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Practical Advice on Turning the Challenges of Building Membership Communities Into Opportunities

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

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

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. This is episode No. 19 of The Digital Entrepreneur. I am your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital. Today, I am joined by a colleague of mine here at Rainmaker Digital, Pamela Wilson, our esteemed executive vice president of educational content.

There are a couple of reasons why I asked Pamela to join us this week and why I’m so excited that she said yes. Here are those reasons. One is that Pamela’s leading our Authority educational content at Rainmaker Digital, and she has spearheaded some initiatives to grow it and make it better. I have some questions I want to ask her about those initiatives.

Number two, Pamela’s going to be a featured speaker at Digital Commerce Summit, which is coming up this October in Denver, Colorado. Her session will be titled How to Cultivate a Profitable, Interactive Member Site.

In addition to what she’s been doing with Authority, I want to get some of Pamela’s general ideas on what it takes to build a membership site that provides value and drives profits because I know that many of you are working toward that goal right now.

By the way, if you don’t have your ticket yet to Digital Commerce Summit, I do hope that you’ll consider joining us in the Rockies this fall. Early bird tickets are still available, so you’re definitely not too late. Don’t worry about that. You’re not too late. You can still get a great price on a ticket.

Pamela’s going to be speaking, as I said. I will be speaking there, and of course, Brian Clark and Sonia Simone will be speaking as well. They’ve been guests on the last two episodes of The Digital Entrepreneur, along with a host of our friends from around the digital entrepreneurship space, including Rand Fishkin, Jeff Walker, Tara Gentile, Joanna Penn, Chris Lema, and many, many, many more.

This is the conference and networking event where you will discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital products and services, so don’t miss it. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That is Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

With that, I would like to welcome Pamela Wilson to the show. Pamela, thank you again for carving out the time to join us on this week’s episode.

Pamela Wilson: I am so happy to be here, and I love this topic. It’s a fun thing to talk about.

Jerod Morris: It’s a good one, and like I said, you have a lot of experience to talk about this, which is why I’m so excited to have you here as the person to share some experience and share some knowledge with the audience.

Let’s start there. You have really extensive experience in online education, dating back to well before you joined the Rainmaker Digital team. Can you give us just a brief overview of what you were doing prior to joining Rainmaker, which was then at the time Copyblogger, and how that informed the work that you’re doing now?

How Pamela Eventually Turned a Childhood Dream into Reality Thanks to the Internet

Pamela Wilson: Right, so I’m sitting over here trying really hard not to laugh at that introduction because I guess I have extensive experience, but I want to share this with people. This might be something they can relate to a little bit more. I actually always wanted to be a teacher. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a teacher. My grandmother had been a teacher. And I was in FTA in high school, which is Future Teachers of America, so this was my dream.

Jerod Morris: That is not a surprising revelation at all.

Pamela Wilson: Okay, so that’s not surprising, but the interesting thing is, my mother actually discouraged me from becoming a teacher.

Jerod Morris: Really?

Pamela Wilson: Well, she saw that I had always been creative growing up, and she really encouraged me to go into a creative career, which I did. That was my entire career. I worked as a designer and a marketing consultant for decades, really.

After doing that for decades, I started to get antsy. I wanted to do something else, and I started looking into building an online platform and teaching online. I ended up moving into that, so I guess I showed my mom, like, “I showed you, Mom.” I eventually ended up doing the thing that I had dreamed of.

Jerod Morris: You know what’s so interesting about that is you find that a lot when you look around, and you look at successful people. Maybe they’ve been successful in business or something in digital entrepreneurship, but so many people have brought a passion from their childhood and found a way to weave it in there.

It’s like you have found a way to combine your creativity and your business acumen with your ability to teach, which is great. I grew up as a huge IU basketball fan, and now I’ve found a way, with the skills that I’ve learned building membership communities and a podcast, to bring that passion back into it. It’s kind of funny how those things will naturally just start come back. It’s very interesting.

Pamela Wilson: Honestly, I think that’s one of the most beautiful things that the Internet offers us. We really can explore those passions in a place that allows it, and we can find other people that have the same passions. It’s a great way to connect with people who have those same geeky interests that we do. You get to draw from all of humanity. Anyone who is connected to the Internet can find you, so it’s pretty amazing.

I ended up looking into how to do this, and right around the time that I was looking for how to build this online platform, I found Copyblogger. That was like 2009, so it’s not like Copyblogger had been hiding or anything. But I just happened to stumble on Copyblogger at the moment when I needed it.

Just a couple of weeks after I found the site, they were re-opening Teaching Sells, which was the seminal course on how to build online courses. I signed up for that, and so my online teaching story is very much interwoven with Copyblogger’s story and how Copyblogger teaches things.

I learned how to create online courses by taking that course, and then built my Big Brand System site, built a course there to teach basically what I had learned to do in my career, but boiling it down so that people who didn’t have a design background or didn’t have marketing experience could understand it and apply it to their own businesses.

Once I did that, I created all of these smaller products, so I created a product called The Ebook Evolution, which helps people to create ebooks by themselves, PDF e-books mostly, Site Setup Kit, which was to help people who had no web developer background build a website that they could control themselves, and then a product called Visual Buzz 101, which was basically to help non-designers create great-looking images for their web presence.

Jerod Morris: What’s interesting about that, you had this formal training with the Teaching Sells, of developing courses, and then you got into it and went out and did it on your own. I imagine from the experience of Teaching Sells, you had a pretty good roadmap to follow. You knew what to expect, but doing it for the first time with Big Brand System and doing it on your own, what were some of the things that surprised you about the experience?

What Pamela’s First Experience Creating Her Own Membership Community Was Like (and How She Prepared for It)

Pamela Wilson: Honestly, that’s one of the coolest things about being part of this team now is that so much of our effort is focused on making the Rainmaker Platform awesome. The biggest surprise to me was how difficult at that time–this is back in 2010–how difficult it was to put together the technical pieces that I had to put together to create the membership site. I felt like I was scaling Mount Everest. It was seriously way beyond my technical pay grade to put that together, so that was surprising to me.

The course part, I felt like the education in Teaching Sells really helped to guide me so that I could put together education that was useful, effective, and all of that, so that part was great. Then the technical piece was just a nightmare, so it’s very cool to be on the other side of that now and helping to contribute, even in a small way, to this product that just makes all of those things so much easier.

I loved it, though. That whole experience of building a community around something that you’re teaching, I loved that.

Jerod Morris: Speaking of that, let’s talk a little bit about Authority. As a I mentioned earlier, you’ve been leading our Authority membership program. I’ve been a really interested observer, watching you systematically, methodically make improvements over there.

Can you provide an overview of where Authority was when you got involved with it and what you’ve tried to do to take what was working and make it even better?

How Pamela Has Approached the Challenges of Running a Mature Membership Community Like Authority

Pamela Wilson: Right. Sonia and I worked together to come up with this plan. We wanted to inject new energy into this program. It was already a solid program, but it had been around for a while. This is one of the interesting things. A membership site at the very beginning of its life cycle and then after it’s been around for a while, it has a different set of challenges.

Some of it is just making the information easy to consume and making it easier for people to get their way through all the information. After it’s been around for a while, you have a lot of information, and people’s first reaction is, they get in there, and they’re like, “Ah, I don’t know where to start.”

It was that, but it was also encouraging people to consume the information. I was looking for ways that we could involve the community more, and I’ll talk about how we did that. Then I was also looking for ways to just simplify the process, the production process on our end, and make it a little bit more predictable. That’s how I came to this idea that I’m going to be talking about at the summit, which is finding this sweet spot in-between your efforts and your profits.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. You mentioned some of these challenges of an older membership site that’s been around a while. It doesn’t have that new car smell and feel. It’s like anything else. You can look at that, and there are challenges there, but you can also flip it around. You can say, “Okay, but what does this make possible?”

Pamela Wilson: Exactly.

Jerod Morris: There are some challenges, but how did you then overcome those challenges, building upon what was already there?

Pamela Wilson: Right. One of the things was to just encourage community. These are all such small things, but one thing was, in our weekly webinar–we have a webinar, a live webinar, every single Friday–and one thing that I’m doing on a lot of those webinars is I incorporate shout-outs to people who have posted in the forum and might have a question. That just helps people to know what’s going on in their community and maybe drives them into the forum to participate a little bit more. That was one thing.

Another thing is just to develop content that highlights our members, what they’re doing, and what their challenges are because so many people have very similar challenges. I set up this schedule of webinars that we do, and it’s basically the first week of the month is always the same kind of webinar. The second week is something else. The third week is something else, so it’s a very consistent … you know me well enough. I like systems and processes. I’m really into that.

I found it made it more predictable for our members, but it also was easier to create content for the program when I had these predetermined buckets that I had to fill. What we’re doing is, the first week of the month, we have this master class educational session. That is no-holds-barred, pure education. We’ve really put a lot of effort you joined us, actually, you and Loryn Thompson joined us last month, or earlier this month, I guess, for the educational session in June.

That’s usually a very high-level and in-depth educational session. We typically create a downloadable worksheet or some kind of handout so that people can apply what they’re learning to their own businesses.

The second week of the month, we’re calling it our ABC sessions, Authority Business Coaching. We invite people to apply to be on these sessions. Then when they are with us live, we do all sorts of things. We look at their websites. We talk about their marketing efforts. We talk about how they could build an email list. We talk about also what’s working because a lot of people have things that are working really well, so it’s a matter of building on their strengths.

That ends up being almost like a private coaching session that others can watch and benefit from. Because so many of us are dealing with the same kinds of business challenges, people have loved those sessions. We’re so grateful for the people who volunteer to basically put their businesses out there and get coaching live. They seem to benefit from it, but then the people watching benefit as well. Those have been a lot of fun.

Then we have always done a live Q&A session every month, and we’re continuing with those. We like to call those mini coaching sessions because it’s an opportunity for people to ask a question directly of staff members from Rainmaker Digital, who are the people manning those sessions. Sonia and I do a lot of them, but I invite special guests in, too.

Then we do this Behind the Scenes session at the end of the month, which is basically highlighting a member who has had some success in some area. We have all sorts of different members with all sorts of different businesses. They might have a product launch that went really well, and they want to talk about that. Or they did something for their email marketing that just made their list grow like crazy, so they talk about that.

It’s just an opportunity to highlight members who have figured something out, and they want to share it with the rest of the membership. Those have also been popular. Basically, 50 percent of our content is highlighting a member of the community inside Authority, and that has been so much fun. It has really helped me to get to know our membership better, and I think members have enjoyed just getting to know one another’s businesses and learning.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. It creates community. It puts people into a spotlight, which people like. And like you said, with the coaching opportunities, the one-on-ones, that’s a great way to provide really significant, specific, one-on-one value to folks, but also value that others can learn from. Those Q&As, even if you don’t have a question answered, a lot of times it can be really valuable.

We’re not going through all of the things inside of Authority here as a commercial for Authority. It’s really more to let you see some of these options that we’re doing. For anybody who’s listening to this who has their own membership site or is thinking about doing it, these are all ideas that you can incorporate into your own.

Why It’s So Important to Find the Elusive Sweet Spot Between Effort and Income–And How to Know When You’re Out of Balance

Jerod Morris: The challenge, of course, is that it’s not easy to do this, and I’m sure, Pamela, as people heard you talking about doing this every week, and this every week, and this every week, it can sound a little bit like this intimidating machine that just needs to constantly be fed. This is where I want to transition into your talk at Digital Commerce Summit. You’re going to be talking about this.

Obviously, you can’t just spend 24 hours of every single day creating new membership content. That’d be perfect, and you’d create, I guess, more value, but the goal is, for gathering a community around you to teach–and to make money doing so–as you said earlier, is finding that elusive sweet spot between effort and income.

How do we find that sweet spot, and how do you do all of this inside of Authority and still make sure that it is a profitable use on your time that’s getting a good return on the investment?

Pamela Wilson: Right. Again, that’s where approaching this as, rather than something that you have to just keep doing week after week, and month after month, I actually find it very freeing to have created these … I like to call them ‘content buckets.’ I know it’s a very technical term, but it’s content buckets.

You know the first week of the month, you’re not starting from scratch. You know what you need to put together, and the second week of the month, you know what you need to put together. Frankly, some of these sessions require a lot more time and preparation than others. For example, the educational session, I put a lot of time and effort into creating those, and I want to make them really, really high value.

We want them all to be high value, but for example, for a Q&A, all I really have to do is to look through the questions. Sometimes I do some minor research on things I want to recommend to people, but there’s not as much prep time.

Having this schedule and this system in place really helps you to pace yourself as you’re creating content for your membership program. That’s where that sweet spot comes into play. You do have to find this place where the time and the money that you’re pouring into your membership program is balanced by your profit. Profit is earnings after you pay all of your expenses.

You have to make sure that any money that you’re spending to keep your membership program alive is balanced with the effort and the time you’re putting into it. You have to do the equation and make sure it’s all worth it.

Jerod Morris: Obviously, a big part of tracking that is knowing your numbers, literally having those numbers there. Are there any other warning signs that you might be able to shed some light on that maybe hint at the fact that this is a little bit out of balance? Anything that you’ve found, outside of just literally tracking the numbers?

The Potential Impact of Tracking Your Time

Pamela Wilson: Yeah. Honestly, I think people have to be willing to do the hard math of saying, “How much time am I pouring into this? How much am I earning from it, and how much does that end up giving me per hour?” for example.

As content creators, a lot of us get really caught up in the content creation process, and sometimes we don’t step back and say, “How many hours am I actually pouring into this, and how much profit am I actually seeing?” It can be hard to do that because sometimes you don’t like the answer, but it’s always better to know the answer and to just say, “Okay, obviously I need to make some adjustments here, and I’ll just make them.”

As much as possible, I love the idea of trying to systematize your content creation for any kind of a program, membership program, any kind of a teaching product. You want to try to systematize it as much as possible. If you own your own business, you always want to look for things that you could hand over to someone who you don’t have to pay as much as what your time is worth.

Look for an assistant-type person, a virtual assistant. Some people use college students who are trying to get experience, and they pay them a paid internship. They’re able to do some things that are important, but maybe can be taught and passed over to someone else once you give them a process. Like any good business owner, you do have to look for ways to do that, that keep your expenses down, and then free up your time so that you can focus on the more high-level stuff.

Jerod Morris: Do you actually track your time?

Pamela Wilson: I don’t track my time now. I used to, though. When I was running my own business, I did. I would track my own time. When I was working for clients, obviously I would track time for them. I never charged by the hour. I always charged by the project price, but I always tracked my time because I just wanted to see. It’s like, “This is what I estimated this project would take me to do. How long did it actually take?” That made me much more accurate over time when I went to estimate projects, so yeah, I did that as a habit.

Jerod Morris: It’s interesting. I hosted a case study inside of Digital Commerce Academy with Andrea Vahl, someone that you know very well. She was telling the story of these two different campaigns she did because she’s obviously very big on testing, which is a smart thing to do.

She had this campaign in February, this launch campaign, and she was going over these different variables and different results for how many people opted-in, different lead magnets that she had, and all these different things. One of the things that she tracked to see how successful this was, was time. For instance, the first campaign took her 15 hours, and the second campaign took her seven hours, and that was all kind of factored into, “Okay, how successful was this?”

It was kind of eye opening for me because we track lots of different variables, like cost per click and all these other different things, and trying to compare the revenue from one to the revenue of the other. In our heads, we understand that we want this to take a little bit less time, but when you actually put the time there, you see the hours that it took.

I hadn’t thought about doing that, but I’m actually considering starting to do that now for myself, just to track the time and see, “Okay, how much is this really taking me? What am I getting out of this?” I’ve never wanted to do it because it just seems a little bit annoying. Maybe not do it forever, but to do it for six months just to see and get a gauge., I think it really could be useful and helpful.

Pamela Wilson: It’s kind of like people who are dieting, and they keep a food log.

Jerod Morris: Yes!

Pamela Wilson: They log every single bite that goes in their mouths, and sometimes it’s very eye opening. Or you start wearing a Fitbit, and you’re like, “Oh, gosh. Maybe the reason I’m not very in shape is because I’m only walking like 1,700 steps every day.”

Jerod Morris: Yeah. You know the funny thing about that is I’ve lost maybe 11, 12 pounds in the last three months, and a big part of it is because I started tracking my calories. When you can actually see it, it does, it helps you eat less because you’re like, “Whoa, I’ve already had that much today. Okay. Let me back off a little bit at dinner.”

Pamela Wilson: Yeah. It’s like knowledge is power.

Jerod Morris: It really is.

Pamela Wilson: Yeah, and that is an old habit from having owned my own business for many years. One of the things that you realize is you are one person, and you only have 24 hours. You can’t manufacture more time for yourself, so you start to become very efficient at using your time, then taking the things that you have to get done, and finding possibly people who can do them more efficiently so that you can focus on things that other people cannot do. It’s an old habit, but I think it’s a good one.

Jerod Morris: Pamela, for the digital entrepreneur who’s out there right now, who’s listening to this episode, and who is considering going down the road of building an educational membership site–they haven’t yet, but they’re thinking about it–what’s the biggest piece of advice that you would give that person about how to get started?

The Single Biggest Piece of Advice Pamela Would Give to People Thinking About Starting a Membership Community, and Those Already in the Midst of Running One

Pamela Wilson: The biggest thing when you’re starting out a membership site is there is this feeling like, “Okay, I’m getting on this hamster wheel, and I can’t ever get off. I just have to keep creating content for my membership program.” Depending on how you structure it, it might be a membership program that doesn’t have ongoing content, but either way, there is this feeling like you have a tremendous amount of work ahead of you.

I would say anything that you can do to simplify your processes and set up systems from the very beginning, you will be very happy to have those things in place. Just look at all of the tasks you have going on, and see if there are things where you could bring in someone to help you with them.

See if there are ways that you can create, like I said, content buckets, consistent content that you create week after week, so you’re not starting from scratch. Find ways to maybe have some weeks that take more time and effort and some weeks where it doesn’t take as much. You’re still delivering the value, but maybe it doesn’t take quite as much time and effort to produce. Even hamsters have to take a break once in a while.

Jerod Morris: That’s right. How about for the digital entrepreneur who already has a membership site and wants to iterate it and take it to the next level? What’s the biggest piece of advice that you would give to that person?

Pamela Wilson: Yeah. I would say, again, if you don’t have systems in place, getting them in place and finding ways to make your job easier is going to help you just keep your momentum and your enthusiasm going over the long haul.

And I’ll share this link with you. There are interesting problems that happen after you do have quite a bit of content on a membership site, and Debbie Hodge actually wrote about that for us on Copyblogger, about what you can do to organize your content to make it easier to get through, easier to find, and things like that. I’ll share that post with you. That’s a fantastic resource. Those are the problems you have once you have a membership site that’s been around for a while, and you have a lot of content.

Jerod Morris: Perfect. You will be able to find those in the show notes. Pamela, thank you so much. This was wonderful. We really appreciate your insights, and I know I am looking forward to seeing you speak at Digital Commerce Summit. It’ll be a good one.

Pamela Wilson: It’s going to be so much fun. I can’t wait to be there.

How to Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: It is. It’s going to be great. We hope that you will join us. Again, the conference is October 13 and 14 in Denver, Colorado. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. There are still early bird tickets, and as I mentioned earlier, it’s going to be a great event, and it’s the place where you will discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services.

Maybe you have a digital product or service, and you want to take it to the next level. Maybe you’ve been thinking about it. You’ve been thinking about getting started. This conference would be great for you as well. Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

We hope to see you there, and we hope to see you on the next episode of The Digital Entrepreneur, which will be here next week. Until then, take care, everybody.

The Transcript

Brian Clark Is Doing What?

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

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

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. This is episode No. 18 of The Digital Entrepreneur. I am your host, Jerod Morris, VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital.

Last week, Sonia Simone joined us to provide a little taste of her closing keynote at the upcoming Digital Commerce Summit, which takes place this October in Denver, Colorado, as we mentioned. You can get more details about the summit at Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

If you missed that episode with Sonia, make sure that you get caught up. It’s called Sonia Simone’s Secret to Starting the 1,000-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle of Building a Successful Business. If you’re looking for some advice and inspiration about the mindset needed to be a successful entrepreneur from a trusted source, that episode is for you.

This week, another of the keynote speakers at Digital Commerce Summit is here as Brian Clark makes his triumphant return to The Digital Entrepreneur, fresh off his season-ending interview with Henry Rollins over at Unemployable, which really is a must listen for anyone who fancies himself or herself a digital entrepreneur. We will link to that in the show notes.

Brian, how was that interview with Henry? It was certainly great to listen to. It must have been a blast to be able to interview one of your heroes yet again.

Brian’s Recent Interview with His Hero, Henry Rollins

Brian Clark: Yeah, ‘yet again’ is the key phrase because I don’t get nervous, Jerod, and the first time I interviewed Rollins, I was a wreck. It didn’t really come across that way, so I held it together. But this time, he’s just such a cool guy, and you know that I drove him to Boulder after our event last year for his show that you went to as well, which was awesome.

Jerod Morris: Yeah it was.

Brian Clark: It’s not like I respect him any less, but he’s a guy. He’s a great guy. You just start to realize that fame can sometimes make people worse, but it certainly hasn’t done it to him. This time, it was just really a very relaxed conversation. I think it came through that way.

But you know Henry. You throw up something for him, and he’ll talk for 15 minutes on that and say things you couldn’t have imagined that you could have coaxed out of him. Then you just throw him another one, and he runs with it.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and well, I loved how you mentioned being respectful of his time toward the end that you were going to cut it off, and he’s like, “No, no, no, I’m enjoying answering these questions. Ask me more. Keep going.” That was awesome.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I think Henry, understandably, doesn’t mind being recognized for how hard he works and all the things he’s done, not being with his hand held by management or whatever. Black Flag, they had to do it all themselves, and he just kept doing that.

You’ll notice the theme of that, which you hear from us a lot. Why we bootstrap and those type of things is because it’s freedom. He gets to do what he wants to do. He does this project in order to do the next project. That’s been a recurring theme over at Unemployable all season, which is really interesting to me because, again, that’s how I am. I just thought I was weird.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Well, definitely check out that episode. You can check it out on the show notes for this episode or go to Rainmaker.FM and find it on the Unemployable page.

On this week’s episode here on The Digital Entrepreneur, Brian is here to update us on how his side projects Further and Unemployable are going and talk a little bit about what he’s learning, what his future plans are.

First, Brian, this is related, but you sent me an interesting email this morning. We were going back and forth about what to discuss on this week’s show. You said we could talk about “why I’m going to start publishing on Medium.” Immediately when I read that, bells started ringing. Let’s just into this right now. You, on Medium? What’s going on?

Brian’s Decision to Syndicate Articles on Medium

Brian Clark: It really is a function of trying out new things with my side projects. No risk, low impact. It doesn’t matter if it works or not, really, compared to the main business. But as you know and Chris Garrett knows, I’m one of the best sources of feedback for the Rainmaker Platform by using it. Often, you won’t find a CEO that actually uses the technology they sell.

We always have, and that’s very important to me, the user experience as a content producer, a curator but not an overly technical person. The more I can do by myself, the better, which is why, unless I just get really stuck, I don’t let any of you guys help me. Obviously, I’m in the podcast network, so for Unemployable, that really helps. But Chris Ducker and Jon also have those deals, too. I get treated like anyone else when it comes to that stuff.

Why This Isn’t Digital Sharecropping

Brian Clark: The whole idea of publishing on Medium is something I want to try. Now, the first thing that is popping in people’s heads, going, “Wait, wait, wait. You, the anti-digital sharecropper extraordinaire are going to go publish on someone else’s land?” No. I’m not going to blog on Medium. I’m going to syndicate on Medium.

What that means is, I’m going to take content that I’ve already created–for example, it could be some of the articles I’ve written for Further in the past. Actually, I know for sure a lot of the topics I covered on the Unemployable podcast, I’m going to take the transcripts, go back and review, and then turn it into an article.

We’ve talked about repurposing content over and over again over the years. Let’s take Unemployable, for example. My main goal with Unemployable, at this phase–I’m not selling anything yet–is the podcast and the curated email newsletter. Those are my assets. Those are my original things that I own, and that’s where I’m always pointing everything to.

But if I can repurpose content and put it on another platform, to me, it’s like guest posting–except there’s no requirement that it be original content. I’ve been watching Medium for a while, and there’s some really interesting aspects to it. I think you might have picked up on those as well.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I have because I’ve been thinking about doing the same thing with some of my side projects and the same, not publishing new content over there, but taking content that’s already been created and syndicating it over there.

It is. It’s interesting what they do with collections. It’s interesting what they do with their own curated newsletter because I get that. I get that in my inbox, and I find myself reading over there. There’s a lot of interesting content, interesting things going on there. It’s a good way, it seems, to get discovered.

When you look at people that are doing it right, you read their article, you get down to the end, and a lot of times, there’s a call to action to get on their newsletter or to go connect with them over on their site. That’s a very important part of any strategy like this. Like you said, it’s not publishing. It’s syndicating.

Brian Clark: Exactly. Now, if you’re a hardcore SEO-type person, you may not like it, but Google is getting much better at finding the original source anyway. If you just publish on your own site first, you can probably almost immediately go over and hit Medium.

But think about it this way. Again, if you were guest posting and a lot of people, from Leo over Zen Habits, Danny Iny did it when he started out, they just went on this massive guest-posting binges because you get access to someone else’s community, someone else’s audience.

That’s what Medium is right now. It’s built probably more effectively than a lot of other platforms in the sense that there is a community over there. It’s something like 650,000 people at this point. Not massive, but it’s interesting.

The mechanisms by which things prove to be popular is very much like a social network. It’s a social content platform. There’s a community there, and if you publish good content and it catches on, you get access to that community. And like you said, everything is pointing back to my site and, in particular, the assets that I’m trying to build at this point.

Here’s the kicker. When I got over there and was playing with it and I actually set up an account–got Unemployable as my log in, thank you

Jerod Morris: Nice.

Brian Clark: Then I realized that, because I logged in with Twitter, the founders of Twitter and Medium it’s not a Twitter company, but they’re the same guys. My largest audience is at Twitter for social media, and all of a sudden, everyone who follows me on Twitter that’s also on Medium prepopulated into my audience. I had an instant following of 24,000 people. That’s kind of cool.

Jerod Morris: That is kind of cool. It’s very cool. When it comes to your strategy over there, then, how will you decide or determine which posts to put over there, which posts to syndicate?

Identifying Which Posts to Syndicate

Brian Clark: That’s the fun of it really. Like I said, there’s a ton of audio content, and despite there being transcripts, it’s not really in that really digestible format that a good article might be. Some of those episodes you can make two articles out of, maybe three.

Quoting people I’ve interviewed–like Rollins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, Annie Cushing–lot of great guests where you can take what they talked about, turn it into an article, quote them. That’s pretty cool. That’s one aspect of it.

The other thing is, like I mentioned with Further, taking some of the short curated summaries that I do as my lead, which is different from what I do with just more brief summary and link stuff over at Further, and publish some of that stuff and see what happens.

The first thing I’m trying and by the time this airs, I should know what happened. We may have to do a follow-up episode. But what I did was take some of my sources that I curate for Unemployable, and I created those classic attention-getting “The 22 Best Sites for Freelancers,” “The 10 Best Sites for Creative Entrepreneurs”–you get the idea.

When you think about it, that’s a perfect post. It has a good chance of being popular. Number two, you lead in and say something like, “Hey, I do the work for you with the Unemployable newsletter, curating the week’s best content, but I thought you might like to see some of my favorite sources.”

You’re promoting the newsletter in a very organic way, right there in the lead of the article, and people are like, “Yeah, these are some good sites, but why do I want to go surf all these sites every week. This guy’s going to do it for me.” So we’ll see how it works.

Jerod Morris: With both of those, with Further and Unemployable, you’re very much in the audience-building phase of those projects. For someone who’s listening to this who may be further along in one of those projects or look at us, for example, with the platform or with Digital Commerce Institute, if we were going to try and use Medium as part of that strategy, would you recommend …

Brian Clark: And if it works, we will.

Jerod Morris: Oh I’m sure. Is that something where you would recommend writing a post, writing a piece of content and then having a direct call to action at the end to go to a product? Or would you really more try and use it to build a list that would then pitch a product? How would you address that?

The Single Most Important Element of a Smart Syndication Strategy

Brian Clark: You know the answer to that. The only difference between what I’m doing now, say with Unemployable, which is a general list-building strategy versus a specific funnel that leads to an eventual offer. That’s the only difference in how I would use Medium. So when you have something to sell, you get more strategic about where you send people. Effectively, you’re always list building.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. So let’s talk about Further and Unemployable on a bigger scale because I know there have been a lot of questions. Every time we have a Q&A that you’re going to be on, people want to know more about how these are going.

Let’s maybe just talk about each one individually, maybe something important that you’ve learned, and what your plans are going forward. How would you assess that with Further so far?

Updates On How Brian’s Side Projects–Further.net and Unemployable–Are Going

Brian Clark: Further, I don’t really think about. It’s clearly got commercial potential down the road, but I don’t really worry about it so much. Unemployable is a good channel for both Digital Commerce Institute and the Rainmaker Platform, so I think more commercially about that project–although most of the time, I forget to even do it like a sponsor.

But the main thing is, I really enjoy curation. There’s an art to it, and I think it’s necessary–not because there’s so much great content that no one can find it, because there’s so much crap content that someone needs to weed through the click bait. People have actually gotten shy about clicking a great headline anymore because they’re worried that it’s just hype.

Why the Role of Curator Will Grow Even More Important

Brian Clark: The role of curators is going to become more and more important. Now, of course, in 2006, I said, “No, you can’t do that. You’ve got to create original content,” but that was a very different time. I think some people blame Copyblogger because “You’re supposed to write a great headline with great content, people”–I always said that. But the curation thing is enjoyable.

I’ve developed an entire methodology and even a business model where you never have to create your own content if you don’t want to, although I think it makes sense down the road once you have an audience to start doing originals. That’s what I’m already starting to do with Unemployable, as I mentioned.

But curation is so broad and necessary. For example, I consider the podcast interview format an act of curation. Effectively, you’re taking someone else’s content. They’re just speaking it to you, though, in an interview format. The better interviewer you are, the better curator and content creator you become.

But it’s still not the same as just having to sit down and create something from scratch. Because I do both type of episodes–I do solo lessons, and then I do the interviews–I can tell you, I love interviews. They’re so much fun. As long as you’re good at asking questions, it’s easy.

Jerod Morris: They are.

Brian Clark: But beyond that, look at affiliate marketing. Look at The Wirecutter. Now, they do reviews, which is a valuable original content creation service, but they’re curating Amazon products, effectively. Then one more step removed, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen
Canva, but they don’t even write reviews. They just curate the best products. They point out what’s on sale, what’s cool, what’s hip. I can’t believe, but apparently they make a lot of money. It’s amazing.

When you marry the topical content curation aspect with the relevant product and service curation, which is the same way we develop products, it’s easier to find someone else’s product and see if people buy it, of course. I don’t know if you remember that interview I did with Darren Rowse on this show under its former title. That’s how Darren figures out what to create. He sees what people buy as an affiliate, and then he builds his own version of it.

Jerod Morris: Where are we at with curation right now? Obviously, we’ve seen a lot of people who are starting to do more curation. Is it still in the early stages where people should get in and start to carve out their niche? Is it already getting over saturated? How do you see the current curation market if someone’s thinking about doing this?

The Current State of the Curation Market

Brian Clark: I think people struggle with the business model aspect of it. Even Jason Hirschhorn of MediaREDEF, he wants to charge money for curation. I don’t think people are going to pay. I don’t know. I could be wrong. Dave Pell has sponsors every once in a while, but Dave mainly does that because he’s an Angel investor. That probably brings him deal flow.

Everyone has their own reasons for curating, but I think a lot of people get stumped on, “How do I actually make money from this?” That’s why I’m trying to point out the intersection between curated products and curated content. That’s a natural match.

Again, once you have an audience, you can afford to publish original content. You just start to supplement your newsletter with your own stuff. Then you’re getting into more search benefits, social sharing, all that kind of stuff. Then also, on the affiliate side, you find something that’s working and that gives you inspiration. You know what your audience will buy at that point. So all you’re left with is the traffic and audience-building problem.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I think the big struggle for folks when it comes to curation is that it is a time investment to do well. That’s really the value that you’re providing–the time to go out and read, research, and consume 30 articles and pick the best five. There is some legwork that’s involved in that.

Then it’s figuring out, “Okay, what business model, either direct or indirect, more likely, can I have on this that is going to make that time investment worth it?” That’s why some people have started and maybe not finished or not continued because it does get a little bit time-consuming for them.

How to Think About Curation Like an Entrepreneur (Not Just a Content Creator)

Brian Clark: Well, let me point this out. The issue here is, if you’ve got something to sell, you can advertise. You can break even and/or make a profit while building your audience. That’s huge. Now, think about Further for a second. Let’s say that I’m a live coach. Further would sell the hell out of those services. Anyone in the wellness industry, personal development is such a huge field, so if you’re a service provider, that’s a no brainer.

That’s what I really start thinking about in terms of potential business models. But again, if I had that type of business, starting something like Further is an immediate ROI venture. Further’s not huge because I don’t do anything to market it, but thousands and thousands of people have signed up for it even though I am not a personal development guy. I’m more of a personal development wreck outside of entrepreneurism, but I’m fighting back, man.

I’ve told people this all the time. Take people on the journey with you, and all you’re doing is sharing what you’ve learned. People start looking at you like, “Hey, this is a guy who knows what he’s talking about.” It actually is working on me because you learn better by teaching others.

It’s one of the number one ways to internalize true expertise, to have to teach someone what you just read. You can read a book three times, and you’ll never know what it as well as if you are forced to sit down and summarize it for people accurately.

Jerod Morris: That’s a great point. One question. I want to go back to Medium real quick before we close off for this episode. I want to ask you a question because we’re starting to see a trend now of sites almost building themselves directly on Medium.

Of course, you talked about using this as a syndication strategy, but what do you think of this trend that we’re starting to see? For instance, Bill Simmons’ new site The Ringer just launched today, the day that we’re recording this, and it’s all on Medium. They don’t even have their own website. It is all built directly on Medium. What do you think of that?

What Brian Thinks of the Latest Trend of Sites (Like The Ringer) Being Built Entirely on Medium

Brian Clark: I think that’s a mistake. Bill Simmons is Internet savvy, but I don’t think he’s learned his lesson. Where did his problems come from? Being on ESPN’s platform. Now you just go on to someone else’s platform. He’s going from where’s ESPN, Connecticut?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: He’s gone from Connecticut to Silicon Valley. Do you think they care about you anymore? Eventually, they will change the rules, and I’ll be fine because I’ve got my own home base. You use these platforms until they change, but Medium’s got to make money someday.

I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but we know what happened with Facebook. We know what happened with Tumbler. We know what happened with YouTube. Come on, people. Syndicate, but don’t just build your house over there.

Jerod Morris: You’re saying the fundamentals of digital sharecropping remain.

Brian Clark: Unfortunately. We will talk about this until we’re just old people, I swear.

Jerod Morris: We will. Well, Brian, thanks for coming on. Thanks for the insight. We’ll be looking forward to seeing your posts on Medium and get an update on how it all works.

Brian Clark: All right. No problem at all.

Jerod Morris: Hey, one last question for you before you go. Sonia gave us a little bit of a heads up on her keynote, what she’s going to be talking about at Digital Commerce Summit. You’re going to be talking about the future of digital commerce, opening up the second day over there at Digital Commerce Summit, which I can’t wait for. Any little tidbits? Any insight you want to share on what you’ll be talking about during that keynote?

The Focus of Brian’s Keynote at Digital Commerce Summit

Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s definitely a look forward that’s not too esoteric because I think things are happening maybe even a little quicker than we think. You and I spoke about virtual reality a couple weeks back. That’s going to be included.

There’s just interesting statistics now. We’re talking at the entrepreneur level at this summit, but I saw some interesting data that said that the largest fortune of MarTech spending at the enterprise level is on digital commerce.

Jerod Morris: Wow.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Scott Brinker says, “We don’t do digital marketing anymore. We market in a digital world.” That’s true, but wait till it’s literally a digital world when we immerse ourselves in these environments, and it changes the way we work, how we collaborate.

Companies like ours that are all over the world are going to become the norm instead of the weirdos. It’s fascinating to me, and I realized that, if I’m this charged up about something after 18 years on the Internet from a business perspective, then that’s probably what I ought to talk about.

Jerod Morris: Which makes me think, if we end up having virtual meetings, 15, 20 years from now, how will the introverts handle that? Will they be okay since you’re not physically in the same room?

Brian Clark: I think that will be more like five, and I don’t know–but I’ll let you know firsthand.

Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: Again, for more information on Digital Commerce Summit, go to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. The early bird ticket pricing is still available as of the publishing of this episode, so you don’t want to wait because eventually that price will go up. We would love to see you all in Denver this October at Digital Commerce Summit. Again, Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

All right, Brian, thank you for being here, and thank you for listening to this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. We will be back next week with a brand-new episode. We’ll talk to you then.

The Transcript

Sonia Simone’s Secret to Starting the 1,000-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle of Building a Successful Business

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

Jerod Morris: Welcome back to another brand new episode of the Digital Entrepreneur. This is episode number 17 of the Digital Entrepreneur. I am your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of Marketing for Rainmaker Digital. I am joined by one of my great work colleagues, one of my good friends, and one of the co-founders of Rainmaker Digital. She is also the chief content officer. A person, a voice, a personality that you know well, Ms. Sonia Simone. Who is also a keynote speaker at the upcoming Digital Commerce Summit. Sonia, how are you doing?

Sonia Simone: I’m good. I’m having a good day, doing my thing.

Jerod Morris: Very good. I definitely appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. We have a really important topic to talk about which I feel like sometimes we kind of shy away from and feel like we’re wasting time almost if we talk about it, but it really is important. We’re going to get to that in just a second. The reason why you’re going to be talking about that with us is because it’s going to be what your closing keynote is about at Digital Commerce Summit.

Most of you listening have probably heard us talk about Digital Commerce Summit before, but if you haven’t, Digital Commerce Summit is the premier live educational and networking event for people who create and sell digital products and services. That’s the big tag line. More casually, it is our annual event. We’ve put on an annual event now for a couple of years. This is now the new annual event that we are doing in conjunction with Digital Commerce Academy, which we launched toward the end of last year.

So Digital Commerce Summit will really focus on the underlying process behind creating and selling digital goods and services. It’s going to be a great event for networking and also a great event for learning from people like Sonia. People like Brian Clark, Rand Fishkin, Chris Ducker, Chris Lema, and Jeff Walker. A lot of really great people are going to be there sharing their expertise and sharing their insight, and we want to tell you about it because currently the early bird pricing is still available — it’s $795 for a ticket. It will eventually go up to $995, so I wanted to make sure that you had another opportunity to hear about it, another reason to go. Go check out the URL Rainmaker.FM/summit and that will give you more details about it.

Don’t do it quite yet. Listen in, because the best way to get details about this is to actually hear from one of the speakers and hear her talk about one of the things that she’s going to be talking about. That’s what we’re going to talk about with Sonia today. Sonia, your closing keynote — which is going to be on the first day of Digital Commerce Summit — the title of it is “It’s All In Your Head: Developing the Digital Entrepreneur Mindset.”

Why is Focusing on Mindset a Worthwhile Investment of Our Time and Energy?

Jerod Morris: I want to start out by playing devil’s advocate for a minute to kick things off. Isn’t mindset talk just a bunch of frou-frou nonsense? Wouldn’t we be better served by just delving into tried-and-true tactics and rolling up our sleeves and getting to work? Why do we need to worry about mindset?

Sonia Simone: Jerod, I’m shocked and offended you would ask that question. I’m not really shocked and offended. It’s interesting, because in our company that’s actually the real question. Brian Clark will ask me, “Why are we doing this?” The answer really comes out of my experience — particularly at conferences. I think that anybody who’s ever been to a good conference where you get a lot of information, a lot of good things that you can use, you think, “Oh, yeah. I can totally try that. That would work. I’m sure that would work. I’m going to try that out.”

You get so many things that you’re going to implement, and you get home and if you do one thing it’s a miracle. Knowing what to do matters. It is important. You want to be working on things that have the best chance of succeeding for your individual unique combination of topic and skills and strengths and weaknesses. You want tactics. Tactics are very important. But if you do not implement then you don’t get results, there’s no way around it. It’s so easy for us to say, “Yeah, I’m totally going to implement. This time I’m going to implement. It’s not going to be like all those other times when I didn’t implement. This time I’m going to implement.”

Really the point of the talk … First of all, where it’s positioned is at the end of day one. You’ve got a head full of juicy ideas. You’re fired up. You know that some of these things are going to make a material difference. The timing of this is so that you get up and you go back to your room for a half hour before you go out to the party and you do something. You actually implement something. And you really can. In a half hour it’s amazing how much you can get done. It’s about getting the spark while the fire is still burning and using it.

Also learning what’s going to keep you implementing, what’s going to keep that momentum rolling as you move forward. Because we don’t want you to get fired up at the conference, have a wonderful time, go home, and have the same exact thing that you had before the conference. The whole point of the conference is transformation and action. That’s why we’re talking mindset. It’s really about getting yourself to do the things that you know will be beneficial.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, You know what’s so interesting about that? You’ll appreciate this. About 15 minutes ago while I was preparing for our conversation I had this spark of inspiration. I was scrolling through Digital Commerce Summit and I saw the description for my own presentation — which I’m giving on the first day — and it led me to this idea for what my first slide can be and the opening statement that I can make. It just hit me, and I was like, “Oh crap, what should I do with this real quick? Should I open up a Google doc?” I was like, “Let me just pull out a notecard. I already know what I’m going to do with it.”

That’s something that you and I — we went to a conference together back in February, a really transformative conference. One of the things that we learned is this whole notecard idea and this way to capture ideas and organize presentations. It’s great. It’s amazing that that still — it doesn’t just linger on, it literally drives.

I know you do this. I do this. And that has been so much of our inspiration — different tweaks that we want to make to our conference to add to it, to make it better. That’s what a great conference should do, really spit you out — yes, with the tactics and with new strategies. But, like you said, they are pointless if when you fly back home, by the time you land you’ve forgotten about them or if you don’t have the motivation or whatever it takes to actually implement them.

Here we are months later and we’re still doing all this stuff from the conference that we went to. That’s our goal with Digital Commerce Summit, for people to be feeling the same way months, even years after the conference because of what they’ve learned and what they’ve gained in this direction — if they’re really excited to go in it.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, Exactly.

Jerod Morris: You know what else is interesting too? In terms of the structure of the conference, your presentation coming at the end of the first day. It’ll be a really interesting bookend to Rand Fishkin’s opening keynote in which he’s going to share the story of Moz and the many highs and lows along the way, a lot of which were driven by his fluctuating mindset and how that all played into it. I think it will be a really interesting bookend to see one of those presentations at the beginning and then yours at the end. It will be a great way to kick off and end that first day.

Sonia Simone: I agree. It’s going to be interesting.

How the Mindset of an Entrepreneur Is More of a Skill to Be Developed than Simply an Innate Talent

Jerod Morris: Okay, let’s get back to talking about mindset here. How is the mindset of a digital business owner — a digital entrepreneur — a skill rather than an innate talent? And why is that distinction important?

Sonia Simone: I think this comes up a lot for people. There are some people — and typically it’s because there’s something in your background that opened this idea up to you — that will look at a tactic and they’ll say, “That’s a good idea.” And they just sit down and do it. The Gary Vaynerchuk type. That kind of high energy, hyped up, action-oriented, not necessarily … A lot of those people are not great planners and they’re not great long-term strategic people, but they get a lot of stuff done. They throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall and some of it sticks.

I think there’s a belief — and it’s very prevalent, especially in the United States — that that is the kind of person who can own a business. That that is the sort of temperament that business owners have. If you don’t have that temperament in your DNA, then you don’t get to own a business. That that’s the only kind of person who can be a successful business owner. But also that a certain amount of that habit of just sitting down and getting it done — just sit down and knock something out real quickly and see what happens — that that’s always an innate trait and that it’s not something that we can learn. We can learn so much more than we think we can. I love Carol Dweck’s work on fixed mindset versus growth mindset.

A fixed mindset is, “I have a certain set of talents. I have a certain intelligence. I have a certain level of energy and drive. That’s what I’ve got and the degree to which I succeed or fail is based on the cards that I was dealt and we’re done with the conversation.” The growth mindset is, “I can get better at things I’m not good at. I can find workarounds for things that are not strengths. Maybe I can either figure out a creative way to not do them, figure out a creative way to partner, or just get better.” A lot of times we can get better at a lot more things than we think we can.

That growth mindset is a question of realizing it. Maybe just noticing in yourself where you have this fixed mindset comes up — most of us have it about some things — and then reminding yourself that that’s not the only way to think about it. It’s not useful, it doesn’t serve you. It’s really much more a collection of habits than it is your DNA. Some people are by nature a little more optimistic, and some people are definitely by nature more introverted or extroverted. There are things that are innate. But you can work with almost any kind of personality type if you can just figure out a good habit set that suits you. That’s where we’re always talking about how unique every business is, because every business owner is so different.

Jerod Morris: Since I’ve known you I don’t think there’s any topic that I’ve seen you get as worked up about, and I mean that in a good way, passionate about outside of this idea that entrepreneurs are born rather than made. Is that something that you’ve seen over and over again? Where people that we might classify as, “they don’t have the traits to be an entrepreneur,” but they’ve gone on to be successful? Have you seen lots of examples of that happening because people have cultivated the skills and habits to make it happen?

Sonia Simone: I have. I think I get cranky about it because for so many years I totally bought into it. I was never much of a salesperson. I was never any good at it. It always made me feel weird, even when I was a kid selling raffle tickets. I like to joke that I couldn’t sell raffle tickets to my grandmother, mostly because I couldn’t make the call and then I couldn’t close the sale. It seemed kind of weird.

I was held back by it for a long time, and really only was able to resolve it from having my back against the wall because I was in a really difficult economy and jobs were not findable. Then, at the same time, I had been reading Copyblogger as a total fangirl and trying things, and they were working better than I thought they could. I started to see that that limitation maybe was being promulgated by people who didn’t know what they were talking about, so I started looking around.

For every trait that you hear passed around as gospel, “A true entrepreneur must have this trait” — one of them is you have to be able to sell. Well, you really don’t, especially now. You have to be able to persuade, but there’s so many ways to do that. It’s not just about cold calling somebody and talking them into something. There’s lots of ways to persuade. Also decisiveness — that comes right out of Harvard Business School, this notion that you have to be decisive as a business owner. Right or wrong, you just have to decide on something and do it. That’s one of the reasons for so many high-profile crashes and burns with CEOs, because they lead their company right off the cliff. “I made a decision and now we’re going to do it.” Well, your decision was terrible.

The business owner with the highest market cap that I know personally, is like a squirrel who can’t cross the street. This guy changes his mind 28 times a day. It makes his people nuts. It’s not necessarily a strength, but I will tell you that no movement happens in that company that hasn’t been well thought out. He also surrounds himself with people who counterbalance that and make sure that there’s movement and drive. I’ve seen people who are not that smart make great businesses. I’ve seen people who are very introverted and really have no interest in getting themselves to get out there and glad-hand. Glad-hand is a verb only introverts use, right?

I just can’t think of a trait that everybody says, “You can’t be a business owner if you have that trait.” In most cases, I could give you two, three, four, five examples of people I know personally. I’ve become very cranky about gurus who tell you that you can’t based on their experience and based on what they’ve seen. In my experience, most of the time, if you’re willing to be creative and you’re willing to look at it in a different way and you’re going to get your head on straight — you can make something work.

Jerod Morris: There are people listening to this show right now who maybe had more of a fixed mindset before, but they’ve started listening to the Digital Entrepreneur, they’ve read stuff on Copyblogger, they’ve listened to other podcasts, consumed other content, and they’ve started to get more of that growth mindset. They’ve started to say, “All these other people are out there creating these successful businesses online or off, so certainly there’s a huge opportunity digitally.” They’re starting to get more of this growth mindset and think, “Hey, maybe I could be an entrepreneur too.” But then there’s that next step between thinking about it and talking about it and getting courses and listening to podcasts and actually going out and doing it.

The Biggest Difference Between Wantrepreneurs and Successful Entrepreneurs

Jerod Morris: Even though we’re talking about the importance of mindset and how anyone can do it, that doesn’t mean that it’s an easy or even a simple transition to make. What do you think is the biggest difference between that perpetually aspiring digital entrepreneur who has all the ideas in the world and a successful digital entrepreneur who actually goes out and will get things done?

Sonia Simone: I think it’s probably two factors. Some people will fall into one and some people will fall into the other. The most common one in my experience is everyone, you, me, Brian Clark, everyone, starts a business or starts a project — it might not even be a business, it might be a project at first — and it’s overwhelming. I think of it as a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. You look at it and it’s a mess. You don’t know how anything goes together. It’s a little hard to figure out where to start. The successful people, just like the successful people who can solve a jigsaw puzzle, take the easiest thing — in a jigsaw puzzle it’s the corners and the sides, the edges — they take the easiest thing that they know how to do and then they start doing it.

It’s very much a question of … Maybe they have a small habit of doing it. If you’re an okay writer or a good writer, then your easy step is “I’m going to pay somebody like $100 to install WordPress for me because it’s overwhelming to even think about that. Then I’m going to start just writing some things down as a blog. I don’t know where it’s going to go, but I’m going to just do that.”

How to Take the First Steps in Any Daunting Project, Including Launching a Business

Sonia Simone: You start in your comfort zone and you start with what you know you can do every day, a little bit every day. You don’t start with, “I’m going to spend six hours a day on my digital business. Every day between 2:00 and 8:00 in the morning I’m going to work on my digital business and then I’m going to go out and do my job.” It’s not going to happen.

Start small, start in your comfort zone, and make it a habit. People who do that start to see momentum. Momentum, by its nature, breeds more momentum. People who don’t do that, they either think too big: “I’m going to do the whole thing now. I can’t do the whole thing now.” It’s depressing. It’s hard. It starts to kick up all kinds of mindset problems. “I can’t do this. I’m too stupid. I don’t have the drive.” And they fail. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is sometimes people will stay in that space for a very long time. They’ll stay in the comfort zone. They’ll stay in the modest habit that they know how to do and they never put their little toe in the water of the thing that’s not in their comfort zone, technology, persuasion in selling, a new format, or a bigger project that requires more steps. Sometimes people will have been blogging and have been doing all the comfortable things for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, or more than that, and say, “I never got any traction.” It’s because you stayed in the baby part of the pool. The whole point of the baby part of the pool is to get you comfortable with the water so that you can venture into a little bit deeper water and get your skills in a little bit better shape.

Those are the two things I’ve seen, and both of those can be fixed today if you just decide to do something differently today. The easiest way to start in both cases is to have a little habit. If you’re going to do something that makes you nervous, like selling, then maybe you have, “Okay, I’m going to do 10 minutes of selling practice a day. On Monday I’m going to write headlines, on Tuesday I’m going to write calls to action, and on Wednesday I’m going to read my free My Copyblogger library and come up with a persuasion technique.” You get the idea. Every day you’re going to take a little practice time to do something that don’t feel too good and feels a little weird and a little uncomfortable. That’s how you get comfortable, is practice.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I love that metaphor of the small end of the pool getting you used to the water so you can go into the deep end, but you have to make sure that you venture out there at some point. Otherwise, you’ll just stay in the shallow end forever.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

One Essential Habit That You Can Develop Right Now That Will Move You Forward and Get Positive Momentum Building

Jerod Morris: You kind of answered this one, but I’m wondering if we can even go a little bit more specific with it. I want folks who are listening to this to really get something to take away from this episode, something they can do literally right now, once they get off of this, or tomorrow, or as soon as possible. If you could talk to everybody who’s going to listen to your keynote right now — several months before it’s actually going to happen — and if you could inspire them to foster one habit before the conference to be a step or two ahead of the game by October, what would that be?

I know you just went through a few of them in terms of stepping outside of people’s comfort zones. And some of those will be dependent, obviously, on what a person is aspiring to do, what their background is, all of that. But is there one thing that people could start doing that would be useful to everybody that would put people a few steps ahead before the conference?

Sonia Simone: Some of you already know what your thing is going to be. Some of you are listening to this and saying, “I should do that for writing blog posts. I should do that for writing a sales page.” If you’re listening to this and you’re like, “I know exactly what to do,” set yourself a daily habit. Put a timer on your phone. If you can do it every day, that really is great. But if it could only be five minutes a day, that would be okay. If you already know, “The next thing for me to get good at is getting better at writing, or doing more writing, or learning about podcasting.” If you already know it, then just set up your timer right now. Set it up now, even if you don’t know what you’re going to fill that time with. Set up 5 minutes a day, 10 minutes a day. If you could do 20 a day, that would be awesome.

It’s totally cool to work up to it. This week you’ll do five minutes, and then next week you’re going to reset your timer setting and you’re going to do it for six minutes every single day, then seven minutes every single day. If you don’t know yet what that might be, then take either your favorite Rainmaker FM podcast — maybe you’re a big Digital Entrepreneur listener, or a big Unemployable listener, or the Copyblogger blog would be another place — read it every day or listen to it. Maybe listen to a different Rainmaker FM episode a day. You’ll get a call to action on one of those. You’ll get a tactic to try, something you can practice.

Then just do that every day. This will probably air in June. It’s only June and the event is in October, so if you’re like a ninja in eight weeks — don’t stay in the baby end of the pool. Come up with another one. “What would be one little small step a little outside my comfort zone on that? What would be a little harder?” Really, if you only spend five minutes a day in the baby pool between now and October, you’ll be amazed at how much actually happens.

Jerod Morris: It’s so important to be better now, to go do this now. We have these moments of inspiration. Someone is listening to you talk right now, Sonia, and they’re like, “Yeah, I want to start doing that.” They don’t do anything with it and three or four days later they’ve forgotten about it. Their motivation has dissipated and it’s like they’re starting back at — not necessarily square one, because they’ve listened to this so they know it intellectually, but they haven’t necessarily matched that with the emotion and with the action that will create the momentum which you talked about earlier.

It’s so important. If you’re feeling that motivation right now from listening to Sonia talk, don’t put your headphones down and say, “I’m going to do it,” and not do it. Just do something quick and small right now — whether it’s putting a to-do in your to-do list, blocking off 10 minutes on your calendar, or actually sitting down and doing something, like going and listening to an episode of Confessions of a Pink Haired Marketer for example — taking that first step. It’s so important to take that first step. Don’t wait till later to be better. Be better right now.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Jerod Morris: Sonia, this is wonderful. I, for one, cannot wait to hear your presentation in October. It’s going to be wonderful, as all of the presentations will be. It’s going to be a really fun conference.

Sonia Simone: I’ll give all you guys a little secret, that Jerod and I are going to be watching each other’s presentations very closely because we did both go to this event where we learned to be stronger speakers and more dynamic and to broaden the range of what we bring to our talks. Jerod and I are both looking at each other like, “Okay, game on.” We’re going to try and see how much we can implement to make these really move you to action and really make a difference in your life.

That’s what makes what we do fun. When I have people come up to me and say, “You know what? That was the thing that made me understand how it worked and I’m doing something differently now,” there’s nothing like that. I want to thank all of you. I sure hope you come and see us live, but whether you do or whether you don’t, that’s really what I want for all of you guys. It’s really what makes it worth doing for me, and I know that that’s true with Jerod as well.

Jerod Morris: Yes. If either Sonia or I start impersonating air or wind or fire, you can send a tweet to Victoria Labalme and ask her, “Why in the world are they doing this?” All right, that URL one more time is rainmaker.fm/summit. Go there and you’ll get the full description. There’s a band that’s going to be playing. We’re having a party. So you can check that out, find out who the band is. It’s going to be fantastic. You can see all of the speakers, who they all are and what they will be talking about. Check out the dates, and of course, check out the price.

Again, it’s 795 right now. That price will be going up, so depending on when you listen to this the price might have gone up already. But certainly if you listen to this soon after it’s out you can still get that early bird price. Again, go to rainmaker.fm/summit and join us in Denver. We’d love to see you, and we hope that we will see as many of you there as possible. All right, everybody. Sonia, thank you so much for being here. For the wonderful episode. We really appreciate your insight.

Sonia Simone: Thank you. I had a great time. It’s always good talking with you.

Jerod Morris: It is. Thank you for listening. We will talk to you next week on another brand new episode of the Digital Entrepreneur.

The Transcript

Does Your Social Media Strategy Need a Mindset Shift?

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

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

Jerod Morris: Welcome to another episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. I am your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and this is episode No. 16 of The Digital Entrepreneur. It’s a special episode because we have a special guest.

Jason Keath, the CEO of Social Fresh, is here to discuss the report that Social Fresh recently released called The Future of Social. You can get that report at SocialFresh.com/Future. We dive into a lot of the insights that Jason and his team came up with, with that report, a lot of interesting data.

The timing of this conversation, for me, is especially interesting because I am actually in the midst right now of putting together a course inside of Digital Commerce Academy called Savvy Social Advertising. The big idea with that course is to teach you, the digital entrepreneur, the 20 percent that you need to know about social media marketing, social media advertising, to derive 80 percent of the benefits.

You are out there developing your digital product, offering your digital service, and you don’t necessarily have the time, the inclination, nor the need to become a full-fledged expert on social media. You have a lot of different things that you’re doing, and that’s not the goal of this course. Again, it’s to teach you that 20 percent that you need to get 80 percent of the results.

What’s interesting about this conversation in this episode with Jason–and why I’m excited to bring it to you–is that he talks a lot about a different way to think about social media. If you’re thinking about social media simply as a way to build awareness and put people into the top of your funnel, you’re not really thinking about social media in the way that it can have the maximum benefits.

Thinking about social media from a customer-loyalty perspective, from a lead-nurturing perspective, from an education perspective, from a customer-service perspective–all of those elements social media does really well–sometimes we overlook them simply trying to build that awareness or even trying to jump right from awareness to a sale.

There are a lot of steps that can and should happen in between there, and you’ll learn about that in this conversation today. You’ll also learn much more about it and learn some really important step-by-step tactics for how to make it work for you and to save you money so that you can make more money and have a better return on your investment in social. That will all come in the course.

As I said, the timing of the conversation is interesting because I’m developing the course, but it’s also interesting from this perspective. We are currently in the midst of our price raise promotion for Digital Commerce Academy. Currently, we’re still offering our post-pilot introductory price of $395 per year for membership at Digital Commerce Academy.

The thing is, since we offered that price the first time, the value of Digital Commerce Academy has skyrocketed. Now there aren’t two full-fledged courses in there. There are four. In addition to Brian’s course on building an online training business and Chris and Tony’s course on marketing funnels, we now have Chris Lema’s course on building WordPress products the smarter way. You have my course on Savvy Social Advertising, plus the entire library of Case Study webinars we’ve done, the entire library of Cutting Edge webinars we’ve done, plus the regular coaching Q&As, which happen every other week, and all of the upcoming ongoing education, in addition to the community.

The time was right to raise the price, and we are. On Friday, May 27th, the price is going up to $595 a year. It’s still a great value, but obviously, it’s a better value at $395. You still have the opportunity to get that. This episode comes out on Thursday, May 26th, so you’ve got about 24 to 48 hours from when this comes out to when the price is going to go up.

Go to Rainmaker.FM/DCA, you can still get that post-pilot introductory price of $395 before the price goes up. Rainmaker.FM/DCA. Again, you’ll have access to my course on social advertising. Especially if today’s episode peaks your interest, then that is a course that you’ll want to get in there and start to dig into. I’m having a lot of fun putting it together, and I really am looking forward to you getting in there, checking it out, giving me your feedback, and learning from it.

Without further ado, let’s get to my discussion with Jason Keath, a really interesting discussion. You will get a lot out of this. Definitely stay around till the end because we get into video at the end. Video is one of the fastest growing content types that is really, really big in social media, and you’re going to want to hear Jason’s tips on how you can make video work for you. We talk about all of that and much, much more here on this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur.

All right, so we are joined on this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur by Jason Keath, the CEO of Social Fresh. Jason, how are you? Welcome to the show.

Jason Keath: Doing great. Excited to be on the show. Thanks for having me.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, yeah. We’re excited to have you here, and we’re excited to talk about your report. You guys just released this report, The Future of Social, and it has some really interesting insights that I want to get into.

I guess the first question is just an overview question about the report, because the report itself is based on surveys. You guys did over 500 surveys that you conducted of digital marketers whose responsibilities include social media marketing.

I’m just wondering, to put this in the proper context for our listeners, how big on average were the companies that these marketers worked for, and will the numbers in the report, and that we’re going to talk about, will those be applicable for digital entrepreneurs who may be solopreneurs or who have smaller teams?

Why The Future of Social Is Relevant Whether You’re a Solopreneur, a Small Team, or a Large Business

Jason Keath: Yeah, yeah. Social Fresh, in general, at our conferences, on our website, on our podcast, everything, we focus on what we call the ‘professional digital marketer,’ or the ‘professional social marketer.’ That’s everybody from solo entrepreneur running their own company, doing their own marketing, doing their own everything, all the way up to the largest companies in the world who attend our conferences. Everybody really gets value out of what we do because we focus on that person and the fundamentals to that responsibility.

The report was no different. We had two research partners, Firebrand Group, an agency out of New York, and Simply Measured, a pretty large social media software company who helped with the report. We also targeted people through some LinkedIn cold emails that we did, so we could get some job titles that we were targeting.

It’s a really well-rounded report. It’s got everybody from very small businesses to very large businesses and everything in-between. It’s really representative of the average of what’s going on in social media marketing.

Jerod Morris: Okay, and for folks who want to see the report, you can go to SocialFresh.com/Future and check it out. We’re going to dive in to some here on this episode. Obviously, we can’t get into everything. Definitely recommend that people go there–again, SocialFresh.com/Future–and check out the report.

The Disconnect Between How People Say They Are Using Social Media and How They Should Be Using Social Media

Jerod Morris: It’s interesting. One of the first observations this made in the report shows what seems to be a disconnect between what people think they’re using social for, what their goals are, and maybe what social is best for them. What I mean by that is, 76 percent of the people surveyed listed ‘awareness’ as one of their top social media goals, yet there were a number of experts that you guys quoted in the report who suggested that this might be a bit of a myopic focus.

What should people–or in our case digital entrepreneurs who are selling maybe an online course, a SaaS application, or premium WordPress product–what should folks be focusing on when it comes to maximizing the time and money that they’re investing in social media?

Jason Keath: Great question. Ten points for the word ‘myopic,’ if everybody’s keeping score at home. Great outline of that. Yeah, that’s right. Social media is great for scale. It’s set up for scale, and it’s set up for all these awareness metrics. You can measure reach really easily. You’ve got a list of followers that’s public. You’ve got ‘likes,’ comments, and Retweets–all these numbers that are thrown at us as vanity metrics.

Even if you’re smart enough to know you should be going after maybe customer loyalty, sales, or leads instead of focusing on awareness, your boss may not be as savvy, necessarily, and may want to really get those awareness numbers higher–those vanity metrics, those followers, et cetera.

Social media in general is still trying to overcome that kind of setup. I don’t know if we’ll ever really get past it, but on the base level, social media is best at people talking to each other. It’s really great at customer loyalty, customer service, really good at building community, really good at taking a smaller audience and making them go from like to love, taking your customers and making them really great word-of-mouth opportunities for you. Or taking your average customer and making them, giving them a longer customer life cycle, giving them upsells, giving them just a better feeling about the trust of your business.

The real low-hanging fruit in social media is that customer loyalty, is that word of mouth, and then building from there. I usually tell people to focus on three audiences in social media, and this is reflected in the report. All the expert advice we got from a lot of folks in the industry is to focus first on your customers in social media, then focus on your qualified leads. If you’re B2B, that could be actually, if you have a qualified lead program or if you’re a consumer business, it could be just focusing on the target audience that’s best for your product.

Then focus on your fans would be the third audience. Your fans can be people that have great word of mouth of your company00even if they’re not necessarily a customer or going to become a customer. They can be partners, et cetera. Those smaller audiences are much, much bigger reward for the business typically.

Jerod Morris: That’s interesting because a lot of people, when they think about social media, they think about filling up the top part of your funnel, but you’re saying think about social media as a way to interact with people across all the different levels of engagement that you have.

How to Use Social Media to ‘Take People Who Like You and Make Them Love You’

Jason Keath: Yeah, and there’s so much opportunity for social. We asked people to name their top two social media goals, and awareness was just by far the most popular mentioned. Awareness, you can do great awareness building using social, using advertising products that exist on social networks, using video.

There’s a lot of great tools in social networks and social media that can help you with building the top of the funnel. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s harder. It’s going to cost a little more money. It’s typically more difficult, and it’s going to cost a little bit more time.

Now, if you are good at talking to your customers, you’re good at talking to your qualified leads, and you’re good at talking to your biggest fans on social, then, yeah, build that top of the funnel. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the average social media team is very small, and the average marketer has a lot on their plate.

Typically, you’re missing the lower-hanging fruit if that’s your number one focus. If you haven’t built the bottom of your funnel to be really good–and your customer loyalty, and customer service to be really good–that’s a better opportunity for the average business.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, and there’s a great quote in the report from Jay Baer, who says, “Embrace the organic social functions more like an email newsletter, and think strategically about how you can use social to make people who like you, make them love you,” which I thought was great and what you just mentioned.

Jason Keath: Yeah, Jay’s great. His new book is about customer service, so that was a great fit for his expertise with the report.

Jerod Morris: Do you think that part of the issue comes back to the fact that people don’t really understand what their goal is? Or that, if they do have a stated goal, it’s the wrong one? They don’t understand what KPIs they should be looking for. I know there was another stat in there.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it was around 25 percent of people didn’t even know what the return on the investment was from the time and the money that they’re investing in social. It suggests that they don’t even know what they should be tracking. Is that a big issue that folks are having who may be struggling with what they’re doing in social media?

Why Having Clear Goals and KPIs Is So Important

Jason Keath: It’s a great question. ROI, we asked folks, 63 percent said they got a positive ROI from social media, which I think is pretty high. If you’re able to say, “These activities I’m doing on Facebook, on Twitter, et cetera are directly correlating to a return on investment for my business,” that’s typically not the easiest process to implement for your business–having the measurement system in place, having the right goals in place, and tracking people along that process, along that funnel.

I thought that was a pretty good sign for the industry, but you’re right. We did have like 24 percent, I think, were not sure, and 12 percent said they were not seeing a return. We correlated that to a few things, typically a lower experience level when it came to marketing and social in general.

For instance, when we tracked people that were using social media software versus people that were not, just the fact that, if you were using social media software versus just posting natively to Facebook and Twitter and not really monitoring it, using any analytics, using software, you saw ROI 19 out of 20 people, roughly 95 percent. If you weren’t using software, it was virtually a coin flip.

There were a lot of things that really told us that the audiences that have a better system in place, a better process, are doing really well. The folks, the marketers out there that are measuring what they’re doing have an idea of what their goals are. Even if it’s the simplest process, even if it’s just Hootsuite and Bitly, two free tools, even those folks have a much higher percentage chance of seeing a good return and seeing it work for their businesses’ bottom line.

Jerod Morris: The key, then, is to be intentional about it, to be strategic about it, not just spray and pray, but actually have a plan in place for what you’re doing.

Jason Keath: Yeah, it’s shocking, right?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Jason Keath: Yeah, basically. We just did a discussion about it when we launched the report. @jeremarketer, the co-writer for the report, mentioned there are a lot of things that are hard to measure. There are a lot of things you can measure, and you can get really intricate with your process and your plan to see what works and what doesn’t. But just simply measuring what you can and learning from that is an initial step that some marketers don’t even take, some business owners don’t take.

Being very intentional about that and learning what data really tells you useful information and what data is more just surface and doesn’t give you as much useful information for actually making more money for your business, that, in itself, is a very important step. These stats amplify that even more.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, absolutely. It won’t surprise anybody, or at least it shouldn’t surprise anybody, that Facebook continues to dominate in terms of where people are spending their money, where people are seeing ROI. I think everybody gets that, but there were a couple of insights that I thought were really interesting that digital entrepreneurs especially need to pay attention to.

Dark Social and the Future of Social Media

Jerod Morris: Like I said, I want to ask you if this is something that a digital entrepreneur should pay attention to. You mentioned, there’s actually a heading on one of the pages that says, “Is the future in dark social?” ‘Dark social’ refers to one-on-one messaging, which can be harder to track. That’s Facebook Messenger and the direct messaging that you get on any of these platforms.

It’s clear to see how this could be a challenge, especially for bigger brands who have tons and tons of fans, and that can get kind of unwieldy to manage. But for smaller online businesses, like the kind that many digital entrepreneurs are running, is this dark social, this one-to-one messaging, is this something that they should be taking more advantage of to connect one on one with customers and even prospects?–especially as we talk about connecting with folks further down the funnel with social.

Jason Keath: Yeah, it’s a hard conversation to give businesses advice on. It’s so new, and it’s so hard to really wrap your head around both tactically and strategically. At the conference this summer–we’ll have our 18th conference in Orlando, Social Fresh 2016–we’re going to have a panel that’s going to touch on at least dark social. We’ve got the CMO of HubSpot. We’ve got some folks from Simply Measured that will probably be talking about it.

Everybody I talked to recently about the future of the industry and where it’s going–everybody that I consider to be very smart in social media–mentions this to me. ‘Social messaging’ is basically what people are calling it, so it’s basic messenger. It’s WhatsApp. It’s half of Snapchat is one-to-one or one-to-many private messaging. It’s what a lot of the Millennials and younger people are focused on.

Even today, social messaging as a platform is larger than social networking. The people that are using these apps, and the amount of content they’re sending, is more content and more people than are active on public-facing social media feeds like Facebook’s feed, Twitter’s feed, Instagram, and LinkedIn, et cetera–which, in of itself, is very important fact.

But the ways to interact with people if you have a Facebook page and you have a brick-and-mortar store, you probably see messages come on Facebook Messenger. That’s important for you to respond to. That’s something that’s very easy to recommend people pay attention to. They’re probably also getting messages or reviews on Yelp, OpenTable, things like that as well.

For the average business, there’s not really a lot of actionable advice to give today that you can directly measure. Simply Measured is actually working on a system that allows businesses to measure social messaging better, but it’s hard. We’re probably years away. I would say two to three years away at a minimum before most businesses have to worry about this.

You’re going to see a lot of untrackable traffic to your website, to your landing pages that might be coming from private Facebook groups. It might be coming from direct messages in addition to the email traffic that you get that you can’t track.

One of the biggest lessons, for me, is what we just talked about, which is investing in your customer, investing in the audiences that are going to be your word-of-mouth ambassadors, and making sure those people are taken care of. If you do that, all of this conversation that happens in private, one-to-one, one-to-many messages that you can’t track, you can’t measure, you can’t see, it’s going to be better for your business if you’re investing in the right people.

Even influence or marketing would be another layer, but just taking care of your customers which are your best ambassadors would be the best, most actionable thing that I can tell people in response to social messaging right now.

Jerod Morris: I guess there are two layers to social messaging. There’s the one-on-one messaging that’s happening between other people that you can’t see, that you have no control over, that you can’t even really interject into that conversation. Then there’s the one-on-one messaging that you’re having with potential prospects, with customers, and that’s really the only one, obviously, that you participate in.

I know you said it can be one to three years. Is there any way that folks can start to open themselves up for that? Obviously, you want to respond if someone sends you a message. Is it something where people should be making themselves available on a Facebook Messenger or Twitter Direct Message, that kind of thing?

Where You Should Be Making Yourself Available (and Why) on Social Platforms

Jason Keath: Yeah. Especially if you’re a brick and mortar or a service industry that’s local, you’re already getting questions asked directly if you’re a business. If that’s already happening, then doing response in Twitter DMs, doing response in Facebook Messenger is something you should definitely look at, especially as a customer-service response tool.

If you read Jay’s book, Hug Your Haters, he talks about messaging people up to two times publicly for customer service situations, and then taking it into a direct message, an email, or a phone call. That’s great advice and really the way most businesses should be treating those opportunities.

There’s some businesses that are using these. Facebook Messenger is a platform now with an API. You can plug your store into it. You can do automated response bots in it that are customer-service based, that are transactional based. If you’re ESPN and a media company, you can send updates about the Carolina Panthers or the Arizona Diamondbacks. You can do all kinds of things in these apps, but a lot of that is very costly on the time and the budget frontend for the average business.

If you’re ESPN, it makes sense. If you’re Jet Blue, it might make sense, but if you’re a mom and pop, an entrepreneur, or even a medium-sized business with one to 25 people doing marketing and PR, it might not be a resource play that you can handle right now because it’s so new. It’s so untested, and it would take a lot of time and effort in testing to really prove the benefit.

If you are interested in that, there are people that can do that for you. There are companies that are building that kind of thing. But for the average business, it’s something to start thinking about, to start paying attention to, but acting on it is probably a little farther away than this year or next year.

Jerod Morris: So Instagram is growing as a trend that we see continue, and you say in the report, “Instagram will officially become the second most popular social network for marketers to spend their time and money in 2016.”

The numbers, the trends, they’re clearly there. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that Instagram still, at least among some groups of folks, has a perception problem of being more of a niche social media site for photographers, foodies, fashion folks, personal trainers.

I still even catch myself thinking that way sometimes. I know that’s not right. I’m just saying it’s that perception that is there. How can digital entrepreneurs who may not have an obviously visual product and who may even have this kind of bias against Instagram for that very reason tap into Instagram? Clearly it’s a place to be.

How to Approach Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter (and Which One Is Outpacing the Others)

Jason Keath: It’s interesting. You have a B2B bias against Instagram right now because it’s hard to get links out of the site. That’s an immediate barrier for most folks. Consumer brands probably see a lot more value in the platform, and that makes sense because of the visual nature of it.

However, if you are running an advertising campaign for, let’s say, a social media conference like we’re doing for Social Fresh, we use Facebook Ads. We use Facebook Ads because it’s got great targeting. It’s a really mature, the most mature, social advertising product, and now you can do all of those ads on Instagram as well.

We just talked about how you should focus on your customers first. When we’re building a sales funnel for our conference, we have a very targeted audience that we want to make sure knows about the date and time of our event. It is an awareness problem for us, and Instagram’s advertising product is really mature because it’s building on top of Facebook. That, in of itself, is going to have a lot of marketers paying attention.

These might be more lifestyle photos that represent your business or industry. You look at somebody like IBM or GE and the type of content that they’re creating that is almost more like a consumer brand. That’s the type of advertising and imagery that’s going to work on Instagram.

If you talk to Instagram, I’ve talked to them directly, one of the things that they’re trying to focus on, focus content on, is making it look more DIY. In other words, less polished, less like corporate commercial, and more just, “Here’s what’s going on at your office, your industry, your employees,” that is a little more entertaining and a lifestyle focus. It can be self-help. It can be solving your customers problems. Those are the directions that I would look.

That being said, if you’re B2B, the bigger opportunities are going to be on Facebook, are going to be on LinkedIn, Twitter, maybe even a SlideShare. If you do have a specific awareness challenge that Facebook’s Ad platform can help you achieve through Instagram ads, I think that’s something to test. The audience is clearly there. It’s bigger than Twitter now. It’s bigger than LinkedIn. It’s growing faster than both of them, and it has an amazing ad platform attached to it.

Just because it’s growing and just because it’s going to receive a lot more attention from social marketers in general, doesn’t necessarily mean that your business has to be there, and has to be investing in it. However, I think look at it, and look at that opportunity and see if there’s something you can test there on that platform.

Jerod Morris: You mentioned LinkedIn, and Facebook obviously dominates the paid advertising spend and the ROI as we talked about, with Twitter and Instagram coming in next in terms of where people are spending their time and their money. But surprisingly, at least to me, was LinkedIn is the one that ranked second in terms of ROI. Why do you think it is that LinkedIn, that people have been able to get a better return on LinkedIn despite it not being used as much as Instagram and Twitter?

Why Some People Get a Better ROI with LinkedIn and When LinkedIn Is a Good Choice

Jason Keath: Well, LinkedIn has been consistent. It hasn’t gone away. It’s bringing in revenue. They’re growing slowly compared to the other social networks, but they’re growing. They’ve got specific products for HR, for some sales folks, for hiring that are really powerful.

Then, when it came to our advertising question, what we saw there is we forced people to pick one. Facebook completely dominated. I think it was 75 percent of people said, “If I had to pick one, Facebook Ads are the best,” which is pretty representative of what the technology can do and the value of it.

LinkedIn was second. It was the only question we asked where LinkedIn showed up in the second spot. It was third or lower in everything else, and I think it’s because there’s a small, but significant audience of marketers, mostly B2B, and probably even mostly SaaS-software-focused audiences, or service focused, that see a good value from the LinkedIn Ad.

You can do things on LinkedIn Ads that you can’t do elsewhere, the biggest of which is targeting job titles–which can be very powerful. However, they’re a little more expensive, so most of the folks that are spending money on LinkedIn Ads that are seeing success, they typically have a larger price point and can stomach that kind of cost-per-lead price that’s going to be higher on the LinkedIn platform.

That being said, I’ve seen that success consistently from this smaller, yet significant audience that is mostly B2B companies on LinkedIn, and I don’t think that’s going away. They are improving their ad platform. They are consistently investing in it, so it’s still got a lot of opportunity for a certain type of business.

Jerod Morris: I have a question that I wrote down: if you could only focus on one network starting today, would it be Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn? I’m guessing based on your answers to these last few questions that it’s really going to depend, and it’s going to depend going back to your goals, going back to your budget, going back on who you’re trying to reach. Would that be an accurate guess on my part?

What Social Platform(s) You Should Be Focusing On

Jason Keath: Yeah, definitely. Instagram’s younger. LinkedIn’s older. LinkedIn’s probably better for B2B. I’d say Instagram and Twitter are better for consumer. These are all generalities. Your business mileage may vary. For us, for instance, for Social Fresh, going out to social marketers, Twitter is probably the best of those three. Although, again, we’re looking at Instagram because there’s a lot of social marketers there’s typically a majority female audience now, for us at least, for our target, and they’re more likely to be on Instagram in a lot of ways. It just depends on your specific demographic target.

Jerod Morris: Let’s turn our attention to content development here a little bit. I thought it was interesting and encouraging that you ask people where the biggest amount of their time is spent, and the biggest chunk of time was spent in content development.

Do you think that we’ve moved past this old era where content marketing and social media marketing, especially paid social media marketing, were seen as mutually exclusive? It seems, to me, that the smartest marketers realize that content and social really feed off of each other and make each other more successful.

Why Smart Social Media Advertising Has a Content-Focused Approach

Jason Keath: Yeah. At the first Social Fresh conference, which I was planning in 2008, ‘content marketing’ as a term did not exist. Nobody was using it. We were talking about social media, and there’s still people trying to debate whether it was ‘social networking’ or ‘social media’ is the term.
We talked back then about blogging. We talked about video content. We talked about creating images. All of that was what people define as content marketing in a lot of ways now. It’s a little broader, but it’s always been the same conversation.

As social networks have gotten noisier, as the competition has gotten to be louder and louder, and harder to get your message out, the focus on more quality content, on a higher-quality product when it comes to video, blog posts, images, or what not, that’s created a subsection conversation that is content marketing. I think that’s great.

For us, we’ve always discussed content and social in the same breath. Email marketing is in that conversation. It’s all digital today, and it all touches itself. It’s all hyper-connected. I don’t see them as separate discussions at all.

Jerod Morris: No, and they certainly shouldn’t be. Again, for people who are doing it right, they’re not. When it comes to content, and specifically types of content, obviously blog post content works. I think images were the one that people who responded to your survey, that they invested the most time in and that they were seeing the most success from. But the one that seems to be growing the most is video.

How can digital entrepreneurs be leveraging video more in their social media marketing? Are there suggestions that you have for creating good, quality video that will work in social media that’s not cost-prohibitive? I know that’s a big challenge for folks who want to get into video.

Why Video Is So Hot Right Now

Jason Keath: Yeah, there’s so many levels of video, and you’re right. If we look at the top three social networks, in a lot of our questions, especially where people were seeing return and where they’re investing their time and money in the future, it’s roughly Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

If you look at what all three of those are focused on, it’s video. Instagram and their newest release, they have an entire section tab dedicated to video. They’re stringing together videos now, similar to a Snapchat story. Facebook’s Ad platform and their feed are focused, hyper-focused on video. Twitter is also following suit and focusing on video, trying not to fall behind there.

Purely as an opportunity standpoint, your opportunity to stand out in this noisy system we’ve described and your opportunity to build the trust with your smaller audiences, your customers, your fans, video is something you have to be looking at. To build on top of that, you have Snapchat as a big trend, which has a lot of video content. You have live streaming platforms like Facebook Live, Periscope, and Blab that are video focused.

There’s a lot of opportunity to experiment. I don’t think you need to focus purely on the storyboarding, the classic TV-commercial-style video where you’re storyboarding something, you’re doing product features, you’re doing high-quality video shoots. That’s super time-intensive, and if you are a big company, maybe that’s important for you. You look at what Lowe’s Home Improvement is doing on Snapchat, where they’re building stories through short video clips or short stills, that’s more of a mixed media experience.

Snapchat’s a great platform for relearning what video can do, and using the Snapchat story product can really, if you start playing around with that, testing it, trying to build narratives where there’s a beginning, middle, and end, and a purpose to your story, that’s really video editing. That’s what video editing has been forever, and this is a much easier way to create things like that. That’s a great education point.

And just one more piece of advice. Look to live-stream platforms to get comfortable with video. Look to Periscope. Look to Blab. Look to Facebook Live to play around with it, to get comfortable in front of the camera, and to experiment with lighting, with microphones, with everything. Just minimum viable product–get something out there, play with it, learn about it, and test it.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that’s what’s so interesting about video. It seems intimidating, yet video doesn’t need to be perfect to work. It seems like what people really want is authenticity and something useful. You can do that in a video that isn’t the highest ‘visual quality’ as long as it tells a good story. Maybe it uses text to help extenuate the visuals–as long as audio is good, which is an interesting part about video is that a lot of people judge the quality of a video by the audio quality and the lighting, of course.

What other rules of thumb do you have for people who want to dip their toes into video with Periscope or with one of those, maybe want to put it out on Facebook and even do some advertising with it? What’s the minimum that folks need to do? Any rules of thumb you have for what people need to have in those videos?

How Even Inexperienced Digital Entrepreneurs Can Leverage Video

Jason Keath: Yeah, you want to tell a story. Facebook Video Ads are great to experiment with. You can almost build a funnel with three to four videos that you try to expose the same audience to.

For our conference, for instance, we might have a 30-second spot just with highlights. Then we might have really short clips of past attendees talking about it, testimonials. Then we might have short clips of speakers from previous conferences on stage showing the product. Then we might have videos of how the conference has actually changed businesses for the better and make that kind of the hard sell at the end–and trying to get people to watch all four of those.

You can do that really easily with Facebook Ads, with Twitter Ads, with Instagram ads now. Make them short. Make the first few seconds really visually engaging because a lot of these videos are muted. The phones are muted or the computers are muted when they’re first watching them. Making them click the volume button, making them engage through a highly visual engagement–people moving around, beautiful people, smiles, action, et cetera. Making sure you have that narrative, have that purpose of your video.

We do interviews like this for our podcast. We do Blab recordings, webinars, things like that. Just taking excerpts of something like that and putting it as a video ad or something is not necessarily the most engaging, so you might have to do a little editing. You might have to do a little bit of planning, of strategy, and testing.

Another key is to test your Facebook Ads, your Instagram photos, your Twitter Ads, and things like that. Learn which visuals are hitting well, and do something that’s very similar or those exact images as your first few seconds of your video. That’s really helpful as well to get people engaged.

Then a software tip, just a really simple software tip, I use something called ScreenFlow, which is $100. I use it on my Mac. It’s as good as any editing software out there. It actually makes some things a lot easier. If you’ve never done video editing, you’re going to have a learning curve. But you have to learn it, somebody in your company has to learn it, or you have to find somebody that you can outsource it to that’s quick and can move fast with these things and learn.

Jerod Morris: Hey, when you talked about that three-, four-video sequence, like what you guys are doing for the event, obviously, you have that last video that’s more the harder sell for the event. Where are you sending people in the first few videos? If they click over, are they going over to the landing page for the event? How do you work that in as you go through the funnel?

How (and Where) You Should Work Links from Your Videos into Your Funnel

Jason Keath: A lot of these platforms, you can easily list a link. You can pop up a link at the end of almost all the videos. Typically, what we do is always have our landing page link for all of them. If you have a longer sales cycle, you may want to take people through more of an education of your product.

For us, we’re typically very narrow in our advertising targets. We’ve found ways that we can really target people that are social media marketers with our ads, so there’s not as much product education. It’s just more convincing people of the quality of what we have to offer through testimonials and excerpts, but we try to include the link all throughout.

Typically, for us, people land on our conference landing page, they’ll check out the speakers. They’ll check out the topics. They’ll realize they’re interested. They may have to go get approval. They may have to submit for budget. They’ll come back again in a couple weeks. They’ll realize they got an email from us that the price is going up in two days, and then they’ll buy it then. It’ll come back to our landing page several times, and we build the ads around that same concept.

Jerod Morris: That’s a really interesting point and a good one. It’s important to have that level of self-awareness for your product and your company, to understand what your sales cycle is. Like you said, you guys have a pretty good understanding of how you’re targeting and what your sales cycle is. You can send people directly to that sales page.

Other people who maybe do have a longer sales cycle but they send people right to the page, they bounce, and they lose that person. Whereas, maybe getting someone to opt-in, taking them through a lead-nurturing sequence might have been a better decision.

Do you find that there is sometimes, for people who struggle with social media, a disconnect between where they’re sending people, the offer they’re presenting to people, and maybe what they actually should be based on what their product is and what their sales cycle really looks like?

The ‘Commitment Curve’ and How It Helps You Build Trust

Jason Keath: Yeah, totally. I think everyone has a nurturing problem. If we all got better at understanding the 17 steps between someone knowing about your company and buying your most expensive product, it would solve all of marketing’s problems.

For me, we look at something I learned a long time ago called the ‘commitment curve,’ which is you get people to take little steps, and that builds trust between you and them. Ultimately, you try to get them to accomplish a larger step, a larger trigger, goal, et cetera. That’s typically a large purchase. This is something political campaigns do really well where they get you to sign a petition as a first step in that commitment curve.

For us, our product, it costs a decent amount of money to attend Social Fresh conference. Mostly, it’s businesses paying for that for their marketers to attend, but we get everybody. We get a really good rating on people that get value out of it and return year after year. But It’s hard to convince someone– they just learned about the company, they’ve never heard about it before–drop $1,000 or more a ticket, depending on how much they’re getting involved in the conference.

So you have to build steps in-between. Our research report is a great introduction to our company. They can spend time with that. They can hear us on podcasts like this. We also have other reports that they can purchase that are a lower price point. We have webinars and things like that, experiences that are good content marketing where they can get to know us.

You have to build those steps along the way. If you’re jumping from an introduction to trying to cram a purchase into their news feed, then it’s a much lower conversion rate for everyone.

Jerod Morris: Jason, when I’m not here hosting The Digital Entrepreneur, I’m over hosting The Showrunner, talking about podcasting, or hosting one of the other three podcasts that I do. I’m big into podcasting. In looking at the report on that list of content, I was kind of disappointed to see podcasts so low on the list of content priorities for the companies that you surveyed.

I’m just wondering your thoughts on why that was. Is that because the medium itself is still gaining traction with content consumers? The medium itself doesn’t really lend itself well to quick consumption. Or something else? Why do you think people aren’t prioritizing podcast content more? Especially when it’s proven its ability to connect so well.

The Value of Podcasts

Jason Keath: I’m a big believer in podcasting. It falls into a larger category for us that we talk about called ‘trust content,’ which is spending more time and more meaningful moments with your audience–with a smaller audience typically.

Podcasts, there’s a lot of barriers. You can’t measure it very easily. Most people are turned off by that. The biggest barrier is it’s hard. It’s hard to get a good-quality audio. It’s hard to turn out consistent content. We’re getting ready to start season two of our podcast for Social Fresh. We believe in it, but we can’t do it year round. It’s just too much of a resource drag on our small team.

But we believe in it enough that we are doing it again. When I talk to people in person, one of the number one things they mention is, “Oh yeah, we love the Social Toolkit Podcast. We love listening to that.” It’s one of the number one things people mention to me as just an ad-hoc, unrequested piece of information, so I love that.

I’d also argue that it’s not that low on the list. You’re saying it’s basically number 12 out of a list we have that’s one through 12, but we had about 20 to 25 different content that were listed for that question. It’s in the top 12.

Jerod Morris: Ah, okay.

Jason Keath: It’s seven percent of people who create podcasts at least once a month. I think it’s growing. It’s young. It’s a hard production, really draining for folks, and most folks aren’t set up to do that yet–just like video.

Jerod Morris: Good, I’m glad it was higher than I thought. That’s good.

Jason Keath: I think it’s higher than you think. Also, there’s no quick podcasting. There’s quick video with Snapchat, live streaming, and short video on Twitter and Facebook, but there’s not really any quick podcasting that does any good for anyone. That makes it a little bit more difficult.

Jerod Morris: Hey, getting back to the video real quick. What’s the ideal length of a video? Maybe that’s an impossible question to answer. It may depend. Is there a rule of thumb for how long my videos should be if I wanted to have an impact in social media?

Finding the Sweet Spot for Video Length

Jason Keath: Yeah, 43 seconds, I would say, precisely.

Jerod Morris: Oh perfect.

Jason Keath: Typically, 30 seconds to two or three minutes is what a lot of people say. I’d say keeping it between 30 and probably 100 and 120 seconds–90 seconds is a sweet spot. That really challenges you.

What you’re going to have to end up doing is taking what is in your head as a video and breaking it up, usually into two, three, or four videos. You probably have too complex of an idea of what video you want to create.

For us, it was highlight reel, testimonials, speakers on stage, examples of that, and then the last video would be simply one case study telling that hard story at the end. Think of those very simple stories you can tell with video, and then try to tell them really well in this short timeframe.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. Well, again, the report is at SocialFresh.com/Future. I really, really encourage everybody to go check that out. You can dig into some of these numbers that we’ve talked about today. Jason, obviously folks will go there, and they’ll be able to check out that report.

If there’s one element or takeaway from the report that you think all the digital entrepreneurs who are listening to this should walk away from this episode from, walk away from reading that report from, what would that be?

The Importance of Focus

Jason Keath: It’s to take a close look at what you’re doing and if you’re reaching the audience you want with the content and the social network that you’re using. There’s a lot of people that are focused on Facebook only, or they went the other direction and focused on all the social networks they can get access to.

My interesting part of the report was seeing that LinkedIn Ad performance, or seeing that there’s still people that answered Pinterest or Snapchat as an ROI answer. It was much, much smaller, but there are people getting a return out of SlideShare, out of webinars, out of podcasts. People are still listening to these things, and it’s important for every business to find their niche. You don’t have to do all of this. You shouldn’t be doing webinars, podcasts, infographics, and video on Snapchat, et cetera, et cetera.

Trim it all down. Find those niche opportunities for you that work for your business. If you’re an e-commerce fashion brand, look at Instagram. If you’re a B2B SaaS company, look at LinkedIn. Really focus on getting those right. There are so many people in these social networks now, you can focus on one and find a ton of opportunity. I think that’s a bigger trend that’s going to play out for social marketers moving forward.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, excellent advice, Jason. If you want to get more from Jason, you can follow him on Twitter @JasonKeath. Jason, thank you for your time and for your insight. This has been a lot of fun.

Jason Keath: Yeah I appreciate it, and I really, really highly encourage folks to check out our conference. If you go to SocialFresh.com/Rainmaker, we’ve just put up a temporary, for the next couple of weeks, $100 off. Check it out. We’d really love to see some Rainmaker, Copyblogger fans out there at the conference this year.

Jerod Morris: Absolutely. It’s SocialFresh.com/Rainmaker. All right, Jason, thank you, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Jason Keath: Thanks, Jerod. Appreciate it.

Jerod Morris: My thanks again to Jason Keath of Social Fresh for joining us on this episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. Again, the URL for the report is SocialFresh.com/Future. If you are interested in their conference, it is SocialFresh.com/Rainmaker. Go check that out. Their conference is in August.

How to Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

Jerod Morris: Again, make sure today or tomorrow that you go to Rainmaker.FM/DCA. The price of Digital Commerce Academy is going up. Even if you get to this episode after Friday, May 27th, the price of one of those courses that is in there would be $495 if we sold it individually, and you’re getting four of those courses plus everything else for $595 per year. It’s an incredible deal.

We really want you to get in there, learn as much as you can so that you can take your digital business to the next level and be as successful as you can possibly be. That is the goal with The Digital Entrepreneur podcast. That is the goal of Digital Commerce Academy. We look forward to you taking advantage of it.

Again, Rainmaker.FM/DCA. If you’re listening to this on the day the episode goes out, make sure you go there to get the best price that you can get on Digital Commerce Academy.

All right, everybody, thank you very much for listening to this episode. We will be back next week with another brand-new episode of The Digital Entrepreneur. Until then, take care. We will talk to you soon.

The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Luck is not a business strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: I remember those days.

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

Jerod Morris: It came into being for that reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whether Digital Entrepreneurs Should Feel Comfortable Building on Top of WordPress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Take Your Digital Business to the Next Level

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Nope, nope.

Jerod Morris: No? Am I wrong?

Brian Clark: It’s $595.

Jerod Morris: Oh.

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Yep. Friday, May 27th.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Take care, everyone.

The Transcript

How Virtual Reality May Shape the Future of Digital Commerce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Oh my.

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

The Challenges of Integrating VR With the Open Web

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

Jerod Morris: A-Frame.

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

Jerod Morris: Probably.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Are you a gamer at all?

Jerod Morris: I’m not a gamer.

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

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

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

Jerod Morris: Slack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How You Should Be Preparing for This Inevitable Future

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

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

Jerod Morris: Periscope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jerod Morris: Yes.

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

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