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The Transcript

How to Start a Podcast Network

Why Our Grandparents Were So Much Cooler Than We Are

Robert Bruce: I’m reading a glossary of hard-boiled slang. This is an age, Brian, when a telephone was called a blower. A $100 bill was called a century. Death was the big one or the big sleep. Coffin is a Chicago overcoat, gun is a heater, and typewriter is a mill.

Brian Clark: This is why you make Ron Swanson look like a modernist.

Robert Bruce: It makes me realize how much style our grandparents had and how boring as hell our language is today.

Brian Clark: You think so?

Robert Bruce: Do you think about that? Have you thought about these things?

Brian Clark: Just a personal preference. You are into that retro stuff.

Robert Bruce: I don’t know if it’s retro. I think it should have lasted. I’m going to try to bring it all back.

Brian Clark: One man crusade.

Robert Bruce: Alright. We’re flipping things around a little bit today talking about the podcast network, specifically how to launch a podcast network.

Brian Clark: Yeah, a little behind the scenes episode that we do periodically after we do something and the dust settles, which I’m not sure the dust has actually settled. It’s even been 10 days.

Robert Bruce: It’s like a pigpen around here still. I’m not going to tell you that, even though I just did. We’ve talked a lot about why podcasting, why a podcast network. We’ve been talking about that for some time on this podcast and off. But we wanted to go, like you said, behind the scenes, talk specifically about what we did to make this happen and a little bit about what’s to come

Brian Clark: This episode, contrary to what people may think, I’m not giving the answers here. Robert, you are giving the answers here. I remember when we had the conversation, and I said let’s do it. Then you spent the rest of the day on the phone, calling people to see if they were interested, and they were. Then you spent the next three months on the phone, which you hate by the way.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, it continues. Yeah, that’s true. It’s a lot of coordination. It s all about people. In this case, it’s all about our people.

Brian Clark: We’ve done some big projects in the past. I remember the whole MyCopyblogger initiative where we switched from newsletter to the content library. That was a pretty massive project, but I think I had my hands all in there in your business, so to speak. This time, I did my best to stand back. Trust, but verify.

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

Brian Clark: Watch. Advise. Tweak.

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

Brian Clark: But really, you get the props. Well, a lot of people get the props because it was a major team effort, but you were the — I would ve called you the project manager, but I know you like to be called a producer, of course.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, it really is about, as you’ll soon hear in this episode, the coming together of all these different people, and it’s kind of staggering. The different kinds of skills, talents and everything that came together to make this happen. In our case, the way we did it, it was something that we, as a company, could do. But we’re also going to talk about how to do this on a medium to even a much smaller scale as well, and why it applies to those of you out there that are thinking you may want to do something like this.

Brian Clark: We’re going to say what we did, but then we’re also going to try to extrapolate that out into general principles. If you had to boil it down to one big secret shortcut to successfully launch a podcast network, what would that be?

The Shortcut to Launching a Successful Podcast Network

Robert Bruce: Here’s a short answer. You’ve got to faithfully serve your audience with a media-based approach to content for about nine plus years, and then you send them an email letting them know that you’ve started a podcast network.

Brian Clark: That’s so wrong. I mean, it’s right in the sense that we’re not trying to discourage anyone, but on the other hand, if you don’t have an existing audience, start today. If podcasting is the way you want do that, many, many people have built really amazing audiences just from one podcast and then added on from there.

We did it a different way. Not all our existing audience is audio people. It’s not like the entire Copyblogger audience is tuning in, but enough of them are to provide a catalyst that got us noticed a little bit in iTunes. I’ll let you talk about that, Robert, which helps us reach a new audience.

Despite the fact that it seem like we had this complete unfair advantage, which we never really apologized to, because we worked our butts off for almost a decade just on this. Never mind the six years before that. Start building your audience today. It’s our hope that this show will give you some insight how you can get rolling by leveraging multiple shows as opposed to just one, if that’s what you’re thinking about.

Let’s talk about how you put this together from our perspective, internally. Our company has its own unique characters, many of which are now hosting shows, and Demian. What the hell?

Robert Bruce: I don’t know.

Brian Clark: Demian s show is a home run.

Robert Bruce: I got to say, though, did I not call it?

Brian Clark: We used to not let him out in public. Now we’re letting him broadcast, and he’s killing it.

Robert Bruce: He is wildly public.

Brian Clark: I know.

Robert Bruce: Did I not call it, though? Did I not call it?

Brian Clark: You did call it. It helps that it’s four times a week.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

Brian Clark: Frequency, there’s a lesson right there. John Lee Dumas was the man there. He just went out every single day and built this huge audience with frequency. Because showing up in iTunes, the more you hit publish, the more often you’re getting downloads., you’re getting exposure, and it really amplifies itself. That’s one tip right there.

The Critical Components of an Audio-Based Network That Works

Robert Bruce: I’ve broken this down into five basic things that you want to think about, look at. Most of them are going to be, if not all, relevant no matter what size project you’re thinking about in terms of the context of this podcast network. But it’s production, talent, technology, design, and promotion.

On the production side, that’s everything that it sounds like. It’s getting the shows produced, edited, transcripts, working with hosts, talking about their shows, getting the sound equipment together. This was kind of a monster job. First time, in some cases, I’m thinking maybe even in most cases, people working in audio, at least at this level, getting them set up to where they’ve got a basic, little, simple studio and a good microphone and good decent microphone technique.

This is going to be interesting, though, because I’m actually blown away with the quality of the sound that’s coming out. We’ve had some glitches. We’ve had some things that we’re trying to iron out, and we will. But the thing here is that I think about, in six months, when these people become more seasoned, and it becomes a part of their daily practice or weekly practice, it’s worth going through these bumps here. You’re going to see not only that, but like a comfortability behind the microphone that just takes a lot of time to get to.

Brian Clark: It’s interesting to me, we have a lot of people in the company that we thought were naturals to be hosts. They did, and they stepped up. But were you a little surprised by how nervous and — what’s the word I’m looking for here — because people like Sonia, I didn’t think twice about that. She’s going to show up, and she’s going to knock it out of the park. But she was a little nervous about it.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I haven’t talked to her about that, but I think that was a bit across the board. Frankly for myself, too, I knew that these people were going to deliver, and we’ll get into talent in a moment. I knew it. But I was surprised at the level at which they deliver — not because of anything about them or past performance — but just simply because this is a brand new thing. It’s in the DNA of what we do as a company all day, every day, but it’s still different. Yeah, I was surprised at the level of how well things turned out overall because it’s a hard game. You turn on that microphone, you hit the record button, and most people, if not all people in the beginning, you freeze up. You sound like an idiot. The hardest thing is just to be yourself for some reason, but it just takes time.

Brian Clark: Well, what’s interesting to me because I don’t even listen to these current shows because I hate listening to myself, but I need to start because you get better that way. The interesting thing to me was that you said, You ought to go back and listen to us in 2010 because we were terrible. I’m like, “Really? We were that bad?” You just said, “Trust me,” or “Go listen.” I said, “No, I’ll trust you. I think that would just ruin me. But it’s everyone. You get better at it. The more encouraging thing recently was we just hired a new production assistant, Caroline, and she listened to the show for the first time. She’s like, “Wow, that’s not bad.” I’m like, “What were you expecting? Oh my God.”

Robert Bruce: It’s the idea that, too, this is media now. This is audio. This is radio. We’re not at the level of the major global players yet, but this is the future of it all. If you’re going to play, you ve got to play. Is there a lot of room to improve and grow and make things? Absolutely. There always is. But, if this is the future of audio, which we think it is, then you want to go big at all times. One last note on the production side of things, we’ve also done something that we’ve rarely done and I don’t think we’ve done, at least on a regular basis, we’ve outsourced the audio editing – so we’re not doing that in-house. It’s a decision we made early on to free up more time on the creative and creating media side.

But I’ve got Kelton Reid and Clare Garrett on the production side, who developed this entire workflow that every single episode for three, four episodes a day now, Monday through Thursday, which will rapidly become more, everything goes through this workflow. Every episode has about 15, 20 tasks attached to it that need to get done. Some smaller, some larger, and it’s working perfectly.

Brian Clark: You know what just occurred to me, that might make a great infographic.

Robert Bruce: That’s actually a really good idea. Alright, Kelton, if you’re listening – wait a minute – he doesn t have any time.

Brian Clark: Yeah, but I mean, that would be incredibly useful for people.

Robert Bruce: That’s a really good idea.

Brian Clark: One of our designers can probably visualize that better than I could. I was just thinking as you’re describing it, I wish I could see that, because when we talk about it, most of the time you say, “Don’t worry about it,” and I try not to because it’s working. I’d only worry if it doesn’t work. That kind of workflow, that kind of process makes anything doable. It’s just a matter of sitting down. I remember you and Kelton sat down early on, before we did anything and said, “What’s the process?” It took a while. It evolved. It s tweaked and all that, once you get into the trenches. But you started with a plan that made it manageable.

Robert Bruce: Kelton’s a pro. I mean, he’s been handling all of our multimedia stuff for Authority and company-wide for a while. A look at any one of his spreadsheets will make you want to run crying to your bed.

Brian Clark: I don’t do spreadsheets.

Robert Bruce: Me neither. Anyway, big props to Kelton and Clare on the production side. Yeah, that’s a really good idea. By the way, for those listening, that’s a lesson. An infographic out of a workflow that we created for the podcast network — repurposing content, useful interesting stuff. Almost anything you can do, you can make something else out of it.

Brian Clark: Yeah, Everything s content is our motto.

Robert Bruce: We’ll go through these other ones. Talent, I mainly put this under the category of the hosts themselves We’re in a situation, again, we go back to that unfair advantage where we look around our own company. We see all of this incredible talent that is available to us, and there’s more out there. There’s more coming. Not everyone’s in that situation. We’ll talk about that a little bit later.

Brian Clark: Well, I don’t know. I just think we think differently about people. I mean, who would look at Sean Jackson and say, “We got to give that guy a show.” But we know Sean is a character, and he knows his stuff. Sean’s show is not out yet.

Robert Bruce: He’s insanely talented.

Brian Clark: He’s our CFO.

I’m going to disagree. I think with a shift in mindset, you could find people in any company. I think most companies are just like, “I’m not putting Jane from accounting on the mic,” because they don’t trust her. That’s the issue. It’s not that there isn’t talent that can be developed, it’s just mindset.

How a Smaller Company Might Approach Creating Content Like This

Robert Bruce: Here’s the way to think about it because we’re still in the idea that, especially you and me, our generation, we remember the old days of radio. We remember the professionals of broadcast terrestrial radio, and we can’t get that out of our head. But Jane from accounting is a professional in her area, obviously, and she can talk about all kinds of things that are useful, related to whatever your business is. But here’s the thing. In new media, people don’t want the golden-throated radio professional anymore.

Brian Clark: Oh yeah, what about you?

Robert Bruce: People want to hear Jane.

Brian Clark: Says the guy with the golden voice, right. Yeah, thanks.

Robert Bruce: They would rather hear authenticity from her or him, talking about what it is they do, and hearing the secrets and tactics and strategies within the job they have.

Brian Clark: This is this whole concept of employee-generated content, which you hate that term. We hate most of the terms that we operate under in this industry, so why not this one? Tell me what your beef is with it briefly.

Robert Bruce: Well, we talked about this a couple of episodes ago. I get where it’s coming from. I don’t think it was meant to be offensive, but this is just completely offensive to me, employee-generated content. No, what we have here in our case is a number of extremely talented human beings thoughtfully creating media for their audience. This is not employee generated like they’re some kind of computer, right? It comes from user generated content. I get it. It s a nice acronym, and it’s a nice connection. But no, these are real people, with real jobs, doing real work, that have interesting and useful things to share, and they’re taking the time.

I talked to Stefanie Flaxman yesterday. She’s the host of Editor-in-Chief. She was laughing because we had a conversation sometime last year. I said, “Hey, Stefanie. I really like you to write more for the blog, for Copyblogger.com.” She said, “Well, I really don’t want to, but of course I will, because I d rather focus on these other areas of the job.” We kind of came to an understanding that worked. She told me yesterday, she says, “Wow, I just realized you got me to write again without me even knowing it, and I’m loving it,” because she’s writing scripts for her show.

I think about Demian. Demian now is doing 500 to 1000 word essays, audio essays four days a week. That’s not employee-generated content. That’s an extremely talented individual with years of experience creating media that people can use.

Brian Clark: All right. Duly noted.

Robert Bruce: Shall I leave it at that, geez? Technology.

Brian Clark: Technology, that’s the easy part.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, this is the easy one. There’s a couple of facets to this, but the short answer is we’re using the Rainmaker Platform to deliver this entire podcast network that you see. Media files that are larger than what we usually deal with, the servers are running effortlessly. The ability to create a new show in — I think it takes me five minutes if we wanted to spin up a new show — about five minutes outside of show art. The ability to schedule things out — all of the things in the podcasting area that the Rainmaker Platform does. Create the iTunes settings within the platform itself. It’s all in there.

But the cool thing here, Brian, that we’ve been finding out is that because we’re eating our own dog food, because we’re using the Rainmaker Platform to create this podcast network, which is a big part of the future of media for our company, we’re seeing what needs to be tweaked. We’re seeing some things that need to be fixed. We’re seeing some things that need to be added.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I started using the platform over at Further, and that’s allowed me to see things that I would like changed. But we’re going hardcore with Rainmaker.FM. You would think we’re pushing the platform to its limit. We’re finding that it’s doing just fine, but we do find things as users instead of the people marketing the thing. We’re going, “Wait, wouldn’t it be cool if it did this, or this is not quite right.” It’s been pretty interesting.

Robert Bruce: Obviously, that makes the platform better and better and better for our customers as well, which is the most important thing.
Next is design. We’ve talked about Rafal Tomal and Lauren Mancke before. Lauren headed up all of the show art for each of the shows. Big job kind of all at once. She, in my opinion, delivered spectacularly. Rafal, of course, on the site design at Rainmaker.FM, always amazing and always seems to get where we want to go without us spelling it out. Props to the two of them for really delivering, in a lot of ways, the personality, the feel and the usability of the site.

Brian Clark: It’s basically the Genesis Child theme, which is what runs on Rainmaker and of course that is the foundation of our whole StudioPress line of designs as well. There are a ton of qualified designers out there. We just happen to have two wonderful people who work for us in-house. If they try to leave, I’m going to throw a fit.

The interesting thing as we get a little deeper here is that it’s not just podcast network functionality that you’ll see on Rainmaker.FM, in fact, you’ll see us use the platform to the full degree once you get into the business models that we’ve got cooked up so far, but we’ll talk about that in a minute.

Then, promotion, that’s how do you get the word out? How do you make a dent in iTunes enough to where iTunes starts working for you?

Robert Bruce: The short answer is how we answered your first question to me, which is you’ve got to serve an audience. Build an audience over a period of time, and then let them know about it. But again, what if you don’t have an audience? What if you have a smaller audience, and you’re thinking about launching something like this? Well, we go back in the archives. There are all kinds of promotional strategies that we’ve talked about in the past — starting from zero — but basically reprinting what you did in 2006, Brian, with Copyblogger.

The Business Model(s) behind Rainmaker.FM

Brian Clark: There’s another aspect of this that’s kind of unique to podcasting, which is why I called the podcast interview an act of curation, that also taps into the audiences of others. How many stories have we read where a podcast starts from nothing, like Jon Nastor, and John Lee Dumas?

It’s an interview format, great positioning, unique, great host, great conversation. Through that process of tapping into outside experts, those people tend to also promote the episode. Showing up, doing the work, and then being smart about politely asking, “Hey, the episode is up. I’d love it if you shared it with your social network. Thank you so much.”

It’s simple. Most people will do it because they’re also promoting themselves as an authority in whatever the field may be. There is benefit there. A form of influence or marketing is simply also how you develop your initial content strategy.

Robert Bruce: One thing on this building an audience for nine plus years, our joke at the beginning there, it’s not a joke. We understand that, that is what we’ve done, and it took us this long, like Brian said. We don’t apologize for that because it’s been a long road of a lot of hard work. Really, if you want to break down to one year or even six months, or three years, whatever it is, it really does come back to that — to do the work and to show up over time to build the audience. There are things you can do, there are tactics and strategies you can do to accelerate that, but really, that is the answer. We always come back to it, and we won’t apologize for that because it is hard work, and it really is just, that’s the answer.

Brian Clark: But totally doable at the same time. I mean, learning a language is a hard work. Learning rock climbing is hard work. Starting a successful podcast is hard work. All of it is within your ability to do, though. You just have to put your mind to it. There’s certainly a lot of guidance. This isn’t 1998 when we were just making it up as we went along. It’s almost like there’s too much information, but you can find some technique or approach that gels with you, as opposed to having to follow us, or Joe Blow, or whomever has the approach that worked for them. There’s a lot of different ways to do it.

That takes us right into the business model. We are content marketers. This network is built on the Rainmaker Platform. Sales of the Rainmaker Platform, or actually pre-trials, because we’re only 10 days into this, have increased by a substantial percentage. When it comes down to it, the network could be killing it, and if our business objective wasn’t being met, then what’s the point? Well, interestingly enough, even if that wasn’t working out, there’s just so much more here, and we’re really finding ourselves in a position where we’re looking into doing things we’ve never done before, like accepting sponsorships.

Why We Might Accept Outside Sponsors Sooner Rather Than Later

Brian Clark: In the first week we got hit by three major companies trying to sponsor the network. Not us reaching out. Not us saying we want sponsors. They just came to us. Two of them we had to say no to. Third, we may say yes to. That’s a fascinating thing because they’re like, “Do you have a rate card?” I’m like, “A rate card? Yeah. Let me cook something out.” You know what I’m saying? I had to do some research because that’s not what we do. We sell eight figures worth of our own stuff a year, but we don’t sell advertising. Yet let’s talk numbers.

We did 100,000 downloads in four days, and that’s only going to grow. It’s a possibility. It’s interesting because, on one hand, you could get an outside sponsor, and that covers all our internal production cost, which we were just going to write off as an expense. It’s a marketing expense for us. Content production and distribution is how we advertise, if you want to put it that way, but it’s way more effective than that. The cost of doing this is really, really not an issue at all in our budget. It’s kind of amazing that you can create this kind of reach and impact, and get inquiries from people who want to pay you money just to mention their name, but that’s what’s happening.

Anyway, we’re going to keep apprised to the whole sponsorship thing because it’s new ground for us. I’m sure a lot of you out there are interested in it. If you look around, podcast sponsorships are hot because they work. It is direct response advertising if it’s done right. People in our industry, people outside of our industry are showing up and trying to land on every show they can because it’s working. That’s kind of amazing, although that’s another reason why we’re effectively our own sponsor. It’s working for us, selling more of our own stuff. The question is, do we have room to bring other people in. I think we’re going to be very, very selective about it. If it’s the right fit then, why not?

Robert Bruce: Definitely. That’s probably an episode in and of itself in the future. But it was a flattering surprise to us, not ultimately a surprise to get those inquiries, but we had talked that we’re just not even going to think about sponsorship for a good while, if not ever.

Brian Clark: Well, yeah, but we talked about if we expanded beyond digital marketing to just marketing and sales, which the Rainmaker brand could do, at that point, you’d be silly not to. I just didn’t expect people to come to us week one. We don’t even have a month under our belt. Anyway, more on that in future shows.

Robert Bruce: One quick backtrack in the advertising and sponsorship of our own products. You’ll notice real quick on Rainmaker.FM, there’s a couple of things going on. Right now, we’re talking about the Authority Rainmaker event and you’ll see that in the little drop down bar at the top of the site. As you scroll down, you’ll see a couple of places on show pages and episode pages. You’ll see a banner right above the footer at the bottom. The idea there I think is obvious, that this is what the network, in this case, Authority Rainmaker is what is bringing the Rainmaker.FM network to you at the moment.

Brian Clark: Ticket prices go up on March 31st. Keep that in mind. We’d love to see you in Denver. You don’t want to miss Jerod s podcasting presentation, which I worked on it with him. Completely changed his topic, realizing that podcasting needs a real big drill down.

Robert Bruce: Anyway, AuthorityRainmaker.com. On Rainmaker.FM, all these places that you see, where that’s being sponsored right now, those can be changed at any moment. It can be worked differently depending on our goals, our needs.

Brian Clark: We can do that without a designer, right?

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

Brian Clark: That’s awesome.

Robert Bruce: There may be one place that we still need to get, but anyway, that is the idea. Anyway, a note on that. The other thing that we’ve got coming up is paid courses. Jerod is going to kick this off. Do we want to say the name of his coming show?

Brian Clark: Well, it’s interesting because with the existing membership capabilities and then the new learning management system that will be out in a matter of weeks, Rainmaker is also an amazing online course and membership site platform. Of course, you also can use a member area for lead generation like we do with the free New Rainmaker course — all of that. But that’s another big aspect of why, even from practical standpoint, why we launched this site on the platform because audio listeners are natural prospects for audio and video training. They learn that way. It’s still portable. It’s still on demand. It’s still all of that good stuff from the free end.

Jerod is actually going to be in the next round of shows that we released shortly. Robert, you know details on that probably by heart, but that’s called The Showrunner, which is a nice nod actually to television. Why do we always mix our metaphors with our names?

Robert Bruce: I don’t know, that one was yours, I think.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I loved that.

Robert Bruce: That’s one of the better names on the network. There’s no doubt.

Brian Clark: Yeah, then a lot of people are already saying, I don’t know how to do this podcasting thing. Thanks for example — this episode, but I need to know things so much more in depth than this. Yeah, we got you. We’re going to work on that kind of training. That’s the obvious starting place, but really, we can do just about any topic in more detail.

Why We Developed the Shows We Have (and Will Have)

Robert Bruce: Think about each of the shows, and we did plan this, not perfectly, some kind of perfect master plan, but it was always in our thoughts. Any one of these shows can also become a paid course. Think about Rough Draft with Demian. You can take that in a nice short, crisp writing course. Stefanie Flaxman with Editor-in-Chief. There’s an editing course waiting to be had there. Sonia Simone, Confessions of Pink-Haired Marketer. The things she’s talking about, it’s a no brainer. Plus she’s so good at it anyway. Anyone of these things, the MarTech stuff that Chris Garrett and Tony Clark are talking about, not that we are going to do a course for each one of these shows, but you can see where all of this leads directly into a business model.

Brian Clark: Just like with the podcasting course, it’s going to come from customer feedback. We’re going to see where people are getting stuck on the free materials, and then that’s an indication to dive down deep and do something more thorough, more in-depth, and higher value.

Robert Bruce: In a show like Pamela Wilson’s Hit Publish, that is such a produced show as it is, like we talked about last time with the early episodes of New Rainmaker. That is a free course waiting to happen, leading into some kind of a paid course.

Brian Clark: Yeah. We’ve been doing that since 2010, when we first launched our membership site software Premise, which evolved heavily into becoming what’s in Rainmaker. We demonstrated that by doing a free course. It built an email list, and it’s still active to this day. Remember, what was the name of that? Is that some sort of an authority?

Robert Bruce: Digital corporation.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that was cool. I’ve noticed that other people are catching on to this. I think Derek Halpern was doing free online courses as a way to build a list. Hey, yeah, exactly. Because that’s more likely to work because it’s higher value, and it’s access and registration — all these things we ve talked about, how we increased our opt in rate by 400 percent, it’s because of a different experience, but also higher value content.

Out of the podcast, for people who aren’t with us right now listening, we can put together all these different free courses. We can tie it into a free member area like we already do with the New Rainmaker course. It becomes lead generation or audience building really for that particular show, or for the Master Feed digest, whatever the case may be.

What s Coming For Rainmaker.FM

Robert Bruce: Let’s spend just a couple of minutes on what’s coming for Rainmaker.FM.

Brian Clark: Well, you tell me because I keep asking you what the schedule is. I’m over here debating. I have two other podcasts I want to start.

Robert Bruce: Well, get in line, buddy.

Brian Clark: I know. I know. I’m no longer important in this company.

Robert Bruce: Well you got a real zinger coming up.

Brian Clark: Maybe, I think so. I think so. Here’s an interesting thing, so Further is the curated email newsletter that I launched, that’s now got thousands of people on the list, but I’ve always been wanting to launch a podcast. Instead of just launching a podcast, I built a specific list of people who are interested in that subject matter. So guess what, when I do launch the podcast, I’ve got at least a Minimum Viable Audience to get that rolling. There’s a strategy for you out there. Figure out a way to build an email list before you launch the podcast. Then launch the podcast by email, send them to iTunes, and you’ll get that nice spike.

But the other show that I’m thinking is kind of like my defining, I always say further is my overarching word that drives me, but this other word — which actually it’s always other people in the company that pick up on these things I say, and they’re like, “We should do something with that.” Like Gardner took No Sidebar and ran with it. Anyway, I’m thinking of making it a short daily show because I ve got to do something to catch Demian. It’s just not right.

Robert Bruce: No, it’s not. Obviously, more shows are coming in different formats, which is also going to apply probably to yours, Brian, which I think is important to think about. You could do just an entire network of interview shows, certainly. But we want to experiment with different formats. We want to have a wide range of things for people to listen to. Right now, we have eight shows in production that are on the way. There are a couple that will come out before, but all of these will be out by the first week in May.

There’s another show that is pending, or in talks with somebody outside of the company to start. Overall, you and I had a conversation about how big should this thing get. I think it’s a fun thing to talk about. It’s not necessarily the most important thing by any means, but I think that brings us to 19 shows by the beginning of May, if all of these work out and if we can do it, which should happen.

Brian Clark: We kind of consistently have eight shows in the top 20 in our category in iTunes. So if you had 20 shows, it’s not going to happen. There are some people who are rock solid.

Robert Bruce: Right. Things will even out.

Brian Clark: Right there along with them, as opposed to thinking we’re going to knock anyone off like Michael Hyatt or Pat Flynn. Besides, those are our friends anyway. It’s not really that kind of competitive situation, but it is very powerful when your shows occupy that kind of real estate. But not every show is going to make it long term. But that is a conversation for the future since you got to let people, like you said, six months minimum to let people find their legs and really start rolling. It’s amazing how much better you get by being consistent, week in, week out, day in, day out, if that’s what you’re going after, and you’ll get better. You just do.

Robert Bruce: More courses coming, obviously. We talked about that briefly.

Brian Clark: We don’t know what those are yet, but we’ll figure it out from you guys. Leave comments if there’s a particular topic that you want to drill down on. That’s always helpful.

Whether or Not It s Time to Hit the Road

Robert Bruce: One thing that I’m really excited about is what you and I are calling the Rainmaker Roadshow. We have this idea to go to smaller venues — and probably larger cities to start just because it makes more sense audience wise — but to record live shows in these kind of smaller venues.

Brian Clark: This is another one of our ideas that we’ve been talking about forever in various context and never do, but it is cool. It’s cool to put on a larger event like Authority Rainmaker, but it’s really cool that you show up in a city, contact people you know there, get 100 people to meet up, hang out, have some refreshments, and then we got to figure out how to set up mics and all that kind of stuff. I’m sure you and Jessica could fix that up.

Robert Bruce: Jessica’s got all that handled, yeah. If you think about the nature of a podcast audience, this audience that you’re building in this format, you’re already seeing it on a bigger scale like with Dan Harmon. It’s now on Netflix. Dan Harmon’s documentary of the tour of his podcast.

Brian Clark: Doesn’t Wait Wait Don’t tell me! — you know that show on NPR. They go around different places. They have a live audience. I love that they have that audience. That’s so cool. That’s one thing you don’t get when it’s just me, and you talking to each other.

Robert Bruce: It’s one of the most rabid fan bases of all shows on NPR. But this is just cool. Obviously, you run into things like budget again, but there are all kinds of ways around this. Number one, you’re creating a piece of content.

Brian Clark: That’s another place where you could bring in sponsors. Obviously, the platform is going to be a sponsor. Again, it’s a marketing cost for us, a content marketing cost, but bring in Shure microphones, which we all use and love.

Our (Loosely Held) Plans for the Future

Robert Bruce: We’re going to start working on the Rainmaker Roadshow, so keep an eye out for that. Of course, in terms of what’s coming in the next months and years, we’re listening to what you want, what the Rainmaker.FM audience wants.

Brian Clark: Always, always. That’s why we never have any truly definitive plans that are more than a month out.

Robert Bruce: Right, right.

Brian Clark: Because it changes, and it should. It’s adaptive. Robert, thanks for the insight. I’m still not sure how you pulled it off.

Robert Bruce: My secret weapon is that EGC, Brian, that employee-generated content.

Brian Clark: I think it was a combination of coffee in the morning and bourbon in the evening from what I understand, but that’s another show. On the Roadshow, people will get to meet Robert.

Robert Bruce: No, they won’t. I’ll be recording from the hotel room.

Brian Clark: Oh, no.

Robert Bruce: You can be live down in the bar.

Brian Clark: That defeats the whole purpose.

Robert Bruce: It kind of does. Thanks to everybody involved in this entire project. There’s a lot of people and really, that’s what it boils down to is these people in this company and the audience, as always, that listens. You quoted something from Henry Rollins the other day on Twitter that I thought was perfect. Now, I want to try to bring it up so that I don’t butcher it.

Brian Clark: That was from an interview he just did at South By in Austin. And it was such a perfect quote. He told me to email him if I came up with any points that I wanted him to focus on and I’m like, Here, I’m just going to repeat your words back to you. You say this again.

Robert Bruce: That’s right. He said, The only reason I get to do anything is because I have an audience, and I need them more than they need me.

Brian Clark: It’s just so how much I feel as well. I know that I worked hard to build an audience, that we re continuing to work hard to build an audience, but it doesn’t matter. We still owe it to them, as opposed to them owing us anything. Thank you, Robert, for your hard work. Thank you to everyone in the company. But thanks to all of you out there for putting up with us and tuning in, and hopefully you’re learning something. We’re going to keep trying hard. Stick with us.

Robert Bruce: If you want to get what you’ve got coming to you with the show, the easiest way to do that is to go to NewRainmaker.FM. That will take you to this show’s page. Or if you want to check everything else on the network, go to Rainmaker.FM. You can subscribe by iTunes. You can get it by RSS, and you can sign up to the 10-part course, that we talked about a little earlier, that will likely change the way you think about online marketing.

Brian Clark: If I can ask for one favor, if you dig the show and you’re enjoying it, please go over to iTunes, give us a rating or write a review if you have some time. Just something short expressing your thoughts. We look at those. Sometimes we’re getting useful feedback that we can incorporate in the show. Other times, it just makes our day to see that you guys actually like what we’re doing. If you can, no pressure.

The Transcript

How to Build a Profitable Email List with Social Media Advertising

Brian Clark: Hey there, Rainmakers. Welcome to the show. I am Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media. Today’s episode is another one in the series that I’m calling free consulting. I have a specific thing I want to learn more about, and I think about who’s the smartest person I know for this topic. That person today is Noah Kagan because we want to talk about using Facebook ads to build our email list.

You guys know, I launched a new curated email newsletter on personal development called Further. It’s doing fine organically, but what if I’ve got more money than time at this point? How can I use advertising to grow that list smartly? Well, that’s what we’re going to ask Noah.

If you’re not familiar with Noah, he was actually employee number 30 at Facebook but that’s not what I want to talk to him, because what he did after he left Facebook was build AppSumo, which is a huge gigantic email-powered business, kind of like Groupon for web developers and online marketers. People like us. Now he has branched out and expanded that into a business that is way beyond the Groupon model. We’re going to talk to him about that a little bit. In fact, why don’t we get Noah to tell us. Noah, how are you?

Noah Kagan: Good, Brian. Thanks for having me, man.

Brian Clark: Thanks for coming, man. Hope you appreciate being our victim in our free consulting. I want to know something, and I want to share it with them. It makes for a good show.

Noah Kagan: Wow. I’m not getting paid for this. I ll help you out.

Noah s Story

Brian Clark: I forgot to mention that part to you. Why don’t you tell people a little bit about the story. Obviously, you were early on in Facebook. You were early on at Mint, and now you’re your own guy as a founder of AppSumo. Give us the sketch of how you got here.

Noah Kagan: Yeah, man. I’ll start with the AppSumo part. Everything else is kind of online. I think what’s interesting is that I started seeing all these web apps come out, and I was like, “Man, one of the hardest things for every single business online is marketing.” In my previous business, I kept getting shit on, and I was a credit card payments guy for Facebook games. We did all the payments, and everyone hated us because they’re like, “You re a payments guy, we don t care about you. Get us more customers.”

Noah Kagan: So I wanted to do something that was more on the top of the funnel, which was getting people customers. We realized with AppSumo, if we created some type of distribution that everyone would actually like us and be like, “Hey, promote our products,” and the customers would be like, “Oh, cool. Thanks for discovering cool things for us.”

So we ve spent the past four years building that up. Ninety percent of our business comes through email. That’s not something I ever really did before or thought of, but I basically became a super huge email advocate, which is, in my opinion, the number one way to communicate with your customers.

Brian Clark: Absolutely.

Noah Kagan: Since then we’ve built tools. We basically took all the tools we’ve been building at AppSumo and put that into a tool kit called SumoMe.com. Those are tools that we’ve been using internally to grow our own email list and get more traffic.

Brian Clark: Excellent. We will link that up in the show notes, so everyone can check that out. I actually have someone who produces a site for me who is recommending SumoMe tools, and I was like, “Yeah. I know that’s Noah, right?”

Noah Kagan: Awesome.

Brian Clark: It’s cool though.

Why You Should Focus on Fundamentals Instead of Facebook

Brian Clark: Okay. I kind of set the stage. I have this new email newsletter. It’s curated. It’s really just fun for me. It’s like my personal blog. By the way, why did you name your personal blog OkDork?

Noah Kagan: I bought it in 2000, which now is 15 years ago. I thought I would buy domains and get rich, and that was one of the names I came up with. I have that one. I have everspeed.com, and the only one I’ve ever been offered is for Community Next, which is a Jewish group in Michigan. They offered me a $1,000 for that. I never got rich off domains, but that was one of ones I bought.

Brian Clark: I had the same idea. Usually, I would buy domains as a placeholder for an idea, and if I decided to do it, you do it. If not, you let it lapse. But no one’s ever paid me a substantial amount of money for any of them. I had actually do the work of building sites out of them. What a pain in the arse.

Noah Kagan: I think that’s a key thing that maybe it should be the theme of Facebook ads, and in general, is that you read articles where this guy or girl buys domains, and they made a shit load of money. Then you do the exact same thing that you’ve read, and it doesn’t work out. I think that’s kind of the same that I’ve noticed with Facebook ads.

You read this article, 2,000% return when I bought my Facebook ads. You copy them, and then it doesn’t work. So the thing to understand is why is it not working for you and then how can you improve that? Or are there other ways that you should be considering, just versus doing what everybody else is telling you to do.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s why this show is going to be about the fundamentals. Facebook changes all the time. Tactics change all the time. Even you’ll tell us that your own approach that works will stop working at some point. You have to continue to reiterate on it.

Is Facebook Now a Pay-to-Play Platform for Marketers?

Brian Clark: Here’s really where I want to start out because I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook, mostly hate. We killed the Copyblogger page because we get traffic from Facebook, but it’s by other people sharing. Our page, unless we paid, really did nothing. On the other hand, I have a local Boulder site, and it does wonderfully on Facebook, organically. I can’t really figure that out, but for the most part, it seems that the sentiment is Facebook is now a pay-to-play platform for marketers. True?

Noah Kagan: Yeah. A concept that I have always been surprised at is that I pay to tell everyone to go to Facebook, and then I have to pay to tell everyone to come back to me. With email, what I’ve realized is it’s the most control you can have in communicating with your customers. You’re married right, Brian?

Brian Clark: Yes.

Noah Kagan: You don’t have someone else talk to your wife, do you?

Brian Clark: I haven’t worked that out, but no.

Noah Kagan: You talk to her yourself. And that’s what Facebook is doing. They’re talking to your customers, so you don’t even know who really gets to see it. It’s, 4,000 people today saw your boosted post. I think what Facebook is good for is actually what you pointed out about your Boulder site, which is for organic or social reach — it s able to spread something, but in terms of a marketing channel that you want to be wary of giving someone else control of your business and of your outcomes.

Brian Clark: Yeah. We call it digital sharecropping, and home-base is always your site with your list, but it seems that you have been incredibly effective at taking Facebook traffic and converting it into that higher value email relationship. That’s why you’re on the hot seat today.

Now you wrote a great article, we’re going to link this up to about a year ago about how you spent $2,000,000 on Facebook ads and built massive lists and what you learned from it, which was very useful. A year later, where are you at today with Facebook as far as your own advertising and what you think about where the platform’s headed?

How to Convert Social Traffic into Email Subscriptions

Noah Kagan: Specifically for Facebook, we’re spending only $3,000 a month on Facebook. That’s $36,000 a year, which is much less. I think at our peak when we were doing somewhere between $200,000 to $300,000 a month. It’s dramatically gone down for us. I think what people have to do with their marketing is consider the effectiveness. If I have $300,000, what is actually the most effective way for us, at that time, which is growing our email list. Right now it’s trying to get people to install SumoMe.com. I basically take $300,000, and I say, “Which will help me get the most amount of people to install it?”

Facebook actually hasn’t been that. It’s very expensive for us. A lot of the traffic is mobile, which converts pretty horribly. A lot of it’s international. It converts horribly. You have to be careful of that. You have to look at, Are there other channels I could spend that on? What more people need to do is sponsor smaller sites. Instead of going to Facebook, go to JonLoomer.com, who s a great guy for Facebook ads. For us, WordPress sites are great. Go sponsor smaller WordPress sites, instead of just Facebook as the only way of thinking about how to do your marketing.

Brian Clark: Here’s my dilemma and my scenario. I’m starting off with a new list, small project, so I don’t think the over-saturation issue would affect me. Here’s my problem, because you, like I, are an ROI marketer as everyone should be, but think back to when I started Copyblogger. For the first 18, 19 months, I didn’t sell anything. All I did was build audience. In that period of time, I figured out what the audience wanted to buy. We built it, sold it, and the rest is history. We have done that every year since.

I have that same mentality with this new project, and yet, like I mentioned, at this point I’ve got more money than time. Advertising to build that list — because I know how valuable that audience will be to me to figure out what to sell them — yet that means I’m coming out of pocket with no chance for immediate ROI. Would you ever do that yourself?

Noah Kagan: No.

Brian Clark: I knew you’re going to say that. That’s generally how I feel, too.

A Longer (More Profitable) View of Social Media Advertising

Noah Kagan: I’ll tell you why. Sometimes, just knowing that people do a certain tactic is just as important as knowing why they’re doing that tactic. When you’re starting a lot of new businesses out, it’s easy to just spend on ads because you don’t have to kiss anybody’s arse, and that’s why I loved it for AppSumo. We did no content marketing whatsoever, and content marketing is all the rage, which is also the same thing as blogging. The point is we didn’t do any of it because I didn’t want to have to go write a post and hope someone would link to it and hope I’d get in a directory or any of that stuff. I was like, “If I buy ads, I can just put in 10, and I get out 20.” It scaled really well.

The difference, though, is that if you go and spend money on ads and it’s not working, 1) you might actually think it s your product that’s off. You’re like, “Well, no one really wants this,” which may not be the case. So you’re like, “Oh. Well no one’s clicking and buying and doing whatever I want them to do. Well this product s wrong, which is not true.

Secondly, you’re spending a lot of money that you don’t really know if there’s going to be an ROI on. You’re going to get a 1000 emails subscribers. Great job. Are any of them going to buy, Who knows! What we’ve encouraged people to do and what I personally encourage people to do — is go validate with offline or one-to-one or other methods, so you’re confident you ll make that money back before you start spending money on advertising.

Brian Clark: When you started AppSumo, were those effectively affiliate offers?

What You Should Do If an Ad Spend Is Profitable

Noah Kagan: When we started AppSumo.com, just like Groupon, we basically lined up exclusive deals. So I would come to you and say, “Brian, you sell your course for a $100 or your web product for a $100. We’ll sell it for $50, and then we split $25-$25.” So I would buy ads. I’ll give you basically the general metric that I was targeting. If you had a $100 product, I sold it for $50, and I get 50% margin. That means I had $25 profit, gross profit. Are you still with me?

Brian Clark: Yeah. Of course.

Noah Kagan: I basically, on Facebook ads, would spend what it would take to get $25. If I could get within $25 of profit within 30 days from those people, then I would say this is a good ad spend, and I would spend as much as I can until it taps out. I just want to repeat that because I think that s a little unclear. It s like, “What the hell is he talking about?” Two things. One, when someone comes to your website to make a purchase, only about 2 percent around there are going to purchase. So you need to collect email addresses. SumoMe.com does that, or there are other tools you can use to do that.

So collect email addresses, which will get you another 10 percent. What we did is that, even if people didn t buy right away, I basically looked at, from that spend on that day, how much money came back to me in 30 days, and if it was at least the amount of money that I needed. If I spent $100, and I got my $100 back from selling four of those products, I was like, “Awesome.”

What I think most people do is they are kind of like, “Oh, okay. I think it s working. Fine, but what you need to do — and what’s the ideal gold mine — is that let’s say that it’s $25 for a product. I spend $25 that day, and I make back $25 right away. I basically go and spend unlimited. I think what happens to too many people, Brian, is that they spend it, they make a little bit of profit, and then they keep it that way. If I find that there’s any profit, I basically try to maximize it and turn up as high as I can. That’s why we got to $300,000 right away.

How to Make Sure Your Ad Campaigns Will Work

Brian Clark: That’s a truism from old school direct marketing. Once you figure out how to make an ROI, you try to buy as much ad inventory or whatever the medium is, as you can. Sometimes, the frustrating part is you can’t buy enough.

Noah Kagan: There’s other ways, too, that we figured out. One thing that most people do when they have profitable — like I saw this guy today, and he was talking about how he had a profitable ad campaign. I was like, “Why are you only spending 50 bucks?” So ways that you can expand that, or you can do manual bidding. So instead of letting Facebook decide how much to bid for you, just make a higher bid. What that will do is you’ll spend more, which reduces your profit but you’ll spend a lot more money, so you actually get to grow more.

Secondly, one thing that was really helpful for us was international spend. We literally tried every major country. My favorite ones outside of the Tier 1 countries — Spain, Germany, France — any of these European countries that do have money. Maybe avoid Greece for now, but that actually was ways we could actually expand our budget when it was working.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. Let’s assume we do have a product to sell. We’re able to calculate whether or not we’re actually making money. Of course, we are funneling them into email because that raises your conversion rate, as you already pointed out. You basically say Facebook has the ability if you’re trying to build a list, that you can choose specific conversion at the site. In this case, that would be the opt in, but you actually advise setting up click to website. Why?

Noah Kagan: Think about it. What is Facebook’s goal? Facebook’s only goal is to make as much money as possible. They will, from an advertiser’s perspective, do whatever it takes to spend the most money. If your ads will spend more money than the other advertiser, they’ll spend all your money. If it’s like, “Great. It’s an opt in.” Perfect. They’ll do that. I like to do it where I have the control, instead of Facebook, so that’s why I generally will choose a click to website.

What I d recommend, Brian, is that, ultimately, from someone beginning out, if you’re just starting your website, “Don’t sweat if it’s OCPM or click thing or it’s an optimize thing or whatever a thing.” Just start with the most basic thing so that you can get a sense of, “Hey, I spent a $100 this month, and I wouldn’t really spend more than that. That s how much I spent when I first started with Facebook ads for AppSumo. And see, How much money did I make back from these people? I generally recommend also collecting email addresses because most people don’t buy right away. The nice thing with email is you can say, “Hey, here’s some free things and also here’s that product that maybe you were still interested in.”

Why Noah Suggests Using Retargeting for Product-Based Campaigns

Brian Clark: Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about budgeting in a minute because you have some really interesting ideas about how you make sure it’s going to work before you hit the gas.

Before that, I played around with the Ad Manager a bit, and it really comes down to getting the right interest group targeting. You ve got this amazing demographic information. You have the ability to target people who like, for example, Tony Robbins. I would be the anti-guru version of what Tony Robbins talks about because I’m not trying to make myself that guy, but it’s the same topic. Personal development — health, wealth, wisdom — all that kind of good stuff.

I played around with it, and I did try to target against other people who are interested in certain pages in more general topics. But until you really get into spending, you don’t know what’s working or not. How do you choose your initial interest group targeting?

Noah Kagan: What I would actually recommend is not any of it. For someone who is really just starting out, Brian, what I’d actually recommend is more of custom audience or focusing on retargeting, if you have a paid product. Oh wow, we’re actually spending a lot more than I thought and yet look at this — I’m pulling up my Facebook stuff, so I could speak more accurately to what we’re doing.

What I recommend is don’t go and try to get new people when you already have 80 percent of your traffic not converting to your email or purchase. So spend time on just retargeting your custom audiences. I use Perfect Audience for my retargeting, but you can even just do it directly on Facebook. I would start with that. There’s way more complicated things that people will tell you how to scrape stuff and blah blah. I’m not going to go into that. For the most basic level, do a pixel on your site, and retarget those people as your first version for your ads. Why try to go out and get new people when you already have people who have heard of you?

Brian Clark: That’s a good point because even if you’re doing really well on conversion, 90, 80 percent of people have left for one reason or another. You’re saying, “Go ahead. Those people had some interest because they clicked through in the first place.”

Noah Kagan: Or they found your content. Exactly. When you start setting up your actual ads that are new, your retargeting stuff — once you got it working — will always be paying dividends. We have retargeting ads for our Monthly1K.com course. I haven’t actually looked at them in six months. Maybe even longer than that.

Brian Clark: Right.

Noah Kagan: Because it started working before — and you probably should go check it more often than that — but the nice thing with retargeting, once you hone in on the ROI. So I spend a $100, and as long as each month, I could see that the pixel is firing and I am making over a $100, then I just keep it going. If I cared a little bit more, if that was my priority, I would go back and try to tweak that a lot more.

The thing I would say with, you know you were saying, “All right, fine. You got the retargeting going but now, what should I actually do to get new customers hearing about me?” What I personally like doing — and I’m going to give you some strategies — we should talk after this, just remind me if I don’t bring it up about what stuff, stuff that’s kind of interesting to the advertiser. There’s some creative things that have worked for us, but specifically on the targeting, I always recommend doing some kind of targeting, less than 10,000 people. Really, really, really small. Why? Because I want to know that it really works before it’s super big and I have to cut through all the shit to get to the actual one that’s going to be working.

If I were you, what I always do, and what works for me, is I look at my best spending customers. If you have a business already, take your best 20, 100 — I took the best 100 of AppSumo, and I just manually looked them up on Facebook. You can search their email addresses. You can search them in LinkedIn.

Then what I did is I created a Google spreadsheet, and I basically just listed all their different attributes. Where are they from? What’s their gender? What s their age? What’s their profession? Books, movies, companies they like, blogs they like, people they like. You’ll basically get a pretty clear picture. Maybe you don’t want to do a 100 because you’re lazy. Fine. Do 10. Do five. Do even one if you’re super lazy. Then you’ll find very, very odd patterns. And the more narrow you get, I would do under 10,000 people, the better.

When we started out, MacHeist was the big one. The best one is someone who s a little identical to you. MacHeist was like an arm for Mac, so I just targeted them super aggressively. I was like, “If you love MacHeist, you ll love AppSumo. Here’s an Apple logo. We were very aggressive. Then over time, we found out that Tim Ferris audience really liked us. They liked all the products. I was just like, “If you have love Tim Ferris or Tim Ferris book, you ll like this.

Then you start looking at like, “All right. What are the other things …” and you get a little broader. But I would say, in the beginning, you want to go as narrow as possible. Just looking at your top five people if that, to understand their preferences. Let’s do an example. Who is a reader of yours or a listener of yours like? What’s that prototypical person or a person who like, “Oh, man. John blah, is that guy.”

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s hard because people know me for something else. There are a lot of marketers on my list just watching what I’m doing. I actually invited them to do that as a kind of a case study. So I don’t have that much of a feel because, effectively, all I ask for is the email address, and I’m going to start figuring that out.
I think the key advice here that I’ve heard from others lately is that you have actual people who are perfectly the persona that you’re looking for. What you have to do is figure them out first, and then go to Facebook or whatever the advertising platform is.

Noah Kagan: Yeah. I mean, just take your last subscriber even for your site. I would just take them, search their email address on Facebook, and you’ll actually be able to get it. There’s some other tools online now. I’ll send you a link afterwards where you can search someone’s email, and it will basically go scour the web for every type of personal profile information about them, which is kind of creepy now that I say it out loud.

Brian Clark: It very much is.

Noah Kagan: But it’s more just to get an idea of you re looking for patterns of cross references. Some of my favorite things are what are the blogs that they’re reading? What are the magazines that they read? Books are huge one. If you have narrower book, like they all love a certain type of copyright conversion marketing, like maybe they like scientific advertising. Those are the kind of jackpots you’re looking for. When you start targeting TechCrunch or Mashable, or even Social Media Examiner, they re so broad and big that it’s going to be a lot harder for you, versus, let’s say if you’re trying to do WordPress hosting, I would target WPEngine.

Or if you re doing WordPress hosting, maybe like Chris Lema’s fan page. Just try to start super narrow in the beginning, and that’s what I would do. Basically, what I do from there is once I find that it works with them, I max out that budget. And then I’ll go to the second tier, and I ll start to test out with smaller amounts, which stuff works.

I think what s really telling is, people hear me talk, “Oh, I spent millions of dollars literally,” but I started out the first month with a $100 or $400. The second month, once I saw it working, it was a $1,000. It wasn’t like, Oh, it worked overnight. It took a few months for us to get it in. Once we got it in, it was $50,000 a month, and then it kept rising.

Brian Clark: I think you’ve really already addressed this, but you’re effectively saying, Start with very small amounts of money, very small slices of an audience, then see if it works, and then try to see if that also scales up.

Noah Kagan: Yeah. There are things that I pulled back, so we’re going from thousands a day, to now I’m doing a 100 a day. It was because we saw that for what we’re promoting now, which is mostly SumoMe, just the CPA got to be $50, something pretty high, where at that point, we didn’t really know our lot, so I don’t feel comfortable doing that ad. If I know that it works, then I’ll go back and spend aggressively.

Things I think are interesting, like News Feed was a big thing for a lot of people. That’s when I started really getting back into Facebook a little over a year ago or two years ago. Then mobile is another thing that a lot of people are, besides app installs, so much of Facebook, probably 30 to 40 percent of their traffic has got to be mobile traffic. So as an advertiser, I think that’s something you have to be very, very concerned about because if you’re going to be doing ads to mobile, you’re probably going to get a really crappy conversion, and you’re going to be spending a lot of money for things that aren’t converting.

Brian Clark: I don’t think I ever opted in to an email list on my phone. It doesn’t feel right. But then again, I’m an old guy, so maybe the younger generation is more comfortable with that.

Noah Kagan: That’s what I want to say for marketing. We all have the same time, so what is the most effective use of time? Is it actually doing Facebook ads? Is it doing a blog post? Is it sponsoring an Instagram person? I think what people need to do is spend time thinking about where they’re going to get the most leverage before they go and say, “Oh. Facebook ads, I can just put in money and get email subscribers.” It’s look like, How do you know that? I would test some small amounts, and see what actually works before I would go and just commit 100 percent to Facebook.

Which Social Ad Platforms Have Performed Best for Noah

Brian Clark: Have you tried anything with Twitter, which I found the ROI on is really bad compared to Facebook, but again, it could be contextual. Organically, Twitter is killing it for me, but that’s my biggest audience. Have you tried any of the other social advertising platforms?

Noah Kagan: I’m not sure if there’s a platform I haven’t tried. I ve spent about a $100,000 on Google. Just to give you some background. I spent a $100,000 on Google. I probably made about $15,000 back. That’s not a good return for the people doing math.

Brian Clark: That’s weird because Google is always the hardcore ROI marketer s first move. Search intent and all that.

Noah Kagan: I think what people have to think about, what is your product and then where is the mind of that customer? If you’re on Google and you’re looking for a solution, you’re not looking for a same day, a weekly special on web tools. You re not thinking about that. But on Facebook, you’re browsing your ex-girlfriend’s photos, and you’re like, “Oh cool. There’s some new web app. I’ll check that out.” It makes a lot more sense.

The same thing with Twitter. I ve had some horrible success with Twitter. Not horrible success. That makes no sense. I ve had some horrible times with Twitter where they’re not a direct response thing, but for content advertising, Twitter is going to be great because people are used to going to Twitter, reading a blog post, and then coming right back to wasting another 15 minutes. The same thing with I had a course called Email1K.com, which is a totally free course that shows people how to grow an email list, and that worked really well on Twitter. Because it was just like, “Oh cool.” Really easy to click, add your email and you’re done, and go right back to browsing it.

How to Successfully Advertise on Twitter

Brian Clark: Did you use Twitter cards with the subscription button right there?

Noah Kagan: We did. I can’t say it’s a game changer, but yeah, it worked well enough. We were fine with it. I think what you have to consider is where is the intent and the mindset of the person you want to be taking action? Even on Facebook, one thing I was going to mention to you, Brian, in terms of two strategies that have worked well of things to advertise. Advertising content has actually worked pretty well. So taking a piece of content — and not making it seem like an ad — but take a blog post that’s really popular or a post that s converted people, and just advertise that instead of creating a landing page or putting them into an opt-in page. I ve had really good success with that.

I ve also had really good success from Twitter and Facebook on advertising contests. Contests are good because, for some of them, you don’t have to pay out right away. You pay out the prize over many years, or you pay out in installments. Advertising it actually is a great way for it to go more viral and get a really effective CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), or CPE, (Cost Per Email).

Brian Clark: Obviously, I m always a content guy, but it’s interesting of course that the same thing we teach people about what’s the right social network? Well, it depends. Who are you trying to reach? That’s absolutely the same thing with advertising except the stakes are just a bit higher when you start burning cash.

Noah Kagan: The thing to add to that, Brian, you re very right, your cash is at stake. In addition to that, what you have to consider is everyone s already doing Facebook. Everyone s already doing Twitter. A lot of people are doing Google already. They re a $100-$200 billion plus company. Where are people not advertising? That’s actually where I have some of the best success with spending money for results. Are there new networks like SnapChat that haven t been tapped out fully? Are there smaller bloggers? Are there new directories? The places where people haven t advertised yet, I’ve always had the best success.

Two Surprisingly Successful Recent Ad Campaigns

Brian Clark: It’s interesting because you ll see MailChimp and SquareSpace, heavy podcast sponsors. They re everywhere. You would imagine it s got to be working. You would hope that they actually care. I don t know about SquareSpace. They buy Superbowl ads.

Noah Kagan: I mean, I buy Senior Citizen home ads. I was talking to one — I don t know if I m allowed to mention his name — but it s a pretty popular health supplement company. He said that he gets 95 percent of his revenue from podcasts, and it s because he sponsors all the major podcasts. So I can t say 100 percent that it s working for everybody, but I m saying that s a channel that I would even consider.

What I look for in advertising, besides that it s ROI, is that it s scalable and repeatable because if you can do it one time, fine, but if you can t scale it or repeat it, like Reddit, for example.

In the beginning of AppSumo, I spent a crap ton of money on Reddit ads because not as many people were doing it, and it was really cheap. There was a lot of traffic, and over time, I couldn t repeat it. No matter what I did, no matter what we advertised, or which subreddit, it just stopped working. That s what happens with ads. When there s a short line at the grocery store, everyone moves into that one.

Brian Clark: So you re saying the actual popularity of the platform impacts your advertising just because of the sheer volume of competitive messages.

Noah Kagan: Yeah, because if you are advertising to Tim Ferris fans, and I am too, then it s just going to get more expensive until a point — for a certain person, it s profitable, but for other people, it won t be.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that s interesting. All right, Noah. I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing your wisdom. A lot of good stuff. A lot of things to digest. I would take this show as a starting point. Do your research. We re going to link up some of the resources that Noah already mentioned, including SumoMe, for you to check.

What s coming up next? Anything you want to preview or tease at?

Noah Kagan: We re developing out SumoMe. Besides even using SumoMe, I think everyone in general needs to build their own email lists. Facebook and Twitter are good backups to amplify your messages, but as things get more locked down, you basically want to be able to connect directly with your customers. Possibly the next thing we re not working on, but someone is — is being able to mass text message your customers, not in an annoying way, but in a permission way where they re looking forward to hearing from you.

Brian Clark: Yeah, there s a lot of people I think working on that. Anyway, thanks, sir, very much for your time.

Noah Kagan: Alright, brother.

The Transcript

Why Copyblogger Media is Betting Big on Podcasting

Robert Bruce: I guess we should start with the fact that we re in new digs here. We re in a new home. Rainmaker.FM has been around for a while, but this is the first episode that we re doing this. What do you think of this new place?

Brian Clark: I think it s kind of crowded. It used to be just us and those guys on The Lede.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: There s how many shows?

Robert Bruce: There are 10 shows, eleven if you count the Master Feed, which is all of the shows in one feed. You re convinced that not many people are going to use that Master Feed, but we ll see.

Brian Clark: Yeah, who knows? I don t know. I just think it s ironic that we re announcing our podcast network, and I have a cold and I kind of sound like Barry White, baby.

Robert Bruce: Do you have a fireplace going, and some scotch next to you?

Brian Clark: Oh yeah. Smoking jacket on.

Robert Bruce: What are your plans for the evening, Brian Barry?

Brian Clark: I think I m going to stop doing that before I embarrass myself further.

Robert Bruce: So here we are, Rainmaker.FM. If you re listening to this through iTunes, you should go check out quietly. We re not announcing this actually until next week. When this goes up it will be Thursday morning, but we re not actually publicly announcing this till next Monday, but check out Rainmaker.FM. Tell us what you think. It s the first live episode that we re doing here.

Brian Clark: Don t forget to give us a rating and a review on iTunes because all of these upstarts are coming along, and we need to increase our lead, so to speak.

Robert Bruce: Yes. You listening to this right now are among the first who have seen it, so thank you. Brian, there is a little interesting news item this week, and a bummer. We re starting this brand new media property, Rainmaker.FM, the same week that a major player is going down, and that s GigaOm, the news of GigaOm.com.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it s shocking to me and sad. It s been around as long as Copyblogger actually. It was about the same time that Om transformed it from a personal blog into a true media property. It just caught me by surprise because I think Om left a year ago to go join True Ventures as a venture capitalist, and there was an infusion of $8 million at the time. Now, on one hand, they either spent $8 million amazingly fast, and are completely broke, but I think probably that was a buyout of Om.

Maybe the cash didn t stay completely in the company or at all, and they had changed to a content marketing focus, in that they were primarily looking to sell research to make money. I think it just brings up one of these eternal questions. It s obviously not that content marketing doesn t work. If you re not in sync with your product or service matched up to your audience, you can still fail even if your content is fantastic like Gigaom. Yeah, It s a bit sad.

Robert Bruce: Fantastic.

Brian Clark: But it s also kind of a lesson at the same time.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, really good content, but also major property, major audience, major numbers going on over there for a long, long time. It is a bummer.

Brian Clark: The whole point of having an audience is listening to what they want to buy, not deciding what you want to sell, and that s been the Copyblogger story all along. Here we are launching a major new authority site based on audio, which is a way to reach a different audience than the core Copyblogger audience. Yet what we re selling — the very platform that it s built on — we know people want it, because from the launch in September, we are now into seven figures easily and growing every day.

The trick for us is not that we have to figure out what people want to buy. We ve done that from listening over the years. Now, it s how do you reach more of the type of people that are going to go for Rainmaker as opposed to self-hosted WordPress or something like that.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Okay, we ve broken this down into three parts, today s episode. We re going to talk about that. We re going to talk about audio content in general and specifically what we ve been doing in the past for part one, what we re doing right now in the present with Rainmaker.FM, and then also what some ideas about what the future may hold.

We re going to stick to that little format. Some of the parts of the story is just going to be me interviewing you, or before I knew you, actually, then moving to the present and the future.

Let s go back to 2005. You launched Copyblogger in 2006, January of 2006. But I know you d been thinking for a long time about what you wanted to do, what type of content, what format, what type of topics you wanted to do.

But there s one thing in particular before you came up with the idea of Copyblogger. You had another idea. Tell us what that idea was and what this thing might have been.

More on Why I Didn t Start a Podcast in 2005

Brian Clark: In 2005, I exited the two real estate companies that I started, sold those to my partners which was a disaster, and ultimately left me with not much of anything. Just to keep it clear that I was not flushed with cash at that point. I had to hustle doing a few online projects in the fall of 2005 just to survive. Looking around at the time, you ve got blogging, which is growing up into pro blogging or commercial blogging.

The other interesting thing that happened and was going on was early, early, early podcasts. Remember they were named after the iPod? I don t know if that s lost on people at this point given that the iPod has been discontinued, and it s really the iPhone and various other technologies that have really caused podcasting to finally explode 10 years later, 9 years later. I was just so fascinated with the concept even though I d never done any form of audio recording outside of You know those little push button tape recorders we had when we had to record songs off the radio.

Robert Bruce: Oh yeah. Absolutely.

Brian Clark: And try to catch it before the DJ started talking or get that instance of the song. That must sound so insane to younger people. Then we d have to carry around a boom box on our shoulder, and we thought the Walkman, which was the size of a small attaché case, and yellow.

Robert Bruce: Okay, we can reminiscence all we want later.

A Short History of Copyblogger Audio Content

Brian Clark: Yeah, I was fascinated. I wanted to start a podcast even though I was completely unqualified to do it, yet I was qualified to write. Smartly, I would say, I started Copyblogger instead. I played to my strengths and that was fortuitous in lots of ways. Number one, I probably would have been terrible. Number two, podcasting crashed and burned. The big VC funded network, I can t remember what it was called, but Scoble was involved and some other technology people tied to blogging and RSS, and it crashed and burned.

Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ was known as the pod father and he was a big podcasting advocate. He was very persuasive about how powerful podcasting was, and his venture completely failed. I m not even sure what he s doing anymore. But he was the man. Everyone listened. Well, everyone being us nerds. We all listened to that show. Did you ever listen to Curry?

Robert Bruce: Oh, I was only aware of him from MTV. I was not aware of podcasting in general till about 2006, but no. No, I missed him in that format all together.

Brian Clark: Yeah. So I think we met in 2006, and you have always had this fascination with audio.

Robert Bruce: Yup. What s interesting to me about this is the crash and burn, the first crash and burn of audio online largely because it was expensive. A lot of the tools that we have now weren t around, so if you wanted to both produce it but also consume it, it was a lot more expensive and difficult to do all the way around. It s still not easy to do well. We ve been doing this now for a number of years — and we re starting this podcast network — and there s still bumps and bruises along the way. It s difficult to get really good audio quality all the time.

Brian Clark: Especially when you re managing a lot of people, and kudos to you for that. You and I, for four years we talked about it, 2006 and 2010, wasn t it 2010 that we launched the first?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Bring Clark: You wrote me an email. I was lying in some gutter somewhere, and you wrote me an email and said, Hey, you want to come work with us, with Sonia and I and everybody? One of the first conversations that you and I had was about starting a podcast, and that s exactly what we did.

It was in November of 2010, and it went really well. I mean it was mostly you and I, and Sonia would come on a lot, and then you or I would interview people, basic format, but it was a hardcore teaching format mostly, like everything else we do. And it went really well.

Why We re Betting Big on Audio, and You Should Too

Brian Clark: Yeah. It s interesting, because that show had rabid fans, yet here it was our perception — because we were killing it with text content. Part of the evolution here is it was hard, and the web from a search and sharing standpoint was just so text focused, yet a lot of people don t read. It s not necessarily something you can do while you re doing something else, like driving a car, one would hope. Although I do see that occasionally on the freeway, and I m like, What are you doing?

It s portable. It s on demand. It s all this perfect stuff for the modern world, yet it took a long time to shift. We never took that podcast too seriously. It seemed like just a novelty for some people because we had an audience full of readers, and you write a post that goes viral, you do a podcast and you re like, Hello?

Robert Bruce: Yeah. One interesting aspect of that that we realized quickly was that this was tapping into a whole new audience that we ve never talked about. Obviously there were some overlap from Copyblogger, of course, but there was a whole new audience of these audio people who we had never had the opportunity to talk to before.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and I think that s incredibly true today because there s a big portion of the web that doesn t read 1500-word articles, but they ll easily consume an hour of podcast at the gym, on the run, in the car, whatever the case may be — in the background while they re getting work done. It s radio, except it s on demand and portable.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, 2005, you re thinking about starting a podcast network. You veer into text, which was a smart decision at that time. Five years later, we start a single podcast, and then four years later, actually, let s finish that part. We abruptly ended Internet Marketing for Smart People — you just stopped doing it.

Brian Clark: It actually morphed into The Lede, and then we handed that over.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. There was a period of downtime, and then Jerod came on and Demian, and they started it up again as The Lede. It was pretty abrupt, and we just kind of stopped doing it. I mean we got busy like everybody else, building the company.

Brian Clark: Yeah, as key products and services.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. It s interesting to think about, ultimately, at some level, that we never would have probably articulated this, it was like this is something that can be left behind. If anything has to be, this is probably the thing. That wasn t a conscious decision, but of course it s the decision we made nonetheless.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it was a thing that if you don t have enough time in the day, then that was a thing, that we didn t see the return that everything s brought to us.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and that s 2010. Now fast forward another four years, and we are launching the Rainmaker Platform, which from a product standpoint is really the future for us.

Brian Clark: That s the reason Copyblogger Media was formed in 2010 when we merged the individual businesses together.

Robert Bruce: But here s the thing, you came to me and said — we started talking about audio, and we d been talking about audio constantly throughout this whole time — but you said, I think I want to launch the product, specifically with a podcast. I said, A brand new podcast or what are you talking about because we don t have any traction. Of course, again, Copyblogger will back that up, but you wanted to start a brand new podcast leading up to the launch of the Rainmaker Platform, and that was going to be the way that we were going to launch this. Let s talk about that a little bit.

Brian Clark: We launched the pilot program.

Robert Bruce: Right. Correct, be specific.

Brian Clark: It was crucial because the pilot program got motivated people into the service, and we were able to take their feedback and evolve it from 1.0 to 2.0 before we ever mentioned it on Copyblogger. We did launch a product without ever mentioning it in text or at least on Copyblogger. We did do it with audio. There were three webinars there at the end, to try to boil down into some very intensive education, the concepts that were behind this media not marketing approach, which is a better way of explaining content marketing. A lot of light bulbs went off there.

It was almost unbelievable. I think it was Mike Stelzner who told me that he was listening to — we did the actual announcement of the Rainmaker pilot program was by audio. He was like, I couldn t stop listening. It was fascinating. I was like, Well, thank you, but I was just hoping I wasn t losing people because it was a completely different medium for me compared to writing the announcement post.

Robert Bruce: I got to give it to you because I was worried — and we talked about it but I ve really got to give it to you for that because it worked. I was wondering if it would or how it would work, but it really did.

Brian Clark: I hear that all the time in this company. Everyone keeps waiting me for to make a crazy decision that fails, not to say that all my decisions aren t crazy.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. Let s be clear here.

Brian Clark: There s usually a method behind my madness.

In 2013 as we re coming into the New Year, it s almost like you feel like coming, and what a year 2014 was for podcasting. Now I can t claim to be prescient enough to say, Yeah. I saw a serial coming.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

Brian Clark: It s intuition. It s just an overall awareness that this is gaining momentum, and this is where the future of the audience is beyond the audience that we have. And it s time to go down with it. I was nervous too, frankly. I just didn t tell you.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Well, and what do we know about this medium. Audio is so powerful from a logical standpoint, that you re talking into somebody s head on a regular basis and you become the listener — and this is true for me of the podcasts I listen to anyway — there s a sense of getting to know the person. Of course, you re not really getting to know them but there s a sense.

Brian Clark: I think there is some truth to that. I mean I m certainly more me in this format than I am in writing.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: Because in writing, every word has to be the right word, and I don t really have that luxury. The early new Rainmaker episodes were scripted, which was something we had never done before because we were trying to create this kind of NPR/educational experience that no one in our space had really done before. We forgot to mention that that part of it was not only new to us, but it was new to the market.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. That was 2014 in terms of our story of using audio in the ways that we have. To kind of close out this first section of the past, you and I have talked for years about the idea of a podcast network and kind of liking that. As we said before, it was impractical from a production standpoint and even from a cost standpoint.

Brian Clark: Do you remember that we always talked about it outside the context of Copyblogger because we just felt like our audience didn t like audio enough.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. We re Copyblogger. We write articles.

Brian Clark: Yeah, exactly. Until, the fall of last year and two light bulbs went off at the same time.

The Thinking Behind Our Decision to Build a Podcast Network

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Something happened there, I m not sure, but we both kind of agreed and it came together in a single conversation, I do remember that. We d been building for several years and we thought, Okay, this is crazy. Are we stupid? Let s do a podcast network. That brings us to the present.

I guess in talking about what we re doing now with Rainmaker.FM, I wanted to talk a little more philosophically about it, like why are we doing it, what were the decisions that we made. Some of it was just gut instinct and we just want to do it. But let s start with the general idea of audio versus text. As we were having these conversations, why do you think we were bending more towards audio in the last, let s say, two years?

Brian Clark: It is a way to reach other people. I think even more of our core audience is consuming more audio.

Robert Bruce: Yup.

Brian Clark: They re becoming podcasters themselves. It s just an evolution. I mean it s not like in the real world we are only readers and never watch video or listen to audio. Of course, we all do all of those things. We tend to prefer one medium or another. To this day, if someone tries to sell me an educational course — it could be the best course in the world — but if its video-based, I m just going to go, Well, that s useless unless they have transcripts, because I can get an idea from video, and I certainly like to watch entertainment like Better Call Saul last night.

Robert Bruce: Yup.

Brian Clark: Have you started watching the show yet?

Robert Bruce: I got the first episode in.

Brian Clark: Then?

Robert Bruce: That s as far as I am.

Brian Clark: The latest one is so good, but I m not going to spoil it.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, don t. Don t. I ll reach through this microphone and strangle you. I got caught back up in Sopranos, so I m screwed for another six months or whatever.

Brian Clark: I still haven t tried to do that because I know It affects my work productivity.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. You should take a sabbatical, a three-month sabbatical.

Brian Clark: Yeah, you let me know when I can do that, okay. You watch the house.

Robert Bruce: Just for the Sopranos. Yeah, where the audience is a big one here, and obviously everybody is aware of the kind of the rise of digital audio content and the ease of which the consumer s able to grab it.

Brian Clark: I think why we decided in that one conversation it was smart. The Rainmaker Platform is not a podcasting platform, but it s got some of the best podcast functionality anywhere.

Robert Bruce: Yup.

Brian Clark: You can create an entire network with it. It s got stats built right in. It s got submission built right in. It s really powerful, and of course it does about 50,000 other things. And Rainmaker.FM itself will demonstrate a lot of those things because audio is content, but it s not the entire aspect of what works best for lead generation or cultivating community, or conversion, all of that kind of stuff. It s a big part of what Rainmaker does. It s not the only thing. We re not selling it as a podcasting platform, but with the growing enthusiasm for audio content, almost every marketer should be using audio at this point.

We re kind of keyed in, and we re like, We need to reach the people we re not reaching, and we ve got all these great features, and we want to do more audio and it s just perfect. It s so funny, you and I decided this in a conversation, then we had to tell everyone else. The response was amazing, right? People were like beating down your door to be involved.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. This idea of not only the podcast because like we said we ve got the new Rainmaker podcast, which we should talk about the change in name here so there s no confusion a little bit, too.

Brian Clark: The change back you mean.

Robert Bruce: The change back, right. The original name of this show was New Rainmaker. We changed it to Rainmaker.FM for various reasons. Now because the network is itself Rainmaker.FM, this show is again what it once was.

Brian Clark: We actually changed the name before we made the decision, and then we just left it because it got the brand out there.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: We even changed the Twitter account. It became Rainmaker.FM. The platform became associated with Rainmaker.FM, and that was a very conscious decision to make sure that people understood the difference.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: The only thing you call New Rainmaker from now on is this show.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, so the why podcasting question I think is relatively obvious, but the next question that begs — in terms of what we re doing — is why a podcast network? Why this group of shows under one banner that we re starting with 10 shows? You ll see that this is going to rapidly grow in terms of the number of shows and as we work on issues of quality both in content and in production. Why a podcast network? Why even think along those lines?

Brian Clark: It s this other trend. Jay Baer has been talking about it a lot — employee generated content, tapping in to the people within your organization, whether it s a huge enterprise or a smaller business in order to create relevant content from the people who are in different facets not just marketing or in our case, editorial.

The people on the front lines, your chief of operations, your head of product development, all these people have perspectives that the folks of marketing need to understand better, yet why do we have to filter everything through marketing or editorial. In fact, some of those voices may turn out to be breakout stars. We started looking around our own organization, and we have a lot of Internet celebrities. Chris Garrett has been a blogger longer than me.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, in his own right. Yup.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Tony Clark used to write but as soon as he met me, he quit because he wanted me to do it all.

Robert Bruce: He does write. He writes a Copyblogger post every seven years, once every seven years.

Brian Clark: Is that it? Okay.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, that s the rule. The idea of tapping into your own resources and your own people — obviously if you re in a smaller organization or you re on your own, this is not necessarily going to apply — but the other side of this that does apply is talking to your talented friends and colleagues around you if this is the way you want to think.

In a moment, we ll do a quick overview of all the shows on the network, but you ll notice that we ve got currently two non-Copyblogger shows, folks that have been or are starting their own thing, and we ll be looking more into that as well. These are people who are not Copyblogger employees, but again, like Chris Garrett, in their own right, subject matter experts and interested in these topics.

A Brief Overview of the Current Rainmaker.FM Lineup

Brian Clark: People like Loren Baker, he founded Search Engine Journal. He works with Greg Boser at Foundation Digital. This guy knows his stuff. He s not really creating content on a regular basis. He has the expertise. He s got a great voice, and he was interested in doing a podcast. I m like, Hey, Loren, how about a show that s kind of focused on modern SEO? He s like, Yeah, absolutely, because we can assist in building his audience much more rapidly than he would be able to do alone.

Jon Nastor of Hack the Entrepreneur, that was just me and him hitting it off. I m like, Hey, we re doing this network. He s like, Yup. I m like, Wait, I haven t asked you yet. It was flattering that he would bring that because that s a great show. It s not going to be our approach to add existing shows to the network like in the way of recruitment. If it happens to happen, great. We re more interested in finding people with subject matter expertise, say Tim Hayden in mobile. They ve got an interest in podcasting we help them get started fresh. That makes more sense to us.

Also, what about this? In our audience out there, there s got to be a huge amount of talent aspiring to start their own show. Those may be the people we need to talk to because we can give them the most benefit with production, promotion, wisdom, what have we learned, what have we screwed up. All that kind of stuff becomes ingrained within the production of this site, and we re able to help people join us in a way that s mutually beneficial.

Robert Bruce: Yup. You mentioned Jon Nastor with Hack the Entrepreneur, Loren Baker s new show which is called — I got to say probably my favorite show title in the entire network right now — which is Search & Deploy.

Brian Clark: He threw out like five different titles to me, and I m like it s Search & Deploy. No, that was like the first or second one, and he kept giving me ideas, and I m like, No, it s Search & Deploy.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. You can stop now. You started this — let s go briefly through the other shows. Sonia Simone, our Chief Content Officer, she s running a show called the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer.

Brian Clark: Which is another great title and the greatest show art ever.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, the show art is pretty amazing. Thank you, Lauren. She s doing a quick weekly monologue-rant type thing. I won t get into super detail with some of these descriptions. You can go to Rainmaker.FM and right on the homepage read a description of each show.

Stefanie Flaxman, she s Editor-in-Chief over at Copyblogger.com. Her show is called Editor-in-Chief. Talking about things, building your platform from that perspective.

Brian Clark: That s a really interesting show because it s instead of just like Grammar Girl or something, which is important, it s a methodology.

Robert Bruce: Yup.

Brian Clark: It s incredibly insightful and stuff that it s hard to talk about in another medium.

Robert Bruce: The grammar angle on that is huge — certainly there will be a lot of direct teaching with that — Stefanie and I were talking about it, building up to the launch of the network itself. She is hardcore in terms of getting all the details right. That kind of thing is going to be infused in her show for sure.

Anyway, that s kind of a must listen. Then we get into the weirder side of things with Demian Farnworth, which is par for the course, I think, from Mr. Farnworth — obviously it s some tongue-in-cheek there. But he s got a show called Rough Draft which is a daily show, very short-form monologue, four minutes. It s pure Demian for you pure writers out there. I have a great affection for this show already.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I mean everyone I hope is familiar with the epic homerun viral sensation post this guy writes. I mean anyone who s creating content or writing should listen to Demian, yet Demian is our resident crazy person. I think he replaced you in that.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I think so.

Brian Clark: You re relatively sane. You just don t leave the house much.

Robert Bruce: No.

Brian Clark: But Demian is so much fun to listen to because he s got brilliance and insanity, right there, that fine line — he walks it every day.

Robert Bruce: Yup. If you re the pure writer, he s your man. Rough Draft is your show. Then we move into something like Hit Publish, Pamela Wilson, I don t know how much you want to talk about what s been going on behind the scenes here, but this is a phenomenal show on a couple of levels. First of all, Pamela is super smart.

Brian Clark: She s also been writing for Copyblogger I think longer and more consistently than anyone in history, and we ve had 150 guest writers.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Something like that. She s almost been part of the team in spirit for a long time, and then of course she came on board, and she s just a badass. She s actually taking over Copyblogger.com.

Robert Bruce: It s probably a whole other episode in and of itself.

Brian Clark: It probably is. We ll get Pamela on here to talk about that.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. What s cool here though with Hit Publish, her show, is she decided to take the high production value road. She s doing a lot heavy-duty editing, working with our editor.

Brian Clark: She s kind of taking on what we were trying to do with New Rainmaker in the first iteration.

Robert Bruce: Exactly.

Brian Clark: Remember when we did those two episodes where I interviewed Sally Hogshead and just kind of interspersed it, again, like a very NPR format. She nailed it, though. She s got multiple voices. I did a recording session with her and answered four questions in a batch on different topics, and she did that with several other people. She s got all this material, and she just weaves it together with the help of our production team.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I m sitting here thinking about all these. We re going to need to bring some of these folks on to talk about how they do.

Brian Clark: Absolutely.

Robert Bruce: Audio production is a big enough topic in and of itself and how people are putting their shows together, thinking about it, choosing their format, all of that.

Brian Clark: And what not to do yourself.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, which is by the way, we re going to learn obviously in these first months and first year, there s going to be some huge lessons on that, what not to do. Then we come to the best show of the entire network which is New Rainmaker.

Brian Clark: No bias there.

Robert Bruce: Jerod and I have an ongoing rivalry between New Rainmaker and The Lede. This has been going on for some time. He thinks The Lede is better, I disagree but we ll see how that pans out.

Brian Clark: Well, I have to side with you, Robert. I don t mean to be the impartial, or partial CEO, but I have to admit this is my show, our show, but I m part of us.

Robert Bruce: Right. I think that s smart. Speaking of The Lede, a lot of you are going to know about that show which is Jerod Morris, and Demian, again, makes an appearance weekly on The Lede. Sometimes they interview folks. They re going to change that up a little bit, so if you have been listening to The Lede, make sure you keep on track or check back in with it.
Then we get into some interesting things, a couple of little different things as we close up this overview of the opening shows, something like No Sidebar with Brian Gardner. He s our Chief Product Officer, founder of StudioPress.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Talk about a personal revolution, no pun intended, for those of you who remember that Brian effectively created the premium WordPress market with the Revolution theme. He has become Mr. Podcaster.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. The last couple of weeks have been really cool. He s kind of found his new thing. We ll see what he talks about on the podcast itself, but we ve been having these conversations, he and I. He s gotten into editing himself and doing the actual audio editing and dropping his bumpers in and making sure everything is perfect in how he wants it to be. He went out and stepped up on a microphone and built a little a recording studio for himself, so we might have created an audio monster there, we ll see.

Brian Clark: Brian doesn t do anything half ass. He just doesn t. StudioPress runs like a well-oiled machine, and he s just sitting there going, What do I do? First thing, though, he started building his sites on Rainmaker, and he s become like an amazing evangelist. He s like, I had a conversation with so and so, and they re coming over to the platform. Like, Really? I thought that was my job and but thank you. Thank you.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: Because business development is the hardest in the world, but with the Rainmaker Platform, often it s just a conversation, and then it s like we deal with migration issues and stuff like that. Anyway, he got really into the Rainmaker Platform, which was refreshing given that he s a hardcore WordPress guy, and he got it. I m not sure he was ever completely sold the whole three years of building because he was primarily running the StudioPress side of things. There s that, but then he actually got the title of his show, No Sidebar, from one of our shows.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. You were going on a rant about, I don t think it was landing pages specifically.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I think it was the landing page.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Stripping everything down. There s no header. There s no sidebar. There s no extra crap, and he ran with it.

Brian Clark: It s nice to know I can say something random and have it turn into a media property.

Robert Bruce: Right. He s got his podcast, No Sidebar, but he also built — on the Rainmaker Platform — nosidebar.com, which is a weekly newsletter and is evolving constantly, so we ll see what he does with that. There s a lot going on there, and there s a lot to come from Mr. Gardner on the audio side of things.
Then we get into for you nerds and geeks out there, Chris Garrett and Tony Clark have launched a show called The Mainframe, and they re going to be talking about a lot of stuff, but particularly the intersection of marketing and technology and how to use these tools that we all have to use and how to use them better and be smart about it. They re also going to be talking about Dr. Who and whatever it is they re watching.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It s like the intersection of MarTech and Marvel. Because if you follow both of those guys on Twitter, they re just usually spazzing out about the latest X-Men news or whatever the case may be. We re like, Hey, you should do a show, and you should do that stuff, too. They re like, Are you sure? Because you re always talking about value for the audience and whatnot. I m like, But in this medium, people want to hear a little bit about what makes you, you. It s not like you and I didn t just make Breaking Bad, Better Call Soul, and Soprano references in midstream. It s just our geekery is different from their geekery, although I m also kind of a Marvel geek, too.

Robert Bruce: Then the last thing is of course the Master Feed, the Rainmaker.FM Master Feed. If you want all the shows in one place, the fire hose.

Brian Clark: This is the fire hose of Rainmaker.FM. With the podcast player now, it s in your phone or on the iPod or whatever, you could just stroll through everything that s newest and greatest, so it ll be interesting to see how many people adopt that. But it is definitely a way to never miss anything.

Robert Bruce: Right. One swipe, other shows you re not into, one swipe it s out of there. Yeah, exactly. That s my thought is if you don t want to miss anything, grab the Master Feed and you re good. That will be doable now, but we ll see in a couple of months when other shows come online.

Brian Clark: As more shows come online, we ll be able to make categorical feeds. The hardcore marketing stuff over here, technology and development over here with design, we ll figure that out, but it s too early to worry about that at this point.

What s Coming Next (and Soon) for Rainmaker.FM

Robert Bruce: So that s an overview of all the shows currently on Rainmaker.FM and that kind of wraps this second part, which is the present. Let s quickly talk about the future. There s a lot here that we re not going to get into, but just as a general kind of thing we ve talked, you and I, before on this show about how the future of audio itself, the future of radio and the future of audio itself online, as the technology becomes even easier than it is now for the general consumer. This is one reason why we ve built this podcast network, because we want to be tied into that wave. We want to go where the audience goes. We want to go into the stream in the direction that it s already flowing, and audio is definitely flowing in this direction. It s not the only reason, but it certainly is one consideration.

Brian Clark: Well, right now you ll see on the home page with the headline that it s focused specifically on digital marketing.

Robert Bruce: Correct.

Brian Clark: As far as we can tell, and we ve looked, just at launch we re the largest digital marketing podcast network in the world. If we re wrong about that, drop a comment, let us know because I d love to see, but as far as what I can see in iTunes or even in Google, this is out of the gate the largest digital marketing podcast network around. I think we ll be double the size in a month or so, which is fairly ambitious — I don t want to overstate the case here — but you could imagine with the brand and the continued ease and popularity of podcast as an on-demand, portable education source for people who need the latest tips, tactics, stories, strategies, all that stuff to stay at the top of their game.

The brand Rainmaker.FM could encompass all of marketing and sales not just digital marketing. That remains to be seen. That would be super ambitious. I mean that s literally what should be a VC-funded company, and yet to this day, we are still completely bootstrapped and self-funded. We re just reinvesting more of what we make into the future, as all smart companies should.

Robert Bruce: I want to run something by you to close this out, and that is kind of a picture — I was digging around — This was months ago when we were first really seriously talking about how this might work, and in the 1920s and 30s, you look at a company like NBC and specifically with the radio station — that s what it was, and what they were doing and how they were developing shows and how they were developing talent.

This may be an obvious connection to some, but I think it s worth saying that it really is no different other than thinks like money and funding and technology of course. NBC building their broadcast system, obviously on a smaller scale and on a more streamlined scale, there s not much difference there. We re doing something here, not going to be as big as NBC, of course, that s not what I m saying.

Brian Clark: What? Now come on, Robert.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Right. Sorry, about that.

Brian Clark: Maybe you re feeling a little overworked right now but let s not box ourselves in.

Robert Bruce: Let me rephrase. The metaphor stands. This is what — and what you can do as well is think like this — look to the past for those cues, for the cues of quality, for the cues of professionalism, for structure. Of course, the technology has changed, and I find it interesting that in the 1920s and 30s when NBC was this powerhouse and even more on the rise. We re getting into the 20s and 30s again, and maybe this is something to look at going forward where an individual could do this. I mean this is a lot of work. Maybe someday we ll talk about what went into this.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Even more, it s more relevant.

Robert Bruce: But you can build your own radio station.

Brian Clark: Look at Procter & Gamble. I use that as an example all the time. They started off with soap operas as radio shows to reach housewives to sell soap to, literally, soap operas. I like that one even better because we are starting off as a content marketing play effectively. We are our own sponsor, but just like Procter & Gamble ended up being one of the largest brand advertisers in history, there is nothing stopping us from expanding into accepting sponsorship ourselves.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

Brian Clark: Again, that is not on the plate at this point. But you just look how relatively primitive things are in media when they start, everything from the original films which were just stage plays to early television. What comes around goes around kind of thing, which is ironic, but at the same time, we also get more sophisticated. We get more scale, and there s a lot of money looking at podcasting right now. That s the other side of things. Are we going to even be allowed to make this into what we wanted on our own?

Robert Bruce: To exist without taking some of that. So as far as the future, that s the picture. Obviously, more shows. We hope to grow the audience of course. On the company and product side, we ll see what happens there, but obviously the growth and evolution of the Rainmaker Platform. Really, that s it. Any other final thoughts before we close this one out and put it in the can?

Brian Clark: No. I d love to have you guys and gals go over to Rainmaker.FM, sample some of the other shows, poke around. This is very early stages for the site. It will grow and evolve in sophistication using more and more of what Rainmaker has built right in, and let us know what you think just knowing that there s more to come. Also if you re listening to this right away, there has been no public announcement of this other than this.

Robert Bruce: As always, you guys are first.

Brian Clark: We re not going to cry if you talk about it, but the official launch is Monday the 16th.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. A final note on that. If you go to Rainmaker.FM and you want to get everything delivered, there s a big green free registration button you ll see. Click that button. That will get you into our weekly email. Right now it s weekly. We re working on how to deliver that the best way from that source.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it will be weekly. It may be the best option right now because we re still getting all the shows into iTunes and all that, so there may be a brief lag between iTunes catching up with us. But as far as our property, our real estate — lesson here, not dependent on iTunes one bit — it s all ready to go for you to take in the initial shows.

Robert Bruce: Brian, thanks, and wherever or whenever you guys out there are on the Internet, good luck to you. We ll see you next week.

Brian Clark: Take care, everyone.

The Transcript

Henry Rollins on the Art and Business of DIY Media

Voiceover: This episode of Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by Authority Rainmaker. It’s a different kind of online marketing conference; for one thing, Henry Rollins is keynoting. Get all the details at authorityrainmaker.com. And yes, it’s that Henry Rollins.

Brian Clark: This is Brian Clark, and welcome to the show. Today’s guest is musician, writer, journalist, publisher, actor, television and radio host, spoken-word artist, comedian, and activist Henry Rollins. Did I mention that he just started his own podcast and is kind of a personal hero to me? Yeah.

The reason why Henry is on this podcast, and more importantly, why he’s doing the closing keynote at our conference in May, comes down to this quote from an interview he did. I think he was on tour in New Zealand at the time. Here’s what he said: “Everything I do, writing, touring, traveling, it all comes from a punk and hardcore attitude, from that expression — from being open to try things but relying on yourself, taking what you have into the battle and making of it what you will, hoping you can figure it out as you go.”

Now, I’m not comparing what we do as DIY media creators to getting in the van and touring with a punk band. Truth is, with all the tools we have, plus the open Internet, we have it pretty damn easy. But it’s the attitude that matters, and the work ethic, and that’s exactly why everyone should be listening to what Mr. Rollins has to say.

Henry, thank you so much for joining us.

Henry Rollins: No problem at all.

Why He Started a Podcast, and How He s Producing It

Brian Clark: So, first of all, I was delighted and maybe even surprised a little, given that you have a radio show, and you’ve got a television show, and you just started a podcast called Henry and Heidi. From listening to the first episode, it’s clear that you blame Heidi for the whole thing, but why don’t you shed a little light on that relationship and how that came to happen?

Henry Rollins: Heidi came to my publishing company as a new hire about 17-point-something years ago. On her first hour there, we were already arguing — not in a mean way — but she basically said, “Are you always like this? Because if you are, I’m outta here.” I’m like, whoa.

We agree on most things, but she finds it necessary to discipline and school me fairly often.

She’s come up with a lot of ideas that we utilize at this company, the publishing company. We do books; a lot of the ways we do things are her ideas, and a lot of the ways we edit books and the ways we go after work for me are Heidi’s innovations.

It’s been a really good lesson for me over the years to learn to collaborate with someone and learn to listen when I want to argue. It’s very difficult for some of us to shut our mouths; it s very hard for me, but I’ve learned that Heidi often has the best idea. In fact, you can count on that. When she has an idea, I just learned to shut up and take notes. So it’s been very interesting.

Everywhere we go, we’re always nattering at each other, and people ask us, “How long have you two been married?” We’re not married at all or related in that way. We’re very good friends, obviously, but it’s been an interesting relationship.

And as technology furthers and makes things more accessible to plain old folks, we’ve also been discovering different platforms, more recently like the podcast, which was all Heidi’s idea.

She said we should do a podcast. I said, I need to get a different bit of gear, because I only have one box for doing my voice-over for auditions and my radio show. She said, Get a different box, then. I said, Okay, so I did that. My engineer buddy came in and set it up and gave me some lessons, and we made our first podcast, I’d say, a couple weeks ago, and the thing is incredibly successful, which both of us are still quite confused by; I mean, it does very well.

But that was all Heidi’s idea. We just do our thing; right in the office, we have two microphones and whatever this gadget is that gets us into a WAV file.

Brian Clark: It’s interesting to me, full circle; I remember the first time I heard Black Flag was when I was 16. It was Damaged; I didn’t even know that you weren’t the first singer of Black Flag, that you came from the audience.

Now I want to talk about that a little bit. You did everything yourselves, and then, of course, you’ve been in films, and you’re in radio and television, and now you ve come full circle to where you sit in your office and do it yourself again with your longtime co-conspirator. How does that feel?

The Secret Weapon Behind His Entire Media Business

Henry Rollins: It feels great to have such autonomy and be able to keep doing it year after year and to rely on your inspiration and hard work and the fact that it pays off. When I say that word — pays — I’m very careful with anything that sounds or smells like money. For me, paying off is the ability to do it next year, and the year after, and the year after. Something that is able to be sustained — a sustainable, innovative work environment — is sort of all I’ve ever wanted. And you’ll find that with a lot of DIY companies.

I just want to keep the lights on and keep the ideas going, because I enjoy the ideas more, and executing them, and realizing them. And then ultimately, let’s say you finish a book — the best part about finishing a book is you get it off your desk, and all of the sudden you have an empty desk that you can fill up with a new idea. It’s like building a big ship over and over again; it’s right there when you crack the champagne over the mast of the ship, because that’s what they do, and you set it out, but then you have an empty harbor, and well, let’s get busy, and you get inspired all over again.

To be able to do that year after year, that, to me, is the goal. It is the thing that gets me up early in the morning and has me obsessively working right through the weekend without really noticing, working through holidays. I’m somewhat driven, but it’s not like I’m driven because of the stockholders. I’m driven because I have a lot of ideas and only so much time. Life is finite. Ideas are seemingly limitless. All of my DIY pursuits all come from one basic idea: I want to do this. You have ideas? Well, I have ideas, too. You have to wrap them in steel and take them into the battleground of the role, because you’re not the only person thinking of things.

What Most DIY Media People (Business or Punk) Miss

Henry Rollins: One of the things that a lot of DIY people don’t take into account is that there’s other innovative people who wake up early just like you, and their ideas are good too; you’re all, in a way, competing for a certain bandwidth. There’s only so many people in the world who can be anywhere near what you want to do or what you want to bring them, and you only have so much time, money, and attention that they can bring to any one thing. So it’s you and five other people or more.

What It Takes to Succeed in Business (and Rock)

Henry Rollins: You get a record company; we have really great bands. You know what? There’s a lot of good labels and a lot of good bands. Why should I take your record? All of your getting up early in the morning comes from trying to answer that question. I go into that basic question with the same basic thing I’ve gone into everything, from being on a record label that was owned by the band or owned by members of the band to starting my own company, which I’ve had since 1983, and they still keep going.

It s that single idea of wanting to do something, and you find that you must put every single thing you have into that idea; your DNA, every amount of affection, everything you’ve got goes into those ideas, to where you had no idea you could be that tired and still work. You push yourself, quite often, past any rational threshold of exhaustion or sanity, and realize, Oh, I can do 19 hours. I can still function at 19 hours. It’s not good for your health to sustain that, but you find out you could do some amazing amount of percent more than what you thought. I learned that by being in Black Flag.

What Black Flag Taught Him about Working Insanely Hard

Henry Rollins: I always thought I was a hard worker. Then I joined Black Flag, and then I realized what hard work was, because the people around me — Greg Ginn, Chuck Dukowski — were these work mavens who made me look like a lightweight, so I learned very quickly. It was not easy, and it was a very hard adjustment to make.

Brian Clark: That’s hard to imagine, as hard as we know you’ve worked over the years. Let’s go back a little bit to Black Flag, because you’ve done a lot on your own since then; of course, you sang lead in a band before you joined Black Flag, but it was the whole idea.

In Washington, D.C., where you came from, you’ve got Minor Threat; no one wants to sign Minor Threat. They should have, but they didn’t know. Go to L.A.; no one wants to sign Black Flag, Greg Ginn starts SST. You guys produce and distribute your own records, and you set up your own gigs and your own tours. Was that the learning experience of DIY, or did you already have the mentality before your joined the group?

How He Financed His First Record Label

Henry Rollins: I had a baby version of it from watching Ian MacKaye, who is from Minor Threat, Fugazi. I watched him build Dischord pretty much at his mom’s kitchen table. He was like, Okay, it’s going to look like this; we’re going to do this, and suddenly he’s got a mailing address. There’s mail order. He has to sell things, and how are you going to do that ethically, fairly? How do people get paid?

I watched him navigate all these obstacles that keep you from being a fair and decent person. He’s quite good at it, but it’s his inherent goodness that he brought to the table, and what you see with Dischord and all the bands and all the music he’s produced, which is just unfathomable, the amount of records Ian has produced — it’s kind of crazy when you see how many records have his name on the back — he comes at it from the same basic core.

I’ve gotten the hang of it; I’ve got my own little band, and the second record on Dischord was my band. I financed that record myself; Dischord didn’t have the money, and my band mates didn’t either. I’m the one who had the full-time job. I financed the recording, the pressing — all of it was me, all $800 of it. But in those days, that was a lot of money. When you’re working for $3.65 an hour, that’s a lot of money, but you just do it.

By the time I got to Black Flag, I had an idea: got to have a mailing list, got to be able to get to your people, and all of that. But SST was more formed; Ian got inspiration from SST. He used to get on the phone with Chuck Dukowski and get crib notes. I remember that he was like, “I called Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag today.” I said, “You did what?” These people were from Mars to us. We were like relative hicklets. I said, “How’d you do that?” He said, “I looked them up in the directory.” I said, “You can do that?” I wouldn’t have even thought of that.

You know Ian; he’ll meet anybody. Nothing really blows his hair back. He could meet the president and go, “Oh hey, I voted for you.” Nothing really gets at him. So he called Chuck and said, “Well, here’s what I’m doing,” and sent him a couple Dischord records; I think that’s how Black Flag first heard me. We sent him my little record.

The Development of His Direct-Mail Marketing Plan

Henry Rollins: Anyway, SST was more developed, had more catalog, had more time in that arena, and was very ambitious. We were running at it; Ian was finding his way through the forest, and SST was taking the machetes to the dense undergrowth looking to build a super highway. All of a sudden, you’re doing band practice, and they gave me assignments: You’re going to be managing all the press; you’re going to take care of all the incoming mail.

All of a sudden, I had this really full-time, archival, public-relations-man thing going. I’m the one relating to the fans; I’m the one keeping all the fliers. I put that job on myself. I’m the one going through all the mail, getting mail orders, fan mail, taking down everyone’s address for the mailing list, and writing up the newsletter, things like that. It was all part and parcel of doing everything yourself.

You realize very quickly how much labor is involved; you want to do it on your own? Okay, it might very well be more than you thought it was going to be. You’d better be ready, and you’d better be ready to be ready. For me, that’s what it was. It was like, wow, you jump out of the plane, and you land really hard. The first fiscal quarter — for the first three or six months of Black Flag — for me, was doing more push-ups than you’re able to and still somehow being able to do them.

Brian Clark: That’s an amazing story. In my mind, I always thought of Dischord and SST as being these comparable, running-at-the-same-time movements in different parts of the country. I had no idea that Dischord was the startup compared to SST.

Henry Rollins: We bought the first Black Flag record before there was anything else, before there was a Dischord anything. Certainly, SST isn’t the only independent label in the world; we were buying independent-label records from bands in D.C. In fact, it was Skip Groff at Yesterday and Today Records who had a label called Limp. He gave us the address to send your tape to get it made into a record; we didn’t know. Skip produced my first record because he showed me and Ian where the studio is that Ian still works at to this day — different building, same guy.

Skip had a local record store, and local record stores, as you might know, were responsible for most of the independent labels — at least a large fraction of the independent music labels — in the ’50s and onwards. A lot of your doo-wop records? That was local bands, like local to the area code or zip code; the person putting out the record was the local record store.

The same as doo-wop label Time Square Records that s the Times Square Record store located at Times Square in New York. That was a guy; these kids would come in, and they’d literally sing a capella for him. He’s like, “Okay, let’s get you guys in the studio. We’ll get you a rhythm section, a piano player, and we’ll do this. I’ll put out the record.”

Some of these independent labels, you’d get songs that are epic, but they started being sold out of a record store with super local distribution. The guy comes in his car, picks up a hundred of yours, with a hundred of the other guy’s, and drives it over to the next county, puts it in jukeboxes, and puts it in the record stores. All of that is super homegrown.

Where this is key, in Dischord, is that what we were doing was in no way new, but for us it was new. I remember when Ian and I first walked into the recording studio where he did his first demo, and we were looking around like pilgrims: Wow, look, microphones. It was all new land. It was a very interesting new world for us. We got the hang of it very quickly.

The DIY thing was imprinted upon me as the way to do it from the get-go and to have that idea of empowerment by age 18, or thereabouts, is incredible. It’s very instructive to be able to see what you can do, because a lot of people are so awed by everything from a major label to a huge production studio like Warner Brothers, that they are cowed by the immense size and proficiency of these amazing corporations. Warner Brothers, Sony, they can turn a film around, or an album. They can probably rebuild a bridge or send a man to the moon at this point.

But you? With your idea and your crazy garage band? What do you think you’re going to do? The idea of doing nothing probably kept a lot of really good music, independent film, literature, poetry, comic books, or whatever else, from coming to fruition. Because you look at everything and go, “I could never do that.” Thankfully, I was around people who went, “Oh, yeah? Watch this, because, on my own, I would never have done that. I did not come upon it naturally; it was taught to me.

Brian Clark: Yes. Excellent. I remember Black Flag broke up in the summer of 1986. I had just graduated from high school, heading to college. I was like, that figures. College ended up this weird mash-up of Guns ‘N’ Roses and Jane’s Addiction, which was the odd dichotomy of Los Angeles at that time.

Here’s the story that I hear: that you wanted to write your first book, and you did. You needed a company to do that, so you named it after your birthday, 2.13.61.

How His First Book Was Published

Henry Rollins: Yeah, that was going to be one book. I was being witty. I thought I was being funny. I’ll name it after myself, because it is me, and I liked the way the numbers sounded. I felt there would be no other way to name anything that would get to my DNA more than my birthday.

I publish this first little paperback book after saving money from doing a couple runs of a phantom staple book, which, with things like that, you make 500, and I’ll sell them all. Well, you sold off eight, and the rest you just give away. I did two runs of 500 of that, which gave me enough money, along with saving my per diem money from being on tour, to make my first paperback.

I got some good advice from a local promoter; he said, You need a DBA, which I did not know what a doing business as thing was. He goes, Here’s how you do it. I still have my DBA to this day; I never even opened it. It’s in an envelope — you take out an ad in the paper — and I’m sure my people have come in behind all that, and squared it up so that everything is accountable, but that’s how I started.

My first real identity was a P.O. Box: P.O. Box 246, Redondo Beach, California. Now, people can reach me, and I can now take out small ads in fanzines, or I’ll trade you one of these books for an ad in my fanzine, okay. You’d barter. All of the sudden, there’s people know where to get to you. You basically have a presence. This is obviously before the Internet. While I was doing Black Flag on SST Records, I had my own company going, but with no other artist than me on it, it was relatively easy to run. I’d write and publish and store the inventory wherever I was living at the time. It’d be like me and 1500 books I’d be hauling to whatever hall I was camping out in.

Brian Clark: Yeah, so your original spoken word recordings are all published by your company. The first iteration of the Rollins Band, was the record released by that company, right?

Henry Rollins: I basically bought and paid for the first few records. Then we signed to a small independent label, and we did one record with them, and then we left; but the first two, three, four, or five — I paid for. Then we did one on Texas Hotel, and then at the same time I’m doing spoken word albums as well, and I obviously paid for all of those.

Then we signed to a label called Imago Records, which is a major label through BMG. That’s when things changed in that it’s no longer DIY; it is DIY got you to a major label. But at that time, the major label was a very good thing for us, because you have this hyper-ambitious band with what I think are good songs, but our megaphone — you know, my cannon to get me to you — is only so big. The record will go 30 feet as far as I can throw it, but with a major label getting behind you, now you have some wallop. If you have something good, now you just have a bigger engine to take it down the road.

I leapt at the chance to be on a major, and I got some pushback. What are you selling out? I go, “Well no, actually, I’m trying to be sustainable.” Maybe I should have stuck to my guns and said Okay, maybe I should be like Ian, and just triple down on having a record company and staff up and try to do it that way, but looking at what I achieved in the major label world, I truly think I did the right thing.

Brian Clark: That leads me to my next question because it’s very interesting, because think about back to the early 90s. Nevermind happened, In Utero happened; everyone knows that Nirvana never happens without bands like Black Flag, okay?

Henry Rollins: That never happens without a band like MC5 or The Stooges.

Brian Clark: Yeah, right, you’re absolutely right. There’s a long lineage, but did the mainstream world ever actually acknowledge that until after the fact?

Henry Rollins: That happens all the time.

Brian Clark: Of course.

Henry Rollins: People are bigger after they re dead.

Brian Clark: Right. So in ’94, instead of being ignored by radio and MTV, you’re all over MTV, right? The Rollins Band is huge. You were at, I think, the first Lollapalooza — I was there in some city, I think Houston, and yet Get in the Van is self-published. Did you try to get the big book deal? Why wouldn’t they want Henry Rollins and his book?

The Trip from DIY Scrapper to Grammy-winning Performer

Henry Rollins: They probably did. We never sought book deals. I think management was probably too afraid to approach me, because anything to do with management, management gets a piece of the action. I think if management said, “Hey, let’s try and get you on Random House,” he was probably afraid I would have come at him with a stick, which, I wouldn’t have done, but I wouldn’t have said yes. I probably would have looked at him like, “Are you crazy?” because at that point, I had a three-person staff, an office, and we had distribution. We were in the mix. We were doing very well — a very sturdy independent company.

It very well could have been that, say, Get in the Van had come out on whatever major publisher, it could have been epic. I did license Get in the Van the audiobook to Time Warner. I licensed it, I retained all the rights, but I said, “Well, you’ve got it for five years.” They did that deal, and that actually won a Grammy.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I remember that, which is amazing.

Henry Rollins: It’s crazy seeing that thing in our office. It looks like this weird … You? That? It was one of the oddest Grammy awards ever given. A guy like me, writing a book like that, gets a Grammy? That’s just crazy. But, I’ve never been tempted to turn over my back catalog to another company.

I have done two books that were not on my imprint. One was a buddy of mine, over at, I think, Random House. He said, “You know, I work at a really big publishing house, and I’m a fan of yours.” He’s a really good guy. He said, “Look, let’s do a best-of, a portable Henry Rollins. Let me put it out here, and it will get people to your catalog.” He just liked me, and he said, “I just want more people to read your books, and you’re never going to get the same impact with your label that I have with mine, so let me use my label to help get people to yours.” This is one of the more benevolent things a guy could have done for another guy. That’s amazing; he’s a really good person.

And that book, The Portable Henry Rollins, has gotten a lot of people to the rest of my catalog. I sign copies of that book all the time at shows. For a lot of people, that’s the one book of mine they have. They go, “Yeah, I know you have other books but I’ve never … ” I’m like, Eh, you will, or you won’t.

A couple of years ago, I finished a photo book, and I showed it to Heidi. She said, Good book. I said, “So, when do you want to put it out?” She said, “Well, let’s not put it out on this company.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Photo books are murder to set up. It’s just so much of a cash outlay.” She said, “Look, let’s license it; let’s get an agent, and let’s license the title,” and I said, “Well we don’t have to endure bleeding out that much money to produce it.”

Like I told you before, Heidi and I have been working together a long time; her ideas, about 99.999 percent of the time, are the best idea. I was like, Okay ; we got an agent, and the book got placed at a very good publishing house called Chicago Review, and the book does incredibly well.

Brian Clark: There’s this theme through your career. In my world, you have some people who use DIY media, and they really want to break into traditional media, whatever that means anymore. Some people have been incredibly successful at it, because they’re good, but they don’t want to ask permission; they want to take their own path, whether by necessity or preference.

You’ve done much the same thing, but you do have a show with KCRW, which is a fantastic station, and you do have the History Channel, a show which my kids only know Henry Rollins through, because they’re not old enough yet to listen to Damaged or anything else. You’ve been in the films; when I was thinking about this interview, I was so reminded of your cameo on Californication as yourself, and Hank Moody’s over there ragging on bloggers. I’m like, Dude, I hope that’s not what he’s thinking about us.

The role in Sons of Anarchy, could you play someone more opposite of Henry? I mean, is that a kick for you or what?

Henry Rollins: I got some interesting letters about that. “Henry, how could you?”

Brian Clark: But it’s acting! Like you just said, I think it shows range, if anything.

Henry Rollins: Yeah, I mean it wasn’t always pleasant. The guy was despicable, but it was an interesting world to live in for six months. The thing I think is worth mentioning is, I talked about preparing the book and licensing it to a Chicago Review, or doing Get in the Van the audiobook and licensing it to Time Warner. You might think, well, where’s the DIY in that? All the parts were produced here in this office. Everything was DIY-produced and assembled.

I think it’s not a bad idea necessarily to take your homemade whiskey and get it distribution, because the product is still the same, you just have to be careful of how it is rolled out to people. I don’t have a problem with coming up with something here, like the photobook, or Heidi said, Look, let someone else deal with the six figure overhead for producing the photobook, and let’s just concentrate on the next photobook. I’m like, Wow, okay, and that turned into an amazing idea.

Yet the book you see — it’s called Occupants, if you ever encounter that book — what you see is what I wanted you to see. There was nothing held back. There’s no image that I sent them where the book company went , “Oh, no; oh no no no no.” That would have been a deal breaker for me. That would have been the DIY going, “Oh, really? You re censoring me? I’m out.”

I told them when I met them — I went to Chicago to meet with them — and I said, I don’t do censorship. They said, “Oh, we know who we’re dealing with.” I said, Okay. I said, “I’m not trying to be a tough guy, but if you’re going to have problems with anything I’m going to do, either you trust me, and you let this happen, or let’s just tear anything up now and not aggravate each other. We’re adults, and we’re professionals, and we’re all hyper-busy, why waste each other’s time?” They said, “No, you do your thing, and we’ll be here to get it going, and me and this editor worked with each other face-to-face, in each other’s grills for months, and we put that book together. His editing and his help actually made it a far better book than what I could have done. His help was immeasurable.

Brian Clark: I think that’s what I was trying to ask; in one sense, it may seem that your tolerance of traditional media companies might be thin, and yet I think that people are more scared of you than perhaps they ought to be, because you seem like a fairly agreeable person when it comes down to it.

Henry Rollins: Yeah, I just want to get the work done, and I guess to some people, I might be intense or whatever, but I’m not the one getting drunk and punching holes in walls and shaking my wife. That’s just so not ever going to be me.

Why DIY Media Producers Should Seek Massive Distribution

Henry Rollins: The point I want to hammer in is that the intent of the book, whether it came out on my imprint or in Chicago Review, which is a very fine company, the intent was still the same. I want to make this book, I want you to check it out. I want to connect with you via this book. The intent of the actual product, the meal, was cooked with love; it’s just getting the wider audience to serve it to.

You might find this fascinating. If you have an original pressing of the Damaged record, which are fairly hard to come by now, you will see a sticker on the back — a hand-placed sticker — and that sticker is covering the MCA logo. What’s SST — little ol’ SST Records — doing with a massive MCA logo on the back of the record? Greg and Chuck did a distribution deal for that album with MCA. This, to them, was the epitome. This was the zenith of the idea, to take your underground, DIY, unapologetic, unrestrained effort, and give it the biggest possible distribution. It backfired, because eventually, the president of MCA heard the record and went, No.

Unfortunately for us, we had already printed the cover, so we had to go down to the pressing plant and put stickers on 25,000 records ourselves.

Brian Clark: Oh, my God.

Henry Rollins: It was me; Black Flag members; Raymond Pettibon, the great artist; Spot, the producer; members of Saccharine Trust; the Minutemen; and any other band or friend. It was a huge undertaking. We’re in some warehouse with pallets of 12-inch boxes of records. It took days. “I’m hungry,” “Shut up.” You’re like, Okay, because we have to get it done. That’s the reason you see the stickers.

Even in those days, Black Flag was trying to get the big distribution, because, in our minds, why shouldn’t we be next to Led Zeppelin? What, we’re not in the house? I went to a record store and couldn’t find your record; why not? We should be as big as ABBA. Screw you; we’re comin’. When we found out that that wasn’t going to happen, we’re like, Okay, we just have to get better with independent distribution, which, for an ambitious band in those days, was so frustrating, because these distributors, their hands are tied. Everything is minimized, and truncated, and small, and tied off, and nailed to the floor where the bands are rip-roaring with ambition.

You’re young, you’re angry, you’re writing four songs a minute; everything is at this incredible metabolic rate. Everything around you is like, “I’m sorry, the battery ran out … My mom said I couldn’t go.” All these kind of piddly excuses for why you can’t take your Lamborghini out into the world and floor it. You’re like, “No, there’s a thing, the guy said you have to sign this.” There’s a lot of frustration, but the autonomy negated the frustration. You realize the frustration was part of the thing that kept you burning the midnight oil. Okay, you’re not going to let me in? I’m just going to build a bigger ladder. Hell, I’ll dig underneath the wall and come in, but I’m comin’.

Eventually, you find a way to break through, and that’s the differences from them to now. Ambition is the same, innovation’s the same, in that, some people are going to come up with really great ideas like Twitter; things doing pretty well. But nowadays, with the Internet and the ability to reach a massive amount of people, you have hundreds of thousands of listeners to your podcast on any given time.

Imagine trying to reach them through the USPS, like we used to do with the mailout. We used to lick stamps and put them on the newsletter and send them out in hopes that someone would read it. We’d get about 20 percent of those things coming back two weeks later, return-to-sender, because that guy had moved. I’m like, Wow, how much money did we just spend on that? That was hundreds of dollars.

Now, we have a publishing company. We had to teach ourselves how to sort zone mail to save money. It’s a bitch to learn to do that, but we did it. You’d send out thousands of these very ambitious 11-by-17, double-sided, laid-out, beautiful mailing list newsletter things, to watch duffle bags of them come back. You’re like, Okay, that was like, $11-1300 we are never getting back. For a little company, you might as well just light our cars on fire. We just couldn’t afford it.

The small DIY person had a great idea: “I want you to hear my band.” Bandcamp. Let me hear your record for free, and if I like it, I’ll buy it. At least for me, I have bought so many records from bands because they let me hear their music online. I bought seven records from some crazy Russian band the other day, because I could listen to all their music for free online. I heard couple of songs and bought their entire catalog. That’s the big difference between when I was young, and the young innovative DIY person now.

Brian Clark: I alluded to that at the beginning; it’s almost like, What’s your excuse? You’ve got this amazing opportunity. That’s really what turned me away from being an attorney a long time ago, thank God, to give it all up and try this Internet thing, and it worked out, but only because I was willing to do it all myself for a while and then pretty much stick to my guns.

Let me ask you this, because there s this example of Black Flag and punk in the ’80s as being this really marginalized subculture compared to the mainstream. Now we live in a world where everything is fragmented, every little world view, and everyone can choose who they want to listen to. On one hand, that s an amazing opportunity. On the other hand, you have to realize that you have to speak to your people only, and ignore the rest of the world, and a lot of people struggle with that.

It brings to mind, when my parents walked in my room and heard Six Pack, and they did not detect the irony. Neither did a lot of my less-than-stellar friends in high school, who were like, “Yeah, let’s get drunk.” They didn’t get that it was sarcastic. How do you deal with being misunderstood? Does it bother you?

Henry Rollins: Years ago, about 20 some years ago, I met a PR person who became my PR person for many, many years. She said, “You’re not all that well-represented in the media. They have this idea that you’re some drooling stupid psychopath when you can actually articulate yourself pretty well. It’s going to take a while, but we’re going to teach these people that you can finish a sentence. You’re going to do a lot of interviews for the next few years, and it’s going to be a lot of work, and it’s going to take a lot of time, and it’s going to be to your great benefit.”

The Worst Thing You Can Do and Be Online

Henry Rollins: In those years, things changed dramatically. So, I think one must be very, very clear, in a world where we communicate all the time, but we don’t always speak. What’s funny in an email might be sarcastic to the other person, whereas I think I’m being funny, and I somehow offend you. If you know this, if you go online, movie stars, politicians, et cetera apologize all the time:”I’m sorry that thing I said went over the line.” Did it? Well, that’s a whole other discussion of what that line is. “I thought I was being funny.” No one thought you were funny. Whoops. When that whoops is a tweet that is was read by 750,000 people, that’s a big oops. And it’s a big mess to clean up.

What do you do? Do you not say anything? Do you censor yourself? Or, do you just maybe take a moment before you open your big mouth realizing the stage, the platform on which you can now launch invective, or anything else, is huge. People are reading; they are listening. They wake up in the morning and their brains are moving.

I try to choose my words carefully. Believe it or not, the Internet, and the fact that everyone’s in each other’s business if they want, has not necessarily led me to censor my thoughts, but to actually try and develop them more, and be very, very, clear when I speak.

Also, for different publications — Rolling Stone Australia, the LA Weekly, different newspapers hire me for a thing here a thing there — a bunch of people are going to read that, so you better really read it over again, and make sure that’s what you want to say. For me, the idea of clarity, and clarity of purpose, is very important in the DIY world. To me, we do a product, no matter what you’re doing, if you’re not making the world a better place, if you’re not making it cleaner, safer, happier, kinder, less painful … screw you.

That’s all well and good, but if you are going to innovate, make my world better, and if you want me to buy something, sell me good stuff. Not only will I tell a friend, but I’ll come back. But don’t be a jerk and don’t fake me out. Don’t lie to me. A guy like me? I’m very easy to fool, because I want to believe you; I want to think, he’s or she’s got a great idea. I’m in. If you want to run around, do a run around on me, you can do it, because I’m not going to please you. I’m not going to always be looking.

So if you’re going to enter into this brave world of entrepreneurship or innovation, I think the best ideas of these people come from a basic goodness. Even Oppenheimer, who had some big regrets at the end of his life — a lot a questions at the end of Oppenheimer’s life — he went at it out of science and innovation and curiosity. The DIY person these days can touch a lot of people. You should be careful with that sword you can very easily wield with the startup of a website.

You hear — I don’t know if you ever do, and I wouldn’t recommend it there are some extreme podcast people as far as white separatist groups, and extreme political opinions as to what foreign policy should be, or the way Americans should conduct themselves — stuff that is really repellent. You know, arguably, I defend it, because I defend the First Amendment, but the Internet allows a neo-Nazi group to get to every single person who is so inclined, who has as little as a cell phone.

If you want to do good, you might be able to do a lot of good, but if you want to do bad, you can wreak havoc. To me, the worst thing is to wreak mediocrity. If you can be eh, then you can reach a lot of people with your eh. I can’t stand eh, I can’t stand it. Life is too short, so either blow my mind or leave me alone.

Brian Clark: Well put. This has been excellent, Henry, and I want to be respectful of your time, but if you can give us just a quick preview of what you’re thinking about your presentation in May.

What Henry Is Going to Deliver at Authority Rainmaker

Henry Rollins: What I want to do is I want to come completely from the truth, which would be my experience — my very long experience — in the DIY world. The good parts, the bad parts, what has succeeded for me, what I learned. I’d love to save any interested person in that audience some time, some time and some heartache: I got a broken nose over this one; I think it’d be great if you didn’t get one. I’m going to tell you when the things fell down and went boom, so maybe you can write that one down, and never do anything like that, and not waste great amounts of your time and money.

I’m no expert; I’m no business analyst. But I’ve been in the business world with profit and loss and all of that for many years, yet I come at it with a very punk-rock, DIY, analog attitude. I want your time and attention. I want to make really good stuff for you. Good radio, good book, good whatever: I want you to dig it. However you like that thing that I do, I want you to like it, be able to use it, and have it be a vitamin for your life. Getting that good intent into a thing that gets across to someone else, that’s an interesting journey.

I’m going to talk about my personal journeys on all of that: the why, the how, and the fact that for almost thirty years now, I have been sustaining companies that are benevolent engines. They do good things and have allowed me to do incredible things that I never thought would come my way. Heck, I raise money for causes because people who know me for my company, they now want me to do this charity thing. The doors to all of this DIY stuff is opened, where, by thinking for yourself, by being brave, you can have some interesting times, and I dare to say some fun. So many people don’t aspire to much; you can really unleash the great energy of your brains.

The fact that you are really good at something — people should be able to capitalize on that, as should you. That’s what I think should be the paradigm of the DIY spirit; let’s do good stuff. Especially in this age of things being so rapidly uploaded and accessible; let’s give ’em really good stuff. Maybe the people in that room can make this the best century we’ve ever had. Maybe this will be the most war–free century we’ve had — we’re not off to a great start — but maybe it’s these people with their great inventions who turn the thing around.

I’m certainly not looking to people of my dad’s age for innovation; he must be 80-something by now. He’s not a dumb guy — he’s a PhD — but at 80-something years of age, you know, I’m not expecting him to get up, launch out of his chair in the morning like I’m looking at some 23-year-old. I presume I’m talking to potential leaders and people who are going to influence others, like me; I’m always looking for someone to tell me something good. That’s what I think I’m speaking to, and that’s basically what I’m going to be putting across.

Brian Clark: Excellent. I love it. Henry, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom, and again, as I promised before we went on the air, I will not be a big freak of a fanboy when I get to meet you in May, but I am looking forward to it, you can tell.

Henry Rollins: I can, and I really appreciate that. I must apologize again for being 18 minutes late calling you; that’s so not me. I like to say I put the punk in punctual. These auditions get you really nervous.

Brian Clark: Just so everyone knows, Henry is reading for a new role, and he was so absorbed in the script, he was a tad late. I couldn t care less, frankly.

Henry Rollins: Well, I appreciate that, but I get so nerved up about this stuff that I forget everything around me. I looked up at the clock, I’m like, “No.” I don’t like to be that guy, but I was, so thank you for having some room.

Brian Clark: The punk in punctual — I’m going to remember that.

Henry Rollins: Yeah, I love that. I hope I came up with that. It was either me or Mark Twain.

Brian Clark: (laugh) All right everyone, that wraps it up for this week. Hopefully we will be seeing you in May in Denver at the conference. Henry’s going to shut down two days of incredible education with the kick in the ass you need to get it done. If not, I will at least talk to you next week. Take care.

The Transcript

Three Misconceptions About Modern SEO That Confuse Content Marketers

Brian Clark: Hey everyone. Welcome to the show, as always. I’m Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media and today we have a very special guest.

I’m really excited that not only was I able to convince this very busy, smart person to appear at our conference, Authority Rainmaker in May this year but as a little bit of a warm up to that, we are going to have a conversation with him today about search, SEO and Google. He is one of the most knowledge people in the work on all of those good topics.

Danny Sullivan is the founder of Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and is Chief Content Officer at Third Door Media. That’s right Danny, isn’t it?

Danny Sullivan: That’s right.

Brian Clark: That is correct.

His Search Engine Expertise Dating Back to 1995

Brian Clark: I’m just going to kick it over to you a bit because you have been doing this for so long, that I think a lot of people don’t realize how early you started paying attention to search engines. So take us back a little bit.

Danny Sullivan: Sure. I was actually a newspaper reporter back in the early 90s and had left to go and start doing web development with a friend of mine because we had seen the Internet and wanted to be part of it.

As part of that, in 1995 we had clients that we would list and get put out onto the web and we would promote them to the search engines but nobody really understood how they worked. And one client, was like “Why am I not at the top of the listing?” because I didn’t really know and no one actually knew. So I took some time to go through and do some research and try to see what had some of the common things were that caused people to rank tops or not rank tops and published all that out there, as what I called a Web Masters Guide to Search Engines.

I did this to try and help people understand some of the common things that they should be doing and it just rolled along from there and I’ve been doing it since.

I am the founding editor of Search Engine Land, where we try to cover everything that is happening in the search marketing space, and we also have Marketing Land, where we expand on covering digital marketing because they are not so separate anymore. People who are search marketers a lot of the times want to know what’s going on with digital marketing and you have digital marketers, who need to know search marketing. So we wanted to cater to the broader audiences as well.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. I think a lot of people are familiar with your conferences, Search Marketing Expo (SMX) and I think I spoke at the Marketing Land conference, which was really excellent. What else does Third Door Media do? Are there other lines of business?

Danny Sullivan: It’s primarily conferences and we have the SMX shows that you were at. And thank you very much for that.

We do one social media oriented show that runs in the fall in Las Vegas and we also have our MarTech (The Marketing Technology Conference) series that launched last year, which covers the marketing technology space. And then of course, the two websites, Marketing Land and Search Engine Land.

We also have a marketing services division, which is where we have contacts of people who are wanting to get in touch with different people, if you are an advertiser or whatever. So if you’d love to reach people who are involved with SEO and what not, then you can go through our marketing services division. They look at our audience to see if there is a possible match. For example, we can get messages out to let people know that you have a white paper that you want them to know about and if those people choose to say, “I want this specific information,” then they can get it.

Brian Clark: Excellent. So with the MarTech conference, Scott Brinker is working with you guys on that. Is that correct?

Danny Sullivan: Yeah.

Brian Clark: So that’s coming at the end of March, so let’s make sure that we point that out. Do you have the details on that? Boston, right?

Danny Sullivan: The first one we did was in Boston. The next one is happening in San Francisco, right at the end of March and that’s going gangbusters. It’s a big, huge exploding space where people are interested. You know, there has been talks about the idea that the next CIO will actually be your CMTO (Chief Marketing Technology Officer) because things are merging together so much.

Brian Clark: It’s so important. The tools are getting more powerful. Often the complexity, the application or execution require that hybrid of technologist and marketer. We’ll make sure we link that show up in the show notes.

The Biggest Misconception About Google and SEO

Brian Clark: :Let’s get to the topic at hand and as someone who’s been trying to make sense of it all for 20 years, you know better than most, that SEO, search, Google, is all a big mess of confusion to a lot of people. We have a lot more people commenting on what works, what doesn’t, what’s the best approach to SEO, so I want to focus on that with you. And really let’s drill down into the stuff that people are getting wrong because there is a ton of things that we need to do to do things right but if you are coming at it from the wrong perspective from the beginning, it gets really difficult to do well.

In your mind, what do you think right now, post Hummingbird, is the biggest misconception about Google and SEO?

Danny Sullivan: You know, it probably hasn’t even changed in pre-Hummingbird and for a lot of people for years and again, it will depend on who you are. If you are an advanced SEO, this probably doesn’t apply to you but if you are somebody who maybe thinks you are an advanced SEO and you are not, or you a playing with it, then it may do.

And that’s the idea that, “I am going to somehow reverse engineer the algorithm and I am going to go and find the exact right formula. I’m just going to manipulate the hell out of it, and rank number one.”

I think that’s a misconception because to me, SEO has never been about trying to outwit the search engine. It’s been about trying to understand what the search engine likes and make sure that you are friendly to it. And those may sound to some people as being exactly the same, right? Well understanding what the search engine wants, isn’t that outwitting it? And I would say, no.

Search engines, if you go back through time and you try to look at all the changes they have done and all the signals that they want to reward, they are consistently trying to do one thing, and that’s figure out what human beings like about websites and reward the ones that are deserving of it.

And so, as an SEO, the more that you are trying to create a side that is not natural in that regard, or you are trying to do things that go beyond what a human being would like, the more likely I think that you are going to get yourself into trouble and you are going to miss the point of SEO.

So good SEO is doing things that humans want. That means like, when you talk about why you want to make sure your site is crawlable, in part it’s because a human being might want to find a page that you have on your website. If a human being can’t find the page because you don’t have any obvious links to it, then the search engine itself isn’t probably going to find the page for the same reason.

And therefore, it’s either not an important page or there is something wrong. So then the wrong SEO move to that is, “I’ll create a site map and I will make sure that the site map is all a bunch of hidden links. Then I will be able to feed it all these pages that I want the search engine to know, but I don’t want the human beings to see.”

Where as better thinking SEO is, “Oh no, this is an important page. I want to make sure that there are visible links that go out to it, so that people can locate it.” Having said that, there are ways for you to provide the actual site map link files and you should do that as well. To some degree those might be invisible but those things were not really intended or designed for the idea that, “I’ll make up 100 pages, one for each city that I do car rentals out of, so that I have a page for each city and then I kind of go with it from there.” One of these kind of nightmare situations that you sometimes see.

By the way, links is another example of that. People understand that the search engines like links and they still do like links. It’s still important to have good link profile pointing at you but then the wrong headed SEO move or misconception is, “Well if I just need some links, I will go out and buy them or use a service and I will get a whole bunch of them. Or I’ll concoct a way to generate a bunch of links for me very quickly because maybe I’ll do an infographic and I’ll embed my link in there with certain keywords I’m hoping to be found for.”

Whereas a more natural approach is, “Yeah, maybe I did the infographic and I left it for people to link how they want to.” And surprise, when Google went through and did their Penguin update, these were the kind of things that got hit. The idea that people who had managed to spend all this time building up links with exactly one word leading back to their website, might have found themselves getting hit. And part of them getting hit is because it’s not really natural. That’s not how people normally link.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s an excellent topic because it seems to me that after Penguin and it getting incorporated into the broader algorithm, the whole concept of trying to look natural just makes that type of linking building and/or buying, a tougher job.

Meanwhile, people like me, and I guess really like you, you were a journalist, that’s how you came to this trade. So you’ve always been a content guy but the thought of building links like that makes me queasy because I’m a writer guy. I’d rather create something for people and hopefully it works that way. But, we hear everything about signals, social signals and the metrics and all the data that Google has. Google+, Google Analytics etc but the link still matters. How does Google really factor in the fact that because of the mainstreaming of social media, people don’t link like they used to?

Danny Sullivan: We don’t know. And by “We don’t know,” and I don’t think they necessarily even know what their long-term strategy is. I have described links as being like the fossil fuel of search ranking signals and they still work. You can pump them into your search engine, literally, and it will get you to perhaps where you want to go but it’s very, very dirty polluted, there’s a lot of junk and a lot of crud.

So in order to make this sort of like a tar sands thing that we are getting now, into something that you can actually make useable, they’ve got to punch it through a bunch of filters. And that’s what we have seen Google do over the past decade, is add more and more ways to filter out all the crud from the link signal. Penguin being the latest of it. It’s like our super duper centrifuge. We’ll put them all in there and we’ll try and see what still sticks to the wall and that can be used. And so that leads over to what Hummingbird was all about and why that’s important.

With Hummingbird it was as if Google literally took their search engine apart. I mean, people hear about a Penguin or they hear about a Panda and they identify that with penalties and they get that’s our filters, so when they hear Hummingbird, they sometimes think that it’s somehow one specific type of thing that Hummingbird is doing.

Hummingbird was an entire rebuild of their search engine and it was as if they said, “Yeah, we know this link signal is really bad, it’s this bad fuel. We’d love to have our solar panelled car. Or we would love to have a car that can run on multiple kinds of energies.” So that’s what they did. They built a search engine that supposedly can do that.

It’s hard wired in there, so if they want to use solar energy or let’s say that social signals are a solar clean kind of energy or whatever, it can do that. Or if they want to use liquid natural gas, they can pump that in there and they have got a fuel cell, and they have got all these different things that are wired in to the core architecture, now so they don’t have to try and bolt stuff onto it. But by enlarge, it’s still using gas, or it’s still using links. But what they may be able to shift to, that’s what we are all waiting to see.

I long suspected that they would shift over to using more social signals. It doesn’t mean that I think they get away from the link signal entirely and it doesn’t mean that the social signal is less polluted, or is somehow not polluted. I think any signal that you get out there can be gamed but I think with the social signal there is a lot of advantages to it.

I did a piece once, where I talked about “when everybody gets the vote” and the idea that social allows you to do that. So Google uses links because when they started they thought, “Well links, it’s sort of like the democracy of the web and when you like something, you link to it, so we can count up the links. We will weight the links. We’ll do some other things but then that way kind of everybody votes. And I said, “If you think links are like the democracy of the web, then that’s like thinking democracy in America was fine when you had to be 30 years and older, white and land owning, in order to be able to vote. It’s democracy.”

Brian Clark: Right.

Danny Sullivan: Because most people don’t link.

Brian Clark: Yes.

Danny Sullivan: Like in the way that they’ve traditionally done.

You don’t go to a great restaurant or have a great experience with a product you purchased and think, “This is wonderful. I’m now going to go out and write a blog post about it. And, I’ll make sure I write the blog post about it and I’ll double check to make sure that the platform that I use doesn’t some how put no follow on all the links and prevent them from passing credit.

Plus, I’m savvy enough to think, that I’ll also make sure that I use a very descriptive link to just kind of help this extra site because they did such a great job.” It’s like, “No, nobody does that.” So you’ve got some who will go out there and do that but there’s a huge amount of great votes if you will, that don’t get counted because that’s not how they link. Although, the way people do tend to link is with social actions. “I like this restaurant. I literally will like it on Facebook.”

Brian Clark: Yep.

Danny Sullivan: Or, “I’m at a place and I checked into it.” Or “I saw something that I liked, so I followed them on Twitter and I tweeted out that I like this sort of stuff.”

I think social offers an important new kind of signal that can be used to figure out what is good and what should be rewarded on the web that enables many, many more people to vote. Also to be able to vote with some accountability, because the social accounts themselves start to build up authority.

You know who these people are, and yes, they can all be manipulated, but so can websites. I think the social accounts can be manipulated, but more controls, or easier ways to detects that, will come. That the social signal will start to become more and more important but it’s taking it’s time to get there and hey, I could be wrong but Hummingbird is supposedly engineered so that it can take advantage of that, if that’s one of the things that Google wants to do.

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. When you think about social sharing of content, each of those is a link, it just so happens to also be no followed, if it’s any sort of reputable search engine.

The Google and Twitter Firehose Deal

Before we move on, I want to talk more about dirty links, a very salacious topic. So Google and Twitter are reinstating the firehose deal, yes?

Danny Sullivan: Yeah. They did reinstate it. It hasn’t actually gone live yet but the deal is in place for it to come back.

Brian Clark: I still think Google+ is obviously of great value and we’ll talk about that later, but Google+ is not a Facebook killer. When are Google and Twitter going to get married?

Danny Sullivan: Ah well, that’s hard to say. I would have thought they would have gotten married long ago, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah, me too.

Danny Sullivan: And I think it becomes harder now that Twitter has gone public because you know, they are probably even more expensive. And I’m not certain that they will. The deal was signed.

You know, there is some bad blood between the two companies in various ways and that’s one of the reasons why it took so long for this deal to finally get signed. Now that they are a public company, you do what makes sense for your share holders but I just don’t think Twitter sees their future as going in there to Google. And also I think Twitter sees their future very much as, “We can grow and be independent and be out on our own.” So as much as Google perhaps may want them, I don’t think that they are thinking that they want to go there. And I also don’t think Google is at the point where they think they want them.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Well Google I think, if they have the data, they may be happy. I mean, because ultimately that’s what they are looking for. But it’s also a huge ad platform.

Danny Sullivan: It is but Google could get that data now. It’s easier if you have the firehose but it’s not for Google to go through and figure out, “Oh, right. This page had X amount of tweets. This account has this many followers.” This is basic scraping. They do stuff that’s even harder than that.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Danny Sullivan: So the data would certainly help them. I think it especially helps them in that if they need the real-time stuff, you know, when you have the firehose coming in there, that’s a hard thing for them to do, which is grab a tweet within the second that it happens, so you can then make sure when someone does a search on your search engine, that you have it. With the backend analysis they can do stuff like that.

But I also kind of don’t know that they necessarily think they need it so much. I’m not saying that they think Google+ is the end all and be all but I just feel like they are kind of stalled with what they know what they want to do with social.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s a good point.

Danny Sullivan: I had this Google+ meal and it didn’t go down so well.

Brian Clark: Yeah, exactly.

Danny Sullivan: I’ll never eat again.

Brian Clark: Right. I know all the consternation that caused all of us, which we’ll touch on.

Danny Sullivan: Yeah.

The Ongoing Power of the Humble Hyperlink

Brian Clark: Here’s another thing. There was a huge amount of confusion around, and I think there is some merit to the topic, but I want to get a feel for how bad it is. And when we talk about bad links, bad neighbourhoods and negative SEO, which is effectively, for those who aren’t clear on that topic, your competitor generates a bunch of dirty links, throws them at your site, Google thinks you’re a spammer, penalizes you and they rise above you in the rankings.

Now I have heard of a few legitimate cases of people I know, who this has actually happened to, at least according to them. Now how big a problem is this? How easily can someone ruin another website by buying or generating bad links at it?

Danny Sullivan: First, back a bit, it’s not new. It’s been out there for almost as long as I can imagine and it has come up in the path to sometimes tag different names like Google Bowling and stuff like that. But it kind of came back out into the forefront with Penguin because people started saying, “Wow. This renewed push to punish for bad links, well what happens if somebody buys me a bunch of bad links?”

And then Google’s like, “Well, as we said, it’s always very unlikely that that will happen.” So then people were like, “Right, well I’m going to prove to you that it can happen” and they go out and they do it. You do get these cases where it can happen but I don’t think it’s an issue for most people. And by most people, I mean virtually all the people who have reputable sites that are doing well and that have been carrying on.

I say that because you haven’t seen that kind of an outcry. You can get these occasional weird things that will happen but you know, if it was just that easy to take out a good site, with a good link profile, you’d hear a lot more noise about it and a lot more complaints.

Where I think it becomes an issue is if you are a site that is not necessarily an essential for Google, or that you are not essential in your space. You don’t have a really good back link profile to overcome the sort of link attack that you might suffer. You know, you don’t have this other natural thing that kind of goes with it.

Then I think you are in more danger about it and you know, it’s still a concern. It concerns me. I don’t like the idea that somebody might be vulnerable to this type of thing, even if they are a small website that just hasn’t had a good chance to really build up profiles that are like that. And I would far prefer it if Google, rather than punish people for links that they think are bad, just don’t reward them.

Brian Clark: Right.

Danny Sullivan: That to me is the equivalent of vote buying, right? So you can think if you found somebody was buying votes and you absolutely knew they stuffed a ballot box, then maybe you would say, “Right, you don’t get to be a candidate anymore. You’re out of the election.”

But if you just come across ballot box stuff and you don’t know who did it, then just throw out the bad ballots. That’s the safer and cleaner solution that doesn’t generate all this sort of stuff and I kind of said that repeatedly to Google, and I have written about it, and that just doesn’t go. They seem to feel like they need to have this sort of penalty kind of aspect of it and I hope that will change because if it does change, I think it will be harder for people then to come up and start talking about the negative SEO stuff that comes up. But I do think for most people it’s not worth your time to worrying about.

Brian Clark: Yeah but you do make a good point though. So if you don’t have an established link profile, you are probably not ranking, so no one cares about you, to attack you. If you do have a well established link profile and you are ranking well, you are a target but it’s less likely to work. It’s sort of what we are hoping for here.

Danny Sullivan: Right, and you do get these horror stories. I had one person say, “Send it to me.” And I think this is the kind of stuff that is terrible, where somebody gets a threat that “If you do not purchase this type of thing or whatever, we will attack you with all this stuff.” So then they are like, “I better pay off this protection because I’m afraid what might happen.”

I think a lot of people can safely ignore that sort of stuff and they will be carrying on just fine.

Brian Clark: Excellent.

Danny Sullivan: And you know, I think of all the things that you have to worry about on the SEO front, I wouldn’t be sitting around freaking that someone was about to do negative SEO on me and that’s going to be the end all and be all.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Good perspective.

The True Nature of Good SEO Practices

Brian Clark: Okay, so again, you are a long time journalist. You have always been a content person. Interesting to me. I started preaching, effectively what has always been the Copyblogger approach 9 years ago, and it just took Google a while to catch up. And now some of our mutual friends, who have typically worn the darker shade of hat, are now you calling themselves content marketers. You knew it was going to come, right? I mean, you’ve been preaching it forever.

Danny Sullivan: Oh sure and you know, there is a bunch of mysteries with that too. You have some people who are saying, “A good SEO is also a content person.” Or “It’s more about the content, than it is about the SEO.” And then I think you have other people who are like, “Maybe it’s sort of the same thing, where we are all content marketers now or whatever.”

I don’t think it’s as clear cut as that. I think a good SEO understands that the foundation of their success comes from having great content. But it doesn’t mean that if you are the SEO, you have to the person who also is a content marketer, or someone who comes up with all the great content.

In a lot of cases, it may work if you are the same sort of person but there is so much that goes on with SEO. It can be a full-time job, that to then turn around and say, “Now you are going to be the content editor and you are going to have to solicit great content. You are going to have to write great content.”

And you know, “Hey, I’m trying to write a million page website, where I am making sure that we are being spidered properly and people are still doing the basic site architectural stuff that should be happening, that is out there and dealing with new spotlight tags.”

I think it can be fine for you to just be an SEO. I think as you have seen this change come in where — not just content marketing has grown — but digital marketing has grown into social and other areas, that you have some people who say, “I can’t just be an SEO. Or you’ve got to be more than that. Or we are not SEO’s anymore, we are all this other stuff.” I think the answer really depends on who you are. It’s fine to just be an SEO.

If it is literally taking up your full-time work to just be focused on how your site is being crawled, the kind of content you have coming in. Is it being optimised well? Are we getting all the things tagged up the way they need to do? And so on. There are companies that are big enough to where if it’s not just a full-time job for one SEO, then there are multiple SEOs that are involved with it.

So if you really are being consumed with core traditional SEO stuff, that’s fine and you don’t need to feel like, “Oh dear, I’m screwing up because now everybody says I’m supposed to be a content marketer, an inbound marketer and all this other stuff that is supposed to be there.” That’s fine. Nobody says to the social media marketer, “Oh by the way, now you are a content marketer.”

Brian Clark: Even though content is what works in social.

Danny Sullivan: And that’s the core but what I think happens is, that in whether you are a social media marketer or an SEO marketer, you understand that you have to have that foundation and if you are not responsible for it, you are working with the people who are.

Brian Clark: Yeah. The analogy is like film production. You know, the screenwriter doesn’t do makeup, production and direction and all this.

I guess the person who is just starting out, a single site, a single content creator, the good news is that at least post Hummingbird, it’s easier I think than ever to focus on content. As long as you understand that things like keyword research, it’s a language that your audience is using. Don’t even think about SEO yet but you still need to know how they choose to talk about these topics.

Danny Sullivan: And that’s an example where your core SEO foundation goes in to help, say, your content people. Because your content people might not be thinking in that regard. So they might not be considering what people are after in order to determine the kind of content that they should write, or if they do write the content, they might not be thinking about the ways people who might actually be searching for it.

And while the keyword research stuff has gotten much more sophisticated now, where you know, if you don’t use the exact words, you are not necessarily dead in the water, it’s still helpful to understand the language of your audience.

And so that’s an example where the SEO can go back and help other people. And this goes to the idea again that, “Oh well, you know, if you are an SEO you have to be all these other things.” If your job is to actually create content, you are probably not spending all the time thinking about all the ways to find out how you can do keyword research. You are probably more focused on, “How do I actually create the content?”

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Danny Sullivan: And nobody would say to the content person, “And you better be an SEO as well.” But what you do tell content people is, “You ought to understand some fundamentals to SEO and understand some fundamentals of social media.” It’s the same thing with SEO. “You should understand some of the things that are going on with content.”

Is Google “Author Rank” Really Dead?

Brian Clark: Yeah and that’s an excellent kind of bridge to what I want to talk about because I think there was this, I don’t know, and certainly people like I championed it as, “Look, Google is really serious about content and that was Authorship.” And then we all put in the tags and people talked about Author Rank in a way that they didn’t really understand. Everyone was looking to the future, where the content creator matters as a ranking signal. I know you have some very interesting views on this. Yes, Google ended it but does that mean that identity, when it comes to content, is irrelevant?

Danny Sullivan: No. And while Google ended the overt Authorship aspect, they actually said that they might still be doing it behind the scenes.

So while Authorship, as a formal display aspect of Google came to an end, the idea that an Author Rank may still be used, so determining who authors are didn’t. And in fact, I think in Google News, they can still may occasionally list actual authors that are there.

So I think Authorship is going to remain important and that Google is going to continue to look at what they can do with it. I just think that the way they ask people to signal them, who’s an author and so on, will change. And some of that I think is just a result of dealing with the fallout from Google+.

But I think you have got a search team that kind of had Google+ thrust upon them in some ways and might have thought, “Well we can figure out Authorship just fine, thanks very much. We don’t need to have all these other things put in there.” And kind of wanted to get back to just doing it that way. So I think that Authorship has not gone, but how Google calculates it, is simply changing.

What He Will Be Talking About at Authority Rainmaker

Brian Clark: All right. Can you give us a little bit of a preview of what your talk in May at Authority Rainmaker will be about?

Danny Sullivan: It will be an amusing and all encompassing. No.

Brian Clark: A staggering arc of heartbreaking genius.

Danny Sullivan: I will expand a bit on what’s been going on with the whole Hummingbird situation and I will also talk a bit more about what we didn’t get into on this call, which is what’s been going on with this whole entity search thing. The idea that Google really understands beyond just words.

I’ll also spend some time talking about what’s going on on the mobile space and why I think people need to be really thinking about that mobile experience. And how that all comes out into play. Plus, I’ll explore a little bit about what’s going on with the direct answers that happen out there.

You know, Google is morphing into almost being an answer engine, as we used to talk about. That you are not actually searching and then clicking and leaving, but they are actually just giving you answers. And there are concerns I think, and rightful concerns about, “How does Google get these answers because Google doesn’t actually know anything? And yet you do these searches and here’s an answer right at the top of the page.” And “Oh, here’s a link to where it came from.” But you probably don’t click on that anymore, which is great for Google and great for Google’s users but not so great for the people who actually power the answer.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it really changes your content strategy because if Google can answer for you, that may not be a question you want to be focusing on.

Danny Sullivan: Exactly.

Brian Clark: Well I can’t wait to see you in May. I may actually see you out on the west coast at the end of March, so we will keep our fingers cross for that. But thank you so much for your time Danny.

Danny Sullivan: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

The Transcript

How an Email Newsletter Publisher Built an Audience of 223,991 Subscribers

Robert Bruce: Peter Cooper of Cooper Press, thanks for coming on Rainmaker.FM. Before we get into the business of your curated email newsletter, which is really the thing I want to focus on today, more than anything, tell me a bit about your origin story as an entrepreneur, publisher and programmer.

Peter Cooper: Man, I hate the word entrepreneur but I’ll go with it.

I guess I had, what would have been in the 80s, a typical male geek upbringing. Unfortunately it did tend to be mostly a male thing at the time. The people I knew had people in their family who had computers and passed them down and I was playing with technology and stuff like that. A great scene in our days. Although it’s a lot more open than it used to be.

So I grew up in the 80s with all the different computers that were around. Working out how to play with them and program them and stuff like that because my parents wouldn’t allow me to have an Nintendo or anything like that. I never had any of that kind of stuff. It was all just normal computers that I was playing with. This was all when I was a teenager.

I got into doing some demo coding and it was just the normal progression, I guess, for someone who was into programming at a young age.

I then got to a point where I was deciding what to do with life and decided I wanted to become a lawyer. A very kind of interesting profession but it didn’t quite work out. I was going to go to college and start training in that side of things but a really good job opportunity came up. It was around the time of the whole new media scene in London, so I took a job there briefly and went on to do some web design/web development related jobs with people. This was somewhere around 1999.

It didn’t work out amazingly well, so I ended up going self-employed because I liked it. It kind of bombed a bit during the dotcom bust era because I was doing work for companies like Internet.com and various companies that have now gone out of business. Actually they went out of business at the time because it was that kind of era.

In the background I was still coding and stumbled across a few different things. The first one being Ruby on Rails in 2004, which I immediately started to use and got on with it really well. I became interested in doing web development again, and at the same time RSS because I’d been into blogging for a long, long time. Even before the term existed, I was doing an online diary and stuff. So I was very interested in doing stuff with RSS and I built a service called RSS Digest, which became Free Digest.

It allowed you to reprocess and repackage RSS feeds in various ways. I ran that for a few years and then sold it. This gave me a runway to mess around and do what I wanted for a short period of time. It wasn’t “Eff-you money” as they call it but it was enough to just think, “What do I want to do?”

So I started noodling around with writing about Ruby and doing some publishing stuff because I realized when I was younger, I had quite an interest in publishing, so I thought I would see if I could make a job of it. And that seems to be what’s happened.

It went from running a blog and the most successful one being Ruby Inside, which was basically the most popular Ruby on Rails related blog between 2007 and 2012. There was various other things along those lines but from that I ran Ruby Weekly. And then from Ruby Weekly came all the other different newsletters that I now have. So I am now principally doing email.

Robert Bruce: So you came from a programming background, which was your interest and you developed those skills. For those listening, I’ll do a little bit of an introduction. Cooper Press is a curated email newsletter. I can’t think of anything better than the word “network” to describe it. It’s a network of email newsletters. Is that fair?

Peter Cooper: Yep.

How This Programmer Became a Major Content Publisher

Robert Bruce: Your focus is still on technical, programming type languages and the news, and you are curating things around that. But this is really going to be interesting for our audience and the shift I would like to make now is, you are this accomplished programmer and you are also an accomplished writer and publisher.

I heard you tell a story a while ago about where the idea for publishing newsletters came from, maybe not that specific to start, but publishing in general. You don’t see a lot of crossover from programmer type folks into wholesale publishing, so how did that happen?

Peter Cooper: It was by accident really. I’ve always been a big believer in blogging and the whole idea of using blogging to build up a business, build up your profile and stuff like that. But as I got into doing it, I realized that a lot of it came from when I was a kid.

When I learned stuff about programming, math or whatever, I would often write my own guide to it and I don’t know why. It was an inbuilt thing that I just did and enjoyed doing.

Robert Bruce: You wanted to write a book?

Peter Cooper: Well exactly, yeah. Not proper books as such but that same idea of, “I’ve got this knowledge. I need to get it down in some way and potentially it could be useful to other people.”

I realized I had a habit of always doing this through life in various different ways. In the mid 90s, I did run Basic, like QBasic type programming and I ran a fanzine for basic programming on a news group, for about 10 or 11 issues. It came out monthly. It had code in it and people’s emails they would send in and stuff like that.

I remembered how all the stuff I had done was so natural to me and I just got to this point in my life where I thought, “Well hang on. I should probably just start doing the things that are still natural to me, rather than fighting against stuff.” Even though I had always written software for a living and didn’t mind do it, I didn’t quite enjoy doing it for other people.

So I thought, “Let me do something that I do enjoy doing for other people,” which is the publishing side of stuff. I just connected those dots in my head and that’s what made me get into this. It wasn’t a big plan of “How can I make some money?” It was, “Yeah, I know I am inherently good at doing stuff like this. Let’s just give it a go.”

Robert Bruce: And folks can find you at
cooperpress.com. At the current count, I think you’ve got eight different newsletters. Is that right?

Peter Cooper: There are more. It’s just that site is hideously bad. I’m like the builder with the ramshackle house.

Robert Bruce: You know, we can talk about fixing that up for you but that will be for later.

Peter Cooper: Exactly. The best way is to go to a site like JavaScript Weekly and then at the bottom, we automatically add links to all the different things that are pre-populated there.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I want to talk about JavaScript Weekly just a little bit later but to give people an idea of what you are doing here with the multiple curated email newsletters, which are focused in and around programming type topics, how many email subscribers in total do Cooper Press serve right now?

Peter Cooper: As of this very second, 223,991. Let’s just round it up to 225,000.

Robert Bruce: That is very impressive. Does one, two or three stand out way more than others?

Peter Cooper: Yes.

Robert Bruce: Or are they pretty fairly evenly distributed?

Peter Cooper: No. It’s quite large gaps between some of them. We have quite a few smaller ones, which are more recent ones and we are trying to build up. But in terms of the really big established ones, it’s pretty much Ruby Weekly, which was our first one but it’s now the third largest. The first two are JavaScript Weekly and HTML5 Weekly.

JavaScript Weekly eclipses the others but HTML5 Weekly is pretty big as well. JavaScript Weekly is about 75,000, HTML5 Weekly is like 55,000 and then Ruby Weekly is like 32,000.

Robert Bruce: Crap.

Peter Cooper: And then it drops off quite a bit. Then it goes into Node and various other topics, which are sort of coming up behind.

Robert Bruce: How long have you been doing it?

Peter Cooper: I believe the first issue of the first newsletter, which was Review Weekly, would have been in very late 2010. So just over four years. It was very amateur for quite some time. It didn’t make any money for the first year or whatever. It didn’t really intend to. It was more of an addition to the blogging stuff that I was doing but now the blogs have pretty much died.

Robert Bruce: Interesting.

Peter Cooper: This has now become the main thing.

How He Promoted His Newsletters in The Early Days

Robert Bruce: So you’ve been doing this a long time and we’ll get into the details of what you do every week for each newsletter a little bit later, but tell me about the early days of publishing that first newsletter and as the other ones came along.

How do you go about promoting your stuff? Did you have a built in audience? Obviously you have been publishing and doing things online for quite a while. How did you go about promoting these email newsletters?

Peter Cooper: In the early days, it was pretty much down to the fact that I already had the Ruby Inside blog, which was very important as a way to launch. It had like 30,000 RSS subscribers at the time, which at the time I thought was absolutely huge but now looking back, it’s funny how things go. So I had that.

I also had a site called Ruby Flow, which I’ve just relaunched in the last couple of days. It’s more of a community kind of blog, where anyone can post stuff.

I’d had these different outlets to the Ruby community anyway, so as soon as I put it out there that I was doing this, within a couple of days I had over 1,000 subscribers straight out of the gate. Just people who were curious. You know, quite a few detractors. People saying, “It’s a bit old fashioned doing email, blah, blah, blah” which you hear less and less now. But in 2010, it wasn’t very trendy to have an email newsletter whatsoever, so it was almost like blogging was in the early 2000s.

Robert Bruce: Is it trendy now?

Peter Cooper: I think it is.

Robert Bruce: I think you’re right.

Peter Cooper: Because every time I go to a company, do a podcast or whatever, everybody is trying to get me sign up for email. I’m almost kind of getting sick of it. It’s very funny to be in this business and seeing that happen.

Robert Bruce: You had a little head start with about 1,000 immediate sign ups but it sounds like after that point, it was really natural growth.

We’ve talked a lot about the email forward being the early social sharing. Did you see a lot of organic growth then from forwarding, from people talking about you online? Obviously, the programming community is a rabid community in terms of interests in the topic. People are close knit and it probably had a lot to do with that. But was it mostly an organic growth from that first point?

Peter Cooper: Almost entirely organic growth. Just a couple of things that I would say that have been big influences is getting mentions by people that are very prolific or well known within the scene. In Ruby Weekly’s case, early on we got a mention from Chris Wanstrath of Github. He mentioned that he liked it and so on, and I believe Paul Irish also mentioned JavaScript Weekly when it was very new. Those types of referrals are worth a lot. You get a certain amount of boost off of those.

The other thing that really helped is, quite a few people seemed to build those lists of things you should read, or things you should subscribe to in certain topic areas and we seemed to turn up on those lists quite often.

Those lists become really popular on things like Reddit and Hacker News. We seemed to get a ton of people coming through. When we have queried subscribers on how they found us, often these types of posts have come up. People said, “Oh, I found this post of useful resources and you were just included in it.” So that’s become important as well.

Robert Bruce: Yeah and I’ve heard you talk about, or write about, elements of conversion on the one page sites as well, that we’ll talk about a little bit later but before we do that, Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform. If you are looking to easily build a powerful sales and marketing website that drives your online business, head over to RainmakerPlatform.com right now, and sign up for a free 14-day trial to see if it might be a fit for you.

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Why He Switched From Blogging to Email Newsletters

Robert Bruce: Okay Peter, we’ve touched on the history of your email newsletter empire and you had mentioned blogging before that, and doing more kind of traditional content websites before that, so why did you shift to this email curation model? Why did you not keep publishing articles on a blog? What was the thought process there?

Peter Cooper: A couple of things. One is we used to have reasonable success with doing roundups of other people’s content but it was never like a really huge thing on the blogs. It tended to be original content that worked a lot better on the blog, rather than leaking out elsewhere, which is why we ended up creating the Ruby Flow site as a way that other people could promote their own stuff. But what I found with email, once I got going with it, because it was just an experiment, it was just a case of, “Someone else is going to do this. I better do it first.”

I discovered that the engagement was very different to the sort of engagement you get on the web. I’d become quite familiar with how readers who found certain things interesting on the web, found different things interesting when it came to email. And just the way they engaged with it would be different and the way we could track the engagement would be different. We knew how many of our subscribers actually came along and actually did something with an item, rather than counting page views and stuff like that.

I really liked the engagement model and obviously the other tempting thing, after a certain period time had passed, and I decided to make it a lot more into a business, is the advertising situation. And certainly in my case, it’s very different in email, as opposed to the web. In terms of the amount you can make, it’s just totally different for the amount of effort that’s expended. You can spend ages writing fresh content every single month, like I did, and make a certain return, or you can spend relatively less time doing email, and make more. So there was just a business equation to be done as well.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, that’s very interesting. And as the Rainmaker audience knows, an email subscriber is a different thing in terms of audience, than a blog or RSS subscriber and obviously a Twitter or Facebook follower. It’s a much more valuable person.

Where The Majority of Cooper Press’ Revenue Comes From

Robert Bruce: You mentioned engagement and then also in terms of responsiveness to either advertising or product, which leads into my next question, which is, what is your business model look like these days, as it relates to the newsletter business?

At the bottom on CooperPress.com, I see online training that you have for sale, which I’m assuming you have developed yourself. There’s a little bit of consulting. And then you’ve just mentioned advertising. Is that about right for the mix?

Peter Cooper: No, it’s not actually. This is what I mean by the site being so radically out of date.

Early on, one of my original plans with this was that I would keep the newsletter to myself and I would use it to promote things that I had created, like ebooks and things like that.

Robert Bruce: Your own stuff.

Peter Cooper: Yeah. I had this dream of getting into that whole side of things, which I know a lot of people have had success with but I thought, “If I’ve got an audience of let’s say, 10,000 people, and I can promote ebooks to them and say 500 people buy it, and I can get someone to buy that amount of stuff each week, I’m going to make loads of money.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Peter Cooper: So that was my original idea but keeping up the capacity and keeping up the quality is a lot of work.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Producing newsletters themselves, plus producing the product or service.

Peter Cooper: Yeah. So then I thought, “Okay, I’ve seen all these people like Amy Hoy and Marc-André Cournoyer and people like that, do online training. So people would pay $400, $500, $600 and they’d get to spend time, almost like a webinar experience really, spread across a few days and learn something new. So I thought I could do this for Ruby. They were doing it for Rails, JavaScript and other things.

I set it up, gave it a go and it worked really well. Each time I did it, it made about $10,000 and I think I ran five or six of them but they do take a lot out of you. Especially since I wanted to redevelop the curriculum every time from all the things I had picked up and I just couldn’t leave it alone.

I found it quite an exhausting thing to do and I suddenly started having all of these potential sponsors coming out of the woodwork saying, “We really like your email and we’ll give you loads of money to put stuff in it.” They didn’t quite put it like that but that’s what they were kind of getting at.

So I started to do it. I thought I’d just fill the gap with advertising, until I figured out what I was doing but advertising has become 90 whatever percent of the business. The remainder of it is actually producing newsletters for other people. This is something that has gone a little up and down over time and something that I am looking to getting back into and doing properly again.

For a couple of years, we ran a newsletter for a company but unfortunately they are no longer in business but we are working with another couple of clients now and we also have a partnership. We have rack space on one called DB Weekly. So we’ve got a couple of things like that going as well. It is pretty much advertising or being supported by companies that want us to do similar stuff.

Robert Bruce: That’s very interesting. Let me ask you this. On the advertising, did you go and pursue advertisers or is it something that happened naturally as the newsletters themselves grew, people found you, advertisers found you and contacted you?

Peter Cooper: It was 100% totally natural. As I said, the plan was to do publishing and all that type of stuff and products, so these people came to me. And pretty much that has still been the case. I can’t even think of the last time I actually sent an email to someone to try and solicit them. Everyone has just turned up on my doorstep, which has been quite a nice position to be in.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Peter Cooper: It’s very different to if you were deliberately going into this and thinking “I want to run a newsletter about X and I want to make loads of money or whatever” then you’d have to start thinking of “What’s my plan here?” Where with this, I just did what I wanted and people reacted to that. So yeah, I’ve been very lucky in that regard.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I don’t know if luck has much to do with it because here, like you said, you’ve done four years. I’m sure it happened well before the four year mark, but you are producing real value to an audience that is valuable to these advertisers. I mean, you did the work and it’s interesting that even in, what is seemingly a closed system, like email, it’s much more powerful than that system in a lot of ways, these people approaching you. That’s fascinating.

The Content Curation Strategy

Robert Bruce: So tell me a little bit about your content curation strategy, like how are you finding good stuff week in and week out, for these multiple email newsletters? You’ve got a lot of content going out, you are finding links, you are also writing and the last time I checked, I think there were 25 links in one issue of a newsletter.

Peter Cooper: With the first one, which was weekly, I found it very easy. I already had the blog, I was already very much into the community, I was actually in the Ruby community, I knew people, and I went to events. It was very easy. Stuff just came to me and obviously I was working with Ruby all the time, so I already knew, “Is this BS or is it not BS? Is this person talking sense or whatever?” So I found that very easy and I still do to a certain extent, even though I am not quite as deep into the community as I used to be.

But when I started branching out to other topics, that’s perhaps where the question becomes more relevant, because for example, I had been working with JavaScript for a very long time but never like a proper professional developer, just more of a side interest or something that I tolerated because I had to use it on various projects.

So when I launched JavaScript Weekly, I wasn’t particularly a super-duper expert of JavaScript, I just knew the lay of the land. It’s actually funny because I over the last couple of weeks I have watched a video of a guy learning to play Tetris The Grand Master, the Japanese arcade game and he practiced for years and years and after 10 years of playing this game almost nonstop, he has finally got this Grand Master status in it. And to do this, you have to play it at a ridiculously fast speed and then you have to actually play Tetris on an invisible level at the end, so you can’t even see where the blocks are going. You have to remember it in your head.

Robert Bruce: What the?

Peter Cooper: Well, exactly. But the thing is, I have seen so many people do things like that and the Rubik’s Cube, and I can’t even comprehend how that works.

Now I don’t want to put myself on their level, but I have been doing this whole kind of look at content, and summarizing it. You know, is it good or is it bad? I have been doing it so much, with some many thousands of items now, that perhaps to someone watching me, they might think it’s a similar thing going on. I can come across a piece of content very quickly, add it into our system, summarize it, tag it, look at it, change the title around, whatever. Sometimes I can often do that within like 30 seconds. I’ll often come back to things because there are certain things that actually look better on the surface, than they really are but I tend to get a gut feeling for stuff like this very quickly.

So it’s down to lots and lots of practice, which is part one and number two, is having really good sources for information. A lot of our stuff comes in by emails, so I get to talk to people first, or I look in places that are trusted or that have a social proof element. So Hacker News, Reddit, and Echo JS. There is a whole bunch of people doing smaller scale curation as well, that I monitor and lean upon. Of course, they do the same thing back with me. I often see things that I’ve mentioned, come up in their stuff.

Podcasts as well. If you have an interesting guest on, I can tell if they are talking sense or not and I will look at their stuff and link to it.

It’s an interesting skill but it’s pretty much a skill that you repeat and you repeat, and you get better at.

Robert Bruce: One thing that really fascinates me in that is, and you mentioned people sending you stuff, could you make a percentage out of it? What percentage of the good stuff you find to publish, is sent to you by others?

Peter Cooper: It’s not a huge percentage. I get a reasonable amount of email but I definitely get much less email than I had space to fill. The problem is that so much of the big news comes from Google and Facebook and big famous libraries of people, who would never get in touch with me because they are too famous, or they just don’t need to reach out because they know that I am watching.

It tends to be independent bloggers that reach out to me, who have written tutorials and posts, that I wouldn’t necessarily come across usually or perhaps they haven’t submitted it to Reddit, or they are not big on Hacker News or whatever. So I get a lot of people like that and libraries that people have not heard of. I would say that about 10% of an issue comes from submissions but you do build up a lot of relationships through those emails as well. Some people come from really not doing a lot, to actually becoming successful in a niche and if you help them get that leg up, they sometimes give you exclusive things later on. I wish I could cite some examples but there’s just been too many names.

Robert Bruce: We’ve seen it in all kinds of topical markets. It’s very true.

Peter Cooper: Yeah, there are just so many people. It’s really fun actually to see how people come up and surpass other people in an industry.

Addy Osmani is one I can think of in the JavaScript and HTML5 world. I remember when he was starting out. I think he was a developer for many years but when he started having a social presence. We linked to him all the time and now he’s like this extremely famous person in the scene. It’s just very cool to see that happen and also how people go about it.

Robert Bruce: One quick last question on that is, is Twitter a factor at all in driving traffic to you or spreading the word?

Peter Cooper: Yes. We don’t really exist on Facebook. I think we have an account but it’s got 10 likes or something like that. So we don’t use that. But Twitter is very, very important.

For example, we have a JavaScript Daily account, so we’ve gone from JavaScript Weekly to JavaScript Daily.

Robert Bruce: You’re crazy man.

Peter Cooper: The reason we created it was because eventually we had too many items per issue.

Robert Bruce: Oh, wow.

Peter Cooper: We have about 100-150 things that technically go into an issue now.

So what I do instead, I still have them. I don’t summarize them. I just literally push them into a Twitter queue. So they go up onto @JavaScriptDaily.

Robert Bruce: Headline and a link.

Peter Cooper: Yeah, just the headline and the link. And sometimes a picture as well because we’ve found that works really well. But now we have, well I can’t remember exactly, like 117,000 followers or something. It’s been even more successful than the newsletter in a way. The engagement isn’t quite as high and the exposure isn’t quite as high but it really has come in useful. It really is a nice place to be.

Robert Bruce: And of course, the point there being the newsletter is much, much more valuable here to your long-term business.

Peter Cooper: Yeah, having the exposure just across lots of different types of media works really well. I’m kind of starting to buy into this whole idea of what Gary Vaynerchuk keeps bringing up, which is “You shouldn’t be afraid to create a Medium account and start writing on there and create a Vine account and start Vining.” Just spread out your message all over the place because the fact is, it’s all going to come back to you in some way or another, even if you can’t technically link back and track everything.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Peter Cooper: You are just expanding that footprint.

Robert Bruce: I think it’s great advice. I mean, depending on the type of person you are, if you are able to function in that fractured way, I think it’s great advice because it all points back to the newsletter. Anything you are creating out there, as long as it’s pointing back to the newsletter, the place that you own, then you are good.

His Approach to Opt-in Conversion Optimization

Robert Bruce: Last thing here, let’s talk about conversion on the actual newsletter sites.

Your sites are relatively simple, one page jobs. I love them. But take us through the elements you’ve got. Let’s go with javascriptweekly.com and why you have chosen to lay things out the way you have.

I’ve got one particular question about something that I have heard you talk about, which is the image. You did some testing and I don’t know if you have any more recent ideas on this, but using the image versus not using the image. Take us through the elements of the JavaScript Weekly page.

Peter Cooper: Okay. We basically have the main title of the publication in the middle, with the description of what it is. In this case, it’s a free, once a week email roundup of JavaScript news and articles. We have a preview of the issue below that and then a sign-up box. There are some other things on the page but those are the main things. If I wanted to make the page really minimal, then I would keep those items.

The original design was actually very similar to what you see now, even though it’s a complete redesign. I just wanted to keep it simple. I’m not a web designer by any stretch of the imagination. I just wanted to keep it simple and effective.

In the early days I thought, “What do I need on the page? What’s going to work?” And I knew from my blogging days that images are really, really important. In the developer scene, I was one of the first people to do this back in 2006, when I launched Ruby Inside. I had this idea that I wanted every single post to have an image of some description. I think it was quite a key thing in it’s early growth because no one else in the Ruby scene was doing that type of stuff. It hadn’t really caught on.

People have this psychological feeling of “I’m already familiar with what this is, before I have even signed up to it.” The fact is that they can see an email preview on the screen, so they think, “It’s almost like I am already subscribed to it in a way.” I don’t know, I was just trying to play the psychology of the situation.

I also set up a tour which I no longer use unfortunately, just because I ran out of time but a system called Visual System Optimizer to do split testing. I would do things like change the color of the button. I would make the title bigger or smaller. I would get rid of the image or put the image back. Or I would say how many subscribers there were or not. So over time I gradually worked out what kind of order the elements, and the size and all that sort of stuff worked the best and none of the things had a huge impact.

Early on, the only thing I would say that did have an impact, was not showing the subscription count. It actually helped. So this actually runs contrary to what a lot of advice is given that, “Oh yeah, you should use social proof.” But I realized that social proof under a certain amount of proof didn’t work that well, so that was really the only statistically significant thing that I found. We got rid of that count for a long, long time. It didn’t come back until we had 10s of thousands of subscribers.

Now we are at this point where it’s just growing on its own, we don’t do any of that testing and I know that’s really, really bad. It’s just a case of lack of time and manpower and so on. But I think it would probably have a big effect, which it’s in it’s point now, where we can actually cross-promote our newsletters and stuff like that, so the growth isn’t as difficult to come by. But those are the basic page. It’s very simple. You just put in your email, subscribe now, you receive an email and you have a thank you page. That’s it. Keep it nice and simple.

We also have all of our archives online, just because I didn’t like the way that it was hooking into other people’s archives systems. I wanted to have it all under my control, so I could track everything.

Yeah, so that’s it.

His Best Two Pieces of Advice for Starting a Curated Email Newsletter

Robert Bruce: Two more questions Peter. Number one, if you could give one piece of advice to somebody who is wanting to start a curated email newsletter on any topic, obviously it’s going to vary topic to topic, what advice would you give them?

Peter Cooper: Man, that’s tricky. I have technical advice and I’ve got almost psychological advice. I guess if I was just going to give one short piece of technical advice, it would be it’s actually very useful to append Google Analytics parameters onto the end of your URLs that you link to.

The reason for this is because if you link to people, they suddenly start getting loads of traffic off of you, they don’t know where it came from, if it’s in an email but people who are using Google Analytics, if you put those parameters on the end, you can actually say what the name of the newsletter is. They can then Google it and find you, promote you and stuff, which has happened to us all the time. I now see a lot of other people doing this idea. There are loads of tutorials about this, although I’m sure many of the systems do it automatically now.

If I was going to give more general advice, it would be to really think about the psychological aspect to your publication. It’s very easy to come up with an idea and immediately run with it but try and think, “Well, if I was presented with this from scratch, how would I react to it? If I saw something called so-and-so weekly and it was presented in such-and-such a way, would I subscribe?” Or if there isn’t something not quite right about it.

I really find this hard to describe but it’s something I do a lot. I’m always thinking about what people feel when they reach a page necessarily, than how practical or how useful the page is. I’m thinking, “What are the psychological aspects? Does this look like a company that is going to spam me? Is it a company at all or is it a person? Am I going to get a relationship with a person that I could possibly personally email at some point?”

There’s always questions that I think run through people’s heads when they hit web pages, that they don’t necessarily ever tell you about or that you really know, so I’m always very aware of what I feel when I reach other people’s web pages. So I try and apply those questions to what I do.

Just think about each aspect of your page. Why is it there? And what kind of vibe is it giving off? This sounds very new age now but I’ve found that it works for me.

What is the Future of Cooper Press?

Robert Bruce: And finally, what is the future of Cooper Press?

Peter Cooper: Well, I don’t have a Ferrari or anything yet. I must admit, I don’t want a Ferrari anyway. I’m already very, very happy with cars.

I think growth is a little bit too celebrated by the Hacker News type crowd. You know, “Oh, you must grow like 10% every single month” type thing. But I do want to grow. I will be very, very happy when I reach a million subscribers or whatever but it is a case of working out how to get there, because once you reach that level of a business, it’s very easy to have numerous people working with you and almost become the Rupert Murdoch of email I guess. But I’m not quite at that point yet.

So there is growth but I don’t want to grow to be some multi tens of millions dollar business. This is pretty much for me people consider it a derogatory talent 3515 but like a lifestyle business. I’m very, very happy, as long as it makes a certain amount of money and helps me live the way I want to live. Goofing off on the Internet and messing around on Reddit and sending email. So as long as it keeps doing that, then great. Currently it does do that for me but I like to have a bit of an insurance policy by making it somewhat bigger and bringing some more people on board.

It’s a very broad overview and a very unadventurous overview but I’m thinking more long-term. I think people are perhaps going to start fatiguing of email newsletters. Obviously, this isn’t exactly what you want to hear, given what you are involved with but I think eventually, there is going to come a point where something else becomes cool. So I am always aware of keeping an eye out for what that is and I have a few very vague ideas of some of the things that will come along. For example, if you look at podcasting. It seems to have had a renaissance, so I think there are cycles with these things and I need to be aware of what’s going on. So keeping an eye on the horizon is also a massive part of my job.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, it’s a very interesting question. You know, better than anyone probably, the yearly pronouncement that email is dead, along with whatever else is dead this year. You know, certainly technology changes. Things are always changing. It’s not a matter of “if,” but “when?” But you look into the future, and I’m not a futurist or a visionary, but there probably will be a time when email is taken over.

You can’t not say that but it’s hard to imagine with the way that email has permeated, for better or worse, our lives online, every account we sign up for, everything that we do, one-to-one and one-to-many, it really is kind of the bedrock of what goes on in these businesses and our lives online. So I think it’s probably the safest bet there is now, and for the foreseeable future, but yeah, you are right, it is good to always keep looking. The beauty is too, if something like that were to happen, some catastrophic email thing, you’ve got the audience to be able to switch them over and a certain number of them will, if and when, that time comes.

Peter Cooper: That is something that I am always thinking about. And this is something that people I know in the software, as a service space, say to me, “Perhaps you should be trying to come up with your own subscription kind of thing. Whether it’s software or whether it’s a publication people pay for.” Just some other way of getting frequent income off of people and building up other businesses off the back of what I’ve got, but then I start to think about all the work I’ve still got to do, so I never actually get around to doing it.

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

Peter Cooper: I think this is a good problem to have though.

Robert Bruce: Well, Peter Cooper, of CooperPress.com, thanks for coming on man. I really appreciate it. This has been really interesting. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while, so thanks a lot.

Peter Cooper: Yeah, it’s been great. Thanks.

Robert Bruce: Thanks for listening everybody. This is Rainmaker.FM. If you would like to get these episodes delivered to you by email, the best way to do that is to go to Rainmaker.FM and underneath the headline there, you will see the green button, just click that, sign up and get the latest episodes as they come out, plus a free 10-part course that will likely change the way you think about online marketing.

We’ll see you next week everybody.