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The Transcript

Why Copyblogger Media is Betting Big on Podcasting

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

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

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: There s how many shows?

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Oh yeah. Smoking jacket on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Fantastic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on Why I Didn t Start a Podcast in 2005

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

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

Robert Bruce: Oh yeah. Absolutely.

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

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

A Short History of Copyblogger Audio Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yeah, as key products and services.

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: We launched the pilot program.

Robert Bruce: Right. Correct, be specific.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

The Thinking Behind Our Decision to Build a Podcast Network

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yup.

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

Robert Bruce: Yup.

Brian Clark: Have you started watching the show yet?

Robert Bruce: I got the first episode in.

Brian Clark: Then?

Robert Bruce: That s as far as I am.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yup.

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

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

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

Brian Clark: The change back you mean.

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Is that it? Okay.

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

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

A Brief Overview of the Current Rainmaker.FM Lineup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yup.

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I think so.

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

Robert Bruce: No.

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Exactly.

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

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

Brian Clark: Absolutely.

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

Brian Clark: And what not to do yourself.

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

Brian Clark: No bias there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Correct.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: What? Now come on, Robert.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: As always, you guys are first.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Take care, everyone.

The Transcript

Henry Rollins on the Art and Business of DIY Media

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

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

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

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

Henry, thank you so much for joining us.

Henry Rollins: No problem at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Secret Weapon Behind His Entire Media Business

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

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

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

What Most DIY Media People (Business or Punk) Miss

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

What It Takes to Succeed in Business (and Rock)

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

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

What Black Flag Taught Him about Working Insanely Hard

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

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

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

How He Financed His First Record Label

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

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

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

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

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

The Development of His Direct-Mail Marketing Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How His First Book Was Published

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Rollins: That happens all the time.

Brian Clark: Of course.

Henry Rollins: People are bigger after they re dead.

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

The Trip from DIY Scrapper to Grammy-winning Performer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why DIY Media Producers Should Seek Massive Distribution

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Oh, my God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Worst Thing You Can Do and Be Online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Henry Is Going to Deliver at Authority Rainmaker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Transcript

Three Misconceptions About Modern SEO That Confuse Content Marketers

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

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

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

Danny Sullivan: That’s right.

Brian Clark: That is correct.

His Search Engine Expertise Dating Back to 1995

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danny Sullivan: Yeah.

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

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

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

The Biggest Misconception About Google and SEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

Danny Sullivan: Because most people don’t link.

Brian Clark: Yes.

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yep.

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

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

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

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

The Google and Twitter Firehose Deal

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yeah, me too.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yeah, exactly.

Danny Sullivan: I’ll never eat again.

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

Danny Sullivan: Yeah.

The Ongoing Power of the Humble Hyperlink

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Excellent.

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

Brian Clark: Yeah. Good perspective.

The True Nature of Good SEO Practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yeah.

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

Is Google “Author Rank” Really Dead?

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

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

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

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

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

What He Will Be Talking About at Authority Rainmaker

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

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

Brian Clark: A staggering arc of heartbreaking genius.

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

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

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

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

Danny Sullivan: Exactly.

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

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

The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Cooper: Yep.

How This Programmer Became a Major Content Publisher

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: You wanted to write a book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peter Cooper: Yes.

Robert Bruce: Or are they pretty fairly evenly distributed?

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

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

Robert Bruce: Crap.

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

Robert Bruce: How long have you been doing it?

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

Robert Bruce: Interesting.

Peter Cooper: This has now become the main thing.

How He Promoted His Newsletters in The Early Days

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Is it trendy now?

Peter Cooper: I think it is.

Robert Bruce: I think you’re right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why He Switched From Blogging to Email Newsletters

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

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

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

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

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

Where The Majority of Cooper Press’ Revenue Comes From

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Your own stuff.

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

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

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

The Content Curation Strategy

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: What the?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: You’re crazy man.

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

Robert Bruce: Oh, wow.

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

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

Robert Bruce: Headline and a link.

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Peter Cooper: You are just expanding that footprint.

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

His Approach to Opt-in Conversion Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, so that’s it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the Future of Cooper Press?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

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

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

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

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

We’ll see you next week everybody.

The Transcript

Has Social Media Killed Consumer Trust?

Robert Bruce: Now last week you said something about coal mines or salt mines. No, you said, salt mines.

Brian Clark: No, I actually meant salt mines, but I said coal mines, I think.

Robert Bruce: Have you ever been down the coal mines of Copyblogger, Brian?

Brian Clark: Yeah, I started them and I used to live there by myself.

Robert Bruce: Oh, you actually built them?

Brian Clark: Yes. Of course.

Robert Bruce: Right. I should have thought that Brian said that.

Brian Clark: But the point being, you were busy.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: In fact, you are actually still busy.

Robert Bruce: Thanks for acknowledging that. I appreciate it.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Well we were both so head down the whole month of January, which started off at full speed and we haven’t really looked around.

So this episode, we are looking around, seeing what’s happening out there and we are sharing that valuable news insight, and specifically yours.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, we’ve got one, two, three, four, five articles that we are going to talk about this episode. A little bit different to what we normally do but we have done this before. And yeah, taken a look outside.

A couple of these things apply directly to what we are doing, what I have been busy with and why everyone has, which is coming. I think by now you have said it a couple of times but we are building a podcast network, right?

Brian Clark: Well go ahead and just come out and say it in plain English. Wow. I was going to have some more fun being stupidly vague.

Robert Bruce: Just drag it out a few more episodes.

Brian Clark: Only fun for me.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Well a couple of these articles apply to that but they will of course, as always, apply to you out there dear listener as well. And then Brian, you’ve brought in a couple of interesting things that are related but before we get into that, this episode of Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform. It’s the complete website solution for content marketers and online entrepreneurs.

Brian, we took a look with Mr Garrett this week at one component of the Rainmaker curation suite, which was the RSS reader. What do you think about that? By the way, it is coming soon. What do you think of the first look?

Brian Clark: It’s pretty sweet. Also a new and improved set of podcasting tools that you and I are also very excited about.

So yeah, this 2.2 release should be out in February and it’s pretty exciting. It’s the next level. We were already talking about how we would make it even better as we go forward. So there is never an end point for Rainmaker but the cool thing is, depending on what package you end up in, and this is all standard package, you get the benefit of all of those improvements over time. You never have to upgrade anything, you don’t have to touch anything and you don’t even have to pay attention. They are just there when they are ready. And of course we let you know so that you can go and play with them.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and it was funny on this call. Chris Garrett was taking us through the features step-by-step. What it looked like and what it does. Several times you said, “Hey, it would be great if What I really want is ” and you were particularly talking about Further.net. “This feature, or that feature.” And every time Garrett was like “yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s coming. It’s on the list. Don’t worry about it. It’s coming.”

Brian Clark: For the first time ever, I just feel like I don’t have anything to do anymore. They are already a step ahead of my demands now. Although I did have that one request that is key to publishing Further and Nick built it that day. He got it into the release, which is just so awesome.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Well if you don’t have enough to do, hold on, let me bring up my list here. I’m happy to give you a couple of items, if you need a few things for this week? Is that what you are saying?

Brian Clark: Erm. Ugh?

Robert Bruce: Find out more about the Rainmaker Platform. This curation suite that is coming. The podcast network feature that is coming. A lot of these things that are on the way. Find out more and take a free 14-day test drive at RainmakerPlatform.com.

3 Business Benefits of Producing a Podcast

Robert Bruce: Okay. Like we said, we’ve got five different articles here. I’m going to just jump right into these Brian.

The first one is from Social Fresh at SocialFresh.com. Nick Cicero writes this article entitled “The Rise of Podcasting: The Ultimate On Demand Content (Infographic).”

This is a topic that I don’t think you can get online without seeing somebody talking about the rise of podcasting. Everybody is talking about Serial and everybody is talking about the massive wave of interest in podcasting that’s going on. And that’s fine.

In a lot of ways, this is a really basic article but there are some good numbers in here. I think it’s good to think about because podcasting as content marketing, and content creation, is an extremely viable way to build an audience. Later on, we will talk a little bit more about conversion.

He goes over some basic stuff and there are a couple of interesting highlights in this article. Number one, the general focus of it is on mobile. And the application of podcasting to mobile devices and people on the go with their mobile devices. It says, “80% of the world’s population owns a mobile phone.” It breaks it down even further. “1 in every 7 people on the planet.” I should say that this was written at the end of November 2014. So some of these numbers are going to be bumped even further by now.

“Between 2009 and 2012, smartphone ownership almost tripled in the US. Nearly two of the five billion mobile phones worldwide are smartphones.” He lays out these three benefits of podcasting and these are things that we have talked about before too.

I think anyone listening to this and is possibly thinking about starting a podcast, or thinking about audio content in any form, is to take a look at these three benefits and let them sink in.

Number one, you can listen on demand. The audience can grab your content anytime they want, 24/7, which has been true of the Internet for some time but a lot of these tools related to podcasting, even more so, as time goes on.

Brian, you and I have talked about this dream I’ve had of the push button subscribe. When somebody invents the simple way to listen, and you can already see this in cars.

I think it was an NPR that I heard, that by 2016, or maybe it was 2017, that all new automobiles will be installed with easy access to podcasts. I don’t know if they are going to do a deal with iTunes. Obviously there is CarPlay but it’s just going to become easier and easier.

Right now that barrier to entry for the normal person is a little tough. You’ve got to get iTunes, then you’ve got to subscribe and then you’ve got to download the episodes.

Brian Clark: Robert, no, no, no.

Robert Bruce: Yes, disagree.

Brian Clark: Okay. Let’s look at the evolution. The format was named after the iPod. And again, when you and I first met, that’s what we talked about. We talked about podcasting and that was in 2006. And yet, as we know, that year was the first VC funded podcast network that Scoble was involved in.

And then of course you had Adam Curry, the old VJ on MTV, the Podfather and all of that stuff. Then the problem was, it was too hard. When you have an iPod, it’s not smart. It’s a music holding receptacle.

So it’s funny that Apple, you know, we call it podcasting because of an Apple product, which is bizarre in itself but it was another Apple product in it’s evolution, the iPhone, that really made it easier and then the ubiquitous Bluetooth. And then the podcasting app that Apple ships with everything now.

I do agree with you that it could be easier and it will become easier but I think there was a huge intersection in the last 4 years but mainly last year, of it being easier for most people, maybe not my mom, but non 73 year olds, and content.

There was content that people wanted to listen to and before Serial and before StartUp and all that, it was the comedians really that drove the adoption. Adam Carolla, Joe Rogan, Marc Maron and all of those guys. Those shows became big because they are entertaining to listen to.

So I agree that it will become even easier, but I think the tipping point happened.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I would definitely agree with that. But there still is that reach and maybe it’s just a thing of the 73-year-olds, and certainly there is many of them that do, and it’s no problem getting podcasts and subscribing. You reach out and you touch a button on your radio and it’s on. You tune it. You do this and that but basically it’s a one button thing.

Brian Clark: What’s a radio?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right? And you and I are in our 40’s.

Brian Clark: The kids are like, “Dad, play that song again.” I’m like, “I can’t. It’s the radio.” “What? What’s wrong with you old man?”

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Right. When it becomes that easy for this stuff, for on demand content, that’s what I am talking about. And it will. I’m convinced that it will.

Brian Clark: And I think even beyond the ease or the relative easierness of accessing podcasts, it’s the on demand thing. Like when podcasting first kind of emerged, again, back in 2005/2006, we didn’t have that. Well, was Netflix around then? I don’t remember. But the whole concept of on demand, binge watching or listening, we’ve seen a huge shift in consumption preference among people to where they are like my kids, who don’t understand broadcast technology that’s not on demand. And now, people like you and I expect to be able to have it on demand.

I mean, I have cable so I can watch the on demand versions of movies and shows because I don’t have time to be at a certain place, at a certain time because you decide to put something on. With the exception of sports, right?

Robert Bruce: Yeah. No, this is huge.

Tony brought up Person of Interest, which is a show on CBS that I tried a couple of years ago and then just kind of fell away, but he and Garrett have been talking about it for a long time and I thought, “Hey, I am going to try this again.” And CBS in particular, I don’t know all the details and all this but maybe it’t available on Hulu or Hulu Plus, but they are famously one of the networks that has not joined everyone else in this idea of doing deals with Netflix. Or doing deals, I think even with Amazon for purchasing episodes.

So I go to the CBS website and at a glance, the last season of Person of Interest was available on CBS.com. I didn’t really have an interest in watching it there, plus I wanted to catch up with season two. Of course, there’s going to be ways to get it but they don’t make it easy.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It’s ridiculous.

Jerod was tweeting about Better Call Saul, which is the Breaking Bad spinoff show and it turns out it sounds like it’s going to be solid, which gives everyone a collective sigh of relief. But I think I call it the Breaking Bad moment when things change.

It seemed like everyone you knew was catching up on Breaking Bad. They were trying to get there before either the final season started, or at least before the final episode, right?

And again, other than sporting events, that’s really the last collective media thing that I felt I shared with a ton of people.

Now, compared to the old days, you know, the 70s and the 80s when everyone watched The Cosby Show, All in the Family. We are never going back there.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: But Breaking Bad was an on demand transitional moment, where it seemed everyone was desperately trying to get caught up so that they could watch the last season and then the last episode in real time.

Robert Bruce: AMC is an example of a forward thinking network. They are doing a deal with Netflix. They are doing deals with Amazon. It’s easy to get into this “on demand” kind of philosophy. So we could talk about this for about ten years straight, but the number one benefit of podcasting is this idea of on demand for the audience.

Brian Clark: Yeah. On demand and mobile, I don’t want to steal the thunder but I can tell you why audio is Yeah, go ahead.

Robert Bruce: We’ll cover it and then we’ll talk more. But number two, you can customise your content. To me, this is related to on demand anyway. But you do select the exact shows and exact episodes that you want. You are not stuck to a network schedule like in 1996.

Brian Clark: It’s a playlist.

Robert Bruce: Right. And if one show comes up that you don’t like, I do this all the time, I delete it and I go looking for something else. Exactly. A playlist is the way to look at it.

And number three in Mr Cicero’s 3 benefits of podcasting here is, that they are portable and free.

Brian Clark: Yes, that’s the key.

Robert Bruce: Yep, you can take this anywhere. On a walk with your dog, in the car.

Brian Clark: Well it doesn’t require ocular attention, to say that you don’t have to look at it. I mean video as popular as it is, you still have to look at it. The whole Internet. You know, the valuations of BuzzFeed and a lot of these text heavy are shifting now. I mean, every time I go over the Huffington Post, it’s like they are doing a video thing now.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: So they are shifting and yet it’s the audio content that’s portable anywhere and from an educational standpoint, from a productivity standpoint, the fact that you can learn something or ingest some information, or just be entertained while you are doing something else at the same time, you can have it on in the background. I mean, hey, it’s radio but it’s better than radio.

Robert Bruce: Yep. And we’ll touch on the free, the advertising and revenue model thing in just a second but in the interest of moving this along, there are a couple of more interesting numbers. As of November 2014, nearly one in three of American’s have listened to a podcast. That is astounding. 15% of American’s have listened to a podcast in the past month and again, this is November 2014.

Apple just surpassed one billion subscriptions. That’s billion with a ‘b’. It’s a podcast via the iTunes app, so via other apps it could be a much larger number. And then another couple of numbers here. One in three American’s already listen to a podcast. Even with these technological barriers to entry that we talked about before, already one in three have listened and then the one billion subscriptions number is just astounding to me.

So in one sense, this is stuff that a lot of you have already heard but it’s good to kind of take a moment and look at some of the reasons why I think we are doing this, and why you should seriously consider doing it for your business.

Anything else on this Brian, before we move on to the next article?

Brian Clark: Yeah. Looping full circle back to the failure of podcast networks in the early days and now they are the darling, I find from a business standpoint that’s what gets my brain in gear.

Revenue Models for Your Podcast

Robert Bruce: Well here’s the thing, and this next article is from Fast Company. Rebecca Greenfield wrote this nice little piece about “The (Surprisingly Profitable) Rise of Podcast Networks” and what you just said to me is kind of the cornerstone of this idea, that even now, even though these podcast networks are rising, people are still asking the same questions. And they are still locked into this idea that it has to be ad supported or venture backed, as we see with Alex Blumberg and Gimlet Media. But it’s not the case, and by the way, it’s not how we are going to do it.

Brian Clark: But at the same time, audio ads at least of the direct response variety, where you are telling someone to go do something now, or giving them a phone number or a URL or something, those work. We’ve known that, before anything about podcasting. So even with an advertising model, I think the brands and the advertisers are saying “Yes, sign me up.”

I was talking to John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing and he recently fired back up a podcast but he’s said that he is getting interest from all sorts of major brands to advertise on his podcast. And you know, he’s not Serial or even StartUp but, I think it’s because it works and when you look at online advertising, which doesn’t, right?

I mean video advertising pre-rolls generally work. I don’t know what the latest data is but if you make it through the ad, that’s sufficient for people to do that but again, you’ve got this entire realm of portable on demand content that’s mobile. It’s moving around and it could be walking down the street, and you could probably geotarget some really precise advertising. There’s a lot of future in advertising on podcasts and that’s how it always works online. It’s always advertising. You know that.

I mean even I, 16 years ago started off with that in my head, but, what about a podcast network used for content marketing? I mean we see people doing it. But it’s funny to me that even our friends in the content marketing space like Joe and Robert over at CMI and Jay Baer, who just launched a third show, they are going for sponsors.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: It’s ironic.

What if you launched a podcast network purely from a content marketing space, meaning you’re your own advertiser and what if, what was being advertised is the very platform that the podcast network is built on?

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Or, if you are in another space, it’s content marketing for your other type of product or service of course. Whatever it is that you do.

Brian Clark: Especially services.

Robert Bruce: Service is huge, right.

Now this is interesting, where Miss Greenfield talks about the struggles that StartUp and Blumberg are having reconciling some of this stuff and as he famously does on his show, which we talked about earlier. “Podcast ads generate ridiculous levels of engagement. Internal Midroll surveys of 300,000 listeners found that 63% of people bought something a host had pedalled on the show. Because of that leverage, Midroll charges a lot, actually” for podcast ads, says Sachs. Midroll is a podcasting advertising company.

Brian Clark: Right.

Robert Bruce: That 63%, as you said, the engagement level there really is clearly insane.

Brian Clark: It is, because the old Paul Harvey was the master but it sounded like he was talking to you, not pitching you something.

There are some guys on ESPN radio that are great at it. Colin Cowherd is a guy there. He’s got a great style. My wife actually listens to ESPN radio and not me. Believe or not. I’m not kidding. But yeah, I kind of got hooked because I am so interested in audio and presentation style.

Robert Bruce: How they do it.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Voice, cadence, all this stuff. So I started listening to Colin Cowherd because of his delivery. He’ll take these very deliberate pauses, and yet he’s a complete pro in his delivery and he’s pretty amazing. But then he’ll just launch seamlessly into Paul Harvey and you are like, “Wow, I just listened to an ad and I didn’t even mind it.”

Robert Bruce: And that’s the thing. Again you mentioned earlier, we are not flying blind here. We’ve got decades and decades and decades of actual real-world cases to look at and learn from. From Paul Harvey to the giants of talk radio, these days and in decades past.

None of this is new. The medium itself maybe newish, even though 15 years old but all of those concepts carry forward. And yeah, you need to talk to your audience. You need to think about how you present this stuff to your specific audience but if you are getting engagement like 63% for advertising, think about.

Now back to your point Brian, if you did this in terms of content marketing for your own business, your own products and your own services.

Brian Clark: Well generally speaking I figured out in 1999 that you’ll make more money if you have something to sell, other than advertising. And you know for businesses trying to create content, let’s segue a little into something I found interesting and related in that “Okay, maybe let’s start a podcast network. How we are going to do it? And I don’t mean by we, I mean that in the general sense, but also us in that what we have been working on for the last couple of months.

A Key Content Marketing Trend We’re Riding

Brian Clark: Jay Baer wrote an article about EGC (Employee Generated Content). We have all heard of user generated content, which Facebook, Twitter, you know, all the social networks built themselves off of but now it’s tapping internal resources. Internal voices know the products and services. They know the customers, you would hope, and instead of sequestering them away from public, which is traditional enterprise thinking, because “Oh my gosh, they may say something real.”

Instead the trend is you’ve got to let those voices out and what better than a podcast, and/or multiple podcasts. And really that’s the premise on which our upcoming podcast network is built. We’ve got a lot of smart people in this company. They are Internet celebrities in their own right. Brian Gardner, Chris Garrett, Pamela Wilson, Sonia Simone, Jerod Morris, Demian Farnworth. So for us, yeah, that’s an obvious place to start.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and it’s big because for instance, not only expertise in terms of reaching into your own company and finding people to do this but it’s also personality.

So for instance, a lot of these shows are going to be covering things. They are all going to be related to what we do and what we talk about generally but some of them are going to go to the outer reaches of things that you and I would never talk about.

So for instance, we were just talking to Chris Garrett and Tony Clark and they are going to do this nerd fest of the intersection of marketing and technology. They’re going to bring their sensibility to it and their expertise with these tools and how to apply them to real-world marketing stuff. Conversion, split-testing and data. Things that you and I touch on all the time but particularly as it relates to nerdery in general, you and I never go there. We would be laughed out of the room if we tried.

Brian Clark: Well it’s just not our thing but you and I are media nerds. We just talked about Breaking Bad and we’ll probably drop a reference to The Wire by the end of this. So to each his own.

But yeah, it’s letting people be themselves because that’s what the appeal is. And out of 8 to 15 shows that we have got in production, who knows what the breakouts will be? We have some guesses but they could be completely wrong because you just never know, and to me, that’s what’s fun about this. I haven’t felt this much giddy anticipation since the early days of Copyblogger, when I would write on a topic that I had never written before and wondered whether it was going to be a hit or not. You know, that’s fun.

Robert Bruce: Jay makes one great point here. You can read the article obviously and I’ll have all of these linked up in the show notes. Under his “4 Tips for Harnessing the EGC in Your Company” number one he says, “You are Simon Cowell. Make them American Idol.” And really this goes back to the old thing we have been talking about for years, the production company.

Brian Clark: Yes. Absolutely.

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

Brian Clark: And we are acting as Simon Cowell because we’ve already told people that if their numbers don’t fly, they are cut.

Robert Bruce: Right. And we’ll talk more about this as time goes on. We’ve got some leeway because in our case, we’ve got the servers but if you are paying in another situation, you’ve got to make those decisions.

Adam Carolla tells a great story. I think is was last year. His dad started a show on his network and it was great and things were going well, but it just kind of flatlined and he fired his dad. He cancelled his show. He was like, “I’ve got server costs. I’ve got to pay for this stuff. This isn’t a hobby.”

Brian Clark: That’s awesome.

How Marketers Have Destroyed Social Media

Robert Bruce: Okay. So the last one and this is also one that you found from Sam Fiorella at Sensei Marketing, which has a nice headline, “Social Media Has Killed Consumer Trust.” What’s he talking about here?

Brian Clark: I think it’s that marketers screw it up for everyone, and I’m not ashamed to say that as one because they do. And, I wouldn’t say it’s our particular breed of marketing, trying to put value and useful content first, which has worked out great for us. It’s just the shortcut mentality and the propensity I think in virtual environments to astroturf stuff, which means fake influence, fake social proof, fake endorsements, compensated endorsements without disclosure.

The point of the article is basically that no one trusts what anyone says online, or on their Twitter account, or whatever because everyone thinks that everyone is on the take. So this article could be read as “Well, the parties over” but no, it’s always been this way, which is why we say “demonstrate authority, don’t claim it.” And that can be interpreted in a broader sense but let me give you a great example.

Everyone just threw a fit when we deleted our Facebook page and one guy, Jon Loomer I think said, “Well it looks like Facebook is your second biggest source of traffic, you are going to lose all that.” Wrong. You know where our Facebook traffic comes from? Other people sharing our content on Facebook.

Us sharing it on a Facebook page because of the algorithm or what have you, did nothing. So, instead of us doing the promoting of our content, we put it out there and it’s the people who share it that get the traction and send us the traffic.

So the ultimate point of this article is that people will only go back to trusting people they actually know and what they have to say. But what does content marketing accomplish, Robert? It gives you a legion of real people, who share and recommend to other real people, and that’s been the point all along. That’s why we lead with content instead of some BS influence or marketing play, where we paying off Kim Kardashian to say nice things about Rainmaker. Not that that would work anyway. What do you think about this Robert?

Robert Bruce: He makes a note under the sub-head of the same thing as his headline. He says, “Clearly the pendulum swung back to traditional word-of-mouth and away from “the wisdom of the crowds.” The wisdom of the crowds is a whole other thing but I think it’s right.

Brian Clark: He kind of mixes some metaphors there.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. Right. But I think it’s as simple and complicated as that first word in social media, which is “social.” You know, thinking about things like, “How would you treat your customers in a real-world situation? How do you treat your friends? How do you treat your family? These are social relationships and that’s a little bit different of course, when applied to business, but it’s relatively the same thing. You treat them as good as you can. As well as you are able. You treat them with respect and you give them what they are asking for, as far as you are able. So in one sense it’s really simple that way.

Brian Clark: Yeah and I think it ties back into what we have been talking about with the power of podcasting because of the ability to hear someone’s actual voice and get clues that you don’t get from text and things like that. I have heard it called “the warmth of podcasting” but it’s a real person, hopefully sharing real valuable information. And again, some of the podcasters that have the most loyal audience that anyone has ever seen and it’s kind of amazing.

So it’s content that gets distribution and you did promise five articles, so we are going to touch on that topic real quick, right at the end. But content gets distributed, which leads to trust in the content brand and the authors of that content.

You know, Google may have killed Authorship but the fundamental principle of it is sound. People want to hear from people, and they want to feel that it’s an authentic exchange, as opposed to trying to figure out what the motive is. So as opposed to objective journalism, content marketing is inherently biased and you should just be loud and proud about that because at least I know where you are coming from. You are not pretending to not be a human being. We all have biases one way or another, whether we are even aware of them.

How To Grow Your Audience When Momentum is Flatlining

Robert Bruce: All right. Yeah. Last one. Let’s touch on this really quick. This is super simple but I like it because it throws a little salt into the stew.

Gary Veynerchuk writes this great article, “How to Scale Your Content After Your Numbers “Peak”.” And he goes through a little bit of an intro here but his answer to this is distribution.

Brian Clark: This is what social media is for. I mean, conversation, yes, customer support, by necessity, because people use it that way, but for content products, social media is distribution. Gary has a couple of answers here that echo what we have been saying on this show for years.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. How do you get that distribution? Maybe things are going well but it’s just kind of flatlining and two really simple answers that are both related.

We’ve talked over and over again about guest posting and writing guest articles for other sites related to your thing. Related to your audience. Borrowing another site’s audience. But one little tweak here, Gary says, “You reach out to the top 100 podcasts that you can get on and promote the show.” Meaning your show, if you have got a podcast. The same applies for your website or whatever it is you are doing online.

But this idea of media tours, which is a simple idea and it’s been around forever. Contact the top 100, or the top 50 or 25 podcasts related to your thing and become an interviewee on those shows, depending on what they are doing. Are you going to get on all of them? Absolutely not.

If you build a relationship with these show hosts over time, your chances are better. If you are doing great stuff, your chances are even better. But for those who write a ton of guest articles as distribution, becoming an interviewee and getting onto other podcasts is a great way to do it. Tell your story that way. For all the reasons that we just talked about, not least of which Brian mentioned as people hearing you. Hearing your actual voice.

Brian Clark: Well the interesting thing for this is, in the last few episodes we have been talking about curation and tied to my new email newsletter Further, and I have yet to do any guest posting. I’m really too busy to even think about it and yet something odd happened, you know, I go on other podcasts and do interviews and what not, and something I hadn’t factored in is, that everyone wants to talk to me, at least in part, about Further. So we talk about it and there’s the link in the show notes. And I’m like, “Wow, that’s pretty cool” and that’s not my main goal here. My day job is the main goal here. You know, promoting Rainmaker, talking about Copyblogger, talking about content marketing but yeah, that’s been a nice thing.

Then of course, AWeber did a nice write up about the Rainmaker Platform and the integration with their email service. Hunter Boil mentioned Further as an example and the people over at Buffer added it to a list of curated email newsletters. So some of this, I am fortunate that people already know who I am but it is a nice kind of thing, in that when you do go and do an interview, people want to know what you are working on. If you can add value to someone else’s show, because who isn’t looking for guests? You know.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, just like a blog looking for articles.

Brian Clark: You just have to focus it on what’s in it for them. I’m always reminded that Seth Godin and Hugh MacLeod, I don’t remember who said it first, but it was basically, “No one is going to link to you if there is not something in it for them.” It’s the same thing. You know, what’s in it for them to have you on their show? What value can you bring to their audience? You can figure that out. I bet you are going to be more successful getting on shows than you think you are.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. And you are maybe thinking, “Yeah, well no shit guys. This is obvious.” And it is obvious but think about this. 25 years ago you needed a publicist and an agent to get onto bigger television or radio shows. That middle man was always there, that you either needed to pay or build a relationship with over a long period of time. Now you can go direct to these people, in some cases, who have massive audiences. And you know, it doesn’t even matter if it’s a smaller audience for a podcast. Getting on their show, delivering value like Brian said, is an amazing opportunity. So as simple as it may seem, don’t discount it.

Brian Clark: Yeah and another thing that I want to say is, if you are sick of hearing about guest posting and outreach and relationships and all that, you know, you are looking for the latest silver bullet, wake up. There is not one and if you are complaining that you have heard this all before and you are not doing it, come on now.

Robert Bruce: I’m going to leave it at that because I can’t think of any better way to close this episode, than with that advice.

Listen, if you like what we are doing here at Rainmaker.FM, would you do us a favor? There is one thing that matters to a podcast right now. There’s lots of things but one of the main things that matters to a podcast right now is getting ratings, comments and downloads in iTunes. Please let us know if you like what’s going on here, head over to iTunes and give us a comment or a rating there. It’s very much appreciated.

If you want to get everything that we do, including what’s coming, head over to Rainmaker.FM and you’ll see right under the header, there’s a headline and then a tagline and a green button. Click that green button, sign-up by email. You’ll get all of our episodes as soon as they are published and you’ll also get instant access to our free, 10-part marketing course, that will likely change the way you think about online marketing.

As always, thanks for listening everybody and Brian, thanks for bringing your wisdom to these five articles that we covered. I’ll see you next week. Well know, I won’t see you next week, maybe?

Brian Clark: Maybe. Back to the salt mines with you.

Robert Bruce: Great. Here we go.

The Transcript

Split-Testing 101: How to Know Which Words Work

Brian Clark: Hey there Rainmaker’s. Welcome to the show, as always. I am Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media. Robert is off today, somewhere in a metaphorical coal mine getting his work done but that’s okay.

Today we’ve got a special guest, that will more than compensate for the lovely, deep tones of Mr Bruce. Her name is Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers, which is a site you should be paying religious attention to, if you are not already.

Joanna completely crushed it at last year’s Authority live event, talking about copywriting and testing the difference between this word and that word, this button and that button. It’s fascinating stuff. And of course, we have been talking a bit about split-testing in the previous episode, so I thought, “Let’s get someone in here who really kind of lives and breathes both aspects of this.”

She is a creative copywriter, and yet she understands the importance of figuring out scientifically what works, and what doesn’t.

Joanna, thank you so much for being here.

Joanna Wiebe: Brian, thank you so much for having me here because I have been admiring you for so long. It always gets me nervous to hear you say this stuff. I feel all nervous now. Like, “Oh-oh, what if I disappoint him?” Anyway, no, it’s great for you to have me here. Thank you.

Brian Clark: Oh, that’s just silly. Come on now.

All right. Now that we have got that out of the way, why don’t you share a little bit about your story. Kind of how you got to being this really go-to expert and running it through Copy Hackers like you do. You’ve got a story that got you there in the first place, and I know everyone does but I want to hear yours.

Joanna Wiebe: Right. Mine is like a lot of people, where you kind of fall into things.

I was a creative writing student and undergrad, which I really liked. I went to Japan for a year to teach, while writing a book, and I didn’t write a word. I came back and almost went to law school. Then some stuff happened in my life and I had this kind of switch where I knew I didn’t want to do some of the things I had done.

At that point I got offered a job at an agency. What they were calling a creative writer and I was like, “Yeah, that sounds good.” So I did that for a couple of years and then moved over to Intuit. The tech company for turbo-tax, quickbooks and all that stuff.

I worked as their senior copywriter for about 5 years and it was really in that time when I was calling myself a creative copywriter, I figured out that copywriting isn’t about the creative all at. But when you are in an agency, that’s a better title to have, than a copywriter, which just sounds dull and boring or something.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: Which is like a crazy idea, right? So that’s where I was and I went into it. There was this huge testing culture, and I was like, “Tell me more. I like it.”

When I was going through the whole law school thing, my favorite part of the LSAT was the puzzles. Like, “Figure something out and see how it works.” And this has always been very interesting to me. So when I moved over to this testing culture as a copywriter, and had everything so informed by data, it was just like a revelation to me. I loved it.

So I was there for about 5 years and I worked with Conversion Rate Experts for a while too, which is one of the first conversion rate optimization consultancies. They are incredible. They are out of the UK.

Then I went out on my own and started Copy Hackers. Basically, it’s to help the smaller businesses that don’t get access to the same sort of resources that the Intuit’s of the world get. For those people that can’t work with conversion rate experts because as much as it’s worth, they just truly don’t have the budget right now to afford for somebody to come in and do their optimization for them. So that’s what Copy Hackers is for.

I have been at that for about 3 years, and last year I got to talk at Authority, which so far, is one of the highlights of my career. It’s been very cool.

Brian Clark: Awesome. That’s a great story.

A couple of things come to mind. Sonia Simone will always take a creative writing degree because you can teach people the testing and the principles of copy and all that, but you can’t teach initial drive and talent to actually want to write. So that’s why Robert was a poet and now he’s a VP of Marketing. That was a tough case but don’t tell him.

Joanna Wiebe: He was a poet?

Brian Clark: He still is actually.

Joanna Wiebe: Well yeah, I guess that never stops, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah. But yeah, that’s how we first met. And the other thing is, I did really well on the LSAT and unfortunately did go to law school. Actually, I don’t mind that I went to law school, it was the years of practice before I quit that was annoying. So I think you took the right path.

Joanna Wiebe: Thank you.

What Every Real Copywriter Should Focus On

Brian Clark: Okay. Let’s get into this. We want to really talk about split-testing fundamentals. You know, the technology keeps getting easier for normal people like, you know, creative writing majors and ex-attorneys to use, but we have to have the proper perimeters here.

So we’ve been talking a lot about getting people on an email list, building an audience, as a precursor to maybe starting a new business or a content marketing initiative for an existing business, whatever the case may be.

So when you are building an audience, and you are starting a new site, you have your ideas about what’s a good headline, what’s good body copy and what’s the right button text. You know, all these things, but really where do we start when we are trying to build an audience in a new context?

Joanna Wiebe: I think that for us, it’s going to be a new audience but naturally, as we all know, the audience exists, so where are they, what are they doing and what are they looking for?

I would start just by going out and doing that initial research. I’m sure everybody does this, but may be they don’t consciously do it with tactics that are specific and documented along the way.

So like with everything we do in any sort of optimization, which is business optimization, or conversion rate optimization, or whatever, optimize your copy.

It all starts with going out and listening to your prospects. You may not have a single customer or subscriber yet but they are out there. They are talking and they are doing that all online in this very documented way. By that I mean, either in forums or they are leaving reviews on the Amazon products that they buy, that are related to what you want to sell. All those sorts of things. Going out, learning and just soaking them up, which every copywriter I think knows, but I don’t know that the world necessarily knows.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Well it’s interesting and I am so glad you started there because that is where the battle is either lost or partially won, before you ever think about testing. And you are right, pre-Internet, every copywriter, direct response to creative agency type, that’s the first job and they do this insane dive down into “Who are these people that we are trying to reach?” and I hope everyone still does that. And I say it every time I can but sometimes I think when it comes to content, as opposed to pure sales copy, people think maybe it’s not so necessary. It’s just whatever I want to talk about. And then it doesn’t connect with anyone and they are like, “Why?” And I’m like, “Well.”

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah. Exactly. “Why is my blog dead?” Right. There’s no, “Why is nobody reading it? Why is nobody signing up for it? Why is nobody coming to it at all and I am telling their friends about it?”

Unless you are Seth Godin, but then you already have a brand established, so then if you don’t have this established brand, I think it’s very hard to build anything, if you are not building it. I feel like I am saying the most obvious thing right now but if you are not building it for that audience, that means you have to absolutely know that audience intimately.

You know, if you are trying to attract students or write copy for students, you go and sit among them and listen to them, and they don’t know that you are listening to them.

Brian Clark: Yeah and now we have social media, which is the biggest eavesdropping thing in the world. It’s all free.

Joanna Wiebe: You don’t even have to leave your desk. You can do it all right here in this little box around you. It’s brilliant and I think that copywriters do that. But as usual, maybe I’m going to rant for a bit here, but we do things and we just accept them as part of how it has to work but I feel like there’s sort of this sense that you should get a bit of a pat on the back in marketing today, if you go do research.

I’m seeing that in a lot of blogs people are like, “Oh, good on you for picking up the phone and calling customers.” And I am like, “How else are you going to do it?”

Brian Clark: What?

Joanna Wiebe: Sure, good on you. Just like good on you for putting your pants on this morning. Good on you for doing the most basic thing.

Brian Clark: That’s right. Continuing to breathe.

Joanna Wiebe: That’s confusing to me, especially as a copywriter.

Brian Clark: Yeah, now I know, and it’s just a matter of perspective, because when things become democratized outside of the way things are done rightly in an existing industry, honestly that’s why Copyblogger came into existence 9 years ago.

The tactics I was teaching weren’t any different. It was the context in which they were applied.

It’s funny that the newer people eventually seem to get it, and yet some of the old school people still don’t get it. I find that odd too. Maybe when you are hitting the mailbox for your own career, you just can’t shift your mind to social and online. But that’s another episode.

Joanna Wiebe: I know, right? I’ve got lots of thoughts.

The Starting Point for Building Any “New” Audience

Brian Clark: Okay. Let’s assume that we all did the crucial up-front homework to know this prospective audience, better than they know themselves. That’s the goal at least.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes.

Brian Clark: We have made some educated guesses about them and the benefit that we are trying to give in exchange for their attention. Headlines, copy and all that kind of thing. It’s still a new site though. We’ve made some educated guesses but if we are smart, we wrote many headlines and then went with the one we kind of felt was best but we don’t know for sure. And this might be where some testing may come in handy but if it’s a new site and it’s not a huge traffic generator, how do you solve that problem?

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah, that’s a big one. When we are talking about testing, a lot of people will say, “Well I’ll just push some more traffic at it. I’ll go buy traffic.” But we don’t necessarily recommend that. I think the bigger thing that we would say to do, and the statement that we have, between Lance and myself, “The lower your traffic, the bigger your change is.”

So if you decide that you want to test your headline, like you said, but you don’t have a lot of traffic, for example you get 300 visitors to your homepage a day and you want to test that, your traffic is just going to be really low to make that happen.

So when you are testing one small thing, the impact is unlikely to be big enough to cause a big win in your testing tool like Optimizely or VWO or whatever it is that you are actually using to run the test, or even if you are using an Unbounce landing page.

Something like that that you are testing in, you need to have this huge difference that’s measured between your control and that new variation. So a small change on your new variation is unlikely. In most cases, I’d say 99% of the time, a small change like a headline, and as important as headlines are, just that alone is unlikely to bring you the huge numbers. The differences that you need, right?

Where if you have five people convert or 25 people clicking through on your homepage a day, let’s say per variation, you need the control to keep having that 25 people clicking through but you need the variation to get like 75, 100 people clicking through. You need huge differences in order for that test to ever get to a point of completion.

If it’s 25 versus 30, the numbers are way too low to say anything about it, right? So for us, the big thing that we try to recommend is if your traffic is low, make sure that new creative you test against the control, is dramatically different.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I kind of figured that out myself. Like I said, we have got split-testing tools built into the Rainmaker Platform, which are really simple to use and it’s tempting to just jump right into. Then I started looking around online going, “What’s going to make this statistically significant?” and I ran straight into that problem.

Now when we test on StudioPress or Copyblogger, traffic is not a problem. It’s huge, right? It’s just an issue that I really wanted to address with someone like you.

The Number of Conversions You Need to Make a Good Call

Brian Clark: Okay. So before we maybe look at some alternatives, what is the lowest amount of conversions per option that you would consider, something even paying attention to? I found some stuff online but I don’t want to say anything. I want to hear it from you.

Joanna Wiebe: There’s a lot online. At Unbounce’s CTA conference last September, Peep Laja from Conversion Excel quoted somebody who said “350 paid conversions per variation” and I’m like, “In crazy land. No way, for a small business.” Forgive me if I am getting this wrong, but it really does sound like the takeaway is, “Oh, crap. If I am not Amazon, I can’t test.”

I don’t think that you have to have that many, like 250 or 350 paid conversions per variation, in order for it to be a statistically confident test. For me, I look at things like the data is good and you have to listen to the data. Follow what it says and pay attention. Don’t jump to your own conclusions or say, “Oh, it looks like it’s trending up, so we are just going to call it a winner and go.”

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: But at the same time, I think waiting around for these huge numbers is actually something that’s not going to happen in a lot of cases.

We like to see about 100 conversions per variation of whatever that is. So it’s unlikely on a homepage, unless it’s a one pager site. I wouldn’t expect a homepage to be responsible for a paid conversion. But for a micro-conversion like a click-through, then definitely.

If you get 100 people clicking through on each variation at minimum, then from that point you can use the calculators that are available within the tool. You can use Evan Miller’s calculator to confirm that the data is good, rather than just trusting VWO or Optimizely. But get to about 100 if you can. That usually means running your tests for well over a month. But that’s what we like to see. Other’s say more but I think that more is often.

Brian Clark: Okay. Let me reassure you because 100 is the number that I use.

Joanna Wiebe: Oh, okay. Good.

Brian Clark: And in this context, obviously we are talking about email opt-ins, which as you know, is a discreet action which does not rise to the level of paid, and yet, it is definitely trackable.

Everything you have said so far, I kind of figured out in my own experience. I tested a “how to” versus basically the same substantive headline, thinking “how to” would kill it, and it wasn’t significant a change because it’s too similar.

Then I tested another idea that was almost a different positioning statement that I had had in my research. It was almost like another way to go. And my first choice of headline destroyed the radically different one, which score one for intuition. But it’s not intuition. It’s like hard core paying attention and understanding what these people respond to, even though you are not currently serving them.

We are going to go back and say, “Start with research” for every question of this show.

Joanna Wiebe: I know, right. That’s always the answer. And, end podcast. That’s it.

How to Know What Site Areas to Test in the First Place

Brian Clark: Okay, so let’s assume that we have got enough traffic and we can do the 100 conversion threshold in a reasonable amount of time. Let’s say, it’s a week or something.

My rule of thumb has always been, you test the headline first because if people don’t make it past the headline, what does it matter if your button text is optimized?

Now do you agree with that and regardless, what are your tips as far as testing headlines? You already gave us one.

Joanna Wiebe: No Brian, I disagree with you.

Brian Clark: Okay. Cool.

Joanna Wiebe: Just kidding. This is why I hesitate there. For me, I know headlines are very, very important but of course, as I talked about at Authority, the button is that site of conversion. Of course, it’s where the activity happens. It’s hugely the headline but I would say the button is equally important. And I would further say that they work together.

We’ve actually run a few tests and we reported on one of them this fall. We ran this test on a UK fashion site called Dressipi.com. I guess our research question was, “Does riskier copy lead to bigger conversion wins?” largely because you are actually saying something that’s sticky and noticeable. So we were testing on a bunch of different sites around this, so we had a whole bunch of headlines that we were testing on different sites and Giuseppe was one of them. And so we tested these two headlines against each other.

The control was “Clothes you’ll love perfect for your shape and style.” Okay. A perfectly fine homepage headline and then the one we tested against it, we pulled from some language that one of their prospects or someone who fits into their market were saying on the forum. Obviously they are targeting women. These women were talking to each other on this fashion type forum, and they were saying things like, “I have got a big bum. And that’s not good on my bum.” Or “My waist is too thick for that.”

So against the headline, “Clothes you’ll love perfect for your shape and style” we tested the headline, “Big bum, thick waist, not so perky boobs? Find an outfit you’ll look fab in, just as you are.”

So it was much bigger and of course, a longer headline but it had the stickier words in it. Things that people perhaps weren’t going to see a lot online but it was language that we saw they were using. So we thought it was a good test.

When we tested we saw about a 15% lift. That held throughout the test for a couple of weeks, but it didn’t actually reach confidence. We never actually got to a place of confidence. We were like, “What the hell? This headline, in my humble opinion, is superior to the non-sticky one, that it was being tested against. It should be doing something. Even if that means polarizing people. The polarized group that is ‘pro’, unless they’re a very small group, shouldn’t they be acting on it?”

So from that point, I was like “Okay, well let’s take a look at the button on there,” which again is the point of conversion. The site of conversion was “Sign up now.” So we had that on both variations. And I was like, “Ugh, ‘Sign up now’ is a terrible button” right? I would never recommend that as a button. It’s the action you are about to take but there is no value associated with it.

Brian Clark: Yep.

Joanna Wiebe: We were like, “Okay” so again, we ran another test. We had those same two headlines tested against each other but on the second one we tested “Show me outfits I’ll love” as the button copy on there. And with that we saw a 124% lift in clicks, with 100% confidence and it held for weeks. I think we even left it running for 6 weeks.

It was so dramatically different. We had two great headlines against each other. And once we optimized the button as well, I think the headline was able to perform better because it wasn’t restricted by this really sucky button that was pulling it back before. Does that make sense?

Brian Clark: It does and I have to admit, I kind of set myself up there because I knew you were going to say that.

Joanna Wiebe: I knew, you knew. That’s why I wasn’t afraid to say that I disagreed with you.

Brian Clark: But it’s so prevalent that we think the headline is just God, and it is so important in content and copy.

I think I love that story and I love what you elaborated on that at the event. That’s why I think you blew people away because you were scientifically and very politely, in the most Canadian sense, destroying a bunch of myths that we all carry around with each other. So, yes, thank you for disagreeing with me, although I was being a little sly there.

Joanna Wiebe: Thank you for setting me up.

Joanna’s Favorite Email Opt-in Button Copy

Brian Clark: Okay. Then I’m going to put you on the spot here. In the context of opt-ins, getting the email address, what’s your favorite button copy, to the extent you can choose something that might work better than most, as opposed to “Subscribe” which is awful?

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah. Let’s say you’ve got an opt-in form, a pop-up, or an exit-intent pop-up. Typically, a great, consistent winner is to take your headline, which usually begins with an action word like “Get”. So the headline has some sort of action statement in it. Just repeat that in the button. We have seen that work all over the place. Not just for opt-in but especially for opt-ins.

So if you say, “Get the conversion rate kit” as the headline, then the button maybe just “Get the kit.”

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: So that’s not a very sexy test but it seems to work, again, and again, and again. If the headline attracted them, and if they liked that and there’s an action to it, then why not just repeat it in the button?

Brian Clark: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It’s action oriented and it’s mirroring or continuing the scent that Bryan Eisenberg likes to talk about.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. Totally.

Brian Clark: Excellent. That’s already worth the price that everyone has paid so far. We joke around that I just invite my friends on for free consulting and then share it with everyone.

Joanna Wiebe: That’s awesome.

The Recurring Theme of Conversion Testing That Works

Brian Clark: Okay. I did want to primarily focus on email and I do of course want to respect your time. Let me just ask you a couple of things about when we are actually selling something, services or products. Lance had a great article just a few days ago that I found very interesting and it had a nice little click-bait title but he totally backed it up with some really smart ideas.

But before we get to that. When you’ve got a sales page, you know, you’ve got a benefit oriented headline, you’ve got features that are written in terms of benefits. If you are doing baseline practices as it is, from there, how do you develop one or more hypothesis that tell you what to test at all?

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah. I think this is a really good question and it’s hard for a lot of people to do. So hard I think that people don’t do it, which is problematic.

I like to break it up into two simple things. As you said, Lance writes great posts on testing. I write posts on copy. So Lance is definitely into the science of it all.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: I run my stuff by him and have him approve it. For me to get my head around it, I like to have a problem statement followed by a couple of research questions. I choose one of those and build creative against it.

Obviously, first consider your conversion goal. Go through all those things that you normally do to identify an opportunity. The problem statement is a question around what’s keeping people from converting at this point. Again, we are talking about sales funnels.

Brian Clark: Right.

Joanna Wiebe: You’ve identified on your product catalogue that there’s a high exit rate on there, so people are not converting. They are leaving, instead of even moving forward. So if you’re goal is to get them to choose one of those products or categories to move forward with, that’s your conversion goal. So choose one they have to click. It will be an engagement test, which is perfect.

Then it’s a matter of identifying what’s getting in the way of them moving forward or what’s making them want to exit on this page. And in most cases, at that point, that’s where we look to the creative.

Obviously there’s lots of ways to go about this but I would say, “Okay. Well if they are exiting here, it’s probably got something to do with what they are failing to find on the page.” So it might not be the right information that they need etc, or the way the information is presented is wrong. So as usual, it comes down to the “What?” versus the “How?” And in that, you have to identify which one of those it is.

At this point, if I said, “Okay, the product catalogue is brutal. We are losing people. It’s bleeding all of our visitors. Or paying for all those people to come here and now they are all just exiting before they even get to a product detail page.” Then I would say, “Okay, well let’s go and run a usertesting.com session. There are about five of those and see what people are saying when they are on this page.

At the point, we go and listen to a lot of what people are doing and saying. Like watch what they are doing on the page and listen to what they are saying about the page.

If it means doing a Qualaroo pop-up survey as well, to get a sense of what they came to this page to do, and what there expectations were, then that can help us see if it’s a “What?” or a “How?”

The “What” is, “Are the right products on this page organized in a way that it’s easy?” Yes, organization is kind of a “How”. However, if it’s buying boots and they are on a catalog page for boots, but they had an expectation that they were able to sort them by tall boots and short boots, but they can’t do that, then that’s a, “What’s wrong with this page?” And that could help us understand what we need to do to optimize this page. Then that leads to a question, which is a hypothesis or phrased another way, it’s your research question if you pose it like a question.

And that could be, “Okay, if we add better filtering on this page or better ways to filter through the products, will we see a lift in click-throughs?” That’s how we would get to the point of identifying what’s wrong with it.

First, what page is causing the problem that’s keeping you from getting that conversion? Next you need to ask, listen and then watch what people are doing on it and develop an hypothesis from there. And of course, you want to ideally go with the one that’s the lowest hanging fruit.

So if only one person says, “Oh, I thought I could sort by short boots versus tall boots,” but other people are saying, “Is anybody else even using this site?” Or it’s indicating that there’s no social proof or a lack of authority about the site, then you choose the best one between those two possible problems and test from there.

When you set up that good hypothesis, or it’s informed by something and you can say something as specific as, “Will adding filtering or sorting to this page increase my conversion rate?” Then you add that filtering or sorting and then you see if it did or it didn’t. You then actually have an answer and you can move forward with that. You can then take away that learning, which I would say, in most cases, is more important than just a lift in conversion.

Brian Clark: Yes. Absolutely.

Joanna Wiebe: I know that’s a long answer.

Brian Clark: It’s a long answer but there is the recurring theme of listen, watch and observe. And at the risk of oversimplifying Lance’s post, he said, “You know, if you are selling stuff to people, why would you jump straight to testing, why don’t you talk to them first?” And it’s so simple. And he wasn’t denigrating testing, of course, Lance wouldn’t denigrate testing and yet people don’t start at the right place.

You mentioned some really cool tools where you can listen, but why not just talk to the people who bought from you and find out from stuff right there?

Joanna Wiebe: It’s so true. I think when you are trying to identify what’s wrong with a page, it can be a little tough. That’s where I think usertesting.com and Qualaroo are fantastic. When you’ve got a page identified and you could sit around at a table brainstorming what’s wrong with it. I have learned this from Copyblogger too. You are not your audience.

Brian Clark: Right.

Joanna Wiebe: So listen to your audience first. I know with usertesting.com the objection is, “Well, are they really my prospect?”

Usertesting has a new peek service, where you can get your visitors while they are right there on your site, to opt-in to share their feedback with you. So there are options and ways to get around it.

I’ve found if you want to find out what’s wrong with a page, then a really great way is to get people on that page to try and use it. Don’t ask them to tell you what’s wrong with it because oh Lord, it will get awful.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: Just watch them and listen to them, which can then lead to a great hypothesis.

Brian Clark: Awesome. Joanna thank you so much for your time. I am still getting over the fact that you are not rejoining us this year but you did have a good excuse.

Joanna Wiebe: It’s U2’s world tour opening night, Brian.

Brian Clark: Wait a minute, I thought you were helping your sister with her food truck? I think I have been bamboozled here.

Joanna Wiebe: No, I told you. Remember in Twitter, I was like “Oh yeah, I think I am doing my sister’s food truck” but that’s because I have two sisters and they are constantly asking for things. No, I’m just kidding. But the other one wanted to go to U2 and I was like “I know I am doing something with my sister that weekend.”

Brian Clark: Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Okay, so Bono wins over me, fine.

Joanna Wiebe: Sorry. This one time.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Okay.

All right. Well thank you again and I can’t wait to do something else with you guys. Obviously, we’ve got to have Lance on the show. And I’ve already got you down for 2016, so don’t even try.

Joanna Wiebe: I’m on it. It’s on my calendar. I can’t wait.

Brian Clark: All right. Take care. Bye everyone.

Joanna Wiebe: Bye.