s really something. It’s like ‘Innovation Pioneer.’ Let’s see, ‘Engagement Superintendent,’ ‘Mobile Intimacy Evangelist.’ This is one of my favorites ‘Social Media Commander.’

Brian Clark: Nice.

Jerod Morris: Very nice.

Robert Bruce: ‘In-House Social Media Savant, on and on and on. ‘Reddit Directors.’

Brian Clark: We should make Jerod the ‘Rainmaker Education Savant.’

Jerod Morris: OK.

Robert Bruce: It sounds like he is going for it.

Brian Clark: Give or take the savant part.

Robert Bruce: Alright, gentlemen, we have been called here to discuss something. We’re calling this episode ‘A Way Better Revenue Model for Podcasting.’ Jerod, you have been up to some interesting things in terms of this podcast network. You’re pushing the envelope, sending out the first volley, if you will, for what may be coming for other shows and the network as a whole. Thanks for coming on. Brian and I are just going to grill you for a few minutes if that’s OK with you.

Jerod Morris: Perfect. Nothing I love better.

The Default (yet Difficult) Revenue Model for Podcasts

Robert Bruce: I wanted to frame this conversation around the idea of, when you think about podcast revenue, when you think of how podcasts have been monetized in the past, what’s the first thing that comes up?

Jerod Morris: Ads, sponsorships.

Robert Bruce: How’s that going for folks out there?

Jerod Morris: I think some people are having success with it if they have really big numbers, but for the most part, it’s pretty disappointing. Number one, the metrics haven’t been there to really give advertisers numbers that they can trust, so I think that they’ve been reluctant to pay well without having those metrics. That’s certainly something that, in the podcast industry, we’re looking to improve on. It just hasn’t been there, and I think people have left feeling like they’re not getting the revenue that they feel like they should be getting for what they’re investing — time and energy in producing their podcast.

Robert Bruce: Metrics are really interesting. We’ve had a lot of discussion and reworking of how we’re looking at our own metrics on Rainmaker.FM. Brian, we’ve had a couple of conversations with Chris Garrett about this, and we made the decision early on that we wanted to land on the conservative side of downloads and plays and things like that.

Brian Clark: Yeah, there’s all sorts of intentional and unintentional ways that your download stats can be artificially inflated. For our network itself, Rainmaker.FM, but also for the Rainmaker Platform and how it counts downloads, we wanted to make sure that it was legitimate because there are issues of caching and all sorts of things that can create duplicate downloads that aren’t real.

I had a brief conversation with Tom Webster of Edison Research. They are big, big, big in the podcasting and podcasting metrics. I got him and Chris Garrett together so that Tom could actually informally audit our download procedure. He gave us a thumbs up on how we approached it. So, good news there.

Robert Bruce: Advertising, definitely, like you said, Jerod, it’s the first thing that comes up when we think about money and revenue in relation to podcasting. Frankly, it goes back over a hundred years into radio. In one sense, it can seem like an easy way to get revenue going. Sometimes it can, but it’s really interesting because it’s a little deceptive that way.

There’s a lot of work that goes into developing relationships with advertisers. You’re talking about recurring billing, all kinds of things that add into the mix, which is totally doable. We’ve decided that we’re not going to look at that for the time being. Advertising has definitely been front and center when you think about these things with podcasting and money. Brian, we’ve been talking the last few episodes about something else, and that’s the ‘logged in’ experience.

The Very Profitable Future of Audio Content

Brian Clark: Logged in experience is an overall online marketing trend no matter what your business model is. In this context, especially with the way you led in with the episode with the dream of sponsorship and advertising, how it turns out to be harder and sometimes less lucrative than people were expecting. That takes me right back to 2007 when I was basically making the same argument to bloggers that, instead of relying on AdSense — otherwise known as ‘webmaster welfare’ — that they needed to create something to sell.

Robert Bruce: I don’t think I’ve heard that one yet.

Brian Clark: Oh, really? That s an old one.

Robert Bruce: All these years, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that. Wow.

Brian Clark: Yeah, online courses were the thing that we were teaching people how to do back then. It’s as true today as it was then except more so, because, again, this $107 billion in online education that will get sold this year alone, that’s staggering. That’s all happened in the nine years or so since we said, “Hey, this is what’s coming.” Let’s just cut to the chase. One of the best ways to monetize any content, but especially audio, is an online course.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, we have a real-time case study, Jerod, which is why you are here with us today. That is that you and Jon Nastor, your co-host of The Showrunner podcast, which is at Showrunner.FM if anybody wants to take a look — just launched The Showrunner Podcasting Course. Tell us briefly what that is, and then we’ll get into some nuts and bolts about how you actually built this thing.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, the course — basically, Jon and I have, over the last four or five years, gotten a lot of experience hosting podcasts — developing them, launching them, running them. Obviously, through that experience, we’ve gained a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge.

So as we started talking about putting together The Showrunner podcast — and it seemed like a perfect fit for him to be the co-host of that — creating a course and sharing with people what we’ve learned just seemed like such a natural fit. There are so many people out there who want to start a podcast, and they are maybe hesitant about it for a number of reasons.

Maybe they’re not sure about the future of on-demand audio, or they fear getting behind the microphone, or they fear how they can use it for real business purpose, on and on. They fear that the technical part will be too simple. What we’ve learned just by doing is that none of those are reasons not to start. There are so many reasons to start that if we can, through what we learn, help people just gain more confidence, gain the simple knowledge that they need to just go out there and start, then there are going to be so many benefits that people find from it.

Really, a lot of the early feedback that we’re getting from people is just loving that little push to get into it and realizing that it’s not this really difficult, hard, complicated thing. Obviously, it requires work ethic and commitment and a lot of that stuff, but that’s stuff that anybody can bring to any project. Instead of podcasting being this thing over here that only radio people, or only a certain type of people can do, we really want to show people how anybody can do it and use it as part of an integrated content marketing experience for their audience.

Brian Clark: All right. Jerod, I’ve created a lot of online courses in my day, dating back to 2002, paid and free even before Copyblogger. And quite a few since then. Mr. Bruce has been involved, so naturally, we micromanaged you during the creation of the Showrunner course. Is that correct?

Jerod Morris: No, you didn’t, which was phenomenal. Part of what made this such an energizing and just educational experience for me, and for Jon, was just the freedom to go create it — to really, as podcasters and thinking about what would have helped us when we started, really thinking of it from that perspective and allowing that to inform how we developed it. But, no, in terms of micromanagement, there was absolutely none of that, at all.

Brian Clark: Probably, you might have appreciated some. I don’t know.

Robert Bruce: Maybe a little help, guys.

Brian Clark: The reason why I find this particular episode to be so interesting to me, because we haven’t really got to talk about this much — you were working hard on it. You got it out. It’s in the pilot phase right now. We’ll talk about that a little bit more — but I really want to hear about your experience because you just got thrown out there like anyone else. No more guidance other than what’s been written over the years by us I guess.

You talked to Nastor, I remember you guys had a conversation when you found out he was joining Rainmaker.FM with Hack the Entrepreneur. Start there and talk about how you two decided you wanted to do this course.

How Jerod Built an Online Course from Scratch

Jerod Morris: I think two things happened simultaneously. When we started Rainmaker.FM, I knew that I wanted to do a podcast about podcasting to share what I had learned. That’s how The Showrunner podcast was born. Jon had, had ideas about doing a course. He’d been thinking about it, so when we came together and talked about it, it seemed like the perfect fit. We already knew we were going to have the podcast. We had the seeds of an idea for what to do with a course. It was just the perfect fit.

We knew that we could use the podcast, obviously, to start to build awareness, to build a connection with people, to demonstrate our knowledge and our experience that would then, obviously, lead the way for people getting into the course. That was the idea, and we were extremely excited about it. Then, of course, as soon as we got to go ahead to do the course, there was that moment of, “OK, what do we do next?” Now we’ve got this idea. Now we’ve got to take it forward, but that’s really what happened.

There’s a lot of potential there for it to maybe not work out as well as you hope, working with a new person and that kind of thing. But I think we immediately found out that we had really good chemistry, both in terms of hosting a show together and doing work together — which are two different types of chemistry. Then, also, just that our ideas and philosophies on it were pretty similar. There were some differences that I think are instructive but pretty similar on how we wanted to approach doing it. That really helped us to build that momentum early on.

Brian Clark: What were you thinking about in terms of what you wanted to be in the course. I know you’ve been looking around at other courses, and Jon has as well. But what were some of your ideas in terms of the curriculum, at least to start, because we’ll talk later about how this will grow into other things.

Why Podcasts Are Such a Great Fit with Online Courses

Jerod Morris: There’s a few different ways that you can take a course on podcasting. There are some out there that have focused a lot on the technical side and getting real heavy into the audio and going for that audio file type. We knew right off the bat that we weren’t going to go to that route because neither Jon nor I is that person. Obviously, we understand the importance of having a sound that is good enough. We know the basics of that. I think people need to know those, and we do teach those in the course.

But we also wanted to be much more about the theory of podcasting, the actual execution of it, the planning of it, and how it integrates into a bigger plan, a bigger philosophy. What we’ve both found is that, with any podcast that we’ve created, there always comes that moment — you get maybe 10 episodes in or 15, 20 episodes in — you get to this point where to do the next one, it becomes a little bit more difficult. You hit that dip a little bit.

What we really wanted to do is really teach people how to get over that because you’ve got a bigger goal in mind, because you’ve really learned how to connect with an audience, and they keep you coming back — really try and teach people how to do it over the long term. Not just get set up to produce episode one really well, but get people motivated, excited, and understanding what it takes to do it over the long term.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, you and I talked a couple of weeks ago about your idea for integrating the public show with the course itself. I think that would be useful for people to hear.

Jerod Morris: It’s funny, yeah. I actually just had a conversation today about how we’re going to change up the podcast a little bit more to do that. The whole idea of the public showrunner was obviously, to the podcast The Showrunner, again, is to demonstrate what we know and to give people that free value, and make sure that the podcast itself obviously, not everything is a big call to action for the course. It is valuable in and of itself. Anybody who just wants some really good in-depth information on podcasting, they will get it there.

It’s to use that then to build a connection with the audience members. Because when you’re going to develop a course you’re going to ask people to invest an amount of money in that course, they need a connection. They need to know that they can trust you. They need to be wanting to take that next step with you to go more in-depth. That was our idea with the show — to really to use it, obviously, for the motivation part, for the excitement, build the enthusiasm, also demonstrate what we know. Then get people connected to us to the point where they want to take that next step with us, and actually go into the course.

How to Make Collaboration Work

Brian Clark: Jerod, let me go back a little bit to the collaboration aspect because I know, if it weren’t for the fact that we have Robert and I generally doing this show, there’s a good chance the show might not happen. Not only with The Showrunner podcast — you’ve got collaboration there between you and Jon — but also, and I know this from experience having done it myself, it takes a special resolve whether to write a book or to create a course. It’s the same exercise.

You have to map it out. You have to execute it. You have to show up. You have to be disciplined. But I found when I’m collaborating it makes it so much more doable. Talk a little bit more about how you guys decided who was doing what, how you motivated each other — any insight you can give me on that. I think collaboration is a topic people are interested in, yet they get hung up on, “How do I find the right person, and how does it actually work?”

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I think the fear maybe with collaboration, especially with a new person, is that you can almost detract from each other if you don’t have a good working relationship. The great thing with Jon is that it was a 100 percent of me, a 100 percent of him, and somehow it became 300 percent. Our ability to work together really multiplied what we were able to do. It really evolved over time because we initially had this whole Trello board set up with the modules, and we split them up evenly with what each one of us was going to do in terms of creating the lessons.

When we first planned it, it was all about the content. We hadn’t yet really thought about the infrastructure of the course, the marketing of the course, getting all that together. As we got into it, I realized how much work that was going to be, so we had to shift a little bit. I ended up spending more time getting the course set up, using the Learning Management System (LMS) inside of Rainmaker, working on getting everything ready in terms of marketing, the launch, and all of that stuff — also doing a lot of editing for the podcast as well.

It ended up working out that Jon was able to spend a lot more time in this initial phase focusing on getting a lot of the videos and the actual course materials done while I worked on putting them together, getting the infrastructure of the course itself done. Now that we’ve got it ready, I’ll be able to start doing more lessons and more videos — which is the part that is really motivating and really exciting. We just had to evolve with it.

Obviously, the closer it got to the pilot launch, all these things come up that you don’t quite realize. There’s some last minute working, and the fact that he knew that I would stay up until whenever on the last week to get it up and I knew that he would, that was really motivating — knowing that there’s someone else out there really busting their butt to get this content out and I’ve got to do it, too.

That teamwork was huge. I really think that, as people get into the course and even get into the show, the kind of working relationship he and I have — that chemistry — is a big thing that people are attracted to that helps connect them to what we’re doing. A lot of that was just born out of a lot of work. We’d get on the phone late at night and pump each other up and even recorded it for one bonus episode. We tried to make it fun and actually invite people in.

Brian Clark: It’s all content.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I don’t want to do any work. “OK, let’s record ourselves complaining about this.”

Jerod Morris: Yeah. But we really do want people to see — because it is — it’s a podcast about podcasting and a course about podcasting. We want to show people a little bit behind the scenes how it actually works and relate that sometimes it is tough. Even when you’re really enthusiastic about a project, there can be moments where it’s tough and it’s hard to take the next step.

Brian Clark: Tell me about it.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. But when you’re committed to a bigger idea and you’re part of a team, it makes it so much easier to take that next step.

Brian Clark: So, Robert, Jerod actually beat you to the punch as far as creating a course out of our new LMS features of Rainmaker. I think you probably want to grill him for some information on that process.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, first, Jerod, let me ask you, would you call yourself a technically inclined person?

Jerod Morris: No. I would call myself the opposite of that.

Robert Bruce: OK. I’m going to give you a couple of softballs here, obviously. When you logged in to Rainmaker.FM — we just somewhat recently released the LMS features — had you been in there training with Chris Garrett for hours?

Jerod Morris: No. I was aware of it on a peripheral level, but no, in terms of actually building it into pieces, I was totally not familiar with it.

Robert Bruce: So you went in there relatively cold. Obviously, you’re familiar with Rainmaker. Tell us about that experience of actually the technical side of building the course, putting modules together.

How Jerod Built An Online Course From Scratch

Jerod Morris: The first moment was a little overwhelming. It was one of those, “Oh man, what did I just sign up to do?” When you get in there, if you just get into the dashboard and you see the pieces, for me anyway, the picture didn’t quite become clear. I wasn’t really sure where to start. My immediate first reaction was almost to go ask Chris, “Hey, can you help me out in doing this?” but I realized how silly that would be, and I trusted that our developers and our documentation writers probably did a pretty good job of walking you through this. I needed to just take a step back, take a couple breaths, and just take the long road to doing it instead of looking for the short cut.

Really, the first thing I did was just get into the Knowledge Base. What really helped, actually, is there’s a whole section there for the LMS about what you need to set up first, because I didn’t quite understand what the product was called and how that fit into an LMS — that you need to set that up first — and then getting the payment stuff set up.

Walking through it step by step, the picture started to become clear. Then I started to see the pieces, and then once you get a course created, then get the module created that goes with that course, and you start to see it come together, then the picture became clear. The nice thing was it was done all with the information that was just there in the backend. I just had to, again, slow down a little bit and make sure that I read instead of just trying to go out and do it myself, which is a problem I sometimes have.

Robert Bruce: Feedback from you, and I know I consulted with Chris Brogan like day one that the Learning Management System features were out — as always, we spot where people get hung up and what we can do better. I did the same thing. I went to the Knowledge Base. I was like, “Oh first steps. Thank you.” Then I went through it, and it was really easy. What we’re adding soon is this WalkMe technology where as soon as you access that feature set, you start getting prompts that tell you, “Do this first and now this.”

It’s the same information, but you would never have that moment of hesitation because you would be greeted by a very friendly interface. I think it’s pretty clear as long as you follow the steps, but I can’t wait until it’s even more intuitive.

Jerod Morris: It is. I did find it very clear — once I understood it. Now it’s nice because I can look at it and really have this sense of pride that I wasn’t out asking for all kinds of questions and all kinds of help. There may have been a few, but to be able to put that together, now the process is so simple. I’m already itching to go do this on some of my personal projects, too.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I got in there, on Further, because I have an idea for what I want to do with a course. Yeah, I was all excited because I can do it myself. Now, we do have to reveal that our very talented friend, Rafal, does do design work for you, but as far as I’ve heard, Rafal was the only person that gave you assistance building this and that we’re actually giving away the Showrunner CSS to anyone who wants it?

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that styling in there will be available to people who want to use it.

Brian Clark: It’s pretty nice. It’s simple. It’s clean. Just modules and lessons. That’s how the LMS works, so that’s nice. I’m going to have to snag that for Further. Yeah, it’s pretty good.

Jerod Morris: One thing Jon and I were talking about earlier today actually was how the way that Rafal styled it and laid it out with the sidebar, is one thing that really makes The Showrunner course different from other courses, especially in the podcasting space in terms of organization and being able to stay organized with a lot of different lessons and modules.

We have 10 different modules, each one has three or four lessons, and we’re going to be adding to it, but the way that it’s all organized and laid out, you can favorite certain ones, and you can mark them as complete, and do some things like that — what Rafal did there from a user interface and simplicity perspective really helped out.

Brian Clark: Yeah, also the approach to how the LMS works in Rainmaker is cool because a lot of online course builders, when you want to add a new content, it makes you go through the entire process from the beginning. With Rainmaker’s LMS, once you have your course created and the modules that go underneath it, you can add a new module any time you want immediately. You can add lessons to each module right there without going through this convoluted set-up process. Really, once you do it once, it really is empowering.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I will say this too about adding new modules. The fact that it uses the same standard paid to edit page as a post or as a podcast and it’s able to fit in to that construct, that’s very orienting. It was a feeling of safety for me. It’s like, “OK, now that I’m in here editing a lesson in a module, this stuff all makes sense.” So once the bigger picture all came together of how it fit together — which was simply a matter of going through the Knowledge Base — then actually being able to go in and create the content itself is simple because that’s an interface that everybody’s familiar with.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and you’re able to add any type of media that you want — video, audio, obviously. The other thing that we’re working on right now are these LMS templates. Just like our landing page templates, you have all these different styles. If for some reason someone doesn’t like Rafal’s, which I find hard to believe because I love it.

Jerod Morris: Who is that? Who?

Brian Clark: No, I mean having different options. As a beginning point, we’ve gotten lots of feedback about that whole side bar interface that pulls up the relevant content to the right, or I guess you could do it from the other side now. We actually used that meta for the free New Rainmaker course that we’ve had now for a while. It’s very intuitive, and it’s beautiful.

Robert Bruce: So I’ve got two more questions. One for you, Jerod, and then one final one for you, Brian.

How to Think Bigger about Your Own Podcast Revenue Model

Robert Bruce: Jerod, you and I talked a few days ago about the bigger idea of this ‘logged in’ model as it relates to The Showrunner podcast and the Showrunner course. You said something interesting that this is just the very kernel of what you hope the Showrunner course to be. You started talking about this larger vision for what a ‘showrunner,’ is and how that might affect the course in the future.

Brian Clark: Also, have you thought about how you would use, within the free podcast to paid course, the marketing automation features?

Jerod Morris: I have. Let me take that question first, Brian, because the marketing automation features in there are phenomenal. I actually already set one up to use as a test. Because what you can do is, basically, when people are logged in, now based on actions that they take, you can take actions. Jon and I want to have a few different little surprises or Easter eggs in there when people get to a certain page and complete that content, be able to send them an email. Maybe as a follow-up to provide some extra information or an extra push, whatever it is.

You can actually go, and based on actions people take, put them onto a different email list, segment them, so that you can communicate with them in a different way. Yeah, the marketing automation, we’ve just dipped our toes in the water in terms of how we can use it. My head is already swimming with ideas. I’m excited to get in there and do some more with that.

Brian Clark: That’s what I’m looking forward to playing with — you’ve got to build the course first. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m going to build a free course. The marketing automation features are crucial there because you are able to see the different paths, who’s a power user, and who hasn’t completed the lesson and tailor that experience for them individually — which is amazing.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, it really is. It allows you, again, to adapt to that person and give them something more relevant. You’re creating a course for a big wide group of people, and you try and make it as relevant to everybody as possible. The more you can learn how people use it and then take them on a path that’s relevant to them, obviously, the better an experience they’re going to have.

The whole idea of an audience experience, Robert, kind of hits on what I was talking about with Showrunner. When we first named the podcast that, I thought it was cool just because, as a Breaking Bad fan hearing about Vince Gilligan the showrunner, that was my first real introduction to the term, and I liked it. It was a cool term. I thought it was applicable.

As we’ve gone down the road now with The Showrunner, a couple of things have happened. Number one, really understanding the importance of connection and the creation of this audience experience. Someone on Twitter a couple of days ago who was running an event, just casually referred to herself as a ‘showrunner.’

She was managing this live event, and it really hit me that the idea of a showrunner — because when you look at it from a TV perspective, a guy like Vince Gilligan, he has the responsibility for this audience experience for the people who watch Breaking Bad. Someone who is hosting a live event, they’re in charge of this audience experience.

The Showrunner podcast, we’re in charge of this audience experience. ‘Showrunner,’ to me, it’s not about someone who’s in charge of a TV show or a podcast or anything. I really think on a larger scale, it can be applied to mean anyone who’s responsible for an audience experience. There are so many different experiences that that can apply to.

Brian Clark: That’s really interesting that you got there. Because when I first thought of using the term ‘showrunner,’ outside of television, obviously, it was the substitute for ‘impresario,’ which is the larger concept of putting together talent and resources and creating something new for an audience, right?

Jerod Morris: Yeah. The way that I’ve started to look at it, too, Brian, we did a presentation at Content Marketing World about the ‘producer, director, talent model.’ We’ve had this idea of the rainmaker, obviously, and I see that person like the producer. To me, I see the showrunner in that director mold, where they’re in between. They are both out there doing it and executing or putting the people in the position to do it, but also, there with the producer, like the person in your position.

You didn’t have specific input in this course, but obviously, there’s a vision that you’ve charted that we understand the course needs to go into that. You’re clearly supplying resources to help that course become a reality, so it made that presentation make even more sense to me, doing it this way. That’s why I really see podcasting being the first of these, but the term itself and what it can mean to people is so much bigger than that.

Brian Clark: That’s true. That just means your show has more legs. It doesn’t necessarily have to stick just to podcasting about podcasting. I’m just waiting to when I get to be executive producer, which means I do nothing.

Robert Bruce: OK, Brian, full circle here. This ‘logged in’ educational course — either free or paid — do you see this as a more profitable, better revenue model for podcasting?

Brian Clark: For anything really, but I think podcasting in particular because of the portable, on-demand nature of the audio. If your audience is used to that from you, with say your interview show or some other format and you’re able to take the topic you’re talking about and drill down in a much deeper sense, then you’ve got the perfect medium for a course.

Of course, get transcripts, and provide supplemental materials like worksheets and things like that, sure. But if you’ve got an audience that appreciates the audio foundation, then you know how to create premium content. That’s a wonderful thing. I guarantee you’ll make more money than most people make from sponsorships.

Robert Bruce: Jerod, any last thoughts on that?

Jerod Morris: Yeah. I completely agree. Obviously, with The Showrunner podcast, we’re creating audio content, and there’s a certain way that you can teach with the audio content. What the course allows us to do is hit people with different learning styles in different ways — to create the action guides and the checklist, to do things with videos. It really allows us to expand the way that we’re able to teach. The concepts are in many ways similar on the podcast, but in the course, we can go into more depth. We can do it in different ways.

Again, people who want to take that next step can. I agree completely. You know I’ve talked about this, Robert. The shows on Rainmaker.FM, there’s so many episodes I listen to and series of episodes, I’m thinking, “That’s a course right there.” That would be simple to translate into a course. I think it’s a natural fit.

Brian Clark: I tend to also use the podcast itself as a sounding board. You don’t go as deep on any one issue as you could, but you are getting feedback. You see where people are getting hung up. You know what to elaborate on. Of course, we’ve been doing that with text content forever. It’s really the same thing, different format. It’s just so much more.

When you can actually learn something valuable in a business or marketing sense while you’re out on a walk or doing something else that doesn’t require you to stare at the screen, it’s pretty valuable stuff. I think the market, the audio book market, is huge. That is the way a lot of people are learning, and as we move into this future of constant lifelong learning, on-demand education, just to keep up with what’s happening — it’s a big deal. It really is.

OK, Jerod, so this show is airing on Thursday, which is the day before you bump up the price on the course. Let’s tell people what to do if they’re listening to this and want to get in on this.

Jerod Morris: Yup. We’re currently in the pilot phase of the launch. That phase is going to last two weeks before we shut it down, really work with the people who are in the course, get some feedback, make some changes to it, and then reopen it.

The way that we’ve set up the pilot launch is this first week, the course costs $295. On Friday, that price will go up. Actually, after Friday, that price will go up to $395 for the last week before we shut it down, and then reopen it at the final full price of $495.

For people who are interested, we’re not circulating the link to the sales page, but if you go and sign up for The Showrunner email list, you will immediately get an email that gives you the instructions for the pilot launch. That email will come, you can go check out the page and see everything that’s in the course, find out all the details, and the purchase information.

Robert Bruce: You can sign up for that email list at Showrunner.FM, is that correct?

Jerod Morris: Yes. Showrunner.FM. It’s right there, right at the top of the screen.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and also on a related note, Jerod and I did a webinar on Monday that basically demos the LMS live for people, and also the marketing automation features. Assuming nothing went wrong with that recording, it should be in the show notes. Here’s something else that is time sensitive. You have until tomorrow, Friday, May 1st.

Jerod Morris: Correct.

Brian Clark: For both of these dates, if you start your trial of Rainmaker Standard by May 1st, Friday, then you will get the option to upgrade to Rainmaker Pro for a flat fee instead of the much more expensive recurring price — and people have been all over this. I’ve almost been shocked. But it’s a good deal. A lot of people are seeing the value in the advanced features, especially if they don’t have to pay forever — like they will normally when the Pro plan just becomes part of the day.

Now, there’s a twist here, Jerod, because I noticed that you’re giving an extended trial period of Rainmaker to people who sign up for the course.

Jerod Morris: We are.

Brian Clark: So if they sign up for the course tomorrow, they get a 60-day free trial period, which also qualifies them for the one-time fee upgrade. That’s the total package, but it’s still tomorrow, May 1st, so choose which way you want to go.

Robert Bruce: Jerod Morris, thank you for joining us today. You are the Harbinger of Disruptive Innovation at Rainmaker.FM.

Brian Clark: Was that another generated title?

Robert Bruce: Yes, yes. Brian Clark, the Digital Sultan of Rainmaker.FM.

Brian Clark: Sultan, like it.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I am Robert Bruce — let’s see if I can get a good one here — Online Space Sherpa. How’s that?

Jerod Morris: Can we just randomize these in our email signature, so there’s a new one each time?

Brian Clark: Yeah, that would be awesome.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, ‘Digital Lord’ was another good one. I might go with that actually. I’ll put this in the show notes. Hey, guys, thanks for doing this today. We will see you next week. Jerod, I’m sure we’re going to see you soon.

Jerod Morris: Absolutely. I hope so.

Brian Clark: Maybe in place of me, again, executive producer here I come.

Robert Bruce: That’s a good idea. That’s a good idea. We’ll keep the name, though, New Rainmaker with Brian Clark.

Brian Clark: Yeah, of course, and everyone’s like, “Who the hell is Brian Clark?”

Robert Bruce: Right. It will be an inside thing. He’s the Human Experience Evangelist.

Brian Clark: That’s right. That’s exactly right.

The Transcript

How Online Courses Accelerate Any Business Model

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

Robert Bruce: You ever notice that famous writers, famous actors, they all seem to have an FBI file?

Brian Clark: That’s weird. Over the weekend while I was contemplating whether or not Ringo Starr should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, well, he’s in. He’s also going to be the last living Beatle. Ringo, of course, is leading a charmed life. Not to denigrate him, but he s the ‘lessest’ Beatle, I guess.

Somehow I end up on John Lennon’s Wikipedia page and was reading up on how Nixon tried to deport him, and he had this FBI file forever. It wasn’t until Clinton that they finally declassified it, and it said nothing.

Robert Bruce: They got nothing on him.

Brian Clark: They had nothing on him.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I found a similar one for Charles Bukowski, and then it took me down the rabbit trail. Anyway, do you think you have an FBI file at this point?

Brian Clark: Yeah, but it has nothing to do with being famous. More like actual criminal activity, I’m sure.

Robert Bruce: Right, right. Well, now we don’t need them because the NSA just records everything anyway.

Brian Clark: Exactly.

Robert Bruce: It’s the next generation.

Brian Clark: I don’t even know why we record these things. Let’s just talk, and hey guys, could you send us that file for Thursday? That’s a good idea.

Why Free Courses Are the Best Lead Generation Tool

Robert Bruce: All right, we’re continuing to talk about online courses, and how they can and do accelerate, you were saying, just about every business model. Let’s start with a big, fat number, which is $107 billion in sales related to online courses just this year.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Speaking of business models, a lot of people, I think, would love to be in that business, the online course/membership site business. As we ve discussed in the past, recent activity has pretty much legitimized this beyond any sort of accredited institution type thing. In fact, it’s those institutions that are having the most trouble. They’re outrageously expensive and generally behind the times as far as cutting-edge goes, so that’s a whole different issue.

It’s a staggering amount of money — $107 billion related to the sale of online education in 2015 alone. Now, in 2007, when we launched Teaching Sells — which is basically the intersection of instructional design and direct marketing, basically how to create online courses and sell them — the amount of time I had to spend persuading people that people would actually pay for online education is humorous now. But it was a different time. I was talking to bloggers. Everything is free. Everything is ad-supported. Everything that we predicted back in 2007 has happened in spades. It’s a big deal.

You see guys like Chris Brogan, and David Siteman Garland — they’re effectively orienting their entire careers around online courses at this point, because it’s a big deal. We talked about lynda.com last week.

Robert Bruce: That s $1.5 billion alone there, right?

Brian Clark: Well, that was the acquisition by LinkedIn, but like I said, I think lynda.com is not Harvard or even University of Phoenix. It is a commercial site that had the cutting edge in the technology topics and design and coding and all that kind of stuff. There’s no normal institution that could possibly compete with them. The other interesting thing about lynda.com is that — even though Lynda and her husband at the beginning did, in fact, create training content in the form of, what was it, technical textbooks and manuals and stuff like that — it wasn’t until they adopted our favorite model, the impresario model, that lynda.com took off.

Why You Don t Have to Create a Lynda.com to Succeed

Robert Bruce: Let’s talk about that for a minute, because I think a lot of people are sitting here, or might be sitting here thinking, “Yeah, okay great numbers, big numbers. I see how this could work, but I’m not an expert in any of these things,” which really was one of the major things addressed by Teaching Sells back, again, in 2007. What is the impresario model, and more importantly, what does it mean to somebody who may be thinking, “Man, I can’t create a lynda.com?”

Brian Clark: Well, yeah. You can, actually. Maybe not to that scale, but if you’re trying to make a great living, you don’t have to get that big. There are a couple of venture capital education sites that I’ve seen. Education is the big thing. Effectively, commercial sites are going to — in some respects — replace other traditional institutions of learning because it’s more effective, it’s more affordable. It’s everything.

But, all of these sites are not the experts. What they are, are delivering the platform for experts. Again, you can do the same thing with your own Rainmaker site, if you will, of aggregating the talents and expertise of others. You’re the one that knows how to do that stuff. They don’t, but they know their stuff in whatever the subject matter is. The dean of Harvard is not teaching all the classes.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. That’s a perfect way to look at it. What about this idea? We’re hearing a lot about the idea of online courses as content marketing, using online courses for lead generation. It s very popular to talk about right now. But again, this is something that was addressed quite a while ago, in fact.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I’m very pleased to see that it’s catching on with other people. I know I saw Derek Halpern talking about online courses as lead-gen. Chris Brogan was sharing that some of his students were all for creating a course, but they couldn’t figure out how to build an email list to sell it. The answer is the same.

If you think about how a blog is viewed, or a free ebook with an opt-in is viewed these days, it’s not regarded as valuable. Yet, with the explosion in paid, online education, free online courses are perceived as valuable. It goes right back to what we’re talking about, about the logged-in experience and all the benefits you get with marketing automation and whatnot at that point.

The reality is, you’re creating a valued experience, as opposed to something where people are like, “Yeah, this kind of dicey,” or “I’m going to download this ebook, and then I’m going to unsubscribe.” To top it all off, they never even read the ebook because it’s just sitting somewhere on a hard drive. The world has shifted in that way.

Our Lead-Gen Strategy (That Works) from 2012

Brian Clark: If the market values online education to the tune of $107 billion in 2015 alone, what do you think you should be using as an enticement to get people into your audience in the first place? Now, I know you remember the first time we used an online course that way. That was in 2012. What was that course?

Robert Bruce: It was called — you and I put it together — How to Profit from the Digital Revolution. It’s funny, because in those days, we talked about specifically what you just mentioned: ebooks and apps and the idea of getting that opt-in and stepping it up with a course.

What we did, it was a free course. There were three parts to it, basically introducing and expanding on the idea of selling digital products, selling products online. That’s all it was. It was three seminars that you and I did and packaged up. We had a really nice landing page. But the whole point there was to introduce this idea is this thing itself was lead-gen, moving toward our product at the time, which was Premise.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Which was an earlier version of the membership and landing page capabilities that are much more superior than Rainmaker because it’s a hosted solution, as opposed to a plugin. That’s the problem with WordPress plugins. You have to make sacrifices for every configuration and install out there. Of course, when you host it yourself, you’re able to control it and deliver a better experience, such as the new learning management system that we have.

I think some people see using online courses this way, as lead generation or as content marketing, as a new thing. It’s not really new, but it works, and we’re still using it to this day. That’s a good indication of how powerful it is.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, so we did that, the How to Profit from the Digital Revolution course in 2012, but you did this an entire decade earlier in more traditional business. Same concept, though. What happened there? Tell us that story.

How I Used This Same Strategy a Decade Earlier

Brian Clark: Yeah. I think sometimes people look at things we do and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s fine for some software or whatever,” and I’m like, “No, man.” I was doing this in 2002 when I started a real-estate brokerage. I’ve often talked about what I had learned effectively in the 4 years of failure and then discovering what I was actually doing, which we now call content marketing.

When I looked around, I said, “Okay, I want to do this, but I don’t want to do it in the field of law.” I looked at real estate. I saw what was happening with the MLS coming online. I looked at the way realtors were marketing, and I’m like, “Oh, this isn’t even fair.” They didn’t know how to use landing pages. They weren’t using email at all.

But I took it up to the next level, based on what I knew about content, and built this site that was effectively the Wine Library of real estate. It was designed to educate people to the point of comfort, to where they decided that my company was the best one to call.

I would try to segment my people. Stuff we talk about people should be doing now as the best practice, I was doing back then. You basically had first-time home buyers and relocation people. Those were my two big segments.

I created courses that were dripped out by simple auto-responders at the time. I certainly didn’t have the technology we have now. Effectively, it was the same thing, and when you look at 2002 and how much value I was delivering compared to the RE/MAX agent with the Glamour Shot, it wasn’t fair. But, that’s how I was able to build. I got advice from people when I told them I was getting my license and going to start a company. They were like, “It’s gonna take you four years, and you’re gonna starve, and this and that.” I’m like, “No, I think it’s going to take 30 days,” and that’s what it took.

Robert Bruce: Wow.

Why People Choose to Buy from You

Brian Clark: The relocation course dripped out over a year, because my research showed that someone starts doing online research for homes before a relocation up to a year in advance. I knew that was my sales cycle. With first-time home buyers, it was quicker. They would usually decide to work with me, and my company within 30 days. You have to understand whom you’re talking to. That is what I was using. It’s effectively the same technique we advocate today, yet you don’t see that many people doing it.

Robert Bruce: Real quick. As in the Premise course, in the Profiting from the Digital Revolution course, you and I did three intensive webinars on selling digital products online. What’s an example for the first-time buyer? Do you remember what you did in terms of offering them for lead-gen in that package?

Brian Clark: Well yeah, it was educating them. The most prevalent initial question is, “Can I get a loan? How does that happen? What kind of loan should I get?” Then I touched on issues about negotiation, inspections, and all of this stuff that’s kind of scary to someone’s who’s never done it before. Frankly, no matter how many homes you buy, it’s a big pain.

It was basically just getting people to feel more comfortable with the process, but also being the person who delivered that information. You know. We’ve been talking about being the authority that creates, yet it was so funny how resistant people were to sharing basic information, especially in a licensed industry.

Robert Bruce: We started in 2012, we jumped back to 2002, now let’s jump ahead one more time to 2014 and the New Rainmaker free course.

How We Launched the Rainmaker Platform with a New Podcast

Brian Clark: You’ve come in almost shaking your head several times. You thought I was insane to launch, effectively the future of the company, with essentially a podcast that morphed into an online course.

Robert Bruce: And a brand new podcast, no less.

Brian Clark: Yeah, but it worked.

Robert Bruce: Yep, and we wrapped up the first seven episodes. You ended up doing a couple of webinars on top of it that became the entire free course that led everyone eventually to the Rainmaker Platform.

Brian Clark: I think that the next question that’s going to come up, obviously — we’ve got a lot of content creators out in the audience. They’re like, “Okay. I know how to do this.” Other people are like, “I’m not necessarily a content creator,” or “What do I use? What’s the proper educational materials?” It’s the thing that people are looking for before they decide to buy, to put it at its most simple terms.

When we switched away from the Internet Marketing for Smart People newsletter, the opt-in concept, and in 2013 switched to MyCopyblogger, that was a huge job, but we didn’t create anything new. All the ebooks were updated and repurposed, reformatted — I guess is the best way to say — content that I built the blog with, right?

Robert Bruce: Right. Exactly.

Brian Clark: We transformed it into ebooks, made sure everything was updated and nice and beautiful. But still, there was that 20-part course. You get the enticement of all this great library of content, but it’s the course that kept them subscribed and engaged on the list. I think if we did MyCopyblogger over, and I think we’re probably are going to soon, I think we could structure that more in line with what we’ve seen work, especially with the New Rainmaker course and all that.

Why You ve Likely Created a Valuable Online Course Already

Brian Clark: The point being, if you’ve been creating content for a while, you’ve probably created the foundation, the cornerstone of what we’ve been preaching for years. If you’re not creating cornerstone content, which is the content people need in order to do business with you, then I guess you need to start.

I think a lot of people out there could just look at their archives and say, “Oh, yeah. I could totally put this into a free pay-wall situation.” Drip it out using basic technology that we offer in Rainmaker. They’d have an excellent lead-generation thing.

MyCopyblogger — I say this over and over and it always blows people’s mind — but a 400 percent increase in opt-ins, I don’t care how much traffic you have, that is something you want, when you can convert more of your site traffic into enduring audience by email.

Robert Bruce: That’s the repurposing of content in order to build a course side of things, but if you don’t have that big archive going back, you don’t have a lot of great stuff, there’s the idea of okay, you’ve got to create some new content to build these courses that you’re thinking of. You’re going to talk about specifically the podcast method, but go back to lynda.com, that example.

It s either bringing people in, experts in to talk about things, or even just a series of simple interviews with the heavy hitters in your industry answering these questions.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I think that’s probably the approach I’ll take for something like Further. Do expert interviews, and offer that as a course content with gluing it together. It’s effectively an act of curation. We’ve talked about how podcasting is curation as long as it’s in the interview format.

With New Rainmaker, we started it as a podcast very deliberately, very strategically. I knew what I wanted to say. We did an episode a week, where I had, for the first time ever, scripted out what I was going to say and tried my damnedest not to sound like I was reading. That was hard. It’s hard to do. It takes work.

Anyway, we put it out there as a podcast. We grew an audience from the podcast, and then we just reformatted it into a course. Now, the enticement to get people who’d already heard some of it. Everyone kind of freaks out, they’re like, “Why? I can’t take something I’ve already given people and put it into this other format.”

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. That’s what I thought.

Brian Clark: I’m like, “Man, you ve got to understand. You wish everyone listened to every word you say. It doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t.” You’re actually packaging something up into a more user-friendly format. You’re dripping it out. People understand what they’re in for. They have their expectations. You deliver consistently.

All I did was take those seven episodes. We transcribed them. We cleaned everything up beautifully, and I added the three webinars. But that was also the launch mechanism for the Rainmaker Platform. Now, that course continues to work for us.

I think it s probably the best job we’ve done of explaining effective content marketing, the whole media-not-marketing thing. It continues to work and result in people taking the free trial for Rainmaker Platform, and buying. It’s an amazing thing. Yet we had to create that content new, but we created it and freely distributed it first to get it working for you in that context. Then you put it to work for you long-term.

Of course, you can just sit down, from scratch, and create a course like this. I’m just trying to say you’ve probably got some existing stuff out there that you may be able to work for. Look at what I’m doing with Further. I’m effectively creating an audience by reading books and explaining them as I educate myself, right?

Again, it seems to me that anyone should be able to do a similar thing. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You need source material. You need to acknowledge it. Do not claim something as your own if it’s not yours. It doesn t matter.

Robert, remember the early days of Copyblogger? I never said I was Joe Copywriter. I said, “Here’s what Bob Bly said,” and “here’s what Clayton Makepeace says,” and “here’s David Ogilvy, the man.” It was always pointing to my mentors in the educational sense, but who got all the benefit of that? Me!

That really ticks me off because we see people doing that, even with our stuff, claiming it as their own. We don’t say anything because, whatever. It’s kind of pathetic, and people know better, and someone might call you out. Just because we don’t, doesn’t mean someone else might not.

Robert Bruce: Yep. If you want to take a look at exactly what we did for this New Rainmaker course, it’s easy to do. We’re talking about signing up for the course itself and just seeing precisely step-by-step.

Brian Clark: The interesting thing is it’s very educational, but it’s also a demonstration of exactly how we did it. It’s not the only way you can do it. It’s a good way. It works.

Again, remember back to the real estate example. This can work in any business model in which you need to attract people and incubate them or nurture them, whatever the language may be in your lead generation world. Until they’re ready to buy, this is the way for them to grow in their confidence in order to do the transaction, but more importantly, grow their confidence in you. That’s the key. That’s why people buy from certain people over other people.

Robert Bruce: If you want to check that out, head over to Rainmaker.FM.

Brian Clark: No, no, no. You forgot, FreeCourse.FM.

Robert Bruce: Oh, yeah, that’s right! I just wrote you this last week. Go to FreeCourse.FM, and you can sign up. It’s free registration. You’ll see the big green button there. Take the course. Learn from it, and learn from how we did it. Look at how we laid everything out and how it works.

Brian Clark: But also, keep in mind that if you’re interested in courses as an actual business that you charge money for, we’ll be talking about that in quite a few future shows.

Robert Bruce: Yep. All right Brian, anything else before we sign off on this one?

Brian Clark: No, I think that’s what we needed to talk about for today. But, I’m excited about what we’ve got coming up. There’s just so much exciting stuff happening right now, in the world of social media, a lot in the world of paid content, in the world of content marketing.

Doesn’t it feel like a lot of the silliness is going by the wayside? We’ve seen some silly stuff over the last five years of people building on Facebook and getting screwed — just this and that and making silly mistakes — and we’re sitting here going, “No, man.”

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: It just seems like a lot of it is shaking out, and people are getting serious, and I m so happy about that.

Robert Bruce: All right. Thanks, Brian, and we’ll see you all next week.

Brian Clark: Take care.

The Transcript

How to Escape the Social Media Swindle

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

Robert Bruce: Are you ready to log in?

Brian Clark: You talking to me?

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Are you ready to log in?

Brian Clark: Someone had an interesting weekend, I take it.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Well, it’s Monday. I’m trying to get back in the game here.

Brian Clark: But it’s not Monday. It’s Thursday.

Robert Bruce: It’s Thursday. That’s right. Actually, it’s whatever day listeners of New Rainmaker are listening to this.

Brian Clark: What is it that you like to say? Wherever and whenever you are?

Robert Bruce: Out there on the Internet. Yes.

Brian Clark: That’s right. That’s your phrase.

The Proliferation of the Logged-In Experience

Robert Bruce: We’ve been talking about this ‘logged in’ experience. We’re doing a mini-series. This is number two in a mini-series of looking at membership sites. We also have a nice little surprise today, Mr. Clark, and that is somebody joining us from the well-known Mainframe podcast on the Rainmaker.FM Podcast Network. That’s Chris Garrett, our Chief Digital Officer. Chris, did you make it in?

Chris Garrett: I am the token geek today.

Robert Bruce: Token geek.

Brian Clark: You’re always the token geek.

Robert Bruce: That’s a good way to look at it.

Brian Clark: Actually, remember in Office Space when the one guy that they’re like, “Could you tell us what you do?” And he walks the plans to the engineers from the customers, and then it turns out he actually has his secretary do it and he doesn’t do anything.

Brian Clark: No, that’s not Garrett. Garrett wishes that were his job. It’s a little more complicated, though.

Chris Garrett: Yeah, right. That’s the dream.

Brian Clark: But he does translate for us quite well.

Robert Bruce: I don’t think there’s anything in this company that you don’t have your hands in, in some way. Right, Chris?

Chris Garrett: I just interfere in everybody else’s business.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. Hey real quick, how’s The Mainframe going over there? You and Tony Clark, our Chief Operating Officer, are co-hosting The Mainframe. How are things over there?

Chris Garrett: We’re having a lot of fun, and we’ve had some nice feedback. I’d like to unseat Mr. Damien, but we’re doing quite well.

Robert Bruce: Join the club.

Brian Clark: I know. That guy, he’s rogue.

Robert Bruce: You know, I was thinking, you do have direct access to the servers, or at least the folks that do, right?

Brian Clark: Wait a minute, Robert. Oh, you want to fix the stats. You don’t want to just kick him off. Actually, we could just kill his show, but I don’t think that would be in our best interest.

Robert Bruce: Delete. Well, for those of you who are fans of Chris, which are many, you should go over to Mainframe.FM. Check out what he and Tony are doing over there.

Chris, thanks for hanging out with us today. We’ve got some good questions for you, too. Like I said, we’re continuing this mini-series on the idea of membership sites.

Brian, you started last week with the general idea of this ‘logged in’ experience. One thing that struck me towards the end of that episode, you talked about the true nature of a site like Facebook. We think of it as a social media site, which it certainly is, social networking site. But you argue that the real nature of it is a membership site, which I’ve never really thought of before if I’m honest, but we opened up with this idea of the logged in experience. There are several aspects of that. Why don’t we do a quick little recap.

Brian Clark: So we talked about Facebook. Basically, you have to register to gain access. If you’re not logged in, your experience is not the same. So, in essence, it operates like a membership site even though it’s primarily a social network. I’ve actually got an even better example for you this week, which we’ll get to in a second, kind of tied into some recent news.

The basic premise, and this is something we acted on in 2013 when we shifted our email strategy, was that the advent and the mainstreaming of social media, the proliferation of apps, and certain sites that deliver premium content, whether paid or free, have transformed the way we think about the online experience. That really comes into this, whether you’re logged in or not. Whether you’re registered for access or you’re not. I think we did cover some of the psychological aspects of that. We can go fairly deep down that rabbit hole, but you get the idea that — what is it?

Fear of missing out is the dark side of social media. That you’re always worried something’s happening that’s cooler than what you’re doing. I think there is some aspect of that — this velvet rope syndrome — that when you interact with a site and you realize that there’s an experience waiting that requires registration, that is much more compelling than opt-in or, for most situations, just a newsletter.

There’s got to be more. We’ve known this for years with the whole ethical bribe, free e-book stuff that isn’t as effective anymore. I think things have shifted to a new level. Let me give you some examples about this that build on what we talked about last week. Membership sites have been around since the ’90s, started off on the seedier side of the Internet, and then slowly made themselves into a mainstream concept. I think that’s the important lesson here.

Why Big Companies Are Sick of Social Media

Brian Clark: I saw something really interesting from Forrester, who obviously reports on the enterprise level, that big companies have grown completely disenchanted with social media. Number one, I think it’s fair to say a lot of them took the wrong approach for about five to seven years there as far as trying to treat the outer fringes of the audience like they were in a ready-to-be-converted mode. As in, “Become our customer,” after you gave us a Facebook ‘like.’ Didn’t really work that way. That’s a very cold relationship. It still counts as part of the audience, but until you bring them in closer to you, you’re not going to get the kind of response you want.

Number two, of course, is that email is 40 times more effective for converting into sales than social media. That’s pretty huge right there, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that. We’ve got the Zuckerberg bait and switch. You’ve got to pay on Facebook to reach your audience. On Twitter, it’s not really that much better because not everyone’s paying attention at the right time. Unless you do a Guy Kawasaki and tweet out 15 times in repetition, which does work by the way, it’s still disenchanting.

So you’ve got these big brands who are going back old school — everything old is new again — with branded communities. ‘Community’ has been a buzzword on the Internet since the BBS days. It’s always been over-hyped, but these branded communities are essentially what we’re talking about here in the sense that they’re driving people back to their own sites. They’re getting them to register to participate. Usually there’s a form involved. There’s a Q&A function. There’s content. Actually, when you combine all three of them together, as this Forrester excerpt of the report reveals — we’ll link to that in the show notes — it goes beyond evangelism and advocacy into you can actually convert prospects into customers.

We certainly know that. When you bring them in at that level, they’ve come on the other side of the rope. You’re now able to communicate with them directly by email. It’s interesting to me, just as we’re starting to really hit on this change in the way a great website should work, that the enterprise level, which is usually forever behind the rest of us, they’re actually moving in this direction and having legitimate success. There’s more to this than just the scrappy small companies.

Robert Bruce: What does this mean to let’s not even mention the idea of ownership of the community itself. We all know you mentioned the Zuckerberg bait and switch.

Brian Clark: That’s the point.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: They’re completely frustrated, and I don’t blame them. We, of course, have been preaching this ad nauseam, but I think this is a good sign. Remember when Gary Vaynerchuk’s book came out and he really emphasized interaction at the social level. Really that’s kind of falling apart. I think there were some very smart people with some ideas that turned out not to be right. We have always been strong on home base. Own your property. Bring the audience to you. All of that. We stayed the course, but I’m feeling better that there’s some sanity returning to the world. Facebook’s going to take you for all you’re worth.

Robert Bruce: Garrett, what do you think of the enterprise waking up to this idea of owing their own and developing their own branded communities?

Chris Garrett: It’s like Brian just said about owning the real estate, owning the asset. When you own the real estate, then you control what that member sees. You can put nudges into taking actions. They might upgrade their account, or they might buy something from you, which you can’t do in Facebook as well. You could do some targeted ads, but you’re not in control of the experience as much as if you owned it. If you do that well, then the social proof and the other members will actually sell for you. You don’t even have to step in explicitly.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s a great point because Facebook benefits from the logged in experience, not you. They’re there. They have the user relationship. They’re logged in. They get to follow them all over the place, serve them targeted ads, and determine what they see in their news feed. You guys remember the psychological experiments they were basically performing on Facebook users without their knowledge. That was interesting.

Chris Garrett: Yep.

Brian Clark: Facebook owns that relationship. They’ve made that abundantly clear by saying, “You now get to pay us to reach that audience you built over here on our land.” Again, Chris is right because, when you own the property, there are all sorts of ways to heighten the experience that you can’t do otherwise.

A Major Content Acquisition, and What It Means for You

Robert Bruce: A very interesting purchase took place recently and that was LinkedIn acquiring Lynda.com, a massive education site. Let’s talk about that for a little bit, and also what it might mean for smaller organizations.

Brian Clark: Lynda.com has been a site that we have followed and admired since the beginning of Copyblogger. I’m pretty sure the early version of Teaching Sells pointed to Lynda as a great learning community. They just got so big. It’s amazing. Then, of course, what was the acquisition price? $1.5 billion? That’s a lot of money for a membership site, but that’s exactly what happened there.

This is going to become my new example of an overall logged in experience type play. Because think about it this way, LinkedIn has the Pulse service, which is freely available content. It started out in their Influencer program, and then they opened it up to others. So you have all this freely available content that’s being shared on LinkedIn, but also across the web. Then you have the original logged in experience, which is a business networking function combined with the 21st century resume, if you will. Again, you don’t get to do all that stuff until you register for access and log in.

Now there’s another component. Now, with the edition of Lynda, they have a paid business training and lifelong learning environment that complements. Something we’ve been talking about since 2007 is, as technology increases, as business models change, as the pace of everything intensifies, you’ve got to be constantly learning. So the reasoning given behind the acquisition of Lynda from LinkedIn was “always be learning,” which again, another play that we did in Teaching Sells a long time ago. This is a good thing because it legitimizes this type of non-university-backed online training because I don’t see any of the universities at the cutting edge.

It’s always been the practitioners, and that’s what Lynda latched onto. In a way, it continues to validate the people who want to make their own online courses, their own membership sites, because this is the way education happens. Therefore, building up your own authority as a subject matter expert or being able to produce sites that rely on the expertise of others, like Lynda does, that’s going to become a crucial opportunity. Lynda’s not going to extinguish all the training programs out there. We already know that today. I think it just legitimizes it.

The structure is what interests me. Freely available content, an initial free logged in experience leading to a paid logged in experience. That’s Copyblogger, MyCopyblogger, and Authority. It’s the exact model we’ve had in place for over two years now. Now, I’m not saying LinkedIn ripped us off. No. I doubt that very much. This is what’s happening. It’s not a Copyblogger thing. It’s a web thing. It’s an Internet thing, and it’s incredibly important. Chris, you’ve been around with us forever, both before you joined the company and then after, how do you see this all playing out?

Chris Garrett: I look at it as your career is the ultimate fear of missing out. If you see other people progressing in their careers past you, you’ve got to look at why they’re getting ahead. You’re going to look at the certifications, the training, the skills on their LinkedIn profile, and you’re going to want to upgrade. But you’re not going to go back to university. You’re going to tactically add those skills and that experience. I think it’s a really smart move, but it validates what we’ve been doing all these years of highly focused training from people who know what they’re talking about. You’ll get the benefit of selling what you know. They get the benefit of all that experience, and they’ll upgrade in their career or the business. I think it’s a wonderful validation of everything we’ve been doing.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Here’s another interesting thing, because I think you’re right on the business front. I read an interesting article that said, “Relationship, skills, and personal development are the fastest growing segments of online education.” Again, not from a university because that stuff doesn’t get taught at university. This article was focused on very smart, very tech savvy people who just aren’t all that great with women or men, as the case may be. It’s become a boon for people who are into things like reading body language. Not the shady seduction courses that we saw about five years ago. More legitimate stuff, but effectively the same topic when you think about it. So it’s not just business.

Why You Should Build and Offer a Free Course Right Now

Robert Bruce: One thing I keep hearing more and more is this idea of, “My children probably will not go to college or university,” but more than that, it’s the idea not so much in the future of a degree that you earn from a university, but a collection of very specific skills that you bring to a project or a job. That’s Lynda.com, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah. The whole concept of ‘just in time learning’ too.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: I get what you’re saying because by the time my son, who just turned 10, is of college age, can you really afford to spend 4 years … On one hand, yes, I want him to, to get a true classical, liberal education, so he can learn how to think, and how to create, and expand his knowledge. But the stuff that’s going to get him a job is probably not going to come from there.

Robert Bruce: OK, what does this mean? Maybe a couple of ideas for smaller organizations that are not in the $1.5 billion acquisition game?

Brian Clark: Well look, this goes back to the 400% increase in email opt-ins effectively by switching away from opt-in and going to a content library concept on MyCopyblogger. We’ve now refined that with the New Rainmaker free course to where instead of a collection of e-books, we’ve gone to a dripped-out online course where the lessons come every few days. And that was phenomenal. That actually was a big part of the launch of the Rainmaker Platform.

We’re getting more sophisticated in how we’re thinking about it. A lot of what we talk about on the show going forward will be what we’re doing and how you can do it as well because the tech is getting easy. It just comes down to strategy and what works and what doesn’t. Rule number one is still build your email list. But doing this whole concept as one project is going to build your email list faster, and you’re going to be in a position to do some really cool stuff that you wouldn’t be able to do with your email list alone. I know Mr. Garrett is quite smart on this topic.

Chris Garrett: I think one of the basic things that we’ve seen is the difference between the library and the class. A library will get people to join. A class will get people to stick around. Part of growing an email list is keeping people on that list, keeping them engaged, keeping them interested. Keeping them looking forward to the future of what’s coming next because, otherwise, you get a high conversion rate, but then you lose everybody within the first week. You need to keep them sticking around long term and actually engaging with you more and building a relationship with you.

Brian Clark: I will say we didn’t experience that problem with MyCopyblogger because it was the e-book library plus a dripped-out course. But that was the old school way. We just delivered it by email. With New Rainmaker, we did it the more sophisticated way. Now with the addition of the marketing automation/adaptive content features, frankly it’s going to get even more personalized, interactive, and effective.

The First Major Transition of Further.Net

Robert Bruce: Speaking of engagement and continued engagement, Brian, you’ve been talking about the first major transformation of Further.net. It seems that it has everything to do with interactivity.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Further.net, for those who are not up to speed on that, has started out as a curated email newsletter. Very simple in a topic that I have no known authority on, and I’m quite candid about that. Started it over three months ago, and it’s funny because the issue this week basically points out the power of teaching as a way to learn and how the act of retrieval and elaboration in the scientific parlance really makes you learn stuff for real, as opposed to the illusion of mastery that you get.

Maybe you read a book three times, and you’re like, “I must have this down.” Studies show actually you probably don’t because simple re-reading doesn’t really go over it. Anyway, long and short, I’ve been doing this curated newsletter. The features are usually me explaining something I learned from a book. Intensified learning. It’s weird how curation can make you an authority when you weren’t before by the simple act of explaining things to an audience.

When you really think about it, what does Malcolm Gladwell do? He takes all these really dense research abstracts and reports. He boils it down for the layperson. He makes it engaging and entertaining. Then he goes and gives speeches for a 100 grand a pop on this stuff that he taught himself by writing a book. It’s the exact same principle. Anyone can become an expert on anything, and my favorite way to do it is not to write a book. It’s to drip out content on a regular basis.

Anyway, that’s what it started with. Now that we do have the LMS, and we’ve already got the membership features, and now we have marketing automation features, what I’m looking to do is make Further go beyond just the email newsletter. Yes, that will be the reason why you stick around, but I’m thinking of doing some sort of 30-day challenge. Further basically covers personal development, so I’m thinking of something such as, “Develop a new habit in 30 days with the Further challenge,” and they register for it.

It’s part education, part accountability and interaction, which we can do with a combination of the LMS and membership features, obviously, which have been around forever, and then the new marketing automation. I haven’t got it all down, so this may be, again, one of my free consulting segments when I kick it back to you guys. Anything pop to mind?

Robert Bruce: Electroshock therapy.

Brian Clark: That would be awesome because if they don’t do it

Chris Garrett: That is doable.

Brian Clark: Garrett, is that in the next release?

Robert Bruce: It is doable. Coming in Rainmaker 2.0.

Chris Garrett: We can totally do that. That would be fun.

Brian Clark: How would you see that working? You’ve got modules and lessons for the education that prompts an action. Therefore, I want to kick it over to them to do the thing, and then also have a way of testing their understanding of what they’ve learned before they go do it. Again, solidifying that learning.

Chris Garrett: Yeah, we do have quizzes and assessments coming, but what you can do right now is you can give people encouragement when they take the actions that they’re meant to take and nurture them to take those actions if they don’t take the actions.

What Marketing Automation Means for Your Business

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s a basic simple adaptive content function of the automation, which is if someone doesn’t respond to this week’s or this day’s lesson or action item, you can send them one message of encouragement or motivation to do it. If they do it, then you can send them a note of encouragement for having done it and encouraging them to keep going. It’s simple, but over the normal email auto-responder experience, it’s kind of cool.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and that being the point, just so people following along, we’re talking about all of this being automated.

Chris Garrett: Yes. If they do not take the action, I would leave them on the current list, the current auto-responder, which nurtures them and keeps giving them reasons to take the action and encouragement to do it. If they do take the action, I would put them onto another list that says, “Well done. Congratulations. This is what you need to do next.” Keep it going. Keep that momentum. So you’re always moving people forward, or further, and the existing people are getting a response to keep it going.

Brian Clark: You’ve got it.

Chris Garrett: You can give them targeted call to actions as well. Because if they’re not in the engaged group, you’ll want to keep giving them more nudges, and more prompts. That’s not necessarily a sale in terms of dollars. It’s a sale in terms of action.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Let’s tie this up with how this relates back. Yes, I am choosing to do it with a free membership concept, but there’s a very good reason for that from a personalization and experience standpoint. It comes full circle back to this logged in experience. Early marketing automation or anything that is an, ‘if-then’ situation, where you can serve up something custom, at its most primitive level, obviously can be done. But we now live in a multi-device world. What happens, Chris, when you cookie someone on the desktop, but they’re trying to come back to you on an iPad or their phone?

Chris Garrett: I saw this over and over again with these big guru launches, the big sales funnels, where I would sign up to something on my phone, and I would click the link. I would do everything they asked of me, but I wouldn’t view any of the content because I wanted to view it on my desktop. I get back to the desktop, and it wouldn’t let me in because I didn’t have the cookie. That is frustrating. You’re screaming at the screen.

Brian Clark: See, that’s what I’m saying. They talk about 1.0 and 2.0, or whatever, but I’m really looking at this as the pre-logged-in cookie world and a much more sophisticated world based on the logged in experience. Again, there’s a reason why the social networks are some of the biggest email marketers in the world. There’s also a reason why they know more about what you do then you do. It all comes down to this post-cookie world we’re living in.

Chris Garrett: It’s also that example of the company knowing the customer and knowing what they should know about the customer. A few times, I got excited about an upgrade of a product I already had. Really, they should give you an upgrade price, or they should give you at least a message saying, “Knowing that you’ve got version 1, this is what you can see different in version 2, and this is the reason to buy.” It’s not that experience of going from device to device. It’s also personalizing it to me in a way that’s good for customer service, and I’m more likely to transact with you.

Brian Clark: Right, and also once you get someone to register, you can do all sorts of things to get them to choose their own adventure, if you will. Identify what type of person they are in the context of the site. “What do you aspire to do? What’s your goal? What’s your problem?” Then all of a sudden, you can put them on different paths that way as well, which is not the same thing that you can do with other technology.

Robert Bruce: All right, gents. Anything else on the marketing automation or adaptive content, or are we going to save it for another time?

Brian Clark: Well Jerod Morris and I are doing a webinar on the 27th April. The post came out on Copyblogger this week. But if you’re interested in these new marketing automation and learning management system features that I’ve been furiously playing with and giving Chris all sorts of wonderful feedback, every time we do a release, we’re already planning the next release. And that’s good iterative development. We get feedback from customers. I happen to be our prime customer in a lot of ways in that, if I can do it myself with my schedule, then it’s working well.

If you want to see a demo of these new features, which are part of the new Pro plan — you can’t buy the Pro plan on the site right now. Existing customers are getting an upgrade option that’s kind of sweet. It’s a one-time charge instead of a recurring higher price, which it will be when it does go live.

So two things you want to do right now. Start your trial of the Rainmaker Platform if you don’t have it yet. If you’re currently a standard customer, you’ve already been given an opportunity to upgrade. Number three, sign up for this webinar, so we can walk you through more of the ‘why.’ We’ve touched on some stuff here today, obviously. Then also a direct demonstration of ‘how.’ — all in one free webinar.

Robert Bruce: You can sign up for the Rainmaker Platform at Rainmaker.FM/Platform. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Platform. Mr. Clark, thanks for putting all of this together for us today. We’ve got a few more of these. What do you think about this little series? A couple more left?

Brian Clark: Yeah. I think we’ve been getting good feedback. Some points where people aren’t getting what we’re talking about. Hopefully, this episode cleared it up. Even though we jumped all over the place between the enterprise, to LinkedIn, to what we’ve been doing for a couple of years, I think you can see the pattern. We’ll continue to explore that a bit.

If there’s anything that you want to know in particular, drop us a note in the comments. I’ll make sure and try to get that answered for you. But yeah, I’ll be back. I think we’re going to be talking about this for a long time. It’s not a series or a tactic. It’s more like, “This is how things work,” or “This is how your prospects, your audience expects things to work.” As the tech gets more sophisticated, it’s going to be an expectation, and I’m hoping to get people ahead of the curve because the curve is moving pretty quickly right now.

Robert Bruce: If you want to leave a comment on this episode, or any other of New Rainmaker, you can do that at NewRainmaker.FM. Mr. Garrett, thanks for coming by today and dropping your wisdom. Really appreciate it, man. You’ve got to do this more often.

Brian Clark: Yeah, thanks, Chris. This was cool.

Chris Garrett: Always a pleasure.

Robert Bruce: For those of you who want to catch Chris Garrett and Tony Clark on The Mainframe, you can do so at Mainframe.FM.

Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next week.

The Transcript

Why Every Great Website Is a Membership Site

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

Robert Bruce: So you’re back in town. I suppose this means I have to give the keys to your show back to you?

Brian Clark: Well, I’ll let you stay in the room, metaphorically. But yeah, I kind of got used to it.

Robert Bruce: Being away?

Brian Clark: No, I kind of got used to the show.

Robert Bruce: Oh.

Brian Clark: I did enjoy being away, but it only takes a few days on the beach for me to get crazy bored and I’m ready to get back. So that’s a good vacation.

Robert Bruce: And you came back with a good deal here, a good idea. We’re going to do a series of short episodes about membership sites.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I think some people are coming to this topic with certain expectations. And those are correct, but it’s also a lot bigger than that. That’s reflected in today’s show title. It’s a different way of thinking, but it’s very in-line with what marketing has become — and I mean from the solopreneur up to the biggest corporations on the planet.

Robert Bruce: You like to tell this story about Procter & Gamble, speaking of biggest corporations on the planet. You tell this story about P&G to illustrate this idea of ‘media not marketing.’ Which, by the way, I think is one of the smartest, most powerful concepts you’ve come up with. But you’ve got another one from P&G.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Just to bring people up to speed, and thank you for that. Again, I already gave you a raise. I’m not giving you another one.

Robert Bruce: Damn it.

Why the Media Approach to Marketing Works

Brian Clark: OK. In the original New Rainmaker training course — which all of you can sign up for free. We’ll put it down in the show notes — it really kind of dives down deeper into this media not marketing thing as a way to understand what’s known as ‘content marketing.’ One of the examples that I use when I go out on the road and give presentations, is several examples of people who created media content to accomplish what marketing is supposed to do, and it works much better because no feels marketed to.

So the Procter and Gamble story. Always in my presentations, I lead with this one before giving other examples. I say, “Here’s a story about a brand that turns to a new technological medium to create content and build an audience in order to build its business.” And then I say, “Well here’s the twist. That company was a detergent company from Cincinnati. The new technological medium was radio. The content was the original soap operas named after the detergent company’s line of business. That company was Proctor and Gamble.” They basically created the radio versions of soap operas, carried that into television in the ’50s to reach their demographic — much like we do now online.

How innovative was that for the 1930s? The bigger lesson when we talk about digital sharecropping and owning your own assets and all that stuff, by the 1970s, the soap opera was the most lucrative form of television on the planet. Not only did Procter & Gamble become this huge conglomerate, they also owned some very, very valuable intellectual property that served them well. That’s my normal Proctor & Gamble story, but they’ve actually given me another example of this whole concept of avoiding the appearance of marketing but getting marketing done — or at least what marketing was supposed to do originally.

Robert Bruce: So what’s the more recent example that you came across? I think this was from last summer.

How a Major Corporation Killed Their “Marketing” Department

Brian Clark: Yeah. I just now came across the story, but it did happen in summer of 2014. Basically, Procter & Gamble removed the word ‘marketing’ from the entire business. They changed all the marketing departments to ‘brand management,’ and every marketing director is now called a ‘brand director.’ That just may seem like semantics and just a bunch of hogwash that we wouldn’t care about.

But it is exactly in-line with the same sort of thing that they were trying to do when they originally created the soap opera, which is, they’re creating an experience for their audience rather than just doing marketing, which is messages that promise an experience. “Once you buy, we promise you will get this benefit,” and “you will be taken care of and this and that.” Guess what, that gets tuned out. The experience has to begin before the purchase.

Robert Bruce: So it’s more about creating experiences, and they’re illustrating this and kind of putting their money where their mouth is by things like removing the word ‘marketing’ from their titles. This idea of experiences over content. But it’s still that strategic content that’s going to get you where you want to go, right?

Brian Clark: Well, technically, all marketing collateral and advertisements are content. But what are we talking about? That’s why I don’t say ‘content.’ I say ‘media’ because people know what that means. We’re talking about media content, or entertaining, engaging, and yes, educational — at least in this context — content that people actually want instead of marketing.

Marketing only promises an experience. Most people are like, “I don’t believe you. I’m not going to listen to your spiel. What have you done for me that’s of value?” That’s another core word in Procter & Gambles’ decision. It’s all about creating ‘value’ and creating an experience that emanates from that value.

The One Word That Epitomizes Great Content Marketing

Robert Bruce: So we were talking earlier about a very specific word that epitomizes the experience that best works for content marketing. What is that word?

Brian Clark: It’s very interesting. Of course, this has been a slow evolution over time, but the word is ‘belonging.’ People want to belong. That’s the experience that they’re seeking: “Do people like me do this type of thing?” Our friend Mr. Godin tapped on this with his book Tribes. Even before that book was The Culting of Brands, which was an older book which I would suggest everyone pick up. Kind of dicey on the topic, but it’s exactly right.

Number one, it says that most cults aren’t evil, which is kind of controversial I guess, and that brands should emulate that sense of bringing people in and the sense of belonging. That’s how evangelism occurs as well. We have all these kinds of religious concepts, but that’s who we are at core. It all ties back to the way we talk about audience.

If you’ve ever seen one of my presentations — or again, taking the free New Rainmaker course — you’ll see these concentric circles that represent the audience experience. On the outer reaches, the cold outer reaches, are social media followers. Someone may follow you on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean they feel like they belong with you in that sense. But as you move in closer in the inner circles, it gets much more warmer, an intimate relationship. That’s what you’re trying to do.

You’re trying to attract people in closer to you and create that sense of belonging as an aspect of them becoming part of the audience. Of course, the audience experience doesn’t end at purchase. In fact, that’s what everyone is aiming for. Retention. Subscription based models. Trying to get the Automatic Customer is another book I just picked up and I’m going to dive into. It’s basically about someone who becomes your customer every month or every year because they’re on a recurring subscription or something similar.

Robert Bruce: So maybe we could look at this another way. ‘Audience’ is the preferred word that we’ve been using for a long, long time. But look at it as maybe audience, and then ‘true audience’ as the person moves in closer into those concentric circles.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I think that’s what Godin was trying to get at with Tribes. You may be part of the audience before you’re all in. That is a good way to think about your content marketing strategy. How are you trying to serve people with value in a way that makes them say, “Yep, I’m in the right place. This is my people”?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. Also briefly on the cult thing for those who may be offended by that or think it’s overly religious or whatever, take a look at the Final 4 that’s going on right now. Any sports team or any hardcore believers.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. All sports are cult.

The Holy Grail of All Revenue Models

Robert Bruce: This kind of really nicely folds into the idea that we work to create a paid membership model. This idea of belonging. This idea of these concentric circles, of bringing the audience in closer and closer, from cold to warm. But there is a type of subscription revenue that’s the Holy Grail, right?

Brian Clark: Well everyone wants recurring revenue. Historically, I don’t think there was such an emphasis on this, but this has been happening over time. It’s accelerating. Again, I think it’s tied to this concept of belonging on one side of things, and the other is just cold, hard cash reality, which is, those are very stable business models. Now think about the electric company. They’re a monopoly. You probably hate them. They probably don’t do a great job, but they bill you every month. If they don’t, or you don’t pay, you don’t have lights.

OK, so that’s an old, old model, almost out of necessity. But think of the advent of cable television where something that had been free, was now not only paid, but you paid every month or you lost access. So now we accelerate all the way up to Spotify, and Netflix, and Amazon Prime. Basically, things you used to own or watch for free have become things you belong to. They are membership communities.

I think the biggest revolution that we’re seeing from the way you and I grew up is the fact that we lease our music if you no longer buy downloads. It took me the longest time to quit buying from iTunes. When I want something, I want it. Even though then, under that arrangement, Apple could probably screw me over.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: This goes back about 10 years ago. There’s this book called The Age of Access. It’s basically predicting this trend, that more and more of what we spend our money on is about purchasing access to things as opposed to owning them. This is way before the sharing economy, and this is before Netflix and Spotify and all this. And it nailed it. In our Teaching Sells program from 2007, this was the big theme, and it turned out to be dead on. It turned out to be dead on about online training. People will pay for information if it’s packaged the right way. If it’s creating access to something more than just raw data or words. You know what I’m saying?

The Power of the “Logged In” Experience

Robert Bruce: Yep. This goes to what you’re calling the “logged in” experience, which I love. It’s something that the mainstream — I hate the word ‘user,’ but in fact, it’s actually quite fitting on some of these services — but the user or the customer or the prospect is ‘logged in.’ We know it. We know what this is about.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s a registration and access concept, yet it’s not about paying. So here’s why I’m saying, “Every great website is a membership website,” because this concept of access has permeated us psychologically thanks to the way everything has developed. One big component of this ‘access mentality,’ even in situations where you’re not paying money — it’s not a subscription model, or it’s not yet — but the beginning of the experience is being ‘logged in.’

Why Facebook Is Not — Primarily — a Social Network

Brian Clark: Another thing that I always hit my audiences with is, “What is Facebook really?” And they just kind of look at me like I’m an idiot because it’s a social network, right? But what is it really on the web or with the app? It’s a membership site. Without access and registration — registration and access, I should say, to go in the correct order — your experience is not the same.

You’re like a little kid outside the candy store window looking in, drooling. You don’t get any of the goodies unless you are logged in. You can’t log in until you register, and of course, that means providing an email address. A good email address because you need to make sure that you can get access if anything goes wrong.

Look at MyCopyblogger. It’s been two years now. That was our hypothesis, that the mainstreaming of social media and these other access and belonging concepts, even in the world of free stuff, would be much more powerful than, “Opt-in to my newsletter so I can spam you.” Number one, you have low trust over here with opt-in, and number two, the world shifted. It shifted to an access and registration kind of mind set. That was our hypothesis with MyCopyblogger. You know the results. Why don’t you share those?

Robert Bruce: Well before that, I really like this because you said, “What is Facebook?” We call it a social network. It’s this thing we all know about. But, really, what this does, when you think of Facebook as a membership site for me, it takes away some of the scary, big, overwhelming idea of, “I must build a membership site.” Whatever that is for somebody coming into this. But it makes it easy and accessible. Back to MyCopyblogger, you know that turned into — are we talking about the conversion?

Brian Clark: Yeah. Absolutely.

Robert Bruce: Over 400% conversion.

Brian Clark: 400% increase in email subscribers compared to the Internet Marketing for Smart People newsletter approach that we did. That always blows everyone’s minds, and it’s just cold, hard facts. But we upped the value. We created a velvet rope experience, meaning, “If you’re on the outside, you don’t get all this stuff.” But once you register, then the experience changes. You go behind the wizard’s curtain, if you will.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: It’s been amazing. I don’t think it’s any coincidence, since email is our sales engine, that the year after we did that and we were able to launch Rainmaker — which of course we did with email when it started getting really serious — that’s why revenue grew by 35% in 2014. There’s a correlation there between a much bigger email list and more money.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. And this is the point.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s the point. Here’s one final thing to think about, and then we’re going to end this. And we’re going to dive deeper on each of these things as we progress through the next few episodes. We’ve been talking about ‘adaptive content,’ which is a form of marketing automation. We just released the pro features of the Rainmaker Platform to existing people who had pre-purchased access to Pro.

And it really is made much more powerful by the logged in experience. With that log in, and that registration, just like Facebook, when you’re logged in, Facebook knows all sorts of scary things about you. Right? So we’re not advocating scariness, but how about enhancing their experience in a personalized way based on who they are, what they’re interested in, and what they’re doing?

Most marketing automation right now, “Oh, they clicked this link, or they did that, so therefore I’m going to send this message so that my sales team can talk to them,” right? Not knocking that. That’s incredibly powerful, and Rainmaker does that as well. But the logged in experience, we’re going to elaborate on this over the next several weeks.

Robert Bruce: Alright, if you want to experience a logged in experience and get back to what Brian was talking about the stories about Procter & Gamble earlier in this episode and freely access the 10-part course that we mentioned, go to Rainmaker.FM. Click that big green free registration button you’ll see right under the header at the top of the site. You’ll get everything for free, the 10-part course, and use it also as an opportunity to see how we’re doing this. How we’re using and playing with the ‘logged in experience’ as Brian s talking about. Brian, anything else before we shut this one down?

Brian Clark: Yeah, don’t ever steal my show again. Unless I ask you to because I want to go on vacation.

Robert Bruce: You just can’t leave town because you never know what’s going to happen.

Brian Clark: Exactly.

Robert Bruce: Alright, we’ll see you next week.