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David Siteman Garland on the Infinite Scalability of Online Courses

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Brian Clark: Hey everyone. Welcome to yet another episode of Rainmaker FM. I am Brian Clark, Founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media. And today we have another special guest making my life easy with all of these interesting people that we’ve decided to interview. I think making your life better is the important part.

Today we have David Siteman Garland, a gentleman I have known for several years now and he has been doing some interesting stuff for quite a while. His path is similar to some of the other people that we featured on the show recently. And yet, it deviates in its own special way, which goes to show you there are way more than one path to succeeding online. David Siteman Garland, how are you?

David Siteman Garland: I am wonderful. Brian, not only am I excited to be here, but how about this one? It is the Rainmaker podcast and it is literally raining outside right now. We could not have made this any better.

Brian Clark: I’ve heard it is always raining at your place metaphorically.

David Siteman Garland: There you go, perfect.

Brian Clark: So you are the proprietor of The Rise To The Top, which is at therisetothetop.com. You started out, if I have this correctly, with that site doing a very cool interview podcast format tied with video. Right?

David Siteman Garland: Yep.

Brian Clark: And then you said, “Forget that, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m into online courses now and I’m the guy who can help you create and sell digital products and programs online.” Not both necessarily, but one then the other. I think that is fascinating and we’re going to get into it, but how about you give us the long view? You were born, you did this, that, the other, and you started Rise To The Top.

Who is David Siteman Garland?

David Siteman Garland: That was it. We just summed it up. Here is the Cliff Note version of an odd path. I’m from Saint Louis, Missouri. I didn’t really grow up with that sort of entrepreneurial spirit if you will. I wasn’t one of those people like a Gary Vaynerchuk who had 117 lemonade stands when he was 5.

Brian Clark: Neither was I.

David Siteman Garland: Yeah, it just wasn’t my thing.

Brian Clark: I figured it out when I figured that I was unemployable in that I couldn’t stand having a job.

David Siteman Garland: Totally. I can relate with that because I always worked. I mean I worked things, you know, everything from working in baseball card business to hockey shops to working for a history professor in college. I was always working, but I was really one of those people that was trying to discover for a long time what I was going to do, with really no clue.

I was big into hockey. That’s one of the huge passions of mine in sports and things like that and fitness. I went to Washington University in Saint Louis and majored in Women’s Studies. So how about that one Brian for you there? Women’s Studies.

Brian Clark: That’s excellent.

David Siteman Garland: So I majored in Women’s Studies, and again, I still didn’t have a clue of what I was going to do after college. I really didn’t have the scope. All I knew is that number one, I didn’t think I was all that employable. And number two, I also kind of had this very traditional view of entrepreneurship, which is that the entrepreneur is like the old white dude in the office with like the suit and tie and the cubicle type thing.

I saw that and to me, that’s what I thought it was. So I was thought, “Well that sounds terrible too so what the heck am I going to do?” I didn’t know anything about these sort of creative industries, or these online industries that we’re all in now.

After college I had a very odd path. I actually worked in a pro inline hockey league for two years here is Saint Louis, Missouri. I sort of ran that league. It was a really, really random thing to be doing for a couple years. That’s where I got my business experience, just by trial and error.

How David Siteman Garland “Rose to the Top”

How we got to The Rise To The Top is interesting, and long story short, I ended up with a radio show when I was doing pro inline hockey. What happened was the radio station called me here and they said, “Hey we’ve got some extra airtime and you could purchase this airtime for a very nominal amount. You could create your own show and you could have your own sponsors.”

To me, that was a very exciting idea because I could promote the league. I had no idea what I was doing, Brian, on the radio. I had no clue.

Brian Clark: That’s how you do it.

David Siteman Garland: My first show I remember I was like, “Hello and everyone and welcome to Pro Inline.” You know what I mean?

Brian Clark: Awkward.

David Siteman Garland: I was turning the page. I wrote out every word I was going to say. That’s how scary it was back in the day.

So I did that and what I decided after a couple of years of doing pro inline hockey and doing this radio thing, is that I wanted to create my own business that was my own thing. That’s when I decided to start The Rise To The Top. And what a lot of people don’t know about The Rise To The Top is it actually started as a local television show in Saint Louis Missouri where I’m at.

Brian Clark: Is this like Wayne and Garth on public access?

David Siteman Garland: Exactly, but worse. I had this Justin Bieber haircut and it was brutal. The idea behind it though was that I would interview entrepreneurs in all different types of industries. That was the idea.

I wanted to do an interview show. I wanted a chat show if you will. I was super interested in creative entrepreneurship and I wanted to see what people were doing in building these companies. So I ended up taking a lot of my savings and investing to create sort of this local TV show for a little while. That’s really where I got the start before we brought it online.

I was interviewing people in Saint Louis and then I ran out of interesting people in Saint Louis. So I was traveling around. And this was all stuff that I blew my savings on to be honest with you. It was to get this going.

How a Small Spark Can Become the Beginning of Success

I traveled around and I would interview people, and then the interesting spark came to me. And this was kind of a Captain Obvious thing now, but realize this was way back in internet years about a thousand years ago. This was 2008-2009.

I came up on 2008 and I said, “What if I could interview people through the computer?” I could sit here on my butt in my underwear or whatever and I could interview entrepreneurs via my computer. I know that’s very obvious to do now, but actually if you remember Brian all the way back in the day, it wasn’t so easy back then to figure that out.

Brian Clark: No, not at all. I mean it wasn’t even easy to subscribe to a podcast unless you were someone nerdy.

David Siteman Garland: You had to be a tech expert to subscribe to a podcast. Right?

Brian Clark: Right.

David Siteman Garland: So back in the day, we decided to give it a shot. And my business model at the time, which has changed now completely, was we had sponsors that I was able to hustle and get and move that direction early on. I remember the first interview that I did online. We did it via Skype video because I wanted to do video because I had done the TV show. I liked the visual aspect of it. And my first one was with (and Brian I believe you know him) is Peter Shankman.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

David Siteman Garland: Help a Reporter. It was my first online interview. And I remember it like it was yesterday. That’s because I did it and I was like, “That was amazing!” Then we realized that we only recorded his audio and not mine. So we had this full interview of Peter just talking to nobody.

Brian Clark: I’m totally telling you right now I always have this moment. Before we went live I said, “Okay, we’re going to pause. I’m going to hit record, and then we’re going to go.” And yet I always have this flash of anxiety and I check the recording light after you’ve been talking for eight minutes because I always have that fear like, “Dude, we got to start over.”

David Siteman Garland: Right. It’s super funny. It’s just the way it is. Thankfully Peter was super cool about it and we ended up reshooting it and it was great and whatever. But that’s really where The Rise To The Top began. It’s not where it is now, but it’s where it began, which was simply by doing interviews.

I did that for lots of years and over 500 interviews of people across every type of industry and that’s where this story begins is with a podcast and doing interviews.

Brian Clark: One thing that I’ve been dwelling on, which is one thing that works for me day and night, what is it almost nine years of Copyblogger archives now? But when you think about the podcast and that audience and the repository that you have in iTunes and the other audio channels and on your site itself of course, I was just perusing around trying to dig up our old interview together.

David Siteman Garland: Right.

Why David Ended His Podcast and Started an Online Course

Brian Clark: And you’ve got this immense catalog of content that continues to work for you and yet everyone thinks, “Well, if I start a podcast, I’ve got to do that forever.” You’re an example of someone who said, “No, I’ve done that enough and I’m going to let that work for me and I’m going to shift.” Talk a little bit about that.

David Siteman Garland: So this is a great question and that’s really where things get interesting to a certain degree. I published my very last in December 2013. So after five years I decided not to do the podcast. Why? Well a few things. Number one is I became obsessed with online course and creating and selling online courses. Now what I am ultimately known for is helping other people create their online courses. That is through my products and programs.

But how that all got started, and this is the funny sort of ironic story was through the podcast. That’s because, and you know this Brian, half the fun of having a podcast or maybe three-fourths of the fun besides creating content and having a great audience to share that with is you get to learn and hear amazing things from people. Right?

Brian Clark: Right.

David Siteman Garland: I always noticed when I was doing interviews that I was always more personally invested and I did a better interview when it was someone that I was really trying to learn something from maybe for my own life or for my own business.

What I noticed is that I had interviewed a gamut of entrepreneurs. We’re talking everything from Zappos and Tony Hsieh and those types of big people, to authors like the Seth Godin’s of the world and we even got to the Brian Clark’s from Copyblogger and Rainmaker, which are very, very difficult to get to. We got to them though somehow.

Brian Clark: Definitely a high point, I’m sure.

Are You a Mediapreneur?

David Siteman Garland: Exactly. We go to product makers and to all these different types of people. But what became so interesting for me is this subset of people that I’ve not deemed mediapreneurs.

These mediapreneurs were like an underground entrepreneurial society without necessarily even knowing each other. It was the Derek Halpern’s and the Maria Forleo’s and the Amy Porterfield’s. It was people like that and they were creating these online courses and programs. They were making a ton of money, and they had zillions of happy customers that were getting results.

They were living this really cool, I don’t want to say internet lifestyle because I think that has a weird connotation, but just more of a freedom based lifestyle. This was where they weren’t tied to, let’s say clients one-on-one work. They weren’t tied to stressing out at the office for twelve hours a day sitting there.

It was very much a freedom based business where they could work from where they wanted to. They could do what they wanted to do with their life, whether it was spending time with family and friends or traveling or whatever they want to do. They could watch paint dry.

To me that was super exciting and sort of a life changing moment, which was when I discovered these people. I said, “This is what I want.” I don’t want to be tied to doing stuff one-on-one. I don’t want to be tied to doing sponsors. I don’t necessarily want to be tied to the treadmill of a podcast.

Brian Clark: You wanted something that is scalable without you necessarily doing more work, right?

David Siteman Garland: That’s exactly right. It punches dollars for hours in the face. You have infinite scalability. So if you have something to teach someone how can you go about it? You, Brian, are obviously one of the best at this.

Well, we could teach someone one-on-one. Great, you’ve helped one person. Or maybe you could teach a small group and you’ve helped five people. Maybe you can go on stage at a conference and you speak in front of 500 people. That’s awesome, right?

But as you know, digital products and programs and courses have infinite scalability. You can reach as many people as you can possibly get to, with not necessarily requiring your time all the time.

Brian Clark: Do you think you would have been able to make that shift if you hadn’t put in the five years?

David Siteman Garland: That’s a great question and it is hard to say. That’s because I did after five years. You know what I mean?

Brian Clark: Right. In my case, it was no.

David Siteman Garland: Now realize, there was also an over two-year overlap. I think that’s important too. It wasn’t like I did the podcasts five years.

Brian Clark: Right, you didn’t just quit.

David Siteman Garland: We pumped the brakes and said we’re going a completely different way.

Brian Clark: Right.

How to Know When to Change Direction in Your Business

David Siteman Garland: I don’t think that’s a great decision for any entrepreneur a lot of times unless you know something is failing, because the podcast was working. We had six figures in sponsorships. You know what I mean?

We had six figures in sponsorships, but I had started to create my own programs behind the scene. It’s hard to say, “Well, do the five years help or hurt?” Obviously it helped to some degree because I got to meet these people and I got introduced to it.

I think people have moments in their life or in their business where they’re inspired or they find a way that they want to go down a rabbit hole. To me it just happened to be through the podcast.

Brian Clark: And think about all the relationships you developed.

David Siteman Garland: Exactly.

Brian Clark: They went from maybe not knowing who you were, to being featured and gaining a benefit out of your show. And you gained a benefit as well. Let me ask you this because I want to talk more about the online courses obviously.

David Siteman Garland: For sure.

The Power of Content Curation

Brian Clark: We’ve been kicking around a lot of ideas about the concept of curation and how becoming the gatekeeper in a world of no gatekeepers has become an important job. Who are the cool people? Who is writing the great stuff? Who is doing the good podcasts? Who is making the great videos in this great sea of content?

Most of it is dreck, but there is a lot of good stuff that never comes to the light of day. But think about the interview podcast for a second and something I said in the intro to this one in that you’re making my job easy. All I have to do is ask semi-interesting questions and let you talk. Right?

David Siteman Garland: That’s right.

Brian Clark: In a certain sense, you were the curator of five years of content that not only gave a benefit to the people you interviewed, but it brought a benefit to you. Talk a little bit about your thoughts on that.

David Siteman Garland: Oh I couldn’t agree more. There were benefits across the board from doing it. The first thing when I started when I brought this online is I really had no audience whatsoever. I really didn’t. I didn’t come from an existing business of other venture where I had a bunch of people that could come in and be like, “Here comes my crew.”

The crew was me hitting refresh, and my mom when we were starting. No one knew who I was and you know what? I don’t think I knew who I was when I was getting started. It more became, “Well, I’m tapping in to information of others.”

I am exactly what you said, a curator of information. I could bring these interesting people and grow an audience that way. I didn’t necessarily come in as someone people personally wanted to learn from because I hadn’t really accomplished anything yet. Right?

Brian Clark: You’re not holding yourself out as an authority.

David Siteman Garland: That’s right.

Brian Clark: But in the process, which this is the fascinating concept because we talk all the time about authority, in the process of featuring all these people who did have some degree of authority already, you became one yourself.

How to Become an Authority

David Siteman Garland: Exactly, you hit the nail on the head. I’m laughing because that’s exactly what happened. I think there are a few reasons for that.

There is all of the knowledge you pick up and all the things you get to learn from guests and great content and all those things and those relationships you mentioned earlier. Also, you start to build a network of people that you can reach out to. It is really, really cool.

That also comes down to your skill of connecting with people too, which is obviously an important thing with that. But what happened was, and you’re right, there was this shift that happened. I think there’s a couple reasons.

One is how people see you. Let’s say they see you on camera with Seth Godin (let’s just use him as an example). They’re probably thinking to themselves in the back of their head, maybe subconsciously, “Well you know what, here’s David and Seth Godin. Seth Godin is a great guy. Maybe David is not a serial killer.”

Brian Clark: That’s not too much of a leap I guess.

David Siteman Garland: Seth Godin is hanging out with him. He probably wouldn’t want to do that if he was a serial killer, so hey maybe he has got something interesting. That almost rubs off a little bit.

Brian Clark: Of course.

David Siteman Garland: It rubs off with every guest that you have. Right?

Brian Clark: There is guilty by association, but there is also status by association.

David Siteman Garland: Exactly. This is where it gets interesting, I think is, and I said it a couple times but maybe it’s not that interesting, but then the questions started to be centered towards me from people. So audience members and people that were on my email list, on social media, and maybe even at conferences and things like that started asking me questions. That got really interesting because I never saw myself, at that point, as an authority or a teacher. I was just an interviewer.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

David Siteman Garland: And people started asking me questions usually centered around online marketing. This is because I’d built up a pretty decent sized audience and had a pretty strong Rolodex of guests on the show. There were also a lot of questions about interviewing and doing interviews and things like that.

Those led me down the path, or the shift from here’s a guy who hosts and asks questions, to here’s a guy who can teach people something. That was a massive shift in our business.

Brian Clark: Yes. And I do want to take a second here to acknowledge that I think your first move into online courses was essentially the skill you have to have to be this podcast curator, which is the art of the interview.

David Siteman Garland: Yeah.

Brian Clark: You did create a course on that and I think it did really well for you.

David Siteman Garland: That was exactly it. My first course was called Create Awesome Interviews, which is still available. The reason for that was I had to open my eyes. I had done a couple things in the past, I had gotten a book contract. I had started teach, but I was still trying to find my flow and where I was going to be in this teaching world.

I wanted to create a product and I didn’t know what it was going to be. I went back to a lot of these people that I’d interviewed and did all the research. I asked them questions about how they came up with their products. I did the obsessive, researching, crazy person thing that we do. Right? I have an addictive personality and so when I do it, I overdo it.

I did thousands of hours of research and conversations with people about their online courses. I remember I was at an event and there was a very sweet lady named Debbie who has been kind of one of my audience members/fans/customers for as long as I can remember. She came up to me and she shook my arm at a conference and she said, “David, you need to create a product. You need to create a product!” She’s like, “I’m going to buy it. I want a created product and you’ve got to do it.”

It was a crazy feeling. At this point, people were like, “David, you need to teach something.” I didn’t know what. Some people know right away what it’s going to be; some people don’t.

Why You Must Listen to Your Audience

Brian Clark: I remember in 2007 after a full year of Copyblogger, and we hadn’t really sold anything, I had two reactions. One was “I don’t understand why you’re not selling me something.” And the other one was, “Will you go ahead and sell me something?” I’m like this is beautiful.

You’re always worried about making an offer because you think it is too soon. If you get to the point where you’ve delivered value, people start thinking you’re crazy on one hand if you don’t sell them something, which is a good place to be.

On the other hand, they’re begging you to sell them something.

David Siteman Garland: Right and that’s absolutely true. When a lady is coming up to you at a conference and grabbing your arm and telling you, “Just create something and sell it, I’ll buy it.”

Brian Clark: That’s not a subtle sign.

David Siteman Garland: That should set off some kind of thing. I’ve got to be honest and way back in the day Brian, I definitely had a fear of selling online to people I was offering this great free content and I was promoting sponsors, but I had this very irrational (that is completely gone now) fear of that “Oh my god what’s going to happen, is there going to be backlash?”

All these things turned out to be completely false and very limiting. I had that. I was like, “Oh, what if I put something together and it’s not any good. What if this or that, or what if people are complaining?” and all these different things.

I was able to fight through that by saying, “Okay, let’s give this a shot. I see these other people doing it. I’m going to model a lot of their top tips and their successes and I’m going to figure it out.”

What’s Your “Green Light” Moment?

To me, the green light moment was really looking around, but back then, all the questions that came to me were really associated about interviews. They were like, “How do I get guests? How do I ask good questions? How do I record it? How do I market it?” All those questions were coming to me.

Now it’s all about online courses, but back then, it was all about interviewing. That’s when the green light went off. I started looking back and I saw that I did a couple how-to posts that did well on my website. I saw that I had gotten a lot of questions about this. I was paying attention.

It was like, “It’s been under my nose the entire time, I need to do a course on interviewing.” And that is when I did my very first course called Create Awesome Interviews.

The Top Two Tips for Giving a Great Interview

Brian Clark: Alright. Give us the number one most important thing about being a great interviewer and creating an awesome interview.

David Siteman Garland: I will say first of all, the cliché one that’s very true, which is listening. You have to actually listen.

That’s because then you will respond as opposed to just looking at what your next question is going to be if you prewrite your questions. Right? If people say something interesting, there are lots of nuggets that you can dig deeper into that you can only pay attention to if you’re listening and not just staring at a list of questions.

Brian Clark: Right.

David Siteman Garland: That’s one of the key things. if I were to have a 1B and cheat on the answer and not just give you one, is what I mentioned earlier. You have to be very personally curious about the guest and what they’re doing. Otherwise, you’re going to end up going through the motions and it’s going to be weird.

I’ve done that. Trust me, that’s why I’m mentioning this. I’m not going to name names obviously, but I’m saying there were some guests where I just wasn’t that excited about it. I was doing it maybe for the wrong reasons.

Brian Clark: You’re phoning it in, right?

David Siteman Garland: I totally phoned it in. There was a big difference in the types of stuff so those are my two major tips there.

Brian Clark: That is an excellent one because I’ve found with this recent set of interviews we’re doing for Rainmaker FM, that a lot of times I’m talking to people I know. I’ve been friends with or colleagues with for a long time.

In the case of Pat Flynn, I had never spoken to him before and I think that interview came across so well because I really wanted to know this guy’s story. I was fascinated by it and I really liked him. That’s a cool thing to discover during an interview that you actually hit it off with someone and I think that shows. But like you and I have known each other, it’s been years. We were just talking about how could it be three years or whatever since we last talked?

David Siteman Garland: Four even I think possibly.

Brian Clark: Even the interview with Jay Baer who I talk to and see quite a bit, but usually you shake hands at the conference. You have a very specific task that you’re talking about via email and then you have no idea what’s going on with this person otherwise. I do feel that if I weren’t genuinely curious at this point about even catching up with old friends, I would rather not do it.

David Siteman Garland: Agree.

Brian Clark: There’s nothing worse than “Hey David, welcome to the show, go ahead and give me your spiel.” Who wants to hear that?

David Siteman Garland: Right. Whether you’re doing it on audio like this interview or video or whatever, either way it will shine through. It will shine through when you’re excited and curious and genuinely want to pull some stuff out and you just want to know versus like you said, phoning it in. That’s a very good point.

Understanding the Value of Online Courses

Brian Clark: Okay. Let’s shift gears a bit to your favorite topic. We’ve got a lot of people listening right now that are very interested in creating online training membership sites. Essentially, they want to find a way to make a living from whatever you want to call it, premium content, digital commerce (insert buzz phrase here).

David Siteman Garland: Right.

Brian Clark: Primarily it’s an online business. There are hybrids. One I like a lot is the service model combined with the online model as a lead generation strategy with the idea of building it into an online play. How many people who take clients don’t dream of that?

David Siteman Garland: A lot.

Brian Clark: Exactly. For those people, I think it is less difficult to find the topic. Well, you’re already providing value in a client based model already.

David Siteman Garland: Absolutely.

Brian Clark: You understand what that is. I think those people need to realize the value that the online course is the new book. Remember how we always talk about why you write the book. You don’t make any money from it, but it’s like a five pound business card.

David Siteman Garland: I have one of those.

Brian Clark: I’m the perfect example of someone who said, “No, I’m skipping over that part. I’m going straight to the online course.” The rest is history.

For those who are really trying to do it in the purer sense as in this is the business I want to start, we’ve talked about how do you find your topic? It’s the intersection of what you’re interested in and what people will pay for. What are your thoughts on that? How do you give guidance to people in that area?

David Siteman Garland: This is one of my favorite topics. There are exactly two categories of people. There are people that know exactly what they want to do their course on and there are people who don’t.

The people that do, it’s usually something maybe they have a book or maybe they do one-on-one work or small group work or maybe they have a blog on a very hyper specific topic and they know that’s exactly what it is. Those are the more obvious categories so we’ll just put those aside for a second.

Category two, you’re more like me when I started. Meaning that you’re thinking, “Well, I don’t know exactly what I should do, what’s going to sell, or even, what do I need to do?”

I’m going to give a couple of very quick strategies. The first one I went over already, but let me review what I really meant by it. A lot of times your topic is right under your nose, and you don’t know it yet. What I encourage people to do is to start thinking about what questions do you get? What advice do people ask you for?

Brian Clark: Right.

The Best Advice for Finding Your Online Course Topic

David Siteman Garland: What’s something that you’ve done personally that you’ve gotten a result from? Maybe you lost twenty pounds after being overweight for twenty years. Maybe you discovered how to do the perfect golf swing that added a hundred yards to your iron game of something.

What personal things have you done that can be put into a how-to step-by-step system to teach others? Think about that. That’s a great starting point, which is to mentally getting there thinking, “Okay, what have I done?” It could also be that maybe you’ve done it for other people. It doesn’t have to be, but maybe it could be.

For example, say you lost twenty pounds. That’s a personal result. Another example is if you work with Sam, Joe, and Sally, and they all lost twenty pounds. Maybe you work with them in a different way. Maybe you did a one-on-one or whatever it might be. That’s another opportunity. It’s either personal results or from other people.

Then what I always have people do, and this isn’t an obsessive thing, and I think people sometimes can get stuck here and I encourage you not to get stuck here, is do a little research. Are there other courses out there on your topic? And guess what, Brian? You know this too. If there are, that’s a good thing.

Brian Clark: Yes.

Fun Fact: Competition in Your Market is a Great Thing

David Siteman Garland: Fun fact.

Brian Clark: It’s the hardest thing to get people to understand that you’re looking for competition to differentiate yourself from.

David Siteman Garland: Absolutely.

Brian Clark: You’re not looking for some vacant niche because that means no one is buying anything. Sorry.

David Siteman Garland: That’s right and that’s very true. That’s a red flag if you go out there and you see no courses, no books, or no associations. It could be any of these things, I’m just giving an example. But look to see if there is no evidence of commerce in that industry.

Brian Clark: Yep.

David Siteman Garland: That’s a massive red flag. What I always tell people is don’t be discouraged. Imagine we go to a bookstore, I think those still exist nowadays Brian, right? There is not just one cookbook sitting there in the bookstore. There is an entire section of cookbooks.

Now imagine the second cookbook maker. He’s like, “Oh no, there’s already one here, that’s it, I’m packing up shop. I’ve been cooking for 25 years and I’m packing up shop. I’m out of here.”

That’s not how it works because there’s always ways to stick out from the pack. There’s always ways to differentiate. No one has your story. No one has your teaching style. No one has your relationship with people, so it’s a different thing there. So that’s the research, which is the next phase.

The Most Important Question to Ask Your Audience

Then what I always encourage people to do, Brian, and this is a big simple tip. I suggest you send out a one question survey to people. The one question, which I’ll tell you right now is simply asking people what do they want to know more about (blank)?

What do you want to know about better distance on your golf clubs? What do you want to know about creating a podcast? What do you want to know more about (blank)? You require an email address obviously for this because it begins a lead generation thing.

You will be fascinated by the responses that come back even if you don’t get that many responses. It’s not about quantity because if you get five, there’s a good chance there’s another five people like that. If there are another five people like that, there’s probably fifty like that. And if there are fifty, there’s probably a hundred.

You will start to pick up language used and you’ll start to pick up questions. And, Brian, I don’t know if you’ve ever done surveys before, but one of the fascinating things I find from surveys is people are always amazed about how simplistic a lot of the questions are to you.

Brian Clark: Yes.

David Siteman Garland: Right? It’s the plight of knowing something, right? You’re like, “What do you mean not everyone knows how to interview Seth Godin? That’s ridiculous, they should all know that.” It’s one of those things where you’ll be surprised about how much you really know and that’s a big confidence booster too as you move forward. Those are some initial steps to getting you on the path of narrowing down the topic.

Brian Clark: After nine years of doing this, I never get over what I take for granted that people need to know.

David Siteman Garland: Exactly. And it’s usually fifty levels to the left than what you think it is.

Brian Clark: David, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. I do want to give a plug to David’s products. I am not getting paid for this although I should.

David Siteman Garland: I’ll send you something depending on how many.

Brian Clark: Just send me a fruitcake or something.

David Siteman Garland: No, I was going to send a pony. It is going to be a live pony and then you’re going to be responsible for it.

Brian Clark: My daughter would love you. And I would kill you.

David Siteman Garland: Exactly.

Brian Clark: So TheRiseToTheTop.com/products, that’s where you’ll find that interview course which if you’re just getting started, start there because think about what you can do with podcasting. It finally became the thing we’ve been waiting for it to become since 2005.

It is a curation strategy when you can get together and interview people that in essence build your authority over time. Then of course, he has his online course, Create Awesome Interviews, which I’d like to take a look at it, David.

David Siteman Garland: I’ll hook you up.

Brian Clark: You can hook me up?

David Siteman Garland: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I have heard nothing but good things about it so I can send you over there without a bit of trepidation because David is a good guy and he knows what he is talking about.

David Siteman Garland: Well thanks, Brian. I appreciate it. Also, if people head over to CreateAwesomeOnlineCourses.com, they will see that oftentimes the page up there says there is a waitlist and things like that. If you just enter your email, you’ll go through and you’ll get a lot of great free content, and all kinds of other cool stuff. Eventually, you’ll receive an invitation to find out what it’s all about. So just giving you a transparent behind the scenes view of what will happen if you check that out.

Brian Clark: And it wouldn’t hurt to watch what he is doing with his onboarding process too. Right?

David Siteman Garland: Absolutely. Steal it. Go for it.

Brian Clark: Alright, David, I want to wish you Happy Holidays and thank you for taking time out to be on the show. Let’s talk more often.

David Siteman Garland: Absolutely. Sounds good. Same to you. It’s been a pleasure chatting as usual. It just feels like catching up with an old friend, that’s the good stuff. I will make sure to get that pony at some point in the mail and so you might want to start stocking up on some food.

I appreciate it, Brian. It’s been great as always.

Brian Clark: Excellent. Talk to everyone later.

Pat Flynn on Entrepreneurial Inspiration and His Profitable Content Strategy

Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and online entrepreneurs. Find out more and take a free 14-day test drive at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Brian Clark: Hey everyone, Brian Clark. We are here again today with another episode of Rainmaker FM. Today is another one of our special interview episodes and I am very pleased to have today as a guest Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income.

I was kind of ruminating with Pat before we started the interview that I’ve been aware of him forever and yet we’ve never met. We’ve never really had a chance to talk. And I decided what better way to end that dry spell than to have him on the show?

I think his story is inspirational. I think it is instructive and I think it is fascinating. I also think it is in line with the theme of these interviews of people who have successfully built audiences, but what do you do then? What’s next? And how did they get here in the first place? I think for many of you that is key. So join with me in welcoming Pat Flynn. Pat, thank you so much for being on the show.

Pat Flynn: Thanks for having me Brian. I’m super stoked to be here on Rainmaker FM. I think it’s really cool that we finally got to meet on a podcast of all places. Podcasting has been huge for me lately. We’ll get into that I’m sure, but amongst other things it’s just a fantastic way to share with people so I’m truly honored to be here. Thank you.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s interesting. At Copyblogger we have kind of this mantra that everything is content. So if you want to get to know someone, in my mind, why not also share it with everyone else?

Robert and I always have these conversations where we’ll reflect back and we’re like, “We should have been recording this, this is good stuff.” For example, our last show was with Jay Baer, and I’ve been friends with him forever, but rather than just getting on the phone with Jay and saying, “Hey, what are you doing, where are you going? Catch me up.” Why not make it into a podcast? And that’s exactly what we did. So again, thank you for being here.

Like I said, you’ve been in the game since about 2008 and it’s kind of ridiculous that we haven’t spoken before. I am mostly intrigued in hearing your story in your own words.

I’ve got the general gist of what happened with the layoffs that affected so many people at that time. Instead of maybe dwelling on defeat, you took that as an opportunity to do something else. Take us back and tell us what happened, how you got here, and all of that good stuff. I’m really interested in hearing how you had such a positive mindset in the face of adversity.

Who is Pat Flynn?

Pat Flynn: Sure. It definitely wasn’t always a positive mindset after getting laid off. For a couple of weeks I went into a state of depression. I just didn’t know what I was going to do. I’d spent my whole life getting ready to become an architect and I was working at a great firm in Irvine, California and all of a sudden a few months after getting promoted actually, I get called into the office and they tell me that they’re going to let me go. This is the summer of ’08.

It just killed me. I had no plan B. I thought this was a secure thing. And my first reaction was actually to call every single architecture firm in a 20 mile radius. And then to call all of my friends and all of the contractors that we’ve ever worked with and just beg and plead for a job. That’s because I was really scared. I didn’t know what else to do. I had no other life.

Luckily, I had a few months until they were actually officially going to let me go because I was a job captain. I had a few clients who I just couldn’t leave and so they wanted to transition me out slowly. During those three months with going to work every day just to make a few extra dollars here and there was what I dreaded every single day.

Why would I want to go into work? I didn’t do any work, to be honest. But I did discover podcasts at that time. And it was at that time I discovered a podcast where I heard an interview from a guy telling his story about how he was making six figures a year teaching people how to pass the Project Management exam (the PM exam).

That’s when a light bulb went on for me because I had helped myself pass an exam. It was a really difficult exam in the architecture industry called the Leed exam, which is sort of making environmentally friendly and safe buildings and things like that.

Brian Clark: Right.

Pat Flynn: To help me pass this test, I created a blog. I had followed blogs. I had started my own blog in college about what I ate for dinner and what parties I went to and things like that. That was on the Xanga platform.

Brian Clark: Everyone does one of those at least. Right?

Pat Flynn: Right? You won’t find it. It’s gone. But I knew that it was a great way to manage content. And I figured you know what, my handwriting is terrible, I do a lot of traveling, if I post my notes online, it would be a way for me to study and study at work during my lunch hour and all of this.

I spent a year just posting content on the site, study tips for me and a few of my coworkers every single day. For a year and a half I did that and I finally passed the exam in March of ’08 and I was done with it. I had no more need for it.

But when I heard this podcast episode months later, I said, “Wow, maybe I can take this site that I built for myself and a few coworkers and actually share it with the world. I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I don’t know even the first step, but I do know that I’m going to need to eventually keep track of traffic.”

So I put Google Analytics on the site. Comments weren’t open. There was no need for comments, so I didn’t know anybody was on the site. I didn’t think anybody was on the site. But the next day when the analytics registered, I saw that there were like 5,000 people who visited the site the previous day from over 30 countries in the world.

It just blew my mind that people were already coming to the site to help them pass the same exam. I had no idea. I don’t even know for how long before that people were coming over. That’s when I opened up comments. People started asking questions that I actually knew the answer to. Even though I didn’t know all the answers, I became this expert over a short period of time.

I was one of the only ones actually revealing all of this information about this exam. And to make a long story short, in October of 2008 I published a study guide. It was an ebook that was delivered digitally. In that month, I had made $7,908.55.

Brian Clark: Wow.

Pat Flynn: That was from a $19.99 ebook. And this was more money than I’d ever made in my whole life and it just completely changed my life. So truly, the layoff, which sucked at first, became a huge blessing in disguise because it opened my world to this online business stuff. Initially my thoughts about online business before getting into it were like, “Man this is a scammy thing, I would never do it.”

Brian Clark: Right.

A Proven Online Business Model Relentlessly Serving Your Audience

Pat Flynn: It was like people are just trying to suck every dollar, but here I was actually providing value for this audience. I was selling something and getting paid in return.

In addition to that, I was getting these amazing thank you letters from people who had taken the exam using my study material and passed the first time. There were paragraphs and paragraphs of thanks. And that is what showed me the business model that I continue to use today in all of my businesses.

This model is that your earnings are a byproduct of how well you serve your audience. That’s always for me the primary motive. Actually, that first month after I launched that ebook, people were like, “How did you do this? Share everything, I want to know.” And I said, “Yes okay.”

That’s when I created SmartPassiveIncome.com to share everything that had happened with that business. Ever since then I’ve just shared new businesses that I’ve created, and things that I do. It doesn’t always go right, but it’s always a lesson, and I think that’s really cool.

People have been following along on my journey. It took about a year and a half for this site to finally take off and now it’s my primary thing, and I have a podcast to go along with it. We just passed eleven million downloads.

I have a second podcast to go along with it called Ask Pat. It’s making tens of thousands of dollars a month primarily though affiliate marketing. I actually don’t sell any products of my own quite yet. The audience I’ve built and the opportunities that has provided for me from book writing to getting on stage and doing keynotes and getting paid to do that, it’s just unbelievable the path I’ve been on.

And amongst some of the content that I create, I also create new businesses publically. Like I said, it doesn’t always go right but it’s always a learning experience. That’s why I call myself the crash test dummy of online business. I’m just so blessed and happy to be that person, to show people what works and what doesn’t.

How Having “Nothing to Lose” Can Lead to Great Successes

Brian Clark: It’s amazing. I do want to talk to you in detail about podcasting, about the Ask Pat show, about affiliate marketing, and all of this because I think there’s a lot to learn there. But I do want to drill down real quick on one thing I noticed on your About page, which really resonated with me.

Of course it was harder and everyone goes through depression and angst and anxiety when something bad happens, but it resonated with me because it’s been my personal experience as well. You said getting laid off was the best thing that ever happened to you.

I don’t how much you know of my story, but I had been an attorney and quit in the ’90s and that’s when I started online. I had become an entrepreneur successfully in ’99 more as a solo, but really in 2001, 2002 I had a real business and I spun off another one from it.

In 2005, I had a snowboarding accident that created a subdural hematoma. I don’t know if you know what that is, but it’s like a life threatening pool of blood in your head. Long story short, I had to have brain surgery and all of this stuff. I say that was the best thing that ever happened to me and people look at me like I’m insane.

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brian Clark: But it’s not that I became an entrepreneur after that. I became the entrepreneur I wanted to be instead of what I thought I was supposed to be.

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brian Clark: And this is a big theme in my life that your own mind really either limits or enables what you’re able to do. Did you have this switch? You created the ebook and that was really your test case, right?

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brian Clark: But were you driven to do that in the first place out of desperation and then you found that this worked out for you?

Pat Flynn: Not necessarily desperation, but it was almost that I had nothing to lose at that point and I think that’s important.

Brian Clark: Nothing to lose is a beautiful place.

How Fear Can Help Drive Your Business

Pat Flynn: Absolutely. If you try and it doesn’t work, well you’re where you were started anyways, but at least you’re giving yourself a chance. That was really big for me because I think because I didn’t have a plan B, because the world of architecture wasn’t letting me back in, I took risks that I wouldn’t normally have taken.

And I always ask myself, “Wow, what would life have been like if I didn’t get laid off, would I be going down this path?” I know the answer would be “no way.” I wouldn’t have pushed myself to try these things. It was that layoff and not being able to get back into the industry that pushed me in this direction, and I’m so, so thankful for it.

It’s funny because your story and my story are very common stories when people go through these tragic moments in their life. Then these amazing things happen on the other side of it typically. Now I actually look for that fear. And whenever I see it, that is mostly a sign that I know something amazing is on the other end.

That’s why I started my podcast even though I was deathly afraid of getting on the microphone and I hate my voice. That’s why I got on video. It’s because I just knew I was nervous so I knew something amazing was going to happen if I were to conquer it. And now public speaking, which if you asked me a few years ago, I would have never said yes to getting on stage even in front of ten people.

Here I am speaking in front of thousands now and I have the opening keynote at New Media Expo next year. It’s just crazy what happens when you actually believe that you can do this stuff. Like Henry Ford says, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”

Brian Clark: Absolutely. I am far from the Pollyanna rah rah motivational type, but I really do try to impress on people that when bad things happen, it’s a cliché to say there’s a silver lining. There could be a gold lining if you just realize that this may be that moment where you’re supposed to go ahead and throw caution to the wind and chase your dreams.

The main thing for me with the near death experience is this is all we’ve got; this is not a dress rehearsal.

You have a great voice by the way. I don’t understand what your problem is.

Pat Flynn: Oh thank you. I think it’s the mic. The mic makes me sound a lot better. It’s a fairly expensive podcasting mic.

Brian Clark: I think everyone hates their voice because you hear it differently inside your head and it’s just not the same thing. Interesting that you mention about a fear of public speaking because I used to be a trial attorney, a young one. It’s not like I was in court all the time, but I was still deathly afraid of public speaking.

I think ironically, you said you’re keynoting in the fall. That used to be BlogWorld and that was my first speaking engagement way back when it started.

Pat Flynn: Oh, that’s cool.

Brian Clark: Me, Darren of ProBlogger, and Chris Brogan really helped get that rolling because there wasn’t such a thing as a blogging conference at that time. They invited me to speak and I was scared to death. But because I was afraid, I had to do it.

Pat Flynn: Exactly.

You Have to Make a Choice

Brian Clark: And it didn’t kill me. I can’t say I was great, but it didn’t kill me. And now despite myself, I regularly speak even though I swear every year I’m going to quit because I’d much rather do this. I’d rather be at home with the kids and not leave them and all that good stuff. But still, it’s always that which intimidates me that I have to conquer just to feel like I’m moving forward as a person.

Pat Flynn: Right. It makes me wish that I knew that this was what to do when I was in high school. I would have asked out many more girls.

Brian Clark: Well, I’m jealous that you’re only 30 years old. I went to law school and got out when I was 27. I practiced for four years unhappily and that was ’94-’98, and the beginning of the commercial web.

Every night I would go home and stare at that monitor. It was an ugly beige boxy monitor back from the ’90s and say “There’s got to be a way to make a living.” I sat there and looked and thought about it for four years because there were no conferences, there were no blogs, and there were no guides. You had to watch what other people were doing.

Finally again, it was that moment of I’m either going to live my entire life miserable holding on to my nice salary and my assistant and my private office. From the outside it looked wonderful. And of course my parents and my friends thought I was insane. You have to do something that makes you happy.

It wasn’t just law, it was being employed that bothered me. That’s because I enjoy the freedom of doing things my own way. It’s not about the amount of money I make necessarily (although that’s certainly nice), it was always “Can I make a living without answering to anyone except for my audience and my customers?” Do you feel now that you could ever go back?

Pat Flynn: No.

Brian Clark: If you got that plump architecture job, you would just laugh. Right?

Pat Flynn: Funnily enough, in March of ’09, several months had gone by since starting my online business making tens of thousands dollars a month. I got a call from my boss who had let me go from the architecture industry. He had started his own firm and he took a few people from the firm I was at. He offered me a very, very generous salary, a year’s worth of rent for free and just the best thing I could ever have asked for if you had asked me like two years earlier.

Now I mean it was the best “no” I had ever said in my entire life. And that’s the defining moment when I knew, like you, that I wasn’t going to be employable anymore at that time.

Brian Clark: I love that. That’s nice. That’s a great story. Okay, so 2008 is when Smart Passive Income started?

Pat Flynn: Yes.

Brian Clark: As a blog, much like Copyblogger, it started two years earlier as kind of a one-man show. Then here’s an interesting story that you’ll think is funny in an almost dangerously disastrous way. In 2005 when I came out of surgery and everything recovered fine, but I was never going to do anything for money except for in the way I wanted to. So my first idea, and I don’t know if you remember back at that time, but that was the beginning of the podcasting rage that was about five to ten years too early.

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brian Clark: Remember Adam Curry, the MTV DJ and all that? My original idea was to start a podcast instead of Copyblogger. I look back and say, “Wow, that would have been a disaster.” That’s because podcasting wasn’t ready for primetime yet. Of course my strength was as a writer and that’s ultimately why I went with it. I had the ability to teach people what we now call content marketing (I didn’t call it that obviously at the time), was really the right opportunity and thank goodness I took it.

Still, even when you shifted to podcasting in 2010, it was still early. That was as a form of content marketing, which is effectively what you do. What made you make that move?

Why Pat Flynn Started Podcasting

Pat Flynn: At that time, it hadn’t yet hit mainstream yet. There were certain industries like online business where it was starting to take off. I knew that because there was a podcast out there called Internet Business Mastery that I discovered.

Brian Clark: Yes.

Pat Flynn: Jason and Jeremy, I definitely give them credit for a lot of what has happened to me because I listen to the show every single day on the way to work and on the way back every single day. I got into a part of their program and they definitely helped me get a great start. I knew a podcast was a great way to deliver content and provide value and help people to take action, which is what I wanted to do.

It was funny because in December of 2008, I actually wrote a blog post. This was just a couple months after starting the blog saying and announcing that I was going to start a podcast. I had actually bought equipment, I did a little test audio, and I had posted it on the blog December of ’08.

I didn’t have my first episode published until July of 2010, so a year and a half later. The reason for that was because I was just scared. Like I said earlier, it took me forever to get over the fact that I had to just do it. Also at the time, it was quite technical to try and figure out. There weren’t any tutorials and it wasn’t necessarily very easy. A lot of the people who were big into podcasting were tech geeks.

Brian Clark: Yes.

Pat Flynn: It was big in the tech geek world, but not so much for people like me. I finally got some help from Cliff Ravenscraft from podcastanswerman.com who helped. He was a consultant for me and he got me up and running and it has taken off since then.

Yes, it was quite early but I think that was to my advantage. I came in at the right time I think. And now it’s still the wild, wild West out there. It’s still very young and podcasting is growing insane right now. I’m so glad to be a part of it right now. My podcast has done very well and I’m just one guy in San Diego and I happen to be ranking in the Top 10 of Business and have been for the last four years.

The Critical Importance of Quality

It really evens the playing field I think especially because anyone can do it now. You’ve got to make good content though. You have to have great interviews or have great shows to stand out because now it is going to become like blogging. It is going to become saturated now so you definitely have to put your best foot forward and best voice forward as well.

Now I have my new podcast called Ask Pat, which is a five day a week podcast inspired a little bit by John Lee Dumas over at Entrepreneur on Fire who has a seven day a week podcast. I never thought that was possible, but in talking with him, he lives here in San Diego with me. He was teaching me how he was able to do seven days a week.

He basically batches everything. He records all of his interviews on Monday, and then hands them off to a VA. He or she puts them together so that they come out every single day. He is months ahead of schedule now, which is fantastic.

That was the inspiration for me to do Ask Pat, which since launching in March of this year and is approaching three million downloads now. Each episode is about ten minutes in length and I answer a voicemail question from the audience. They call in using SpeakPipe to leave me the voicemail. Then I record it and then I hand it off to my assistant who then slices and dices the show and puts it all together.

Honestly, to be able to put a whole month of Ask Pat up there probably takes four hours for the whole month. And it is amazing because now I’m doing sponsorships and getting paid through having sponsors on the show. So each episode of Ask Pat pretty much makes me around $250 on average. And then each episode of the Smart Passive Income podcast probably makes about $2000.

That alone is enough to supplement my living expenses even more. Then I have everything else on top of that too, so it’s quite amazing what the podcast has done for me. And like I said earlier, it has allowed me to get in contact with people for potential publishing deals. It has allowed me to get on stage because there’s just something about the voice that is unlike any other medium.

With podcasting specifically, people can read a blog post maybe up to 15 minutes worth. With video, our attention span is even less, it’s maybe five minutes if that. With the podcast, some of my shows are up to an hour and sometimes an hour and a half. That much of my brand in a person’s life is unlike anything else.

That’s why when I go to conferences now, people come up to me who I’ve never met before and they call me by my name. They’re like, “Pat, dude, I feel like I know you. I feel like we’re friends because you are in my life every single day.” At first, that kind of creeped me out.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It can be that way.

Pat Flynn: People were like, “Hey Pat, how is your son doing?” And I’m like, “Who are you?”

Brian Clark: Right, I know.

Pat Flynn: And then I was thought, “Wow, this actually means I’m making a true, strong connection with people, and it’s all because of the podcast.”

Ask Not What Your Audience Can Do for You, Ask What You Can Do for Your Audience

Brian Clark: It was interesting to watch you segue into Ask Pat. That’s kind of more of an advanced strategy because you need an audience really to have the questions in the first place. It’s also a sign that you’ve become an authority, whereas in the beginning of your podcast, it’s mainly an interview format. Is that correct?

Pat Flynn: I think it is maybe sixty percent interview, forty percent solo.

Brian Clark: When you first started, was it primarily Pat teaching or a mix or interviews?

Pat Flynn: It was a mix actually. Now I’m actually headed more into the interview space. With Ask Pat, like you were saying, it’s me answering questions.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: And like you said, in the eyes of the audience that puts me at that authoritative level. Beyond that, I think I love it more because, and people have told me this, they hear the voice of people in the audience and they can related to that. And then I come in and answer so they feel like they are not alone. I might answer their question, even though somebody else asked it for them. They feel more involved.

Brian Clark: Of course, this ask format is just exploding in popularity. You’ve got AskGaryVee, you’ve got I think

Pat Flynn: Ask Altucher.

Brian Clark: Exactly. Right.

Pat Flynn: He actually asked me if that was okay if he could do that.

Brian Clark: Oh really?

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

Brian Clark: How nice of him.

Pat Flynn: It was awesome. He was like, “I don’t want to take this, and I know your Ask Pat was sort of the first one out there.” I was like, “Dude, do it.” Everybody is doing it now. There’s an Ask Jason, ask Dr. this, and I think it’s cool. It is definitely a great strategy and I don’t mind people adopting it as long as your name is not Pat.

Podcast Content vs. Written Content

Brian Clark: It reminds me of an early strategy. Everything comes around in new formats but in the IM world, like pre-2005 everyone had an ask thing but it was different. It wasn’t the podcasting format, which to me is a much more intimate. Like you said, you really get to know people.

My writing style comes across in a way that I think is very decisive and yet not as warm. When either I meet people in person or they listen to me in audio they’re like, “Oh, you seem much nicer.” I’m like, “Oh I’m not sure how to take that.” But you know, it’s true. It’s a different medium. It is so much more warm and personable and relatable I think.

Pat Flynn: The ask format you mentioned and how it was sort of adopted podcasting is really interesting. That’s because the “AMA’s” or ask me anythings on Reddit are always really popular. Like you said, it’s sort of just enhancing that experience through the voice here.

Brian Clark: Yes, absolutely. You’ve touched on a couple things that I want to elaborate on. In many ways, especially with podcasting as you’ve evolved now into more than one show, you’ve been a trailblazer. I’ve seen your influence. Sometimes it’s unmistakable and other times it’s as simple as someone like James saying, “Hey, I love your format, do you mind if I steal that?” And then again, you and James couldn’t be any more different. Right?

Pat Flynn: Right. Got the crazy hair.

Brian Clark: Exactly. Now, you are incredibly transparent with your sources of income. You do monthly income reports. You do create your own sites. You show how you effectively you find a niche, and you focus on satisfying the needs of that audience, and they give you money. It’s an amazing thing. I’ve seen many examples of the various niche sites that you’ve created and they are income generating.

Ironically, a big chunk of your income comes from what I call aspirational affiliate marketing. So for example, I’m Pat and I produce this site and this podcast. Now, I have this new podcast, and here are the things I use to do that.

And that turns into, because of course there are affiliate programs tied to many of those products, you make a lot of money from that. Effectively, I’m saying that people want to be like you. They want to do what you’re doing. That in itself has become a source of revenue. You kind of act like you were surprised about that when that actually took the lead in revenue.

Pat Flynn: I was because I was just sharing what I did and reporting on it. I was getting involved with other companies that I could potentially earn an income from through commissions and affiliate marketing. It just took off and I was surprised at how well it did. I knew people were going to go through those links because I was there providing value and not saying “You have to go through this,” but “Hey, this is what I use if you want to go click.”

Brian Clark: There is nothing more credible.

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brian Clark: You’re not selling something for the commission. They’re buying what you use. That is a credible source of marketing in my mind.

Pat Flynn: Right. And I feel like if they’re going to buy anything anyway, I might as well make sure that it’s something that I know is going to be helpful and valuable to them. Whether they choose to go through my affiliate link or not, that’s up to them. I feel like the main purpose is just helping a person achieve whatever their goals are that they want to achieve.

In the course of doing that whether it is free content or paid content or your product or somebody else’s product, whatever the case may be, you’ve got to share it. So on my resource page for example, which is my profitable page on my site, in fact about fifty percent of my revenue actually comes from that page. When people go there, they are looking for tools that are going to help them. I have used all of them and I have commented on all of them.

Some of them have videos and tutorials on how to use those things. A lot of those things don’t have an affiliate income, they’re just there to help. That is again going back to what I said earlier, your earnings become a byproduct of how helpful you are. It’s interesting because it’s IM and I’m selling these products that people want to use to do what I do. That’s something that was a little bit hard for me to understand at first. That’s because I can share the tools, but people have to put in the work.

Brian Clark: Yes.

Pat Flynn: It’s like how can I make sure people do the work? You can’t. But you can show them the path and hopefully help them and be motivated to use those tools in the right way. I’m very lucky that I have a very transparent audience with me too, who a lot of them share their success stories. I think a lot of why my brand has grown is because people do use the strategies that I share, have found success in different levels. They do share and spread the word for me too.

Brian Clark: Let’s talk for a second, and this is something I kind of brought up with you before we got on the air, about one example that is so remarkable to me of someone who has followed the Pat path. He happens to live in the same town as you and you mentioned him early, John Lee Dumas.

I follow both of you guys, and I look at John who started after you obviously, and I look at his avatar on Twitter. And I look at yours with the Smart Passive Income little bot. What is that thing, by the way, on your microphone?

Pat Flynn: It’s called a mic flag and you see it in newscasts and stuff like that.

Two Necessary Tools of Success

Brian Clark: Yeah, I love that. That’s great. So he has his for Entrepreneur on Fire. He does income reports like you. And as you mentioned afterward, he has followed your path. And yet there are two things that you’ve already mentioned are necessary, or in my mind I think also are necessary, in that you’ve got to do the work and you still have to have your own voice.

So John is someone who I think has followed your path incredibly step by step in the sense that if it isn’t broke, don’t try to fix it. And yet as you pointed out, John works like a maniac. No one would ever fault him for not putting in the work. But also he has his own unique voice. When it comes down to it, no one is going to confuse you for him.

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brian Clark: So you both live in San Diego and you were actually the first guest on his show. Is that correct? Tell us a little bit about that.

Pat Flynn: I was actually. I met John in Las Vegas at New Media Expo and he was watching one of my presentations. This was in 2012. I did something interesting at the end of that presentation. I did a reverse Q&A where I had people come up to the mic and I would ask them questions instead of them asking me questions and John was the first to volunteer.

Later I found out that his coach at the time was Jaime Tardy from Eventual Millionaire who had suggested that he go to these conferences to talk to people and build relationships to sort of get people excited about this brand that he was going to create. He didn’t have a single follower at the time. So he came up and I asked him a bunch of questions. I gave him some advice on this brand he was going to create and he actually did it.

Then he came up to me and asked me to be a guest on his show and I said, “Yeah absolutely.” That’s because he seemed like a cool guy. I’ve just not necessarily been coaching him, and I haven’t even really been telling him what to do. He has been just following along with what I do and I feel like he has taken even beyond where I’m at.

Like I said earlier, I don’t have any products or membership sites right now. He has his own products, membership sites, and that’s reflected in his income report. He is doing extremely well with those. Beyond that, like you said, he has his own voice and he is working like mad.

He was very smart in the way that he knew that podcasting was going to be big. He knew there was a hole in the fact that a lot of people have weekly shows and there are people that were just constantly waiting for new episodes so he filled in that gap. He created a seven days a week entrepreneurial interview podcast which nobody was doing.

It was similar to what other people were doing, but it was in his own style and he filled that gap. He had his position knocked down and he’s been killing it. But I feel like there are differences between us. I have a family, two kids at home, and my “why” is them. So I spend most of my day with them. John, he is a maniac, and so he is working a lot.

Brian Clark: How old is he? Is he younger?

Pat Flynn: I believe he is younger than I am, but not by much.

Brian Clark: Sometime I think that having two children as I do and I guess you do, two as well?

Pat Flynn: I have two children, yes.

Brian Clark: Half of you wants to work less to be with them, and the other half says I better get to work because these things are expensive.

Pat Flynn: Absolutely. I’ve sort of found a good rhythm now. I actually don’t work at all during the day. I work at night when they sleep. But when I work at night, I make sure I’m the most productive efficient person I can be.

Brian Clark: Right. The after night-night time work was treasured for me for many years. It actually still is because they are nine and twelve now, but the house is chaos until I can get them to go to bed.

Pat Flynn: Oh great, so I still have that to look forward to. My kids are two and four.

Brian Clark: You’re still in the early stages. You’ve heard this a million times, but you really do have to treasure these times because they grow up so quickly. You’re like, how did that little baby girl turn into this twelve year old?

Pat Flynn: It scares the crap out of me.

Brian Clark: So John does very well with his podcasting course. Again, it’s a form of aspirational marketing. In essence, John interviews entrepreneurs, but he does it via podcast. So the natural inclination for his audience is to go “maybe I could do a podcast” and that makes perfect sense.

The Value of Producing Online Courses in Today’s Market

I happened to catch a recent episode of your show with David Siteman Garland who is heavily into the online course world. He’s a great guy, by the way. And you mentioned that this is on your radar. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Pat Flynn: It is on my radar. I have always been reluctant to having my own course just to have a course. That’s kind of what everybody does and that’s a great way to make money, especially if you can have a recurring revenue to go along with that. But I’ve always thought, I don’t want to force it on my audience. I’m doing well with the affiliate marketing and things like that. But then of course, affiliate marketing is relying on other companies.

Brian Clark: And you don’t own the customer relationship and you’re doing really well. For me it was always the same thing. The next step is not only do you have the audience relationship, but you have the customer relationship. Things exponentially happen from there.

Pat Flynn: I’m excited about that. I also feel like, and I’ve gotten good advice from other people in mastermind groups where I’m providing value on the site, but I could be enhancing the experience where I bring people through to achieve their goals. And I might be doing my audience a disservice by actually not having a course or by actually not selling something where when people pay for stuff. That’s because they’re more likely to go through and do it. That was an eye opening way to look at it.

Brian Clark: Do you get that feedback from your audience? I remember when I started Copyblogger, which was a different time and different place. The concept of talking about selling with a blog made me the devil to half the blogging world. Of course, look at where we are today. It is so commercial.

But I went a year and ten months without selling anything. And into that second year, people were concerned. They were like, “Why are you doing this, why don’t you sell something?” on one end and the other end was “Please sell me something.”

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brian Clark: And that’s a great place to be. I see you in that space in spades. You’ve been delivering value for seven years now.

Pat Flynn: I feel like nothing is going to change on the front end of my site if I come out with a course.

Brian Clark: Right.

Pat Flynn: It is for people who want that enhanced experience. They’re going to have that opportunity to do that through that course, so nothing is going to change. It’s going to be enhanced.

What’s in Pat Flynn’s Future?

Brian Clark: Do you have any topical ideas you can share with us? Or are we flying under the radar right now?

Pat Flynn: There are a number of different things I could create courses about. For me right now in working with my team, which I just started to build this year, it has been amazing to work with other people to help take the brand forward. It’s just discovering what’s first. There are a lot of different angles to go. From affiliate marketing to niche sites, there are all different ways to go. It’s just a matter of picking which one’s first.

Brian Clark: It’s like the problem of having too many options. Right?

Pat Flynn: Right. I know that I just have to pick one and go.

Brian Clark: Generally you’ll get the final inclination from the audience.

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brian Clark: Even if you don’t ask them directly, because you never want to ask them what they’ll buy. That’s because often that won’t turn out to be true. It’s more about what their biggest problem is. What can you help solve?

Pat Flynn: Yes and there are all of these incredible strategies now that go along with selling a course. John himself has presold courses to validate the idea of creating that course. So he says, “Hey, if I get this many customers, I will create this course.” Which is a really cool, smart thing to do.

Brian Clark: In 2007, our first product was an online course and we sold it before it existed. This was way before Kickstarter or minimum viable products or anything. It was really that we needed to make sure people wanted it and we needed cash to take the next year to build it.

At the time that was regarded as insane, but it’s just smart. If you take an educated guess, you’re probably going to make some sales. If that’s enough to justify going forward, fine. If not, worst case scenario is you plead forgiveness and refund everyone’s money.

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brian Clark: Thankfully that has never happened.

Pat Flynn: So courses are big for me this coming year. I feel like if you want to truly provide value for your audience, a course is definitely the way to go. It’s the best way to get that experience through your brand and to enhance the knowledge that they have through what you know. And the way to deliver that content is a lot more organized than if it is just on the front end of a website.

Brian Clark: So our mutual friend Chris Ducker, you and he are up to something.

Pat Flynn: We are up to something.

Brian Clark: I know there is a pending announcement. This show will air maybe after that. Can you share anything with us or should we wait?

Pat Flynn: Well, I will share part of it with you. Chris Ducker and I, he is a good friend. He actually lives in the Philippines, but he travels quite a bit. Whenever he comes to San Diego we do this sort of twenty-person event where we have people pay to come and hang out with us.

Twenty people is all we can take and we do it for a whole day. We put everybody in the hot seat. We break down their businesses and build them back up and we just mastermind together. Then we have a nice dinner afterwards. It’s always really fun. It’s actually one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done.

Chris isn’t actually traveling to the US as much next year so we were deciding how can we continue to work together and do this sort of thing where we’re working with other entrepreneurs and everybody gets to learn from everybody else’s example? So we decided (and this is going to sound crazy to you because we already talked about my two podcasts), we’re starting a podcast together.

Brian Clark: Okay, so your free time is about to be obliterated.

Pat Flynn: You say that but actually, no. I have completely outsourced all of the production of all of my podcasts. This one will be just the same. All I have to do is hit record.

Chris and I talk on the phone every week on Skype anyway. We might as well make those conversations useful. We’re going to have people call in and share their business for sixty seconds and what they need help with. Then Chris and I are going to go back and forth for fifteen minutes, just like at these live events that we do. Hopefully this can help build, buzz, and promote something else that’s happening later in the year for us as well.

Brian Clark: If any of you out there are skeptical about the power of podcasting, look no further than Mr. Flynn because this will be number three. Excellent.

Pat Flynn: Four, actually. I don’t know if you know I have a podcast for my food truck niche theme.

Brian Clark: That’s right. I did see that. Interesting.

Pat Flynn: Which one of the shows actually got featured on the front page of iTunes.

Brian Clark: Nice. Don’t think I don’t notice every time, which is all the time, that your show is ahead of ours. Hey, we’re coming for you. We’re coming.

Pat Flynn: Bring it, Brian.

Brian Clark: I know.

Pat Flynn: I’m looking forward to it.

Brian Clark: Thank you so much for being here. This has been a treat for me just because I got all my questions answered that were haunting me about where you were and where you’re going and all that. I think more importantly that everyone out there probably has their head boiling over with ideas, which is wonderful. So thank you again.

Maybe we can do this again in the future when you’ve instituted Pat 4.0, or whatever phase you’re on right now with the online courses and all that good stuff.

Pat Flynn: Thanks so much, Brian. I appreciate it. And I just wanted to publically thank you for all the inspiration. You and Copyblogger were one of the first blogs I started following back in 2008 when I got into this world. And it was a huge inspiration for me, so thank you.

Brian Clark: Thank you so much for saying that. I appreciate it.

Pat Flynn: Of course.

Jay Baer on “Generosity Marketing” and the Power of Business Podcasting

Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and online entrepreneurs. Find out more and take a free 14-day test drive at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Brian Clark: Hey everyone, Brian Clark here with another episode of Rainmaker FM. Today we’re breaking our normal programming just a bit to bring in a very special guest. We’re going to have more guests periodically, but this is a guy and a friend that I really thought should be the first one.

So Jay Baer, you know him most likely as the bestselling author of Youtility, which if you have not read is one of those few bibles of content marketing. And as someone who has been doing this a while, I feel like my opinion on that has some credence. Definitely pick it up and take a look if you haven’t read it. If you have read it, you know and are familiar with Mr. Jay Baer.

I’m going to ask Jay to bring us up to speed on his path to best-selling author and content marketing celebrity in his own right. But in general, Jay has managed five marketing service firms, which is amazing. And in the process of that he has worked with over 700 brands, 30 in the Fortune 500. That’s kind of ridiculous.

I want to find out and I know his shop is growing, I know they’re doing interesting things but it is better to hear it from him than me. Jay, how are you?

Jay Baer: Hello my friend. Thanks very much for having me. Greetings to everybody out there at Rainmaker FM Nation.

Brian Clark: Very nice. So as I warned you, I’d love for you to give us more details. So you were born and you’re here today, please fill in the gap.

Jay Baer: I feel like what Chris Brogan said a few years ago, “It took me ten years to become an overnight sensation.” I started in online in 1994 so pre-browser, pre-Yahoo, and way pre-Google.

I was originally in political consulting. I ran political campaigns. I went from there to corporate marketing and from there I had a brief, and I mean brief, a foray working for the Government as a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections.

My job was essentially to give tours of the juvenile prison, which isn’t even as fun as I just made it sound in the previous sentence. I had been there about four months (and this is a true story), they put me in charge of a 13 person business card redesign committee. I thought, “Wow, that seems like a lot of people involved in this process, that doesn’t really fit my thinking on life and in business.”

At the same time I had dinner with some friends of mine from college who had started the very first internet company in Arizona and they said, “Hey, this company that we built is starting to get a little bit bigger and we don’t know anything about marketing.” And I said, “Well, that’s okay because when you say the word ‘internet,’ I don’t know what that word means, but I will literally do anything other than giving another tour of this prison.”

So I walked in the next morning and quit, and found myself the Vice President of Marketing for an internet company without ever having been on the internet. That is an interesting place to find yourself.

So that company ended up getting pretty large and we sold it to MindSpring and I started another company and another company and another company and another company. And here we are at Convince & Convert, which I started in 2008 to provide true strategic consulting services.

We’re not an agency, but many of our clients are agencies in fact. We work with medium sized and large global brands to help them with content marketing strategy and social media strategy, governance, metrics, competitive analysis, and things like that. We probably operate more like an analyst firm or like a McKinsey & Co., than we do like an agency. That’s because we don’t get involved in tactical work.

Befitting the Rainmaker audience, the company is purely virtual. We have staff members all over the United States. We only have one company meeting per year and we have four phone calls per year, period. Everything else though, is with Teamwork, which is like Basecamp but I prefer it and Skype. And that’s how it rolls.

Brian Clark: Interesting. How many people do you have now?

Jay Baer: Ten.

Brian Clark: Ten, okay. I did not know you were virtual, or as we like to say geographically agnostic.

Why Good People Are Good to Find

Jay Baer: Absolutely. We’re in all time zones and it works out pretty well. The other thing that many people don’t know about Convince & Convert, is that all of our team members with the exception of myself, also have their own consultancies on the side. So everybody who works with us spends half to two-thirds of their time with Convince & Convert and the balance of their time working on their own clients.

Everybody is a 1099 in our company and sort of has that motivation and mentality and skillset to be a sole proprietor. I really look for those kind people when I bring folks on the team because it takes a special kind of person to say, “Hey, go work on a social media strategy for some of the biggest companies in the world. You’re never going to see that company. You’re never going to meet that company, and you’re never going to have a meeting with your team. It’s going to be all on the phone.” Not everybody can do that and so we’re pretty careful about who we bring into the fold.

Brian Clark: That’s interesting because that was my exact sworn plan when I started Copyblogger. There would be no partners and there would be no employees after coming out of my last three businesses, which almost killed me. Now we have 42 employees and 4 partners.

I think whatever you have to do is, you look at what the goal is and what needs to get done to get you there? I think you’re familiar with the story. I didn’t even have a product or service much less some grand goal of creating X, Y, or Z, you kind of roll with it.

Jay Baer: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Anyway, thank you for that summary.

Jay Baer: I’ll add that there’s no doubt that it gets harder to maintain that thesis as you get bigger. At some point it starts to change the dynamics when you get more people. In fact, just 31 days ago we added a Director of Operations to the team. We did that because we got to the point where we needed somebody in that role because it just gets too loosey-goosey.

Brian Clark: I would recommend to anyone starting out, to start that way. Even if you do go with a partnership to some degree, hiring people is capital intensive. I think Joe Pulizzi over at Content Marketing World, with this fantastic conference, has only got one or two actual employees. It’s like he’s a force of his own.

Jay Baer: Absolutely. It can be really effective, but the corollary to that is you absolutely have to have the right people.

One of the challenges with that kind of business is that even though we’ll be on the Inc. List next year, we’re growing fast. And having that sort of setup does prevent you from growing even faster because you’ve got to be really, really careful about whom you add to the team. You can’t babysit. It’s impossible to babysit them.

Brian Clark: Again, we have employees but it takes a special type of employee to be trusted to sit in front of a screen and not look at cat photos all day and to actually do the work. I feel blessed that we have this team. Every day I think about what if I had to get to a hundred employees next year. Everyone has come from the audience. It has been beneficial and I feel lucky and I do think about that.

So, your first book was The Now Revolution with our friend Amber Naslund. What year was that?

Jay Baer: It was 2011.

Brian Clark: Okay. And then Youtility came two years or one year after that?

Jay Baer: Two years after that, so it was last summer.

Brian Clark: That book has really had some influence. I remember when I saw you do your keynote at Content Marketing World, the first time I heard you talk about Youtility and I was like, “That’s damn good.” And the book didn’t disappoint.

Where We’re Headed After the Launch and Popularity of Youtility

So Youtility has become in its own way its own “buzzword” I guess, to represent what we’re trying to accomplish with content marketing. Where are we going from here? What’s beyond Youtility?

Jay Baer: First, I don’t think we have conquered Youtility. You and me and the people that listen to the show and the people who consume the content that you and your team create are at the very vanguard of this line of thinking. As you know, we do a lot of big corporate consulting and I do a lot of bringing the Youtility message to major corporations.

In those organizations, this concept of help rather than hype is by no means something that has been embraced. In some cases they’ve got their toe in the water a little bit. But we’ve got a long way to get Youtility and that thinking sort of embedded in the culture of organizations across the board.

It really is a cultural imperative more so than a content marketing imperative.

Certainly the manifestation of it and the tactical execution of it could be classified as content marketing, but you have to believe in the power of giving away value. Most companies simply do not because they haven’t had to historically. They could just advertise their way out of it. I think we’ve got a long way to go to reach sort of peak Youtility if you will.

The Decline of Online Reading?

What I think is really interesting coming down the road is how the Youtility execution layer is changing really, really quickly. A lot of the things we talk about in the book even a year ago were blogging and mobile apps and things like that. Now, you see such a tremendous rise of multimedia content and short form video in particular. So whether it is Vine, Instagram Video, short videos on YouTube, short videos posted natively to Facebook, and podcasting of course.

As a four-time author now, it kind of breaks my heart, but Johnny don’t read. Right? Johnny don’t want to read anymore.

Brian Clark: I’ve been saying that since 2007 when we launched a training program as our first product called Teaching Sells. The arguments I had to make are, “No, people will buy content,” which no one wanted to believe in 2007. It’s hard to believe that now with the rise of eLearning and online courses and all that.

Jay Baer: Of course.

Brian Clark: The other thing was people don’t read. You do because you’re my audience and we’re readers. Right?

Jay Baer: Right.

Brian Clark: That’s why Copyblogger has been so text heavy throughout time, but I think you’re noticing that we’re branching out more into audio and video.

Jay Baer: You have to.

Brian Clark: There’s only so many people that are readers, but you can’t leave them behind. I do want to talk a couple other Youtility focused books, and you do work with some gigantic organizations.

These are for the people that are little closer to my heart. You’ve got one for accountants and you’ve got one for realtors, which these are the professional services’ small business engines of our economy.

Jay Baer: Absolutely. Youtility applies as a concept to every business. I really believe that.

Brian Clark: I do too.

How Your Business Can Move Vertically from One Strong Product

Jay Baer: Big, small, B2B, B2C, government, all that. In order to actually do it, I think it is sometimes easier for people to see themselves in the stories even more than they might in the regular book.

I essentially stole a play from the chicken soup playbook as well as the e-myth playbook and said, “Geez, we could tell stories in a vertical.” So Youtility for Accountants came out in March and has done really well within that community. That’s certainly a type of professional service provider that typically has not embraced that type of marketing at all.

Just two weeks ago we released Youtility for Real Estate, which has been on and off the number one Kindle book for real estate on Amazon for the last couple weeks since we released it. I think it is actually the best thing I’ve ever written. I think it is better than the Youtility hardcover. That’s because I’ve had another year to year and a half to think through the principles and organize my thoughts better.

There are so many realtors out there and they all do the exact same thing. There’s very little differentiation between any of them in terms of how they go about building their business. And so Youtility is a recipe for doing it in a different way and it has been really successful.

We’ve had great coauthors on both of those projects. Darren Root, a friend of mine who is a very popular famous thought leader in the accounting space and Erica Campbell Byrum is the head of digital marketing for Homes.com and for Rent.com. She coauthored the Youtility for Real Estate book.

It’s nice to have those vertical subject matter experts alongside to help me find case studies and to add a little industry gravitas to the proceedings. Those books are virtual only, which has been an interesting dynamic to not have a physical book. They’re just $2.99 in Kindle iPlay, Google Play, iTunes, and all that. It’s less than three bucks, which is remarkable. We look at it more as a marketing exercise for the real book than it is necessarily going to make at $2.99.

Brian Clark: Interesting. This is something I’ve seen and I think influenced me early on because being generous, giving things away, and giving value away to make money some other way is the basis of my entire career. I would never argue with the utility of generosity. You see that in your very best real estate agents and you see that in your very best accountants.

Jay Baer: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I remember my first accountant was that kind of guy. And still, you have people who are trying to squeeze every dollar out or are kind of ruthless.

The Power of Generosity

Is it easier at the professional services or small business level? I ask because generosity is a personality trait and the enterprise can’t culturally assimilate that.

Jay Baer: I think that’s some of it, but I think some it, Brian, is that at that small business level, you’re closer to the customer. You can see the outcomes of Youtility faster and you can see them more clearly.

So the feedback loop of, “Hey, I did this and I have both anecdotal and actual evidence of success” generates more enthusiasm for the concept and it creates a snowball effect.

The problem with Youtility in corporations (and I say this as somebody who consults with corporations on doing Youtility) is that even if you’re great at it, like Charmin is one of the examples we use in the Youtility book. Columbia Sportswear is another one and Hilton Hotels is a classic Youtility case study that I talk about all the time.

Those companies are terrific at Youtility, but the Youtility programs that they’ve adopted is such a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny piece of their overall marketing ecosystem that it is almost impossible to point to that and say, “This is the lift that that created,” other than anecdotes. And anecdotes work great in small business.

I think small business decision-making, especially on the marketing side, is almost always powered by anecdotes rightly or wrongly. On the corporate side, on the enterprise side, anecdotes don’t count, so it’s a different circumstance. That’s why I think small businesses are really well established and set up to put Youtility into practice because they can see it work right in front of their face.

Brian Clark: Certainly you’re an angel investor and advisor to a lot of startups that have internalized this as a launch strategy effectively.

Jay Baer: Buffer for example. I was one of the first investors with those guys, and those guys have really figured it out.

The Shifting Landscape of Multimedia Content

Brian Clark: Buffer is a great example. Okay so you and I have been chatting about a lot of stuff this Fall working on various things, but I think the exchange that led to this podcast was me marveling at how well done Jay Today is.

Jay Today is what, three minutes? I love your tagline and of course you’ve got to tell them what it is, but I think you’re a natural both spoken and in front of the camera as well. I can generally rattle off whatever, but I get a little self-conscious with a camera in my face. If you would, please tell people a little bit about Jay Today and why you’re doing it and how it’s going.

Jay Baer: Well, we were just talking a moment ago that people don’t read. We’ve got to find a way to create other forms of content. I’ve had a podcast for a long time called Social Pros that you’ve been kind enough to be on that focuses on interviewing big companies, social media managers and thought leaders like yourself.

That’s great, but that show is not about me. It is intentionally about the guest. At the same time, like you, I blog less than ever. Right? I used to write all the blog posts on Convince & Convert once upon a time.

Brian Clark: It happens for some reason, why is that?

Jay Baer: Yeah, our editorial calendar three years ago was with maybe four blog posts a week, and I wrote all of them. Now we do eight blog posts a week and I write one of them. But the traffic keeps going up.

I think the lesson there if you confuse your correlation and causation is that the less I write, the more traffic we get. So what I felt like was A: I need to create more content that’s not written and B: I didn’t really have an outlet for “Hey, here’s what I think right now.”

That’s because I’m not like Mitch Joel where I just say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. I’m going to sit down and write a whole blog post about it today.” Our editorial calendar is done pretty far in advance.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Ours too.

Jay Baer: Yours is as well.

Brian Clark: It’s like a magazine.

Jay Baer: Exactly.

Brian Clark: It’s not really a blog anymore.

Jay Baer: Precisely. So I no longer had that outlet. With that, I said, “Geez, what if I just turned on my iPhone and just almost did a reality show confessional. It would be like ‘Here’s what I’m thinking about.’” And I thought, “You know, it can’t be that hard.”

I got some people to help me figure it out and got some sponsors so it wasn’t going to be a complete disaster and it has worked out great. So the tagline is “Jay Today where I give you a piece of my mind three minutes at a time.”

Brian Clark: I love it.

How to Repurpose Three Minutes of Content Seven Different Ways

Jay Baer: It is three videos a week. We publish them Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. They are three minute videos, just about whatever. It could be like what’s going on in social media, in business, in life, and just sort of observations.

My friends at Candidio were a terrific video editing company up in Indianapolis where you just upload your video and then they take care of it. They put the titles on it, they clean it up, they export it to YouTube, and the whole thing. So they are a sponsor and they are great guys and we’ve generated a ton of business for them because people watch the show and are like, “I want a video like that too.” So that’s worked out great.

And Sprout Social is a sponsor as well and they’ve been terrific partners on that project also. One of the things that I think you’ll appreciate and certainly the Rainmaker folks will appreciate is what we’re doing with those videos.

The original plan was give me a platform to talk about what’s on my mind and create more video content. Okay, easy enough. What we’ve decided to do is to really make that, because I do it so frequently, kind of the content atomization engine. So every time I record the video, and I just do it on my iPhone with an external microphone.

Brian Clark: Which is amazing because it looks really good. It is a testament to how far the iPhone has come.

Jay Baer: Right? And the 6 is definitely better than the 5s in that regard in the reverse facing camera. I have a tripod, which is big because it keeps it steady. So we take the videos, they go on YouTube, and they go on our website on a distinct domain name jaytoday.tv, which is powered by Vidyard. Then we have it on a video podcast and we also have the audio version as an audio podcast both on iTunes.

Brian Clark: Yep.

Jay Baer: Then we take it, we transcribe them, and we make them a written blog post on Convince & Convert. We take the transcription, tweak it, and make it a LinkedIn blog post. We take the transcription, tweak it again, and put it on Medium. Then we take the videos and post them directly to Facebook. So every three-minute video becomes seven distinct content executions.

Brian Clark: Nice. That’s a beautiful segue into what I’d like to talk about next, but I think I see a theme emerging here. We’re both writers. I would take it that you probably prefer to read than consume audio or video, or is that not the case?

The Secret of Keeping Up with the Modern Day Consumer

Jay Baer: I do. In fact, I’ve got a funny story about that.

So my son is a big sports fan as I am. Every morning when he gets up and gets ready for school, he is not allowed to watch TV, but he has his iPad Mini and he is always on ESPN or NHL.com. That’s pretty much what he does while he is eating cereal or whatever and I do the same thing. I start my day with a little sports news and this happens with shocking regularity.

I’ll look over and he is on his counter stool and I’m on my counter stool and we’re on the same page of ESPN. Right? But if you’re familiar with the way their site works, they almost always have the video at the top and then the text at the bottom.

Brian Clark: Right.

Jay Baer: Constantly I look over and he is watching the video with his headphones on and I am reading the text of the same. That happens all the time.

Brian Clark: That sounds like me.

Jay Baer: All the time. It’s crazy.

Brian Clark: If that video auto-rolls, it’s off and I’m down to the text. I’m glad they do provide the text for people like me.

I’ll watch television and film to a certain degree and enjoy it immensely. But as far as watching YouTube videos or listening to a very long podcast, it is very difficult for me. I’m a reader and yet, I don’t make the mistake of thinking other people are like me.

Jay Baer: Yeah.

Brian Clark: And the early Copyblogger was essentially a blog about writing and it was delivered in written form. But as you say, you’re going to limit yourself in the universe of content if you only stick with text regardless of Google’s continued predilection for it, which can be solved with transcripts. And you’re essentially talking about doing something once and creating seven unique manifestations of it.

Jay Baer: Right.

Brian Clark: This year, we have become very bullish on starting with audio, getting that transcript, making SlideShares, making webinars, and making articles. You can crank out more than seven if you really put your mind to it.

Jay Baer: Absolutely.

Brian Clark: Generally, you want to see what worked and what resonated and focus on that. Don’t repurpose everything because we all strike out from time to time, most often more often than not. You know?

Jay Baer: Yep.

The Undeniable Benefits of Podcasting

Brian Clark: So where are you on podcasting right now? I think I know, but we’ll let you get to that.

Jay Baer: Well, I’m hugely bullish on it not only because I see great results from it, I’ve been doing the Social Pros show now for almost three years and of all the things that I do, but I probably get more anecdotal feedback on that. That includes people saying, “Hey I love the show, I listen to the show all the time.”

Our downloads of that show are up a hundred and something percent year over year. At the same time, you see lots of other people in the digital marketing community, the content marketing community creating more and more podcasts, which is I think good. I think a rising tide lifts all boats at some level.

Then you see research from people like Tom Webster at Edison that shows that podcast consumption has increased 25% in this country year over year to the point that 15% of Americans have listened to a podcast in the last 30 days. And you may think, “Well geez, 15% isn’t that much.” Well yeah, except that 18% of America is on Twitter and nobody is saying that that doesn’t have a future.

Brian Clark: Exactly.

Jay Baer: So 15% of anything when you’re talking about a country this large is a lot of people. Right? It’s a lot of people. And what the data shows is that people who are into podcasts are really into podcasts. They listen to three, four, five, six, seven, or even eight shows a month.

Increasingly, when we get to this “Hey, there’s no more scheduled content” in terms of “Hey, here’s when this television program is on,” etcetera and you already see that now with binge watching on Netflix and Amazon, podcasting is going to be the audio and spoken version of that. Think about a universe five years down the road where blogging fades away because nobody wants to read and everybody accesses the internet through wearables, which is a screen which is not big enough to read on.

Brian Clark: Yep.

Jay Baer: And consequently, the way you educate yourself, the way you become a better marketer, a better business person is instead of using Feedly to create your customized information newspaper, it is using something like Stitcher to create your customized audio newspaper. Then, you just listen to your education. I think that’s where we’re headed, which is why I wanted to sort of get on top of that and build a search engine to help people find shows like them.

Brian Clark: I want to talk to you about that specifically, but you mentioned the time shifted aspect. I was an early adopter of satellite radio because at the time I had a business that had me in the car a lot.

Jay Baer: Yep.

Brian Clark: The fact that I could listen to 80s alternative on the original XM was just amazing to me. But now certain programming is like, “Tune in at X o’clock.” And I’m like “Are you kidding me?” That’s not going to happen.

Jay Baer: They’ve completely gone back on what they originally were intended to be.

Brian Clark: Right, okay. So as you mentioned, MarketingPodcasts.com, is that the URL?

Jay Baer: That is the site. It is as we record this nine days old or something.

Understanding the Long Game of Content Consumption

Brian Clark: When you told me about it in September in Cleveland I was like, “Oh that’s cool.” Then I saw it launch and I felt like, “Oh, that’s really cool.” But then I was asking, “Why is Jay doing this? I can’t figure out the angle.”

Now you mentioned something about the future of content consumption that tells me you’re playing a long game here. I’ll let you talk about it.

Jay Baer: Yeah. It’s a very long game with MarketingPodcasts.com and the site is free. It’s really the first ever search engine for marketing podcasts.

Unlike most of the things I do where I have a fairly well thought through plan on how it all fits together and revenue streams and synergies with our other properties and things like that, this is one that was really born out of personal frustration. I was literally looking for marketing podcast because I do listen to shows during my commute to the airport and I’m familiar with a lot of the great podcasts out there. But I’m sure there are more out there that I wasn’t aware of and so I just went to go try and find some. I went to iTunes, and if you’ve ever tried to find a podcast on iTunes

Brian Clark: Marketing and management, right?

Jay Baer: It is marketing or management and unless you’re in the first page, it’s a hot mess. It’s ridiculous. It is impossible.

I thought, “Well surely there is a better solution.” And so I looked around and looked around and looked around, but all I could find was a few blog posts out there like, “Here’s my favorite podcast.” I’m like, “Well that’s not really a search engine.”

So I thought, “Seriously, it’s almost 2015 and this doesn’t exist? How can that be true?” And then I thought, “You know what, screw it, I’m just going to do it because it needs to be done.”

Then I talked to our developers and their WordPress ninjas at Marketing Press, who are great guys. They built the current version of Convince & Convert and JayBaer.com, which are riding on top of many of your products.

Brian Clark: Genesis, right?

Jay Baer: The Genesis Framework of course.

Brian Clark: Synthesis hosting.

Jay Baer: Yes, Synthesis hosting and Genesis.

Brian Clark: I always forget you’re a customer.

Jay Baer: Of course I am.

Brian Clark: You don’t cause me any trouble.

Jay Baer: I just pay my bill and keep my head down, buddy.

Brian Clark: That’s how we like it. No. Hopefully we’re not causing you trouble to give us trouble.

Jay Baer: You’ll be the first person I call.

Brian Clark: Of course.

Finding Out What’s Possible and How to Make It Happen

Jay Baer: So these guys are really talented. And I said, “Hey, is this possible?” And they said, “Well, we’ve never thought about it, but maybe.”

So we spent quite a bit of development time and quite a bit of development dollars to figure it out. We essentially do some very sophisticated mining of the iTunes API to create a feed of podcasts to rank order them in a bunch of different ways. You can sort by total episodes, you can sort by what we call audience approval rating, which is our gymnastics algorithmically to rank order shows. We have a staff of reviewers now that are reviewing podcasts every week.

You can obviously search by categories so if you want content marketing podcasts versus SEO podcasts versus advertising podcasts, you can do that. It’s fully responsive. The whole thing works great and the feedback has been tremendous, and I’m really excited about it.

The reality is now that it’s out and I’m super excited about it and the feedback has been great and people love it, I really have no idea what to do with it. Right?

That’s because it’s not part of what I do day-to-day. It doesn’t neatly support other things that we do, although Marketing Podcast is “sponsored by” my podcast so hopefully we’ll get some more listeners to my show.

Brian Clark: There is a purpose. You can always find one.

Jay Baer: There’s always a purpose. Here’s the thing, it has gone so well and now that we know how to do it, now that we know how to do the technology, there is certainly an opportunity. Maybe we should build ComedyPodcast.com and TVpodcast.com and SciencePodcast.com and build out a whole network of these. Then it becomes a pretty interesting.

Brian Clark: I’m currently doing Who Is on those domains.

Jay Baer: A domain search, yes. It becomes a pretty interesting sponsorship opportunity for a bigger company at a bigger level at that point.

The other thing is I was talking to John Wall at Marketing Over Coffee, which is a great show. He’s a great podcaster and the other day he said, “One of the problems with podcasting is that there is no way other than through your own efforts to get more attention on your show.” You can’t buy an ad on iTunes and you can’t buy an ad on Stitcher. There’s no marketplace for attention within the podcasting community, which is puzzling.

Brian Clark: Right.

Jay Baer: There’s no Outbrain for podcasts, for example. We’ve thought about building an ad network to sell sponsorships, to aggregate everybody’s podcast audience and to sell sponsorships to big companies and be the middle guy on that.

We’re really good at sponsorship packaging and sales at Convince & Convert, so that’s an option. We’ve also thought about the next version of MarketingPodcasts.com sort of being like a Google search engine results page. That would be where it’s like here’s the shows that organically rank and then these guys have paid us to be at the top of the search results.

That’s an option as well. There are several things we’re kicking around. Now that we have it, it’s like “I better figure out what to do with it.”

Brian Clark: That’s interesting. I’m going to be watching that because I think you actually do. This is something I face all the time and often keeps me from doing projects like that at all. That’s because I know that to truly make the best of the opportunity or I wouldn’t be thinking about it in the first place will take some serious work.

Unless you have the team to handle that, you tend to launch it. If it does well you’re like, “Wow, I could really make some money from that if I did this, this, or this, but I’ve got this business over here.” It’s challenging.

Alright, in summary, if you have not read Youtility, you need to read it. If you are a realtor, broker, or an accountant, I would check the vertical Youtility that Jay has released because specificity, right Jay? We’ve been trying to teach the fundamentals of content marketing for nine years and people always get lost on “Okay, how do I do that for me?”

Jay Baer: Yep.

Brian Clark: I think that’s a smart thing, moving in to the verticals. Jay Today, check that out. And MarketingPodcasts.com, I will certainly be keeping an eye on it and hoping Rainmaker shows up somewhere.

Jay Baer: It is on the list.

Brian Clark: Of course I looked.

Jay Baer: Of course you should.

Brian Clark: We’re just now getting a consistent schedule of broadcasting and actually upping our frequency because it’s fun and it works and there is a huge ravenous audience out there for it.

Jay Baer: Here’s a tip, if you’re listening to the show and you like what Brian is doing with Rainmaker.FM, as soon as this episode is over, go to iTunes and leave a review. Please don’t just leave a rating, but leave a review. Make sure you put a five star score on that. That will certainly help the show not only get into the MarketingPodcast.com database, but rank quite well in the database. We have over 450 podcasts right now in the site.

Brian Clark: Excellent. As always, the check is in the mail. Thanks for the review plug. Jay, thanks a lot for joining us. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season.

Jay Baer: You too.

Brian Clark: Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

How to Use Content Curation to Create a Recurring Revenue Business

Robert Bruce: Welcome to Rainmaker.FM. Today, we’re not going to answer any questions. We’re going to dive deep into a very specific topic this content curation thing and how to build revenue from it.

Brian Clark: On one hand it is not an abstraction because this is my blueprint for a site that I am just giddily working on that I’ve hinted about in past episodes.

This is the real plan that I’m actually following to create “Brian’s new site.” It is not Copyblogger Media. It’s just me and it’s something I’ve wanted to do and it’s something that interests me. I’m not really worried about it making money right away.

But you know me, I haven’t done something that doesn’t generate revenue. That is generally something that I don’t do so I’m going to map out what I’m going to do including the monetization and the revenue aspects. You could follow the first two parts of this blueprint with any business model and I think that’s what’s so cool.

Let’s talk about what I am actually trying to accomplish myself and that will make it real. Then, as we go forward and I get this thing going, I guess we could turn it into an ongoing case study. That’s because as we’ve discussed Robert, you throw it out there into the void and then you start figuring it out.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: I’ve got a plan and I think it’s solid, but there are certainly going to be nuances. The cool thing is because of this podcast, I’ll be able to share them with you. Thank goodness for our meta-teaching nature.

Robert Bruce: Alright, so here’s what we’re going to do. The title of this episode is How to Use Content Curation to Create a Recurring Revenue Business, and it’s got three parts. We’re going to go over content, number one. That will include how to find it, where to look for it and the basic ideas around that. Number two, we’ll talk about traffic. That will include several ways of how to get it. And number three, we’ll talk about your product, or what it is that you can sell.

This is really interesting in the context of the Copyblogger universe. I’m looking forward to going through this with you. I do want folks out there to know that this episode is sponsored by the Rainmaker Platform. You can find more about that at Rainmaker Platform.

Understanding the Basics of Content Curation

Alright Brian, let’s get into the first part of this which is content. What kind of content are we talking about when we’re looking to make content curation the centerpiece of a business model online?

Brian Clark: Well, of course you know that we are huge advocates for original compelling audience driven content. I’m not going to say that I’ve changed my mind.

Copyblogger is not switching to a curation model. But for my next project, it is something that I am more interested in than just starting a blog or starting a podcast or whatever the case may be. You talk about content shock and that’s irrelevant because the great volume of content out there is invisible and it’s not worth seeing. That’s not the issue.

What I’m seeing though is there is a lot of good content in just about any topical area you could think of. And even taking an intersection, which is one of our favorite positioning strategies where you match up copywriting and blogging and you get a site called Copyblogger. That’s just a cheap example for you, but it’s finding an editorial angle like we talked about last time in a profitable and competitive niche. That means that people are selling stuff there already.

When you look around and you look at the amount of really good articles that are lost in the mass of mediocrity and all the really good podcast episodes that no one is going to find because that’s like a full-time job. This is the job of the curator.

There really is an opportunity here because you can still build an audience as long as you are creating the value. Here you are creating the value by finding the best, eliminating the dreck and sending that to people.

Find Your Value Proposition

That’s your value proposition. You’re basically saying to your audience that if they’re interested in whatever the topic may be, or whatever the intersection of topics may be, but you can’t subscribe to everything and you don’t want to. So let my inbox get filled up with everything and I’ll pick the stuff for you and that’s the value. I think where we’re at online right now, that value proposition properly stated and executed on, you can build an audience with that.

That’s if you’re the one who is getting to send the email to a thousand people, or even ten thousand people. In some of these areas, the audience size is great as long as you establish that, “Let me, a real human being do the hard work of ferreting this stuff out for you and I will give it to you in my own unique way.”

In essence, you’re creating a unique piece of content out of other people’s content. It’s your explanation of each of these. At the center of it, you’re building an audience. And how are you building that audience and in what form? Is it permission based email? This goes all the way back to Seth Godin in ’99 and it is still true today. If you can command that attention by providing that value and being invited into the inbox, that gives you the opportunity to make a relevant offer that is more likely to be accepted. We’ll get to that part as we progress through here.

Robert Bruce: Two things come to mind with this. Number one, there are a couple of examples that we’ve talked about in our last episode, we talked about how to find a great topic to work with. So you can go back, listen to that, and find a starting point as we talk about topic and market in this episode.

Number two, here are a couple of examples of what we’re talking about here that don’t necessarily match up with the revenue side of things, but they’re just a great example of people finding and publishing great curated content. They are Dave Pell at NextDraft.com and we’ve talked about him before. There is Maria Popova at BrainPickings.org and then Jason Hirschhorn at MediaREDEFined.com.

Brian Clark: Yes.

The Critical Importance of Your Email List

Robert Bruce: You can check those folks out to kind of see what this can look like from a content gathering and distribution sense. And Brian, like you just said, we’ll talk about the revenue later, but those will give you a good idea of what this looks like.

Brian makes a distinction here in terms of distribution. Right now at this point in time, email is key in terms of distribution. And it’s not that you don’t use other tools, but the centerpiece of how you want to build this audience is around the email list. Why is that?

Brian Clark: Email is still the primary transaction medium for selling stuff and you have to earn the permission in the first place to get them on the list through your value proposition, which is the curation. Then you have to earn the right to make an offer. In the early days that could be relevant affiliate offers. That’s a great way to start generating revenue.

It’s not the best way long-term because you’re not getting the customer and obviously that’s not a recurring model. That’s a transactional model unless you tap into a program that is subscription based. The point is that that’s where transactions continue to happen, forty times greater than social media. That’s also if you have the trust and the value proposition, that’s where you’re going to get the most attention. People do pay attention to their inbox, which is why they’re so jealous about who they let in there.

Three Steps to Finding Your Topic Market

Robert Bruce: Let’s move on to what you’re talking about specifically for this project that you mentioned?

Brian Clark: Well, I’m not going to talk specifically about my project until I launch it and it’s not quite there yet. I’d rather give an example of a topical market and how a site that is creating original content is executing on that market. Then I’ll let you see that with the mass volume of content just from one site. Then you’ve got an entire market segment, an entire universe of people creating content aimed at this market, and how by you paying attention to all of that and picking out the very best from the filler, how you can create a publication that has this value.

In the last episode, I mentioned in passing this market segment called LOHAS. That stands for Lifestyles Of Health And Sustainability (horrible acronym of course).

Robert Bruce: LOHAS!!

Brian Clark: (Laughing) Ok, it goes back to around 2000/2003 where this huge market segment was identified of people who are interested in personal development, health and wellness. But it’s all tied together with this sustainable green focus, and these are well educated affluent people.

Increasingly what you’re seeing as the millennial generation comes into its own, is they’re kind of this way by default. I’m not saying every millennial is like this, but it’s not strange to them to think that way. Of course, they’re definitely educated hopefully accruing revenue.

Anyway, LOHAS, it’s billions and billions of dollars of people who are interested in this self-improvement, both physical and mental. It’s all wrapped up in “I’m going to spend money, I’m going to invest in companies that are green, I’m going to support organic and sustainable and green building and all this kind of stuff.” It’s a very well defined group.

There’s a site called MindBodyGreen.com and it cranks out content like you wouldn’t believe. Can you see how transparently that’s matched to the LOHAS market segment? That’s just straight up positioning and it works because those things, mind body green, are the primary aspects of that market segment. That’s a good example.

So you go to that site and they’re like Huffington Post in the level of content they’re creating. They’ve got a thousand contributors. I think most of the people write for free. It’s that kind of classic model where the publisher is getting the benefit of providing access to an audience and then the contributors are creating the content. That’s one site in this area.

You can find many, many, many, many more and there’s so much good stuff. Some of the stuff on Mind Body Green is good and some of it is just dreck. It’s filler and it’s not inspired. You can see with this example that you’ve already identified a huge profitable market segment where people have money and they spend money, which is step number one.

Number two, you found a site that is going directly after that market. And then three, from there you start looking around and finding the other content producers that you can begin to curate from. Then your value proposition is, “Hey, there is all this great stuff out here, some of it is not so great, some of it is spectacular. I’ll do the job for you of sending only the great stuff.” Say it is a health or wellness topic and the article makes an assertion about a new research study, then you go and do a little bit of research and provide your own perspective. That’s how you create original content out of someone else’s base content.

That’s a very concrete example of where there’s a market, and here’s how one site is going directly after it. Then that’s my starting point for finding all of these other sites and all these other podcasts and all these videos. Right? Think multimedia and not just articles because eventually all you’re doing is linking and embedding and you’re curating. It’s actually a very powerful thing.

The Additional Benefits of Curating Content

Robert Bruce: Another side of this in terms of the finding of good stuff, is to look at Jim Coudal at Coudal.com. He’s said they have a very, very simple link blog running down what he calls it the spine of their website.

They’re talking about design and film and things related to their business and what they do, but that link blog was started in Halloween of 1999. He said not long after, that became the centerpiece of what has allowed them to launch other products. He went into this great description of what it has done for them. One thing that came of that as well is that people send them great stuff all the time in order to post on that blog.

Brian Clark: Oh yeah, that is an excellent point because as you start developing what we like to call the minimum viable audience where they start growing themselves, which we’ll talk about in a second, but they’ll start sending you material.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: It’s amazing. All of the sites like Huffington Post, Gawker, and even BuzzFeed, at the beginning were really aggregation sites. For example, Gawker would find an interesting story. They’d put a better headline on it, they’d summarize it effectively. There was no reporting or research other than restating the content. So that’s an aggregation strategy. But you notice as a form of curation, all these mega-sites started that way.

Robert Bruce: Everybody comes after me with pitchforks whenever I bring up Matt Drudge, but in a 1996/98 interview I caught, he was talking about getting up to ten thousand emails a day with news tips. Of course that’s the news business. It’s an entirely other thing that we don’t necessarily recommend you get into. But that’s another example of becoming known in your market, in your topic market, people will send stuff to you over and over.

Brian Clark: You have to figure out how to manage that. There’s a happy medium between doing your own exploration and having things come at you. I can see the benefit of both. The next thing you may be thinking is “Okay, so all I do is curate?”

The way I’m thinking about this now is once I have that email audience that is topically relevant, I’m probably going to add original content. I could see launching a podcast. Instead of launching a podcast and struggling to try to get an audience, how about you get a relevant audience first, launch your podcast and then it makes a splash. Right?

Then of course you could start writing your own articles and you could hire freelancers to work with you. I think that the curation aspect of this alone mixed with something perhaps like affiliate marketing could get you some revenue to where you could not only make a bigger splash with the launch of your original content, but you could finance its publication.

Robert Bruce: Yep. You’ll see this both with Dave Pell and Jason Hirschhorn if you go to their sites. They have heavy curation and aggregation, but they also have sections broken out for originals. I think that is a common word that we’re seeing pop up now which really are just articles or as you said Brian, it’s a podcast that’s launched off of that audience.

Brian Clark: Right.

This Episode of Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You by

Robert Bruce: the Rainmaker Platform. And in keeping with today’s topic, I just want to talk curation for a moment.

Specifically, I want to share what’s coming to RainmakerPlatform.com.

There are two main aspects of any good content curation plan and they are collection and distribution. We’re also going to be talking revenue here later in the show. But, to do these two things well right now, you need to manage a handful of web services in different places and then bring them together in a way that makes sense for you.

One of the “great curses” of the web is precisely that, it’s the management of multiple logins and passwords and apps that you need to use to make it all happen. But what if you could run every aspect of your content curation strategy from one place, one login, and on one bill?

Early next year, the Rainmaker Platform will allow you to do just that. I’m not going to go into great detail here but we’re currently building the Rainmaker Curator and that is a suite of tools that is going to allow you to find, organize, and distribute content not only to social networks but to the property you actually own, namely your email newsletter and your website. That will be with just a few clicks.

Yes, the RSS Reader, social media scheduling and content distribution tools will be built into the Rainmaker Platform. There will not be any more multiple accounts to manage. You can get rid of a good handful of passwords when we launch this thing. This is coming to the Platform, but it is not ready yet.

If you want to take a look at the rest of Rainmaker, take it for a free test drive for 14 days. You can head over to RainmakerPlatform.com right now.

Quit screwing around trying to build your website and managing all of those services scattered across the web. Get back to building your business RainmakerPlatform.com.

How to Build Traffic for a Curation-Based Website

Alright Brian, let’s get into traffic. How do we build this audience? How do we get people to our property where we’re doing this content curation?

Brian Clark: Well you know it is ironic to me that I started out in email publishing in 1998, and here we’re just shy of 2015 and I’m effectively launching a site that is based exactly how those early properties were. Some people may remember this because it was obnoxious, but people would forward email about everything.

Those of us in email publishing at that time, those were our early calls to action. It was all about how to get people to forward this to a friend, get them to click here and sign up. It almost sounds antiquated. The original content sharing killer app was email and the simple forward.

But what do you see Dave Pell doing every issue? He does that exact same thing. We have content sharing built in without any of these fancy platforms like Twitter or whatever. It is called email, and people do it, and it works. So you have to have enough of an audience to get that catalyst going and that’s the hard part. Once you get there though, people have that forward button at their disposal all the time and people still use it. Right? So email is a social network. The internet has always been social since the first email was sent way back when.

Are You Asking the Right Questions in Your Emails?

Robert Bruce: The original social network, right.

Brian Clark: That’s right. So make sure that you’re not forgetting to ask. Your primary call to action in your emails is not to sell something to begin with; it is to get distribution. You want to get audience powered distribution.

Now thankfully compared to 1998, we also have all of these amazing social networks and they are mainstream. They’re more mainstream today than email was in ’98 even though that sounds hard to believe. But you have to understand how the internet in the late 90’s was the shiny new thing that almost fell apart because of the exuberance and now it is the fabric of our lives.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Part of that with basic content creation and content marketing, is you have to build up your relevant social networks. A big part of that of course is attracting an audience.

My plan right now is that I haven’t launched the site yet, but I do have a Twitter account and I have been sharing content. I don’t have any kind of following because I never told anyone about it, but that’s the beginning of my own curation strategy. I’m selecting the type of content that I think fits and I’m effectively preserving it in a Twitter feed at which point when I launch the site, I will be creating an issue. I’m talking about this in terms of newsletter.

Robert Bruce: Yep. Back to email.

Brian Clark: You’re creating an issue, which is original content that is driven by the things you’ve discovered, consumed, and are summarizing and/or commenting on. I will use social media to tweet the issues and share the issues.

Of course, the site will be designed to maximize that opt-in at the bottom of the issue and at the top of the issue. Everyone will always be reminded, “Hey if you enjoyed this, don’t rely on Twitter. Make sure I send it to you just once a week, all the good stuff and none of the fluff.” Social networks are still fantastic for content distribution and also relationship building.

When you share a content creator’s content, let them know. You’re building allies. You’re building relationships. This can open a lot of doors for you. If your reading about Dave Pell and the power he has, or Jason Hirschhorn, you know people want to be featured in MediaREDEF, right?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I’m like giddy about all this. You know I just think it’s fantastic.

Robert Bruce: It’s like on steroids. Do you remember the days when you showed up on somebody’s blogroll in the sidebar of their blog?

Brian Clark: Right.

Robert Bruce: It’s coming back in a much more powerful and relevant and useful way for the audience.

Brian Clark: Right. So with social media, you understand that you have to build up those networks to get any kind of exposure. I led with email forwards and those calls to action with an issue because I think sometimes people just forget how easy that is to share.

Robert Bruce: Yep. I also don’t want to run over something else you said. You’re actually using Twitter as an organization tool for that content to use again later.

Brian Clark: That is exactly right. Why would I put links in a Google doc when I can put them out there and slowly attract some people.

Robert Bruce: And have them start working for you.

Brian Clark: Right? Without really trying, but as an organization approach. It has benefits beyond the fact that I just look at what I found each day, scan down the feed, and I could pull out the ten things I want to talk about in an issue.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: So that’s what I’m doing so far. If it gets more complicated, then I’ll have to look at other solutions. There’s some software called Curata I’m going to check out. It’s expensive so I probably won’t be recommending it to you guys even if I did it, but sometimes I just think the tools aren’t all that necessary.

Robert Bruce: No.

Brian Clark: It’s really more simple than we want to let it be. It’s like finding good stuff, preserving it, revisiting it later in order to decide which of these fifteen things I found this week that I actually want to pare down to the best eight or ten things.

Two Excellent Tools to Find Shareable Information

Robert Bruce: You’re right, this is not brain surgery here. I’d like to add two things in particular quickly.

I use Twitter lists to do this. Through a Twitter list just set one up and then follow a bunch of people on that list so it’s not in your main stream. You don’t want it to get buried. That is a great way to keep up with particular sites or people who are in this market that you’re looking to target. Or what about going back to good old fashioned RSS reader? I personally haven’t done that in a while.

Brian Clark: I use RSS to find stuff. I’ve got a pretty big list. And I follow people on Twitter with that account that I’m actually posting to.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

Brian Clark: I find stories that way. The RSS may not have caught on with normal people but we’re not normal people. If you’re a curator, you want RSS. You want all the feeds you can get in order to find the cool stuff. Right?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: It’s so obvious, but the light bulb went off because I’ve got all these RSS feeds of primarily text based content. I started looking into all the podcasts and I’m like, “There’s some really great stuff here, but who has time to do this as an end user?”

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: That’s what continues to get me excited about the need for this. You’ve got to find a way to get the word out there because when you’re creating original content, let’s say you’re completely unknown like I was with Copyblogger, the first three months were pretty lonely. I got a couple of links that kept me going, but it wasn’t until I created this original piece of content, this PDF report that it blew up huge. That is the power of original content.

With curation, you don’t necessarily have that although you could strategically. For example, say you’re curating for three months and you’re slowly building that audience. It’s not a homerun, but you’ve gleaned some insights that would make an incredible infographic. Right?

So you invest in the infographic at that point and then you promote that thing like crazy and maybe that is your moment. Again, doing original content is not necessarily required. But if you’re struggling a little bit, it can be the catalyst.

The Best Way to Build an Online Audience Today

Here’s what I really want you to focus on though with original content, which is guest posting. This is probably so counter intuitive to people given that we always talk about creating content on your own site. If your main value proposition is curation and your original aggregation of whatever you decide to put in this particular issue, that’s what you’re selling for free, but that’s your thing. You still have to be able to read the relevant audience on other content sites.

For me, what I would do as opposed to creating original content right off the bat for my site, I would instead go out and guest post. Now remember when Zen Habits launched? Do you remember that?

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: Leo Babauta, it is one of the most popular personal development blogs in the world. And Leo just went out like a maniac and guest posted everywhere he could. That’s how Zen Habits became a thing. It is tried and true.

Robert Bruce: That is what made that site. I think he was at the time still working his day job. He was obviously writing an article or two a week for the site or whatever his schedule there was, but he was everywhere. I think he said it several times that that’s what made the site.

This is guest posting and it is advice that’s been around for so long and you hear it so much that it’s almost invisible and it’s easy to toss off and say, “Ah yeah yeah yeah, guest posting ”

Brian Clark: The advice has been consistent in that your best work should be on the other sites. That is counterintuitive to people. But in curation, it is totally easy for you to do that because you’re not creating original content on your site. You’re curating. You’re performing a valuable editorial thing.

So everywhere you guest post, you’ve got to make sure you’re getting what you need out of it which is either the ability to link within the body, which probably won’t happen unless you have a relationship. With that though, your bio has to be 100% focused on expressing the value proposition of your curated email.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: Get all the good stuff and none of the bad with blah, blah, blah. You have to be ruthless about that. If someone is accepting contributions and they’re not going to let you create a bio that provides a link back to your site, there is nothing in it for you unless they’re paying you.

Again, the only value of getting that money would be to use my next tactic, which is old-fashioned paid traffic with the singular goal of email opt-ins. Your homepage should be nothing but your value proposition and an opt-in. And below that, maybe you have a sample issue and a link to an About page for people who aren’t sold yet.

But that’s all you’re trying to do. That is your singular focus. No sidebar. No nav. It’s Landing Page 101 with no distractions and one goal.

Robert Bruce: We’ve talked about this several times and I think people get a little freaked out about that whole thing of “If I’m going to pay for it, I need to get some cash back out of it.”

Brian Clark: It’s the audience and the list. I think that’s understandable but it’s a little naïve. Have you ever heard of Noah Kagan talking about what they were willing to pay for an email subscriber at AppSumo?

They built that amazingly huge list. The audience is an asset if you do it right. You don’t want junk traffic so you’ve got to be very careful about what you’re paying for. But if it’s something like pay-per-click or Facebook ads or Twitter ads, or something like that, you have to experiment and figure out what that email subscriber is worth to you. You may be shocked at how much value is placed on one email subscriber.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: I put paid last because not everyone has got the budget for it. If you do have the budget for it, you should realize that you are definitely investing in a long-term asset.

And what if within the first 30 days of subscribing you have figured out an affiliate offer that works? That’s a way to break even. You may even make a profit. It’s okay to think that way. You don’t have to be brutally uncommercial. That’s not the goal. I do recommend affiliate offers as a means of growing the audience as opposed to the primary way to make business.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: Look at a guy like Pat Flynn with his podcast. I think I’m going to interview him for the show, but I think all he does is make affiliate offers and he makes a ton of money. You can get there. I like to think in terms of investing and building an audience asset. That’s what I did in 2006 with Copyblogger. It has been paying us every year since.

Robert Bruce: And if paid traffic is not your thing, then go back to number two, which is guest posting. It can’t be stated enough at how powerful that can be.

Brian Clark: It’s really time or money? What do you want to spend?

Robert Bruce: You want to sweat it out and that’s fine, but it really does work. So those are the three points under the idea of getting traffic and getting to the starting point of building an audience, which is through the email newsletter. It’s making use of and asking for that forward. And then general word of mouth throughout social media is number one. Guest posting is number two. And paid traffic is number three. How about we get going into the idea of what a revenue model could look like for this content curation strategy?

A Curation-Based Revenue Model

Brian Clark: Well you know the overriding topic of the last several episodes is membership sites on some sort of paid premium content. That’s one of the best ways to make money because you own the customer, you own the relationship, you’re building a paid community, and there’s a recurring revenue model there. So again, affiliate marketing is great.

I think someone asked us a question where they said, “Would you ever do affiliate marketing inside a paid member area?” Yes, that’s actually one of the business models in Teaching Sells. Absolutely. It’s about how much you promote and what really comes down to your relationship with your audience. I think there’s always a judgment call when that happens.

So how would we take this audience that we built with email? They’re obviously interested in certain topics. These topics are things that people spend money on. We’ve already gone through this process, so let me give you a little bit of an anecdote.

Back in 1984, a guy named Harry Marks and Richard Wurman put on a conference. It was kind of a financial disaster and it went away for six years until 1990 when a guy named Chris Anderson took it over. It was a conference about technology, entertainment, and design. Robert, what conference is that?

Robert Bruce: It’s got to be TED.

Brian Clark: It is. It’s TED. It’s one of the most prestigious and well known. Everyone looks at where things are and says, “Oh, I could never do that.” They don’t look where it started. The first year was a flop. Six years later it is resurrected and slowly builds up. And then based on their success, I think tickets are like $4,600 and you’ve got to be invited and it’s amazing.

Robert Bruce: When did Anderson take it over again?

Brian Clark: ’90

Robert Bruce: So even from that point, it’s still a long slog.

Brian Clark: I think it was the mid-2000s when they put all the videos online and it became a thing. That’s just the benefit of showing up and going and growing. All of a sudden you’ve built something and people are like, “I can’t build that.” I’m like, “You didn’t see where I started.”

The same thing could apply to Copyblogger if you wanted to go look at what that original site looked like with just me and a couple of articles a week. So TED is an example. And even Chris Anderson, what does he call himself? He’s the curator of the TED experience.

In past episodes, we talked about this impresario concept, which is an old-school term for people who used to put on operas and other staged events where you have an entrepreneur, or the impresario who is effectively collecting the talents of others and creating something out of it that is delightful, but also profitable. Just like the TED conference is a curated experience that relies on the brains and the abilities and the presentation skills of all these other people, the same thing can go for you. We’ve talked in the past about virtual conferences.

Outside of my own little pet project that we’re using as a case study, we’re going to be doing various virtual conferences in 2015. It will be business model level stuff and something that we know there is a giant need for but is really beyond our normal content marketing material. That’s because one thing we’re good at other than content is a business model. We can look at how you structure something between what you give away for free and what do you charge for, all the way up to your revenue model.

Robert Bruce: So this is leveraging the audience that you build from the curation into some kind of impresario situation like you’ve just described.

Brian Clark: So you’ve got the audience.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: You’re starting to develop relationships with content creators because they’re noticing that you’re sending them traffic. Maybe you’re going out there to relevant live events and developing those relationships. It always comes down to that.

At some point, you could take relevant presenters and put together your own virtual conference. There are lots of different ways where you can make that happen. For example, say you’ve got people and you’re like, “Okay, look I’m going to put together this thing. I’ve got this audience and you’re going to get exposure. Even better, you have an audience, and we’re charging money for this so how about we do 50% revenue split on all the tickets that you sell?”

Or I know this sounds crazy to people but it happens all the time in direct marketing which is, “I’ll give you all of the sales, I don’t care.” That’s because what happens when you put on that first year event and maybe you don’t make any money or maybe you lose a little bit of money, but what do you have now? You have a whole bunch of paying customers. They’re your customers and not theirs.

This is how people get ripped off by Amazon all the time. They’re like, “Oh I don’t want to have to sell this myself on my own site so I’ll just go to Amazon.” Guess what? They have the customer relationship and you got a few dollars.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

A Lesson from Mike Stelzner at Social Media Examiner

Brian Clark: The customer relationship is everything. Let me give you a real world example of this. So there’s Mike Stelzner with the Social Media Examiner. I love this story because Mike used to write for Copyblogger.

One day he comes to me maybe around 2008 and social media is just going crazy, or maybe it was 2009. But he was like, “Hey do you think if I started a site like Copyblogger that focused only on social media, it would succeed?” And I’m like, “Mike look what happens every time we talk about Twitter or Facebook or whatever, it goes crazy on that platform. Yes, I think that’s probably a pretty good idea.”

That’s exactly what he did and it went crazy popular because it was talking about the medium that it was depending on. Some people don’t realize now that Mike has this huge live event that he started with this exact model, which is a virtual conference. He called in all the relationships that he had, including me and many other people. He did a revenue share on ticket sales so he was leveraging other people’s audiences even though he did have one of his own, but it was really just getting started.

He wanted to make sure that he shared the wealth with the people that he was relying on for content for his virtual event. So that happens. But the next time he needs to put this event on, he’s got all these attendees so he markets to them first to make sure he’s got enough sales to cover expenses and just get it going, and that’s all his because those are his customers.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: So what is Mike doing? Mike is curating. He is making it worth the while of the people who are contributing in the different context content, much like people at TED are contributing their time and expertise to get up there on stage.

Now of course there’s something in it for them too and that’s what you always have to realize. You have to answer what is the right level of in it for them? Is your audience big enough to where that’s all they need? Sometimes. When you’re first getting started there is revenue sharing or something like that. You could even pay people for their time if it needs to come to that.

We can’t sit here and think that this is free. Either your time or your money is going to be involved and it really just depends on what you have more of. So you’re curating to build the audience and then you invest your time and/or funds into creating a membership site.

Jim Kukral comes to mind as well. He focuses on helping authors with their marketing. He has a membership site for authors but he is also doing a great looking virtual conference that I stumbled upon the other day.

I’m asking which is first, the cart or the horse? If you do a virtual conference, you have all this relevant content, hopefully that’s somewhat evergreen and that becomes the basis of your membership site. Now you’re going to want to create a community.

So we’ve been teaching in Teaching Sells since 2007 that the forum, they’ll come for the content, they will pay you initially for the value of the information that you’re providing, the benefits of knowledge as we’ve discussed, and they’ll stay for the other people. They’ll stay for access to you. It’s hard to sell community only and I’ve seen people crash and burn doing it. You’ve got to lead with content.

Once they get in there and they have this experience, they don’t want to leave. So you could do the virtual conference as a one-time fee. You’re either collecting some revenue or you’re basically sharing it with your partners in order to put on the next show or to sell the ongoing membership program.

That’s where those recordings come in. They can either be the initial content or augment other membership content so you can invite those original attendees to be charter members of the ongoing recurring member program. Or you just continue to do your virtual conferences as a form of event marketing.

These virtual conferences tend to defeat that inclination of not joining a membership program because, “Oh, I can always join later and I’ll just have more stuff at that time.” Right? Virtual conferences may be online only, but they are events that take place at a certain time. Whether or not you provide recordings to attendees, there’s a lot of variables that you can do and you can take a look at what some other people are doing out there, but you get the idea.

You’re curating other people’s authority, other people’s expertise, and maybe even leveraging their audience. That’s the start to where you continue to grow revenue. And then you can make different choices as far as “Okay, now I can really accelerate my paid traffic for the newsletter” which are all the prospects for the next virtual conference of the membership program. Does that make sense?

Robert Bruce: It does. And it also makes sense to me that even if someone does not pursue this particular revenue model, you should be able to see here the bigger point, which is with an audience, with connections, there’s almost anything that can be done in terms of a business model.

People jump straight to “I’ve got to get tons of traffic so I can then get advertisers.” This opens up a whole new world based on real human connections and a real audience that you built over time that should show you what is possible in terms of a revenue model with this kind of business.

Brian Clark: And a mega-site like Mind Body Green that I mentioned earlier, they do accept advertising.

Robert Bruce: Oh sure, absolutely.

Brian Clark: They also do virtual conferences and they sell courses. That’s because everyone has wised up to where advertising may cover a site like that’s overhead, but they’re making their money off of the member content.

We’re seeing more and more journalists splitting off and making a living with their own membership site based on their unique insight. If you’re not that person who wants to be the voice, what you need to be is the impresario. You’re the entrepreneur. You make it happen. You bring people together. You have relationships.

Of course none of this says that if you’re a writer or a podcaster that you can’t just do it the way it has always been done. I still love this leading with curation thing because people are starting to value the fact that you’re doing that work for them. They do want to keep up with whatever it is, they just don’t have time.

Robert Bruce: Thanks for listening, everybody. If you’d like to get Rainmaker FM delivered, head over to Rainmaker.FM and sign up by email. When you do that, you’ll also be given free access to two weeks of training that we think will change the way you think about online marketing.

If Rainmaker FM does something to you or for you, please leave a comment or a rating for us over at iTunes. That helps spread the word about the show and is always very much appreciated by us. Brian, thanks for this one. I’ll see you next week.

Brian Clark: See you, everyone.

7 Ways to Find a Topical Market that Will Fuel Your Digital Commerce Business

Robert Bruce: This is Rainmaker FM, the broadcast that provides you with the knowledge you need to build your own digital marketing and sales platform that works. I am Robert Bruce here with Brian Clark.

Today we’re going to answer a couple of your questions before we get into the main topic, which is seven ways to inexpensively find a topic market that will fuel your digital commerce business. Brian, here’s our first question.

Jane Doe asks, “Is it really that big of a deal to build an online platform on properties you don’t own?” She says she sees lots of successful people doing it in places like Tumblr, Squarespace, Twitter, and Facebook but what’s the true danger here?

Understanding the True Danger of Digital Sharecropping

Brian Clark: We’re still getting this question.

Robert Bruce: How many years has it been?

Brian Clark: I don’t know. The evidence keeps mounting and we don’t have to do anything because you’ve got the big Silicon Valley platforms that are constantly screwing people over. And people still wonder, “But what’s the harm?”

I will say that she included Squarespace. Squarespace is a website suite of tools, so it’s your site, it’s just the way you build it, so I wouldn’t include Squarespace. We distinguish between Squarespace from Rainmaker in that Rainmaker is way, way, way more sophisticated and powerful. Most of the people we’re talking to especially on the topic of membership sites and digital commerce and all this, they’ve graduated beyond Squarespace. But otherwise, I don’t consider that sharecropping.

Robert Bruce: Well, we know the stories of Facebook. And you just brought something about Tumblr this morning to me that I hadn’t heard about yet.

Brian Clark: Facebook of course, did the biggest bait and switch on people ever. They basically let people build audiences there, and you had a lot of bad advice from short sighted social media consultants who said, “You don’t need a website, just build on Facebook.” Effectively, Facebook has changed the rules so many times since that time that it’s ridiculous.

The biggest thing of course is that the audience that you built, you now have to pay to reach. And you’re still missing out on all the value of owning your own media property, which has real value. You can sell a site. You’re not going to sell your Facebook page. No one is going to buy that. They may buy it in conjunction with your overall media business, but no, you’re not going to sell your Facebook page.

I’m still a little perplexed about how entrepreneurs or business people could think that way. There is a huge tide of people, like everything from Cory Doctorow’s new book to most people in the startup world. It’s like, “You’ve got to own your own platform.”

So Tumblr, you know when Yahoo bought Tumblr, they said, “We’re not going to screw you over Tumblr people.”

Robert Bruce: Well, they never do. These companies never do that.

Brian Clark: No, of course not. Well, what did they do last week? They basically decided that Tumblr is going to be a YouTube competitor, so they did a bunch of stuff including resizing the image field on everyone’s post since the beginning of time. It broke all the images, and the response is “too bad.”

That doesn’t happen to you if you own your own property. I think most people get it right now. The fact that some people have this question I think is because they somehow think it’s easier or that it’s a shortcut.

Number one, it’s no easier to build an audience on property you don’t own than one you do. And secondly as Sonia says, “Don’t take shortcuts. They take too long.” You end up getting screwed by the company that you thought was doing you a favor at the beginning because your interests and theirs are not aligned.

Robert Bruce: I think one of the things you brought up, is that people miss most often or don’t get or it takes them time to realize, is the idea of building the digital media asset itself. You can’t do that on a sharecropped external third party site, which is because of things like exporting your content and all of that.

There are work arounds for that, but the one thing is the building of value in that asset that you actually own. And for some reason, that just skates across the ice.

Brian Clark: It’s because people aren’t thinking like media entrepreneurs. No media entrepreneur doesn’t own their own intellectual property. That is the asset.

I haven’t had a chance to read Cory Doctorow’s new book, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free. It’s about how all these platforms are exploiting creators. To a certain degree I’m sympathetic, but it’s our own fault if we don’t control our own platform. That’s why the Rainmaker Platform is our passion. We’re giving you the tools to do things easier and more powerful and better, but it’s still yours.

How Does Content Curation Fit into the Rainmaker Media Content Strategy?

Robert Bruce: Alright, question number two. John Doe asks how content curation fits into the Rainmaker Media content strategy. Since it’s not your own media that you’re publishing, should you use it at all? Should you curate at all?

Brian Clark: You and I have been talking about curation forever.

Robert Bruce: Well, allow me to elaborate just for a moment here. I believe it was late 2010 or early 2011 (I’d have to look at the dates), but somewhere back then I started a little weekly publication called. The Lede. The Lede is now Copyblogger’s podcast.

It was a simple curation play. And I’ve got to say Brian, at the time I got a little flack from you for it. Now to be fair, you had been doing this from the very beginning like so many others. Once in a while, you would post links, but you did it in a much more casual kind of fun way. But what if you look at it as an actual strategy? What if you looked at it as a centerpiece around a whole media operation? What do you think of that?

Brian Clark: Well, back when you first started The Lede, I thought it was an interesting little addition to our original content, and as you know, our original content does so much better. A link post isn’t going to go viral.

Basically what happened since that time is content marketing went mainstream and we’ve got this exponential increase in the amount of content out there. There’s a lot of good stuff out there but who can find it?

I’m really starting to find curation as a primary strategy to be much more appealing. In fact, I’m working on a project that is something I’ve wanted to do for a while and it’s going to be straight up email curation. It’ll be using Rainmaker and the new curation tools that will be coming soon.

I’ve got to say that I’m coming around on it and there are certain things about it that are important. Number one, you’re driving. It’s got to be email, right? If you own the list, number one, does it matter what the content is as long as the audience wants it? Number two, you curate and you summarize. Dave Pell’s newsletter is great. It’s just the most interesting stuff that happened that day. What’s it called?

Robert Bruce: Next Draft.

Brian Clark: Right. But Dave writes his own narrative. It is original content with links. So you’re getting social sharing and you’re getting search value in there.

Robert Bruce: And you’re getting Dave.

Brian Clark: You’re getting a human being with a sense of humor and a perspective instead of an algorithm. That’s the big thing I’m seeing right now. Computers are choosing what you should see. I think there’s a real hunger out there for humans to say, “Hey, here’s what I found and it’s fascinating and here’s what I think.” That human connection works, but the key is email. Dave Pell has a huge audience that subscribes to email, which is the Holy Grail, but he is a curator.

It is doable and I’m going to make myself an example of how to do this. Some people are like, “Well, you’ve already got an existing audience, that’s not fair.” I don’t know. This is what I want to do and it has nothing to do really with Copyblogger. Our friend Chris Brogan tried to change directions and a lot of people resisted. I don’t think it’s a lock that you have an existing audience if you’re going into a brand new area, so we’ll see.

Robert Bruce: Well here’s the other thing about that. We both, you and I, and many of listeners to this show follow a few curated areas, either newsletters or folks doing stuff on third party services like Twitter. One part of that that keeps coming up between you and I, is that we have yet to see a really smart and powerful revenue model applied to it.

Brian Clark: You know what’s interesting to me when I look at that? And I do agree with you. It’s that I’ve got the revenue model.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: It would be membership based. I hate to say that’s the easy part, but it is. What’s interesting to me is whether or not I can find the great stuff. Can I create a voice that is appropriate and engaging for this audience? It’s those types of things you would think some people will say, “Oh, that’s the easy part.” But is it?

Robert Bruce: We’ll find out. Thank you for these two questions, folks. To get your own question featured on Rainmaker FM, just head over to Rainmaker.FM, drop it into the comments of one of the episode posts there.

Rainmaker FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, which in our opinion is the best and easiest way for content marketers and online entrepreneurs to build a powerful content driven digital commerce website.

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Understanding Digital Commerce: How to “Be the Market”

Robert Bruce: Now, into the main topic for today’s broadcast we go. One of the big questions that comes up again and again and again is around the topic of finding a profitable market. How do you do it? How do you know that it’s potentially profitable and where do you start?

Let’s talk about the headline you’ve come up with here, 7 Ways to Find a Topical Market that Will Fuel Your Digital Commerce Business. Way number one is, “Be the market.”

Brian Clark: First of all, let’s just refresh everyone’s memory when we use this term “digital commerce.” It’s a newer term that we’ve adopted. Essentially it means selling premium content.

As we talked about last week, it’s a little bit more than that. You’re really selling the benefits of knowledge and a complete experience of access to others. It’s also selling yourself and other subject matter experts and all that good stuff. In its simplest form though, what is an area where people will invest in online training or some other sort of member fueled paid content community?

As you mentioned the first one, “Be the market.” Somewhere around 2001 or 2002 I had somehow educated myself in the world of direct response and direct marketing historically and had been applying it to the internet. There was permission based email lists, and all that kind of stuff.

I started seeing opportunities everywhere. You get to that point where you pay attention and you’re like, “Oh, you could do this and that, and that’s how you’d make money.” Right? That’s what I mean when I say monetization is easy for me. What is not easy for me is passion and interest in those things.

There are a million ways to make money and most of them I do not want to do. Sometimes even things that interest me, I don’t want to do. You have to give me a pep talk and then we move on. Right? But you get what I’m saying when it’s like if you’re not interested, if you’re not passionate in something, it is very difficult to do the work, to carry on and to keep going.

Think about it this way, if you want to be the leader of a tribe, you’ve got to be a member of the tribe. How often is it successful for an outsider to come in and take over? Usually it doesn’t work and it rarely works in online communities. So you need to be interested and passionate and you need to be the person with the problem or desire.

Then you can take that leadership role into helping people who are similar to you. That’s very much why I started Copyblogger. People think, “Well, I’m not an expert yet.” But just merely going on your own journey and sharing what you know and bringing people along with you puts you in that role.

Look at Darren Rowse’s story. No one started out as an expert. They just knew a little bit more than the other people. Right? It goes back to the curation thing. Like if you can find this stuff that you are genuinely interested in in your own life, and this project that I’m talking about, it’s where I’m at right now. Just like in 2005, I was at a place that resulted in me starting Copyblogger, so this is a tried and true one for me. From a content standpoint, I’m not saying you can’t just go in ruthlessly and learn everything about a market and own it. You can. It’s just it would be hard for me to keep going.

Robert Bruce: I’d like to add to what you brought up a moment ago, in that I think there’s a road block that people have in their mind by saying, “Yeah, I can’t talk about this stuff. I’m not an expert. I’m not a PhD in XYZ topic.”

I don’t know if you remember, but growing up it seemed if anybody was on the radio or on TV or in a magazine being interviewed, it seemed like they were all experts. It was as if they were all people of great authority.

But like you said, when Darren Rowse started Digital Photography School, he was not nearly an expert photographer, but he very clearly famed his position as “I am a diehard to the end fan of photography. I want to learn more. Will you come along with me?” And that’s the way to position it when you’re in that position.

Brian Clark: Yes, be an enthusiast. I’ll be the first to tell you that when I started having to try to teach people copywriting and content marketing, my own level of sophistication exploded. That’s because I was forced to truly examine these issues at a level to where I could communicate it to others.

Teaching is one of the best authority builders in the world not only in the way people view you, but in enhancing your own expertise. So again, the new project I’m going to be starting, which I am by no means an expert in any of it, but I am passionate about applying these principles to my own life and therefore I’m taking people along with me.

Get Thee to the Newsstand

Robert Bruce: Alright. Number two, one of my favorite things, I’ve talked about this a bunch over the years after hearing you and Sonia bring it up, and that is get thee to the newsstand. Go to a magazine rack and look at the magazines on the rack. What do you mean by this?

Brian Clark: Even if you are in the market, you are an enthusiast, and you are a member of the tribe you want to lead, you still have to do research. You’re not starting from zero when you are similar to who you’re trying to reach.

In any scenario, research is crucial and I do this all the time. I did it again with my most current project. Go to Barnes and Noble, anywhere where there is a big selection of magazines and look around. Find out if you have an idea for a membership site or some sort of digital commerce premium content site. Is there a magazine on it? How many? How are they positioned? That’s because that’s what it comes down to.

You need to find a topical market that is big enough to bring you enough people. You’re not going to reach them all and that’s always the danger of going really niche. Hey, no one is talking about this yet. What did Sonia call it? Naked mole rats?

Robert Bruce: Naked mole rats. Yes.

Brian Clark: So looking at naked mole rat enthusiasts. There is no magazine for that. If there is a paper magazine for a topic, then it is a viable niche.

Robert Bruce: It means there’s advertising in it and people are paying not only to buy it, but people are paying to be seen in it.

Brian Clark: Exactly. And then you look not only at the content, but you look at who is advertising.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: That’s really informative to figuring out what’s happening. It really helps inform your own strategy because you’re getting more specific with every step you take in your research to understanding what the audience wants currently and what they could want in the future that is slightly unique.

Robert Bruce: One side note on this, if you’re building any kind of a hyperlocal website and making that kind of play, if you go to your local newsstand or grocery store or bookstores (and sadly so many of these great newsstands are gone now) but you’ll see that not only are the big magazines there that are always there, but you’ll see interest from your community.

For instance, I’m in Oregon’s wine country. There are all kinds of wine magazines at a local grocery store that we go to, but there’s also an entire rack of hunting and fishing magazines that are not going to show up in newsstands in Portland. That awareness might inform those of you who are working on local websites as well that there are all kinds of angles to approach it with.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. The free lifestyle magazines in any area are amazing at giving you a big head start. You know? My Boulder site, YourBoulder.com, there are several free and paid competing local Boulder publications and I’m killing them all online. That’s because they’re focused on print and that’s good for them, but they’re very bad at online. And that is an opportunity.

What You Need to Know About Niche Positioning

Robert Bruce: Number three is a big topic with niche positioning.

Brian Clark: I touched on this, but you’re going to want a huge and competitive topical area. I always talk about the big three, not counting technology, which is obviously a huge one and super saturated.

There’s health and wellness, money and investing (wealth if you will), and personal development. Those are eternal. There will always be room for more, especially if you are coming at it with a unique perspective. And how could you not since you are a unique human being?

That’s only the beginning though. Again, it comes down to being part of your market. That helps because your personality cannot be duplicated. But you also have to look to position yourself in a way that is perceived to be something completely new. A lot of people struggle with positioning but it is the most important thing. I could point out countless examples of blogs or newsletters or magazines that are essentially talking about the same exact thing and yet they are completely different in the eyes of the audience.

Robert Bruce: Right. And not only that, but their reprinting the same exact articles and headlines on maybe a 6-8 month to a year schedule.

Brian Clark: You’re thinking of the old Men’s Health thing, right?

Robert Bruce: Exactly.

Brian Clark: You might want to explain that if people don’t catch it. Basically Men’s Health does a different cover photo and the same exact headlines for stories once a year or something like that.

Robert Bruce: I don’t know what the cycle is, but it might be even longer. I’ll drop a link to a post Demian Farnworth did, with a look at this.

He found this great picture that you can probably easily find online, but it’s up of four different Men’s Health covers. The picture is different, but it’s almost word for word on the headlines for the same articles over a period of a couple years at least. It’s very interesting. And you know what? I don’t read Men’s Health, but I was never aware that was happening.

Brian Clark: Of course not because people tend to come in and out of those types of things depending on where they’re at in their life.

Robert Bruce: Right.

How to Tap into the Essential Elements of Content Marketing

Brian Clark: The topics are pretty much the same at any given time. You want to lose weight, you want to gain muscle, and improve your sex life. It’s the same thing. I would be very surprised to find that there are people who have been subscribed to Men’s Health for ten years unless they’re really just not paying attention.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: The goal here is that you tap into existing desire with these things. You’re not creating desire. What you are creating is the impression of a unique approach to satisfying that desire. That’s essentially what marketing is with regard to content.

It’s voice. It’s editorial positioning. It is how am I coming at this topic that is not quite the same as everyone else? I know from being one of these people and doing copious amounts of research that this is something that’s right on the cusp of the way people are thinking about this topic.

Trend or Fad? Know the Difference for Your Niche

Robert Bruce: Number four, you have down trend watching.

Brian Clark: Exactly, that’s how you do it. That’s how you create an editorial positioning which is unique. It’s fresh and it’s innovative, even though you are talking about timeless topics. There are always new fitness research trends or fads. There are always new ways to make money or new ways to lose money. Mostly in the stock market, that never changes.

Trend watching is just as it sounds, except I want to make sure I distinguish between a trend and a fad. A trend is a long-term shift. It’s a movement in a direction within a broader topical area.

The green movement is a trend. It is not a fad. It is something that has been happening for a long time and is accelerating with certain people. It is being pushed back against by other people, but those people are not your audience. Maybe it’s like gluten free, but I don’t know this one yet. It almost appears like it is going to be a trend.

Robert Bruce: It’s interesting, yes.

Brian Clark: That’s even though I thought it was a fad, but that remains to be seen. That’s what you have to determine though. You could start a wellness site that has a broader positioning that includes gluten free, but you don’t have to call your site Gluten Free Community. That’s because at that point, you are betting everything on that one trend.

I did see a magazine, Gluten Free Magazine, which may be why I’m thinking it’s a larger trend. Or they’re very into cashing in for a brief period of time and then going to do something else which there is technically nothing wrong with that, but I like long-term things. I like things are going to keep going and you can evolve your content with it as opposed to “Oh, I’ve got to start over.”

Robert Bruce: I do too. There are a lot of people that make a lot of money on fads. To me, that always seemed like a really exhausting deal, which is my number one point. But number two, look at your comment about trends.

A trend is something that you’re working on, writing about, and that is more long-term. Again, we’re talking about building an audience here. Fad to fad to fad to fad is a tough area if not an impossible way to build any kind of meaningful audience.

Brian Clark: There are some people out there who think content marketing is a fad. I’ll tell you right now, it is not. It is a trend because no one is going to raise their hand and say, “Ehh enough with the useful information, just pitch me.” It’s not going in that direction.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: The empowered prospect is the engine of the trend towards content marketing. You’re looking at the results of broader trends and the internet empowered people to take things into their own hands as opposed to the companies and corporations being in charge of the sales process. That’s a huge trend. It’s not going away.

TrendWatching.com is a good site. There’s free and paid content there. If you’re really serious, you can buy research reports that take a really serious deep dive. I do think there are certain scenarios where it’s worth the investment.

A couple of trends I identified, I’m going to forget, it is LOHAS basically. It’s basically people who are kind of like hippie yuppies. They’re like those of us here in Boulder. They’re into organic, they’re into sustainability, they’re into conscious investment, spirituality, green live and all of this kind of stuff. It’s a very well defined market segment that is big and growing.

So understanding that market has informed my content strategy. It’s not about that, but that’s an aspect of it. Here’s another thing, which is healthy aging. Now you’re thinking, “Okay, that may apply to people like you in your forties and up.” But no, actually when you dig into the research, the millennials are very interested in healthy aging. Why do you think that is, Robert?

Robert Bruce: It’s because they think they’re going to make it to the singularity.

Brian Clark: Yes. They’re the first generation (well, hopefully not the first, I’m still going for Gen X), but the millennials have a decent shot at living a lot longer than any other human if science and technology keep breaking through in areas of longevity.

At a minimum, people will start living over a hundred years routinely. That has been increasing on a linear path throughout the last hundred years or so. With that, the better you take care of yourself when you’re young, the better shape you’re generally going to be in when you’re older. That was fascinating to me that healthy aging is not an old person topic.

If you’re already old, you’re probably kind of stuck with the decisions you made when you were younger (which I’m trying to get over).

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I’m not sure I can take this shit for a hundred years. We’ll find out.

Brian Clark: I know, it’s like living a long life and is it actually worth living?

Robert Bruce: Right. That’s the real question.

Brian Clark: Yes, that’s the real question.

Robert Bruce: See, when we get into philosophy and you and I get going. Okay, anything else on trend watching?

Brian Clark: Yes, TrendHunter.com and there is a site called Springwise that deals with trends specifically in the context of startups. Check those out.

Again, there is some combination of paid and free, but there’s a lot of great information that’s on their free stuff.

Why You Need to Be Aware of What’s Already Selling

Robert Bruce: Let’s move to number five in this list of 7 ways to find a topical market that will fuel your digital commerce business. This one is to find out what’s already selling.

Brian Clark: You can see how all of these interrelate. Again, don’t be afraid of competition. Don’t be afraid that someone else is selling something similar to what you have envisioned. That is actually a good sign. It shows that people are willing to pay for something. If they’re willing to pay for it and you connect with them better or provide more value or just take that unique angle that really resonates with people and yet effectively it is kind of the same thing, you still win. You’ve still got a viable business.

It is important to go into big markets. It is important to find out what is already selling and then use that information to make yourself unique or more valuable or as the case may be, make it something that is going to resonate with people in a way that your research has revealed.

This is where it gets squishy because people are always like, “Well, what’s the bright sign I’m looking for?” If I could tell you that, we wouldn’t be doing this podcast. It’s in there, that’s all I can say. It’s in there if you look.

And the Survey Says

Robert Bruce: Number six, you’ve listed something here that you have an interesting take on and that is doing surveys.

Brian Clark: Yeah, certainly. If you are very smart about surveying and you have an existing audience or you tap into someone else’s audience through some sort of native advertising or pay-per-click or something, you can get very valuable information from people.

The tough thing about surveying with multiple choice is it is almost always not going to be as valuable of information as you’d like because you’re restricting the response for your own convenience. You’re probably subtly suggesting or influencing the answers. People will tell you what you want to hear and never buy from you.

What people say they’ll buy and what they do buy are two different things. There’s only one marketing genius in the world and that’s the guy with the credit card who pulls it out and says, “Yes, I want that.” So surveying with open-ended questions is best.

There used to be this internet marketing thing called Ask. It was this really simple software, but that was the deal. It wasn’t multiple choice. They had to type in the answers.

Robert Bruce: Oh, none of it was. Yeah.

Brian Clark: Derek Halpern does Social Triggers. He does something when you sign up for his list. He asks what your number one problem is right now and he wants you to respond freeform. That’s because it’s not as neat or able to be put into a box. It is more authentic and it is more likely to provide you with insight.

Here’s a lesson with that is that Derek asks about problems or desires, right? He does not ask you what you want to buy. As Steve Jobs says, “That’s up to you to figure out what they want to buy.” Everyone thinks Jobs was such a genius and that he just created desire for something that didn’t exist. No.

Everything that Apple sells, with the exclusion of maybe the iPad, which was probably his biggest gamble, were just improvements on existing things. The iPod was not the first MP3 player; it was the first one that was beautiful and functional.

Robert Bruce: It was the first one with amazing marketing behind it, by the way.

Brian Clark: It had all of it. Right?

Robert Bruce: Apple is actually a great example of improving on what’s already out there and just owning it as opposed to trying to create something completely unique. The other thing about Jobs is he was great at identifying existing desire and satisfying it. That does not mean he created desire.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: It’s a firm belief that desire is out there. It’s up to the entrepreneur to recognize it and then to create something that satisfies it.

With surveys you don’t ask them what they want to buy, you identify problems and desires. That’s what we did on Copyblogger for nine years now. We just didn’t do it by surveys. We just watch.

Again, that’s one of those things that drives people insane. “What do you mean listen or watch?” It’s just that. It’s all out there in social media especially. Unscripted, unfiltered, and probably more than you’d like and it’s very real.

Your Minimum Viable Membership Site

Robert Bruce: And finally number seven, the minimum viable membership site. This sounds interesting.

Brian Clark: I do have to admit, we have never done this. That’s because by the time we launched Teaching Sells, and by the time we’d launched Third Tribe and then Authority later, we’re right there. We understand our people and that’s why we’ve never developed a product that failed. This comes from the whole lean startup world and the minimum viable product.

Here’s one thing I do when developing any sort of paid content play. I start mapping out headlines and copy before I create the thing because that tells me what I have to create. It goes back to why I write a headline first. It tells me what I’m promising and therefore what I have to deliver.

It’s the same thing with paid content. The copy has to effectively tease at the benefits of knowledge in a way that you then have to satisfy. Right?

This may be dicey to some people, but I could see how it would be an amazing market research thing. You basically create your outside of your membership site with copy and everything based on what you’d like to create. This is something that’s done all the time in the lean startup world.

You basically throw paid traffic at it and when people get to the sign-up part, you have to let them go far enough to where you have a firm indication that they actually want to buy that. If you haven’t created it yet, you either have to give them a notice that “we’re not taking members at this time” or whatever. You’ve got to be careful not lie.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: I think there are people that aren’t careful and they just flat out lie. I don’t believe in that. You have to do something that’s obviously going to disappoint someone who was going to buy from you.

But the fact that someone wanted to buy from you, what did I say? That is it. That’s the only way you’ll ever know. How do you know what someone wants to buy? They bought it.

Building the front end of your site and then seeing if your hypothesis that people want this type of training program or membership site is very important. Then you go into product development. When we first launched Teaching Sells, that’s all it was. It was a report and it was outside copy. We got people to join up and we delivered the content over the next year, so there’s always that method too. That is something we’ve obviously done.

You know what you want to create and can you go through your whole launch process. Once I put out the first Teaching Sells report, I knew that I had identified the right thing.

At that time, Copyblogger made no money. I had been going for a year and nine or ten months making money in other ways, while building the audience on Copyblogger. Then we launched something and we got paid to create it. So that’s the ballsier approach to the minimum viable membership site, which is to actually sell something that doesn’t exist yet but people are paying you. You have to deliver, but in a way, it is like a Kickstarter thing.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: I forgot the Kickstarter thing, which people are used to this now. Right? You promise something that doesn’t exist, they give you money, and then you have to deliver it. Right? We did that in 2007 on our own with our own audience.

Robert Bruce: The beauty of doing it this way as opposed to even the nice shiny new Kickstarter way is that not only are they paying to get this thing going for this thing that you have (the course in this case planned out, the membership site planned out), but I remember you telling me that once you got going, those first customers as they were working through Teaching Sells actually altered the course of Teaching Sells. This happened by the feedback they were giving you. And by the listening to those paying customers, it got better.

Brian Clark: It’s just like we talk about with content marketing strategy when you’re giving away free content. You’ve got iterate. You’ve got to see what works and what doesn’t and what people are saying. It’s a constant process.

I liked that we did Teaching Sells that way because I had the core concept correct, but not the implementation of that. I started realizing “Okay, people need more than I thought they did on the groundwork.” Right? We’ve released Rainmaker, we’ve released every single product we ever have this same way since Teaching Sells all the way to Rainmaker. “We’re giving you our best deal, you give us feedback, and we promise to listen.” It has always worked.

Robert Bruce: Thanks for listening everybody. If you stumbled onto this broadcast and you’d like to get it delivered to you, the best way to do that is to go to Rainmaker.FM and sign up via email. When you do that, you’ll also be given free access to two weeks of training that will likely change the way you think about online marketing.

You can also grab this show in iTunes . If you like what’s going on around here, please leave a comment or a rating for us while you’re there. Those are always much appreciated. Mr. Clark, I’ll see you next week.

Brian Clark: Thank you, Mr. Bruce.

The Crucial Starting Point for Building a Digital Commerce Business

Robert Bruce: We have two questions from audience members, one of which is a customer of Rainmaker. But here’s the problem, Brian, I didn’t get permission from these fine folks, so I’m not going to name them, but their questions are valid nonetheless. Is that alright with you?

Brian Clark: I think that’s a smart move.

Robert Bruce: Alright. So John Doe says he’s interested in building an audience with paid traffic, but it’s quite difficult to engage in content marketing and these ideas of content strategy without an audience. What do you think about building an audience, versus selling a product with paid traffic?

“What Do You Think About Building an Audience, Versus Selling a Product with Paid Traffic?”

Brian Clark: Well, that’s an easy answer. The hardest of core, grizzled pay-per-click veterans who make their money on return on investment between paid and selling stuff will tell you that you will sell more stuff if you get someone to opt-in to a content stream. This is instead of hitting them with the sales page from the click.

You can’t avoid content strategy because it pretty much works better in every context. All you’re really doing is talking about distribution of when you pay, instead of some other organic method that takes longer.

We did talk about this in the context of the New Rainmaker training course, which is paid media as your distribution catalyst. We have more options than ever with social advertising and getting that spark going by paying Twitter or Facebook to reach enough people, and then having it kick in organically at that point.

The key is if your content is crap, you’re still going to throw your money away. It still has to be dead on with the audience. I can tell you right now, compared to how I started Copyblogger as a complete unknown, I did not allow myself any budget whatsoever. It was just content and good ol’ begging. “Hi. Would you like to look at my content? I think it would be beneficial to your audience.”

Luckily some very nice people like Darren Rowse and Liz Strauss and some other people who weren’t so nice, but thought they were being big shots by disagreeing with me and not realizing their audience was quite interested in what I had to say. But it was still a lonely three months there at the beginning.

If I started a project now, let’s say it’s completely on a different topic so I would not presume that my current audience would necessarily be interested in it, I would get the word out with creating great content with a strategy aimed at the type of person I was trying to reach. Then I would just invest that cash. And not that I have the time to go begging for exposure anymore.

I think a lot of people would pay to build an audience if they knew they could get a return on it. The process of content development and strategy toward that audience is still the same. This is because ultimately, either you spend your time or you spend your money getting the word out, getting distribution, and getting that catalyst. It’s still the same process. By all means, use money to make it happen, but just realize that the process is the same as far as the content you develop and the strategy behind it.

Robert Bruce: For those of you who may not be totally clear on the big idea of what we’re talking about, it’s the idea of creating really good/useful/entertaining (whatever is relevant to your goals in your business) content and sending paid traffic of various forms to that content. It’s like looking for the opt-in as opposed to sending paid traffic to a product page or a landing page selling something specific.

Brian Clark: There are times where that can work, but that’s usually commodity battling it out on price. It’s a rough game, man. Google makes it worse because they’re always going to up the price per click. That’s the problem of depending on Google for anything.

Robert Bruce: And it’s short-term. Right?

Brian Clark: Yes.

Robert Bruce: You want to sell something.

Brian Clark: Anytime you advertise in the traditional sense (and that includes Google), you are buying access to an audience instead of building your own audience. When you build your own audience, you still get to keep them as long as you’re serving their interest. When you borrow constantly, you’re always going back and paying someone else. That’s a horrible thing to do.

“How Do You Determine What Should Be Used as Public Attraction Content Versus What Is Used for Member Content?”

Robert Bruce: Alright. Jane Doe asks, “How do you determine what should be used as public attraction content versus what is used for member content?” And this is in the context of building a paid membership site.

Brian Clark: That’s an eternal question, and there are so many methodologies. You and I have talked about this before Robert, once you put in the time and the research to understand the audience you’re going after, you just get a feel for it. I know that’s the squishiest answer ever.

But if you really know them, intuition I believe, is just informed subconscious knowledge. You know the answer is in there and then it bubbles up to you.

Okay, but that’s totally not a satisfying answer to anyone. The very best thing you can do for really great concrete answers is to go to Chris Garrett’s post on Copyblogger about this exact topic. It’s literally titled “What to give away and what to sell.” I would go through that. It’s very comprehensive. It was a homerun of a post for Chris because so many people do have that very question.

We could also look to Sonia Simone’s favorite analogy, which actually comes from Sean D’Souza, but it’s almost become attributed to Sonia because it’s so hilarious that a hippy feminist from Berkley loves this analogy. I always tell people it is Sonia’s favorite before someone yells at me for being sexist or something.

It’s actually Sean D’Souza’s concept that Sonia adopted called the bikini concept. Very simply, it is that you can show people 95% for free but they’re still going to pay for the last 5%. Yes, that’s somewhat crude, but you get the idea immediately. This is covered in Chris’ post much more extensively.

But you know, it’s about the why and the what for free as long as it is hitting on the problem or desire that’s already out there. Again, that’s just good old-fashioned research and understanding who you are trying to reach. That’s the stuff you give away for free. You can actually talk in general about the solution, and about the how. You can tell people quite a bit of what the solution is and they’re still going to want a little bit more, and go a little more in depth, and a little bit more step by step.

This is the whole bikini concept, and as cute as it is, it really goes back to one of our favorite guys Eugene Schwartz, who was a copywriter who also was an entrepreneur. I don’t know if he published his own books, I don’t remember, but I think he did. They were do it yourself self-help type books on various topics. His marketing would give away the best part of the book. He would give away the meat of the solution and yet he sold boatloads because people want the whole context. They want the whole solution. They want the whole package.

That’s why I think people sweat this question maybe more than they should, yet I totally understand where it comes from. Take a look at Chris’ post but keep in mind that sometimes you could give away everything in text and yet you will sell boatloads of a different format such as video. Some of the savviest internet marketing people have done that effectively. They pretty much give it all away during the launch and yet everyone still buys for the format or the context that they prefer.

Robert Bruce: Alright. So we’re going to keep going with these questions in upcoming episodes of this show, Rainmaker FM. If you have questions about media content strategy, what we want to ask you to do, with all respect and politeness, is to please drop them into the comments section of this episode’s post.

We’ll keep answering these in the weeks to come, as many as we can get to. We’re going to do about two an episode. Please go to Rainmaker.FM and you’ll see the stream of posts for this podcast there. At some point it won’t matter which one because we’ll keep going through those, but drop your question in the comment section.

Brian Clark: Yeah, whatever one is at the top, please drop it in there.

Brought to You by the Rainmaker Platform

Robert Bruce: Speaking of questions, this episode of Rainmaker FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform. There are a lot of questions and a lot of frustration floating around out there that really boil down to one thing. That is “How do I quit screwing around with building my website and focus on building my business?”

A lot of people are sick of worrying about software updates, database crashes, whether certain plugins are compatible with certain versions of a CMS, and that’s not even to mention the massive cost and hassle of building and maintaining a custom membership site.

We’re going to talk more about all of that later in coming episodes. Then there’s the management of multiple services and software and trying to cobble them all together into something that looks and functions remotely like you want it to. If any of these frustrations sound familiar to you, I want you to try something right now.

Head over to RainmakerPlatform.com, and click around over there. Go ahead and sign up for the free 14 day trial of the Rainmaker Platform. Stop horsing around with your website and start building your business, RainmakerPlatform.com.

dCommerce: What It Is and Why It Matters

So let’s talk about dCommerce. I’ve heard of E-Commerce, but what is dCommerce, Brian?

Brian Clark: Well dCommerce makes sense in contrast to eCommerce. I’m not sure I’m totally sold on that. You like it a little bit better than I do.

Robert Bruce: I like that it breaks out. We all know what E-Commerce is or have an idea of what it is, but this kind of clarifies two different versions between eCommerce and dCommerce.

Brian Clark: Right. So it is short for Digital Commerce. And what we’re talking about here in the broadest sense compared to eCommerce (which is the online selling and fulfillment), is the purchase and fulfillment of physical goods using the internet. That’s eCommerce.

Digital Commerce, as it makes sense, would be the sale and fulfillment of digital products and services online. So to me, that would include the entire downloadable software industry, the entire WordPress theme industry, anything that can be delivered digitally online. There’s no mailing involved. It all happens at the point of sale followed with a download.

Now of course Rainmaker, one of its strengths, is that the platform is anything digital commerce. Right out of the box, you can sell anything that can be digitally delivered. Digital Commerce, as it is being used in the broader sense online seems to tend to exclude other forms of digital products and services and really just focus on content. Right?

We’re talking about the question from earlier. You know, “I want to sell content, I know I have to give away some to attract people; which is which?” Digital commerce is the content that you actually sell.

This goes way back with us from both a practice and a philosophical standpoint that you’re not really just selling content even when that’s the business you’re in. Digital commerce is really about creating access to a beneficial experience. That experience includes information that’s in digital format obviously, but it really comes down to why would someone pay you for your information as opposed to maybe doing hours and hours of Googling trying to piece it together themselves?

It really has to be something that is a well-defined beneficial experience and it has got to be being part of something and belonging to something. That’s really the crux of a membership site. It’s “I belong,” and other people don’t. It sounds kind of primitive, but psychologically it is very strong.

Robert Bruce: I get that the definition of dCommerce as selling digital content. I like that. Like we said, it clarifies it. But what is an example? What is the beneficial experience of say, the Authority membership site?

Brian Clark: That one is easy because a big aspect of that is the community and the forums and the interaction, not just with us.

Robert Bruce: It’s not just the downloads.

Brian Clark: Well, certainly not. There are tons and tons of information in there and I think that’s why people buy Authority. But once they’re in there, it has been quite clear to us that they stay for the community. They stay for the interaction with their peers and with us. And it’s funny how their peers become even more important than us over time.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. One more thing actually, you’ve brought this up before many times. In the context of our product, StudioPress and the WordPress themes and the Genesis framework they build over there and sell over there, the beneficial experience there that you’ve talked about many times, but the thing itself has to be good. In that case though, it is more about the support that you’re buying.

Brian Clark: Right. In the world of WordPress with GPL software, you are selling support. If you just want the thing, you can go find it or you could just use a free theme. Right?

Robert Bruce: Right, that’s what I’m getting at.

Brian Clark: That’s not really what people are buying. So even if they don’t use the support because we’ve done a good enough job with our instructions and with our product design so that it’s that easy, they still want to know it is there. Right? A lot of people don’t understand and there are some very sophisticated analytics people online who don’t understand how normal people think. Most people don’t use these Tor networks or whatever to download stuff. But you know, I’m like “Nah, I’d rather just pay for it. I don’t know what’s going on over there.”

Robert Bruce: Exactly.

Brian Clark: That’s in addition to wanting to support the creator which is huge.

The Amazing Difference Between Now and 2007

Robert Bruce: Alright, so you launched from Copyblogger, in 2007, a product where the whole thing is about what’s now known as digital commerce. What has changed in that since 2007?

Brian Clark: It is amazing. I’m not surprised by what’s changed, but it’s still amazing to reflect back. So when we launched our first premium content training program, the mentality at the time was that no one will ever pay for content again. It just shows you that you get these crazy thought leaders with these opinions.

They have authority, and people do follow them. It doesn’t matter that they’re completely wrong until someone else says, “Hey, maybe this person or these people don’t have perspective that predates them starting a Twitter account.” That’s dangerous, right?

So in 2007 with the original Teaching Sells report, I spent a great deal of time making the case that in fact people will pay for content and people do pay for content. It’s becoming more of a thing, not less. And Google and the internet are actually contributing to the fact that people will always pay for content.

Fast forward to 2009 and 2010, and it became quite apparent that the initial idea that people wouldn’t pay for content again was completely wrong. Now we’ve got the rise of ebooks, we’ve got the rise of the app stores, we’ve got training programs and membership sites across the spectrum, and the biggest of all was elearning. It’s a ridiculous billion dollar industry.

One would say that people are paying for more content than ever and as lifelong learning becomes the norm, I think you’ll see people won’t go to college at some point in the nearer future than a lot of people would like to think. That’s because you’re effectively spending four years learning outdated information and the world is passing you by. I know that sounds crazy, but there are a lot of people who see it that way.

I’ve got a daughter who is twelve and a boy who is nine, I think they’ll probably go to college if they want to, but only because I can afford it and that’s great. I want them to do what they want to do. But if it were otherwise, I don’t think I’d advise them to go to college.

Robert Bruce: Unless you’re going to be a brain surgeon or you want to build bridges or buildings

Brian Clark: Right. There are certain professions where you have to do it, right?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, the vast majority.

Brian Clark: But I’m going to try to make them into entrepreneurs.

Robert Bruce: Well the joke too has been, “The liberal arts education, what did it get me?” for decades and decades.

Brian Clark: My liberal arts education was the greatest thing ever. That includes my legal education, which technically I don’t use, but it changed the way I think. And the way you think is the thing. You could have taught me how to think critically and otherwise with a great e-learning program. In fact with gamification, it probably would have been more effective.

Why You Have to Own Your Own Platform

Robert Bruce: You mentioned the rise of e-learning platforms and programs. You look around at things like Udemy and Skillshare.

Brian Clark: Can you imagine? I had to make the case in 2007 that you could actually sell content and then now we’ve got things like Skillshare. It’s everywhere, Treehouse, Lynda.com, and all of these.

I look back at it as ridiculous, but you really have to understand that’s how people thought at the time. Now look at today. What are these things that certain pundits are telling you? What was it a few years ago, Robert? “You don’t need a website, use Facebook.” Right? How bad does that look right now? We were there saying, “Don’t do that, don’t do that. Digital sharecropping is bad, bad, bad.”

Now Cory Doctorow has a new book out called Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free. He is effectively arguing that the big platforms (Apple, Google, Amazon, whatever), they’ve effectively perverted copyright law to extend to the point where the platform is controlling your sense of choice in a way that we would never accept from someone else. I’m like, “yes.”

Again, this goes back to what we’ve been saying. Why is it called the Rainmaker Platform? It’s because you have to have your own platform, and these are the tools that allow you to build it. Robert, I know you almost lost your mind so much against people whose marketing strategy was “just put it in the app store.”

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: You used to rant and rave about that. I’m like, “Robert, you can’t fix the whole world.”

Robert Bruce: Listen, when people are praying to the wrong gods, like the gods of Apple, it gets me.

Brian Clark: Apple is great for buying stuff from, but I don’t want them to sell stuff for me.

Robert Bruce: In the same light, back to content, I think yesterday Gregory Ciotti tweeted that Fast Company’s Facebook page has 500,000 followers. They’ve got half a million followers.

Go look at that Facebook page. Go look at many of these Facebook pages and see the number of comments and the number of shares, versus the number of followers.

Brian Clark: Facebook just throttled the whole thing.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: They do that so you’ll pay them to reach the audience you built.

Robert Bruce: But here’s the problem, Brian. People, like Facebook, the Apple store (the app store) and these kinds of opportunities, I don’t think people would say a shortcut, but they seem to be saying, “Okay not only is this is where everybody is” is a common refrain, but “it’s so much easier than building a website out and building my own audience and building an email list.”

Brian Clark: It’s easier to be completely invisible is what it is.

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

How the Game Has Shifted in Your Favor

Brian Clark: We always look at the outliers, everything from the startup game. You look at Twitter and Instagram and don’t realize that not only were those one in a million flukes, but the people who started them were well connected and they were rich already. They had the mobile phone numbers of venture capitalists when they wanted.

They said, “Hey this seems to be working, I can’t believe it. Can you give us some money?”

“Yes.”

You think that’s a normal experience? And here’s the other thing that I’m seeing very different from 2007, there were a lot of people who wanted to build a digital commerce business as we now call it. I don’t think a lot of them were qualified to do it in any sense of entrepreneurial ambition though. A lot of people just won’t do it.

Sometimes it’s life that intervenes, sometimes it’s a confidence issue, or sometimes it’s a skillset issue. It goes on and on and on. But remember in 2007 content marketing was not even an accepted term much less a billion dollar industry. Right?

What I’m seeing in contrast now is there are lots of highly qualified people. They’ve been trained, they’ve been doing content marketing, and they’ve been doing content creation. A lot of these people have backgrounds in traditional advertising, copywriting, journalism, and there’s all of this talent pool.

I’ve been speaking the last couple of weeks more than I usually do and I’m meeting people. And they’re like, “I’m a content creator, I’m a content strategist, or I’m a copywriter.” And I’m thinking, “Oh, well we’re coming out with this reseller program for Rainmaker where you’re able to deliver this sophisticated solution without development. Of course, you’re making your money providing content services, etcetera.” They’re replying that, “Yes, I am definitely interested in that, but I also want to start my own online training and my own membership site.”

They have the same dreams that people like you and I had, and they’re qualified to do it. The interesting thing I think you’re seeing is these hybrid business models where someone is like, “Yeah I’m going to take clients because there is a ton of people who know they need content and they’re not qualified to do it themselves. They’re going to have to pay someone like me, so yes, sign me up.”

At the same time, they are building something that is either a way to attract better quality clients, which is one of our Teaching Sells business models effectively, and/or they want the membership training etcetera to stand on its own and become the business over time.

I think it’s amazing compared to 2007. It took us forever to get Rainmaker out, which is what people were asking for. “Please give us the tools that are easy to use.” It took a long time to get out and yet I keep seeing that the timing both from the content marketing industry and the digital commerce industry is perfect. There are finally enough people who can really do this. It’s not a pipedream for them. They have the skills, all they need is guidance, and of course, we are more than happy to provide that.

The Truth Behind the Famous Quote, “Information Wants to Be Free”

Robert Bruce: You have quoted, “The right information in the right place just changes your life.” Why does that quote matter so much?

Brian Clark: That is part of this infamous saying by a guy named Stewart Brand who said it in 1984, pre-internet. He was one of the founders of The WELL and other electronic communities before the web. He’s the guy who said, “Information wants to be free,” and that is what has been quoted out of context over and over and over again.

What he really said first was “Information wants to be expensive because the right information in the right place changes your life.” Then he said, “On the other hand, information wants to be free.” He’s talking about electronic distribution.

So how is it that Copyblogger Media was able to build everything that it has without venture capital and without advertising? It is content with social distribution. Right? In that context, free information makes a whole lot of sense because it brings people back to us and we’re able to sell what we actually sell. So that’s where the saying comes from.

But people are missing two-thirds of the quote when they say, “Information wants to be free.” Again, I referenced Cory Doctorow’s new book which says, “Information does not want to be free.” I think that shows you what was me making a niche in 2007, which is not only mainstream now but it is dire.

Creators need to make money from what they create. And this particular model, whether you want to call it online education, e-learning, training or more less intense membership sites, all of this is more viable than ever. If free information with social distribution is the greatest marketing thing ever if you focus on the audience, information wants to be expensive. I think you are the type, and I’m the type and a lot of people are the type, that do enjoy acquiring knowledge for its own sake. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But when it comes to paying for it, we usually want some benefit out of it, right? Whether it just be more cohesive, more convenient, and more efficient.

Robert Bruce: Or from a particular source.

Brian Clark: Right. The particular source is the big one, authority, which is to say “Who do we trust?”

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: It’s the benefits of knowledge as opposed to information, and that’s why people pay and will always pay.

Understanding the Intersection Between Direct Marketing and Instructional Design

Robert Bruce: I want you to elaborate on something you’ve said several times in that the Teaching Sells program represents the intersection of direct marketing and instruction design. What did you mean by that?

Brian Clark: So instructional design is basically when teaching adult learners (although it should apply to every learner and I think that’s the trend), you’re designing for engagement, retention, comprehension, and all of that stuff. The way you do that is by focusing on the benefits of knowledge.

This was once cutting edge instructional design thought. Learning psychology back in 2001 and 2002 when I really was just fascinated with this stuff with my background in general psychology and sociology. It was a natural topic to me. At that same time of course, I was teaching myself copywriting and direct marketing, direct response, and all of this stuff.

It’s like when you’re geeking out on two unrelated things and you realize they are completely congruent. I remember reading an e-learning textbook and it was basically advocating copywriting techniques for instructional design for e-learning. That’s because why does copywriting work in a commerce context? It’s engaging and it focuses on benefits.

It turns out if you want someone to learn something, you’ve got to do the same thing. So features versus benefits, Copywriting 101. People don’t want a drill, they want a hole. Right? Really, they want to hang a piece of art in their home. Or beyond that, they want their neighbors to perceive them in a certain way based on the art hanging on the wall that required a drill.

We can do this exercise to ultimate benefits all day long. But the simplest expression is “I don’t really want a drill. What I need is a hole in the wall.” It’s the same thing. It’s knowledge for its own sake, versus the benefits of knowledge.

Going back to what we were talking about, with a college university degree, we can say that I would send my kids to college for the experience. A lot of the college experience is not all that healthy if they follow in their old man’s footsteps, which we may not want.

The liberal arts education and the learning experience, is such that I was exposed to things that I might not have been exposed to otherwise. But is that really historically why we send our kids to college or why kids want to go to college? No.

They want that degree so that they can get a job or get into a certain profession, which is that the end benefit? No. They want money. They want prestige. They want a good life. They want a family. Those are the real benefits. It’s the same exact thing.

Starting point number one: realize that you aren’t selling information; you’re selling access to benefits and an outcome that matters. That’s a big part of what we tried to teach in Teaching Sells, which was those two things, marketing and the creation of content are not mutually exclusive. One is not a necessary evil. They are completely intertwined when you realize that they’re all about the expression and delivery of benefits.

Robert Bruce: Alright everybody, thank you for listening to another episode of Rainmaker FM. You can find more of these episodes at Rainmaker.FM and please do two things

Number one, please leave a question from the Q&A section of this podcast in the comments section of any one of those posts.

Number two, if you like what’s going on here, leave a comment or rating in iTunes. We appreciate it very much.

This episode, like all of the episodes of Rainmaker FM, are brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform. Check that out at RainmakerPlatform.com. Mr. Clark, I’m going to see you next week. Right?

Brian Clark: Absolutely.

Robert Bruce: Thank you everybody.