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Behind the Scenes: 2014 in Review and the Road Ahead

2014 was a pivotal year for Copyblogger Media.

We …

Launched a Pilot program for our Rainmaker Platform using a podcast
Evolved the platform to version 2.0 during the Pilot phase
Arrived at the 8-figure level for annual revenue, up 34%

For an added twist, we tried things, observed, learned, and made changes on the fly throughout the year – from content, to format, to development. Which, let’s be frank, may have made us look like we didn’t know what we were doing.

Welcome to the real world. When you play in real time with a real audience, you figure out everything you need to know. But you can’t be afraid to adapt based on what they tell you just because it differs from “the plan.”

In this 32-minute episode Robert Bruce and I discuss:

Why 2014 was such a strange year around here
The big project we’re working on for 2015
The biggest Rainmaker.FM episode of 2014
I (finally) reveal my new curation project
The future of the Rainmaker Platform
The content trend you need to focus on in 2015

Listen to The Digital Entrepreneur below …

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The Show Notes

The Transcript

Behind the Scenes: 2014 in Review and the Road Ahead

This episode of Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, which we will be talking about a little bit later but you can see more of right now at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Robert Bruce: Happy New Year Brian.

Brian Clark: Happy New Year to you too.

Robert Bruce: Thank you. It’s 2015, for those of you who are still in a fog rolling into the days of January here.

Brian Clark: That would be me. So, thanks.

Robert Bruce: Well you get a lot done, it seems. Some of which we are going to be talking about a little bit today but we have laid out a nice little plan for this episode. Another behind the scenes episode of Rainmaker.FM.

The first half of the show we are going to take a look back at 2014 and the second half of the show we will be looking ahead at 2015.

We were talking the other day that folks in and around the Copyblogger audience, if you are watching closely, you may have noticed some interesting things going on, you may have even questioned some of the decisions we have made over this last year, wondering why we are doing what we are doing. So we will talk about a few of those things and obviously, what we learned from them. Then will go onto 2015 in the second half of the show and what’s coming next for us, which hopefully will be informative and useful to all of you.

Why 2014 Was Such a Strange Year Around Here

Robert Bruce: Yeah Brian, what do you think about 2014, generally first? Some of these things, turns, decisions we made.

Brian Clark: It was a big year. It seemed like a crazy year. We tried a lot of things, we learned a lot of things and we figured out a lot of things, and yet we did it all on purpose as a demonstration.

When we launched this podcast at the beginning of 2014 we had a general plan for what we are trying to accomplish but we were really learning as we went, figuring things out, taking in feedback and seeing what worked and what didn’t. And of course, that early effort turned into the New Rainmaker training course, which shows that I’m still not a jaded old fart. But in our LinkedIn discussion group when they were talking about the best of 2014 from Copyblogger, several people chimed in and said it was the New Rainmaker training course that was their favorite thing from the year. That warmed my old jaded heart.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and let’s talk about that for a minute, because we started the podcast in January, we built on the Rainmaker Platform, both the product site and added the podcast to it, but it was always going to be more than a podcast. It was always like so much of what we do is going to be a demonstration of the platform itself, of marketing strategies and that initially turned into this Rainmaker training course, which was essentially seven episodes. The first seven episodes of this podcast that we repackaged, cleaned up, added transcripts and then three on top of that. Three separate webinars that you did. So there are ten lessons altogether in that course.

Brian Clark: Well the interesting thing about that is that, yes, it culminated in a training course, but the podcast was actually the launch of the Rainmaker Platform pilot program, so that was a first for us. We launched not only a new line of business but the primary go-forward line of business for this company with a podcast. I think that really kind of spoke volumes, considering we are pretty much known as a writing focused company.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: But it was outstanding. With the pilot program, we got a lot of enthusiastic people who understood the deal, “You are getting a great deal. You are going to help us make it better”, and literally from April to September we went to Version 2.0. It really was amazing. It’s amazing of course on the side of our developers, who I am extremely proud of, but I’m also proud of all the people who gave us crucial insight. Some of the stuff we kind of knew, and it was confirmed. Other people had requests, that we were like, “Yeah, that’s good.” And I really think that sort of customer-centric collaboration is what it’s all about. You know, building something according to what’s in your head and throwing it out there, it’s really not that all that smart a strategy, although you still see it all the time.

Robert Bruce: Anything else you want to hit on the launch, Rainmaker 2.0 and the Rainmaker Platform?

Brian Clark: Well, let’s just say that when you are betting the future on something and it goes well, you know adding another seven figure revenue line for the company, and pushing us into eight figures overall for the year, that’s pretty big. So I’ve got to say I’m pleased, despite the chaos.

If it looked chaotic on the outside, multiply that by ten on the inside, and try and build a SaaS product, coordinate editorial and support and all that. But that’s the thing, 2014 really just set the stage for the go-forward, which you’ll start seeing being implemented this year. That’s all we’ll say about that right now because I think the demonstration of what this thing can do is the most important thing, instead of me just saying how wonderful it is.

The Biggest Rainmaker.FM Episode of 2014

Robert Bruce: So back to this podcast in particular, we covered a lot of ground over the year and in a relatively few episodes. There was some specific things we wanted to cover which dictated our schedule for releases but one topic in particular kind of dominated the year, and that is curation.

Brian Clark: Yes, so we took the summer off because we had work to do on evolving that 1.0 to a 2.0. By the way, that won’t happen again.

Robert Bruce: It won’t?

Brian Clark: No. Hey if you want to take the summer off, that’s fine but I may quit everything else. I’m going to do the podcast of this show. I’m doing 50 at least this year.

So yeah, we came back in the fall and we did a couple of interesting little NPR storytelling with guests.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: With Tom Asacker, and Sally Hogshead, who will be keynoting at Authority Rainmaker. Some people liked them because they were short and quick, other people didn’t. But it took an incredible amount of work to do those little episodes. Right, Robert?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I had to write a script. I did the interview first, which is usually all a podcast is, as we demonstrated with the guests we had at the end of the year, then you take that, you select excerpts of what the guest expert said, and then you write a story around it. Then you give it to Robert to narrate. It was quite the production. I was proud of those two episodes but I don’t think we felt that the response was strong enough to justify that amount of work.

Robert Bruce: Yeah it’s very interesting. The interview, the straight kind of interview shows, and the shows where you and I are rambling along talking, were some of the biggest ones and, of course, the content curation topic as well.

Brian Clark: Yeah, so the curation one was more of an educational format. One thing we did catch is that some people like the interviews a lot and some people didn’t, because that is very standard in marketing podcast land. And I get that. We get that. That’s why we have experimented with different styles. We don’t want to be like everyone else.

But one thing came through loud and clear is that people want to learn something. Whether it’s short, or it’s an hour long interview, there has to be a focus on education and I always try to do that, but I think it gave me some good insight into going forward.

So anyway to your point, the curation topic was really kind of a tease at a new project, that at that time was nothing, because it was only an idea, and I hadn’t implemented anything at that point. But it was basically the roadmap of what I wanted to do with this new project that’s built on Rainmaker. Not only that, but completely done by me. I don’t have you, and I don’t have the Copyblogger team behind me really, I mean to the extent I need assistance with design work, Rafal of course is always there, but I kept the design really minimal.

Anyway this is a busy CEO’s side project as case study of a curation business model. We didn’t know how that would resonate or not, but I thought it would do well because curation is a hot topic. You have got people talking about “content shock” and glut, and this and that, which I think is mostly overblown, but there is incredible value in being the person who finds the best stuff, packages it up, gives their perspective and commentary, and delivers it preferably by email. So that was my idea.

So you and I did the show and it was like a home run. I mean people just went crazy over it.

Robert Bruce: We are going to talk more in the second half of this show about your project in particular, without giving away any details.

It was really kind of a basic overview. There was a little bit of shock in the sense of the history of Copyblogger and what we do, and what we are known for, versus a new kind of strategy. Not that Copyblogger, as you said in that episode, is going to move to a curation model.

Brian Clark: No, Copyblogger is what it is.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: This is an alternative approach to it, that I want to do no matter what. But I figured if people were interested it might make a good case study and it turns out people are interested. So taking that fact with the emphasis on education, you’ll see the next several episodes of this show focusing on that project, which we will talk about a little bit in the next part of this show.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

The Next Big Project We’re Working On

Robert Bruce: So we’ve chatted about this a couple of times, and we are trying to decide what to talk about and what not to talk about in terms of our next project here. I am going to leave it to you to start this little conversation. So away you go.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and this is part of the “try it and figure it out” motif that was 2014. We started out with the brand, New Rainmaker, that was always supposed to signify content, and then of course we launched the Rainmaker Platform. And that of course is the SaaS service that allows you to do what we do effectively as we are demonstrating it.

You have to be careful with a term like ‘rainmaker’. I mean people instantly get it in the context of sales and marketing but that also means that you have to be careful in a trademark sense. That it’s a generic term, so you have to have a trademarkable, ownable term to prevent confusion in the marketplace. That’s why it’s really important that we have modifiers like New Rainmaker, Rainmaker Platform and then people saw us introduce Rainmaker.FM. I understand why it happened but it was kind of concerning, you know, everyone was like “The New Rainmaker Platform, New Rainmaker”, you know, there was all this confusion in the insertion of ‘New’ because it’s in the domain name.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: We do own RainmakerPlatform.com. It’s not the sexiest url but it’s easy for people to find the ever moving sales page for Rainmaker Platform. But that’s what I am talking about.

If you’re looking from the outside, and you are like, “These guys are all over the place.” Hey, we did it in public, in front of you, on purpose, so you can see that we are not just making this up about iteration and adapting, and putting out there and figuring it out. That’s how it really works, and if some people want to say we were kind of inconsistent last year, that’s okay, but I think that’s the wrong lesson to take away from it. This is actually how it works if you are truly listening to the audience and to your customers.

So in the fall, all of a sudden we introduced Rainmaker.FM, which is a url and we were using it for the name of this show. And right about that time is when we had the lightbulb moment, right Robert?

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: I think it was somewhere around when I started the interview series and, I’ll be honest with you, I did those interviews as a demonstration of what I consider a form a curation. You know, not putting myself out there as the expert in that context. I’m having a conversation with someone who I really want to hear from.

I think it was David Siteman Garland that said, “The key to a great interview is being genuinely curious in what the other person has to say.” I think that’s why those interviews went so well.

But the recurring theme that kept coming up about podcasting, and Jay Baer said some very interesting things about how we have video, and we have text and they are never going away, but audio is the only true mobile content format.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: And of course, we thought of that a year in advance, which is why we did a launch by podcast. But I think that the whole idea of Rainmaker.FM and the conversations you and I had about what we really wanted to do, finally I just decided “Yeah, we are going to do that.”

So, here’s what I’ll say. This show will again be eventually known as New Rainmaker and Rainmaker.FM is something that encompasses that show. Now, can you guess what that is Robert?

Robert Bruce: Yeah but I’m sitting here trying to remember what the heck we talked about in terms of what we are going to reveal and not reveal. I mean it will become clear soon enough.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Let’s just put it this way. Right now Copyblogger is our flagship content site and we are about to launch another one.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: It couldn’t be anymore different, but you have probably caught on if you have seen what we did in the last year. Again, launching a product with a podcast. So stay tuned on that. I think we will just wrap up 2014 on that note.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, let’s leave it at that.

And let me say that this episode of Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the RainmakerPlatform.com. If you are looking to easily build a powerful sales and marketing website that drives your online business, head over to RainmakerPlatform.com. There’s that url again, Brian. Head over there right now and sign up for a free 14 day trial to see if it might be a fit for you.

Rainmaker handles all the technical elements of good online business practices for you. That’s design, content, traffic and conversion. And she does it all under one roof. Get over to RainmakerPlatform.com right now and get back to building your online business in 2015.

Brian (Finally) Reveals His New Curation Project

Robert Bruce: Okay, speaking of 2015, you hinted at, and have been talking a bit about this new project of yours, and we had also touched on how the curation episode of this very podcast took off in the minds and imaginations of our listeners. What is that going to look like in regard to this project, this podcast and your project in 2015?

Brian Clark: I believe the next three episodes of this show will be me doing a three-part case study on my curation project. I guess you could think of it as a mini course, like we did with the original New Rainmaker course from the beginning of 2014, but it will extend beyond that as I have new insights to give.

So this will be kind of the core of “Here’s what I am doing. Here’s my strategy. Here’s my plan. Here’s how I plan to execute. I’m going to continue doing that and then the things that I do well and the things I screw up, I’ll come back and continue to report on.

A lot of people who have already caught on to what I am doing are kind of excited about being able to get notes in process. It’s not, “Here’s what I did five years ago.” It’s “Here’s what I am doing right now and here’s what happened.”

As we have been discussing, this is a curation project. Meaning I am finding and synthesizing content created by others to create these email newsletters that hopefully have high value and are able to build an audience because I am delivering value in the sense that I am finding the best stuff for people without them having to do it. One neat little package from someone that they trust.

So I’ve actually, what am I on? I have done three issues, right?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I think that’s right. The third one was yesterday.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I wrote the first two with no audience at all and then I kind of leaked it out on social media. So people are starting to figure out what it is but if you haven’t seen yet, it will be in the show notes but it’s called Further. Further.net. Not a cheap domain. Even for a .net.

Robert Bruce: I was going to ask you about that. Let’s reveal the price tag on that.

Brian Clark: You don’t want to know. Not as bad as you might be thinking but worse than maybe you are thinking. I don’t know.

So, what is it about? It’s not about marketing necessarily. There are aspects of it that relate to entrepreneurship and marketing in that context but it’s really I guess, encapsulated in a pithy tagline, personal development without the fluff. It’s very science based research driven information, non-guru, non crazy, new age stuff about living your best life. In fact, that’s the headline on the homepage. “Live Your Best Life.” There’s a brief description and an email opt-in. So that’s it, Further.net.

I guess the other two components you would want to know about from being able to follow along with the case study, would be the Facebook page, which goes by the handle facebook.com/furtherdotnet and on Twitter, it’s @furtherdotnet.

Unfortunately, I wish Twitter would allow you to put dots in names. That would be much more attractive but they do not, so I had to spell it out. In both cases the dot is spelled out.

Robert Bruce: So that is a look at what’s coming for content on this podcast. We are looking into the curation mini course, the case study of Brian’s new project, and there’s going to be interviews. There’s going to be a lot more than that.

The Future of the Rainmaker Platform

Robert Bruce: One thing that is directly related to that on the product side of what we are working on in 2015, is the suite of curation tools in the Rainmaker Platform.

Brian, you and Rainmaker customers across the board do not have access to that yet but these tools are coming, and they are going to be in the standard package of the Rainmaker Platform. This is going to make your job a lot easier in a lot of ways. We have talked about this before what these tools are going to do and how they are going to help, particularly in the curation aspect of doing content, but what are your thoughts on some of this that is coming in relation to how you are doing things now?

Brian Clark: Well without the tools inside Rainmaker, I am having to patch everything together which is the problem we are trying to solve, and in some cases I had to deal with some pretty annoying translation issues from page to newsletter template. Don’t even get me started. It was horrendous but hopefully that is all going to be worked out. The problem is, I wanted to get this thing started in advance so that we could kick off the year with this case study.

So, you are right. Things will get easier when the curation tools are released as features inside of Rainmaker. Now here’s the good news, because if you have been following along with our product announcements for Rainmaker, we said the curation tools are part of the pro package, which will be fully delivered by the end of March. That includes marketing automation, adaptive content and the full learning management system and what else Robert? I mean there is a lot of cool stuff coming but that’s part of a more expensive plan.

After I saw that reception of the curation episode and the fact that I’m doing this myself, I said, “Hey, let’s throw the curation tools in the standard package.” So if that’s not clear, if you buy Rainmaker right now, that’s the standard package. So when the curation tools are added, which is coming, you will automatically get that upgrade. You don’t even have to do anything because obviously we upgrade all Rainmaker sites for you.

Another interesting thing that’s coming in the standard package, right now of course we are using Rainmaker to produce this very show. One show on one site. Well, Rainmaker is about to become capable of hosting many, many shows on one site, which will be very handy for this Rainmaker.FM thing.

In fact have I said too much?

Robert Bruce: I almost just stopped you, but I think we are still okay. I mean I don’t want to make a damn circus out of this.

Brian Clark: You love a good circus.

Robert Bruce: But yeah, you are right, it’s going to make things a lot easier for the project we are doing called Rainmaker.FM. The next iteration. The next evolution of Rainmaker.FM. All of these details will be coming out. We don’t mean to be coy here but yeah, and that will be part of the standard, to Brian’s point, of the standard Rainmaker platform.

Brian Clark: If you have been waiting to get onboard because you felt like you had to invest in the professional package to get these particular capabilities, including podcast stats, multiple podcasts hosting on one site and all the curation tools. You don’t have to sweat it because you could get started right now and those features will be out shortly. I’d say within the month. A month and a half at the latest. That’s my latest word from development.

So it’s very exciting. My curation product is a demonstration that I am going to do a case study of. Rainmaker.FM is going to become a highly educational content site that is also a demonstration of the Rainmaker Platform. I think you kind of get the feel here. We are committed to teaching you one way or another whether you use our products or not, but it’s going to be pretty apparent how much easier and more powerful the Rainmaker Platform allows you to be to do these kind of projects.

The Content Trend You Need to Focus on in 2015

Robert Bruce: Let’s close this episode out about content and let’s go back to content strategy and philosophy.

You brought something to the table a few months ago, this idea of adaptive content. How do you want to approach this? Is it something we are going to be focusing on a lot in 2015? How do you want to introduce this to the Rainmaker audience?

Brian Clark: Well I think adaptive content is, or can be, a confusing topic if you have heard of it at all, but you will. In the sense that there are many definitions of it. I mean I have seen people talk about adaptive content starting with mobile responsive design, which of course we have been doing at StudioPress and with Rainmaker as a matter of course. It’s a mobile world now.

If your site doesn’t render automatically on a phone, a tablet, a laptop or a desktop, you’ve got issues. To me that’s just web 101 now. And of course, that is built right into Rainmaker.

It’s adaptive in the sense that it senses what device or what screen size you are on, and it adjusts. But the broader concept of adaptive content is the type of user you are based on your interests and needs, the content itself changes.

So that sounds a little bit like marketing automation and I think we have been using the two terms side by side because I think there is a line. But there is a reason why most of the marketing automation companies, Marketo, Eloqua, and even HubSpot are very expensive and they are aimed at companies that have sales teams.

Marketing automation is really identifying moments when you can identify that a person is ripe to speak to a member of the sales team.

Adaptive content is more for companies like Copyblogger Media, where we sell online or for service companies for example that do lead generation online but it’s not exactly going to a 20 person sales team. It might be coming into a realtor. Like when I was a broker, the leads came in by email and then I distributed them as necessary to agents and all that kind of stuff.

It’s really the content and your copy that is your sales team, whether you are selling digitally online or you are doing lead generation of the type that I just mentioned.

So adaptive content is really about being your sales team, being the right sales person at the right time, for the right person. I think that’s the best way to think about it. But I guess, you are going to be learning more about it.

I’m working with Jerod and Demian on the series Demian is producing because as we were building out the advance features of Rainmaker, we realized it’s really an adaptive content platform. And rather than a buzz phrase, I think adaptive content is just what content marketing will be in the future as consumers whether, B2B or B2C, or whatever the case maybe, will expect a more responsive and personalized experience. It’s no longer good enough just to produce content that half or 60% of people on any given day are not interested in. I am not denigrating that because that’s how Copyblogger was built. But the technology is getting smarter and that means that your competitors are going to start doing it. It’s really not super complicated, it’s actually kind of wonderful.

Remember, Robert, the theme of the New Rainmaker training course and again, if you haven’t taken that, go sign up. I think 30,000 people have taken it, which is pretty cool. But create less content with more impact. Well that’s what adaptive content allows you to do. You are able to serve up the right article from your archives at the right time, instead of it being buried back there.

There is stuff in the Copyblogger archives that I’ll stumble upon and I’m like, “Ah, I wrote that?” That’s not how it should be and that’s not how it’s going to be. It’s the technology that’s exemplified by what Rainmaker is evolving into with the professional edition that will be out by March. So that’s why we are starting this educational campaign primarily on Copyblogger, and also on this show, about adaptive content and how you do it.

Robert Bruce: So that’s a very brief look at 2015. What’s coming for us and as it relates to you. I mean we didn’t even touch on things like Authority Rainmaker, the live show we are putting on in Denver in May. We didn’t touch on a major shift that we are doing regarding email on Copyblogger, but we will be talking about that.

Brian Clark: Well you know we killed blog comments and our Facebook page last year, so we had to top that somehow. I would expect we might have some surprises.

Robert Bruce: I think so.

Well thank you for listening everybody. If you would like to get Rainmaker.FM delivered to your digital doorstep and not miss a thing in 2015, head over to rainmaker.fm and sign up by email. Just click that big green button you’ll find at the top of the page there and we’ll take care of the rest. And if you want to go direct to iTunes and subscribe to Rainmaker.FM in iTunes, I’ve got a little bitly link for you. It’s bit.ly/rainmaker.fm and it will take you directly to the iTunes page.

Brian Clark: And if you would like to give us a nice review or some stars of some sort, that would be wonderful.

Robert Bruce: Some stars of some sort. Yes, that is the language that iTunes understands. So yes, a rating or a comment over in iTunes is extremely helpful if you like this show and you want to see us do better in iTunes. Thank you for that. We always appreciate it.

Wherever or whenever you are out there on the Internet, good luck to you. Brian, thanks for this episode. See you next week.

Brian Clark: Thanks man.

Seth Godin on Stepping Up and Making it Happen

by admin

Seth Godin is the author of 17 bestselling books. He’s the founder of email marketing pioneer Yoyodyne, and the charity-driven publishing platform Squidoo. And he’s the selfless dispenser of daily wisdom via the most popular marketing blog on the planet.

But if you had to sum Seth up in one word, it might well be impresario.

The classical definition of that word refers to a promoter, manager, or conductor of an opera or concert company.

The modern definition, set forth by Seth himself when he’s teaching others about the prime entrepreneurial role of the connection economy, is as follows:

One who gathers others together for creating art–the art of making a ruckus; the art of inventing the future; the art of important work.

Whether bootstrapping a startup by building an audience first, curating content to create something vibrant and new, or assembling a tribe that changes the world, it’s the modern impresarios who best take advantage of the power of the Internet to turn intangible ideas into real things that really matter. Things that change lives.

In this 30-minute episode Seth Godin and I discuss:

How he sold 40,000 copies of his self-published book (so far)
Seth’s early failure, and what he learned from it
His training for the post-industrial “connection economy”
The kind of business that we’re all in now
Why it’s worthwhile to embrace the impresario concept
How to waste your life, one simple step at a time
If Seth’s decision to stop publishing traditionally was worth it
Why every bestseller is a surprise bestseller
The biggest challenge in producing his latest book
The future direction of education

Listen to The Digital Entrepreneur below …

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The Show Notes

The Transcript

Seth Godin on Stepping Up and Making it Happen

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

Brian Clark: Seth Godin, we meet again. How are you sir?

Seth Godin: I’m fabulous. It’s so great to talk to you.

Brian Clark: Yes, it’s great to have you back and it’s wonderful to see the work that you are doing, which of course we are going to explore a little bit today.

Who Is Seth Godin?

Brian Clark: Now Seth Godin probably doesn’t need much of an introduction to most of you, but just in case, he’s the author of 17 bestselling books. One of those books, Permission Marketing, was the first marketing book I ever read, thank goodness. I had nothing to unlearn and that basically set me on the path I am today.

I think by far, he runs the most popular marketing blog in the world. He’s founded and sold several companies but mainly I think he thinks of himself as a teacher and he’s certainly been one to me. As a reminder, I’m Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media and this is Rainmaker.FM.

Today we are going to dig down a little bit with Seth. He’s got a new book out but I think we have got an even bigger scope of things to talk about and how it all ties together with the work that Seth is doing right now. So that’s what I hope to accomplish today.

How Seth Got His Start

Brian Clark: Seth let me start here. I don’t think this is something that we’ve ever specifically discussed, but you spent 15 years as a book packager. And number one, I’m not sure everyone knows what that means, so let’s start there. But talk a little bit about that period of your life.

Seth Godin: It’s fair to say, no one knows what it means. It’s a little bit like being a movie producer, except for books.

It turned out that until recently there was a shortage of books. The world needed more books, particularly complicated books, than there were people to make them. So folks like me would come up with an idea, write down a proposal for the idea and send it. Amazingly all the publishers would let you send it to them at the same time.

So I would send it to 30 publishers that I worked with the most often and if someone liked it, they would mail me money and I would make the book. Some of the books had my name on it, other books were bigger than that or had famous people’s names on them.

I did the Information Please Business Almanac, which was basically the Internet in a hardcover book. I did books on gardening, investment and a whole range of stuff. I brought Stanley Kaplan into the book world. It took 3 years to get them to say that I could make books with their name on it and I had to build the whole thing.

I loved that industry and I learned a lot about work from that industry. There were two things particularly that resonated. One, almost everyone with very few exceptions was extraordinarily honest, kind, easy to work with and kept their word. That was really cool.

And number two is, it’s one of the only industries where you could get paid basically for ideas. You certainly had to implement them but you would send an idea to somebody and they would send you money back. And once you get hooked on that cycle of creating for a market place and being able to do it professionally, it’s pretty compelling.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s fascinating because it’s such an entrepreneurial activity. You’re literally making something out of nothing, other than an idea. You are taking disparate resources and putting them together, often without a net, and yet when you talk about the post industrial connection economy, was there a better training than this job?

Seth Godin: Well you see I also learned a whole bunch of things that are dangerous and aren’t true anymore.

The first one was, the first year I was doing it I was a complete failure. I sold nothing. And that’s because I was trying to write for readers, I then learned that you have to write for editors. That the way you get a book published is making the intermediary happy, not by making the media happy.

That explains why you will see a lot of books in the bookstore that someone thought was a good idea but the readers don’t. So in order to survive, that’s what I did but in a disintermediated connection economy, that doesn’t work nearly as well. There isn’t a middle man you have to please. There’s an end user you have to delight.

But the second thing that’s really important, that I learned and tried to teach the book industry but they are resisting is, that in the book industry the bookstore is their customer. That is who they focus all of their energy on and my proof is that if you work in a bookstore, you have a phone number that you can call that will be instantly answered by someone at a publisher, who will help you with your problem. But there is no phone number to call if you’re the reader.

They don’t want to hear from readers. They want to hear from the middle man. And once you can embrace the idea that your customer in the connection economy is the conversation, that you don’t succeed unless person A tells person B, then you can start becoming focused on being in the connection business and it’s the connection business that we are all in now.

Brian Clark: Excellent. So I wanted you to talk about that a little bit, number one because without what you did and what you learned in that role, I’m not sure the Seth Godin we have would be the same Seth Godin, which is true of anything of course but in this case I think you really see the evolution of that sort of role.

Something we have been kicking around on this show in relation to a lot of things, but specifically to this broad concept of curation, everything from maybe putting together a newsletter that draws from different sources and becomes its own original commentary, to something like TED, which is a curated conference experience.

The concept, the word which I love, is impresario and back in 2012 you wrote about impresario and becoming that person. You did a really interesting workshop, which I believe was with some college students that was pretty amazing because you cranked out a book I believe with a group of kids.

So the classical definition of impresario from the Italian I guess, is a promoter of operas or concerts and broadly I guess the dictionary definition is someone who puts on an event. Someone who puts it all together. Much like a movie producer or a book packager. But you have a broader definition of impresario and let me read that for people.

“One who gathers other’s together for creating art. The art of making a ruckus, the art of inventing the future, the art of important work.”

Now I have not received my copies of your new book yet.

Seth Godin: Oh no.

The Impresario Concept

Brian Clark: They are on route. It’s close. But from what I can tell, there’s a direct line between this concept you kicked around in 2012 and the new book. Talk a little bit about what an impresario means to you.

Seth Godin: Okay. So let me take it into two pieces. First I think it is totally worth while for the Rainmaker audience to talk about what it is to be an impresario today, just from a technical business point of view. If you go to your favorite search engine and type skillshare impresario godin, you can get the course that I actually did and it’s free on SkillShare. You may have to sign up for SkillShare to see it but it’s a three hour lecture and there is no upside for me other than sharing the insight. I hope people will try it.

What I argued there was, there are really only two ways to go forward as a player in this economy. One is you can be a cog in the system, hoping to get picked. A freelance writer that gets hired by Microsoft to write an article or the person on the chocolate assembly line who puts the bonbons in the box or the investor who waits for the stock to go up. These are players in a system bigger than any of us.

The other thing that’s relatively interesting too is the ability to put on a show. To say, “I’m going to assemble this information, these people, these resources, these assets, put this into the world and hope that people will embrace it.”

And impresarios range from the guy who started COMDEX, which became the biggest trade show in the world, to somebody who is running a meetup in their little town, or to somebody like a book packager, who puts together maybe brand names, editors, whatever and makes a thing. And that spirit of being an impresario has to happen before you can do that work. You have to say, “My role is to put on a show and I have enough confidence in myself and I care enough about the people who will interact with it, that I am willing to put myself on the line emotionally to do that.

That leads to my second thing which is why is this hard? And it’s hard, not because we don’t know how to do it, because we do, it’s hard because we have been raised to need permission. And the impresario refuses to wait for permission. That’s what makes them an impresario.

So in fact you are correct, it’s a straight line from that to the new book which is called What To Do When It’s Your Turn. And again, trying not to be a hypocrite, I took my own advice so I wrote it, I edited it, I laid it out myself and I published it myself. It’s being printed in Vancouver and shipped from Seattle. You can’t buy it on Amazon. It’s at yourturn.link and what I tried to do in the book is argue as cogently and passionately as I could that in the post industrial world, there’s a moment, I don’t know how long it will last, when people can stand up, choose themselves and say, “Here. I made this.”

Brian Clark: So getting back to the book packaging, to the fact that you just assembled, and I love the word assembled, this book from beginning to end, even in distribution. Do you view yourself as an impresario? Is that who Seth is?

Seth Godin: On a good day there’s no question about it. That is what I seek to do.

Brian Clark: And on a bad day?

Seth Godin: On a bad day I have been known to answer 1400 emails and do nothing of obvious productive value.

Brian Clark: I think that’s everyone though. You can’t really get too down on yourself for that, as long as you have more good days than bad, I would suspect.

Seth Godin: I mean it’s very hard. We have optimized our culture for the quick hit, the quick click, that burst of endorphin that one gets from seeing one mentioned by someone on Twitter or answering an email successfully or zinging someone like a troll. Those things when we do them feel pleasing but if we do them long enough in a row, we create nothing. And so that hard work, at least for me, is to put all of those toys away and to sit with nothing until I am lonely enough as Neil Gaiman has talked about, to actually do the hard work starting something.

Brian Clark: Remember when you announced that you would no longer be working within the context of traditional publishing, any regrets?

Seth Godin: The biggest regret is, I said it in a broad way that made some people think that I meant that I wasn’t going to be putting things on paper or sharing ideas, which wasn’t what I was saying. I was talking to myself and basically saying, “I worked super hard for a long time, to earn the privilege of writing a book a year for trusted, esteemed colleagues in the book publishing industry.” Which used to be so perfect because they would pay you a check, you would do the work, you would have a whole year to create this environment and then hand in this thing and they would do all the heavy lifting of spreading it.

So I did that many years in a row and I loved every minute but what became clear to me was that cycle that seduced me into insulating myself from certain parts of the market and working to please my editors, who were amazing but weren’t necessarily my readers. That making the bookstore happy is really different than making a reader happy. So I wanted to put that stake in the ground so that I wouldn’t then in the next lonely moment I had turn around and go back to where I was because I loved doing that, but this was scarier and I felt it was important to do it.

Brian Clark: It’s interesting that you say that because it seems to me, relating back to what you learned from being a packager, that you knew not to focus on pleasing the intermediary and yet it’s so easy to do. These are your friends, your colleagues, these are people you respect and yet you recognized the disparity between perhaps their sense of taste and what the audience really needs. Is that a right way to say that?

Seth Godin: I’m not even sure it’s taste. Every bestseller is a surprise bestseller. Every bestselling app is a surprise. Every bestselling book or movie is a surprise and that’s because the conventionalism wants to do what it did yesterday because it feels safer. So there are endless rules of thumb about price points and formats, and what a thing is supposed to look like and what it’s supposed to deliver. And if you want to change conversations, you have to break those expectations.

I’ve been lucky enough to have super brave publishers and editors who have encouraged me to do that sort of thing but I end up feeling badly. So if I put a book in a cereal box and Barnes and Noble opens every cereal box and throws it out, I feel bad that I made my publisher waste all that money. So yes, you have to at some level take enough of a leap in who you choose to work with, that if you really want to do this work on the edge, you are going to make the very people you trust the most, uncomfortable.

I saw you do this with your conference, your amazing conference because it couldn’t have been a unanimous vote of a claim from your team, when you said, “Let’s go from this virtual electronic thing that involves serving no refreshments to strangers, to building this thing that might not work.” That’s hard and in order to do it you need to look in the mirror and say, “Yeah, I want to do that because it’s worth it.”

Brian Clark: Yeah, you pretty much know that one, although they were very supportive but my inner lizard brain was working overtime, going “What if no one comes? What if no one buys anything?” And I feel a little blessed in this sense that when I am truly afraid of something, I have to do it. But I’m afraid that’s no everyone’s reaction. As you know too well, the natural response is to do nothing.

Seth Godin: Right. Exactly.

The Biggest Challenge with Seth’s New Book

Brian Clark: Kind of along those lines. Now Icarus was a novel project but it’s still was really kind of pre-funding, engaging, interest. It was proving a case that you still took to a publisher. This time it’s just you. What has been the biggest challenge?

Seth Godin: The biggest challenge when I was working on the book was, “Is this enough?” You know I’m going way out on a limb, both financially and organizationally to do this. “Have I put enough tears into this book because I am not going to get a chance to do it again?” And I will confess that when I wrote the last essay in the book I was in tears and as I hold the book in my hand, I’m super pleased with it. There is very little other than the seven typos that I want to fix. But once it was done, it’s been extraordinary to see how a decade of permission marketing creates an asset of value.

You know, if Walmart comes out with a new line of walkie talkies and puts them at the cash register two weeks before Christmas, no one is surprised when they sell a million walkie talkies because Walmart has been spending 30 years building the value of the cash register before Christmas. So of course, they are going to sell a million walkie talkies. And it’s 30 years to be an overnight success.

In this case, I said to my readers, “I made this thing. Here’s what it is. I’m not even going to tell you everything that is in it, which is the opposite of what Hollywood does and the opposite of what most things online are about. I hope you trust me enough to buy a few.” I sold 28,000 copies before we went to press. That’s thrilling.

Brian Clark: Wow.

Seth Godin: Really thrilling because to me it was a validation of showing up every day for 10 years and saying, “Here, what do you think of this?” So that raised the stakes for me because I don’t want to disappoint these people who get the 28,000 copies.

So now the book is out and after 10 days we are up to 40,000 copies. And that’s even more thrilling because it means that the book is being spread and it’s proving that maybe other people can do this too. That’s part of what I am doing here. There are no secrets. There’s no magic sauce. I sell no consulting. I’m basically saying to people, “Here’s how I did this, you can do it too because if we can get more worthwhile ideas in the world, it would be a project that I’m glad I did.”

Brian Clark: It’s kind of amazing considering that on a good day, depending on how the New York Times Bestseller List works, you could get on that list with what, 5,000 copies sold?

Seth Godin: Yep.

Brian Clark: Yeah. It’s ridiculous, as you know but 40,000 copies, that’s amazing.

I purchased 3 copies. One for myself, and one for each of my two children, who are 9 and 12.

Seth Godin: Yay!

Who Seth Wrote This Book For

Brian Clark: And I can’t think of a better way than to hand my daughter a book about it being her turn. I know your kid just went to college, so you’ve been through this, but they don’t listen to their parents necessarily but if they see something, maybe it’s a beautiful book such as this, or it’s their basketball coach who tells them the exact same thing their Dad just told them but all of a sudden it makes sense to them. It’s just very refreshing to have this resource.

I know you have purposefully not said, “On page 32 you’ll find this nugget of wisdom.” You know, the typical book marketing type thing but if I want to presell this book to my children, it should arrive any day, what would I tell them? From the mouth of Seth, should I say, “Here’s what this is. I want you to look forward to it and take a look when it gets here.”

Seth Godin: “On page 32, there’s this story about the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.” Made famous by Ghostbusters.

Brian Clark: That’s right.

Seth Godin: In fact, there is that story but you don’t have to presell the book because the book is pretty enough that it better sell itself. The real challenge, and I wrote it for your kids, without even knowing you were going to get it for them but that’s who it is really for, is for the parents who have been seduced and brainwashed by the industrial economy, to have the guts to consistently honor the kind of stuff that you and I are talking about.

That when you raise free range kids and you talk to them about being the best in the world at something and you talk to them about being an impresario and failing and making a connection, when they come home with a C in biology, you are not allowed to say “You need to get an A, even if it means doing less of that thing that you are great at.”

Brian Clark: Right.

Seth Godin: I worked so hard when I was raising my two sons with my wife, to create that environment where we meant it. That it was more important to us that you successfully edit a Wikipedia article, than it was that you do well in algebra in 8th grade. Because one is about compliance and the other is about generously contributing. And what we need to figure out how to do during this inter-regnant period, is how to raise kids who don’t measure their worth in the famousness of the college they get into or the number of digits in their SAT score but in fact can point to a trail they leave behind. A trail of projects, a trail of connections, a trail of overwhelming expectations with the big promises that they make and deliver on. That cycle can’t start when they are 24. It has to start when they are 9.

Brian Clark: Yes. I love the term “free range kids” and it’s more of an intellectual thing, than necessarily roaming the way kids don’t seem to get to do anymore, but I did as a kid.

Will College Serve Any Purpose in the Future?

Brian Clark: The interesting thing to me is with the rate of change and we hear a lot about this, you’ve just sent your children off to college and I even wonder even in 5 or 8 years with my two, does college serve the purpose we think it does anymore? Do you think about that?

Seth Godin: Oh for sure. And different colleges are approaching this problem in different ways. There’s no doubt that there is a higher education bubble going on. There’s no doubt that we have confused certification with accreditation, with competence, with desire and there’s also no doubt that the combination of sort of tribal behavior, binge drinking, organized sports in certain institutions, is really belying the whole reason that we invented higher education in the first place.

So with all of that wrapped up together, the question is what are we hoping these kids will be doing in 20 years. And the chances that they will be a middle manager moving paper around in a skyscraper in midtown Manhattan for $200,000 a year, are very, very low. And I get that was the ticket out for our grandparents, and that was the home run for our parents but if that’s what we are training our kids to do now, to have no real obvious, best in the world, scary skills, that they are not trained in, “I can take an idea and make it real” but they are trained in, “I can go to a meeting. Tell me where the meeting is being held and I will take good notes and I will say back to you what you just told me.” I think we have wasted years of their lives and a quarter of a million dollars in tuition.

Brian Clark: Yeah, from my perspective of course, I just like to teach them to be entrepreneurs so they never have to rely on anyone else. They never have to be picked by anyone else. On the other hand, I’d like them to get a good liberal arts education like I had. I have a law degree that I no longer use technically but I’ll tell you what, the way that I was trained to think in law school has served me everyday since.

So I really struggle with 4-7 years of binge drinking, which let’s face it, unfortunately that’s a big part of the college experience. Then not only that, but taking them out effectively of what’s happening in the world.

Seth Godin: Yeah. I totally agree and we need liberal artists. But famous colleges are not training liberal artists. Famous colleges are training pre-law students.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Seth Godin: And there is something different. That if I walked into a second year philosophy course in almost any famous college and said to any individual in the room, “What would you do about Terri Schiavo?” Would they be capable of having a cogent conversation with me? Or would they say, “Well that wasn’t on our last test.”

Brian Clark: Yes.

Seth Godin: And that’s the problem. In the last couple of days, I’ve been confronted with not one but two examples of marketing courses that are being run at institutions you would have heard of. And I have to tell you, I am stunned at, and marketing is obviously not liberal arts, but it’s being taught like a liberal arts class in these two cases. Being stunned at a) the age of the textbook that is being used, b) the things that they are being asked to memorize, c) the vocabulary that their teacher is saying is important but most of all, the way the interactions go.

In one class each student is expected to give a PowerPoint presentation. They are marked off if there aren’t four bullet points on each one of the slides describing in detail something that came from the notes. And it’s an industrialized, memorized processing which no one has been taught to think about anything and this is an area I have some expertise in and I am just looking at this mouth agog saying, “These people are going to be leaving this institution thinking they learned something, when in fact they have learned nothing.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that really worries me. And I like to almost brag about how objectively clueless I was when I came to the Internet about marketing and how permission marketing was “Oh, this is how you do it. OK. Great.” But that’s not entirely intellectually honest because I majored in psychology, with minors in sociology and philosophy. I got the ground work like you wouldn’t believe of what marketing, certainly modern marketing, really is and yet my mother of course thought I was wasting my time. Turned out fine though.

What’s Next for Seth Godin?

Brian Clark: Is it too soon to ask what’s next for Seth Godin?

Seth Godin: You can ask all you want. I have made it my full time job to figure out the answer. I’m sitting here with Winnie Kao who is working with me full time on that very process. I have made it into a process. There’s a wall covered with cards, notes and plans and we are having a sprint for a few invited guests next week, where we are going to talk about one of them in detail. And I am not going to rush it. I’ve got to figure out how to use this platform in a way that matters and if I don’t do it the first time, I’ll do it the second time or the third time but it’s tempting to hide and I’m trying very hard to not do so.

Brian Clark: It’s a lesson right there though about how the next thing evolves. Process, not necessarily concrete plans.

Seth, thank you so much for your time. Please tell everyone where they can find out more about the book and more importantly, get their own copies.

Seth Godin: If it’s interesting to you, I hope you go to yourturn.link. You can not buy one copy but you can buy more than one because the whole point is to share it. I will finish by saying, you sir are the poster child for that. You have been sharing from the first day I met you and I hope your listeners and readers understand just how extraordinary the consistent generosity is. It’s not easy to do and you keep pulling it off.

Brian Clark: Thank you so much for that. Thank you again for your time and Happy Holidays sir.

Seth Godin: Alright. We will see you soon.

Michael Hyatt on Building a Media Platform and Becoming a 10-Year Overnight Success

by admin

Michael Hyatt is the former Chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, the seventh largest trade book publishing company in the U.S. In fact, Hyatt has been involved in the traditional publishing business his entire working life.

Not the typical profile of a do-it-yourself blogger, right?

And yet, in 2012 when Thomas Nelson was acquired by HarperCollins and Michael left his executive role, it was his 8-year-old blog that opened the door to an exciting and vibrant new chapter of his life. A blog that he toiled in frustrating obscurity for many of those foundational years.

It was the blog that provided the launch pad for his New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World. And it was the book that opened the door to his membership program Platform University. Seems like we can learn a few things from this guy about building our own online marketing and sales platforms.

In this 31-minute episode Michael Hyatt and I discuss:

His path from traditional publishing to independent media
The rough start as a blogger, and what skyrocketed his traffic
The dirty little secret of productivity
His realization about the power of online publishing
What you need in addition to world-class content
The critical importance of owning your digital platform
The compelling nature of audio vs. text content
The interesting way he produces his very popular podcast
Almost every author’s epic missed revenue opportunity

Listen to The Digital Entrepreneur below …

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The Show Notes

The Transcript

Michael Hyatt on Building a Media Platform and Becoming a 10-Year Overnight Success

Brian Clark: Hey everyone, Brian Clark here with another episode of Rainmaker FM. Today I have another special guest, someone that I’ve admired from afar. And as in this case, sometimes you just don’t connect with people even though you’re in the same city, at the same conference, or whatever the case may be and that’s Michael Hyatt.

Now many of you are probably familiar with Michael. He has done some really great work in the last three or four years. He is the former chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, which I think was the sixth largest publisher around. He was sprung from that position when it was acquired by Harper Collins in 2012.

He did not slow down from that standpoint as you might have noticed. He is a proprietor of MichaelHyatt.com with the tagline “intentional leadership.” We’re going to talk a little bit about that concept today. He has a podcast, This is Your Life and he is the author of many, many books, more than you probably think. Most notably is Platform from 2012. He was nice enough to mention me and Copyblogger in that and we do appreciate that.

First of all, join me in welcoming Michael Hyatt to the show. Michael, how are you?

Michael Hyatt: I’m doing great, Brian. Thanks so much for having me on. As I said to you before the show, I’m a total fan of Copyblogger. I recommend it everywhere I go. It has really helped me in my writing. Thank you for what you do.

Brian Clark: I appreciate that very much and the feeling is mutual. Like I said, I’ve been watching your work and this amazing audience that you’ve built in not the longest amount of time really. I just love it because effectively you’re walking the talk.

You’re practicing what you preach and that’s really what I want to dive into today. Real quick though, I always ask people from, okay you were born and we’re here today; what happened in the middle there? I did just find out though that you went to Baylor. When were you there?

Who Is Michael Hyatt?

Michael Hyatt: I graduated in ’78.

Brian Clark: Okay.

Michael Hyatt: I met my wife there. And my parents lived there until two years ago in Waco, which is a little town outside of Baylor. Are you familiar with Baylor?

Brian Clark: I went to Texas A&M right down the road, but I was there a little bit after you. But you know, we don’t like each other during football season. You know how Texas is.

Michael Hyatt: I know.

Brian Clark: It’s like its own religion there. I didn’t know that, so I found that out so we did have that I-35 experience going for us. Okay, you were at Baylor and then if I understand correctly, you started your career as a literary agent. Is that right?

Michael Hyatt: No, I actually started in the publishing business. It wasn’t until much later, about 20 years later that I became a literary agent.

Brian Clark: Oh, okay. Fill me in on that because I missed the gap there.

Michael Hyatt: When I was in college, I was completely enamored with books. I just saw the power of books to really change a culture and change people’s lives. I got really committed to books.

So I went to work right out of college. It was actually while I was in college my senior year at a local, small publishing company. Then I ended up going to Thomas Nelson. I was working first in marketing and then I went over to the editorial side of the business.

Then I decided to start my own company. I did that for about five years. That company unfortunately it essentially went bankrupt. We were able to sell it so we kind of avoid all the ugly parts of bankruptcy. Then I decided to be a literary agent, which was a great education. After a while, I decided I wanted to get back into traditional corporate publishing so I went back to Thomas Nelson in 1998 where after several years I became the president and then the CEO and the Chairman and so forth.

All my background is in traditional publishing and traditional media. In 2004, kind of on a whim, Brian, I started blogging. I thought I’ve always wanted to write more and I wanted to discipline myself to do that. I thought this might be a way to express this pent up art that was in me about writing.

I was inconsistent and then I’d go in streaks where I’d try to be more consistent. But long story short, after four years, so from 2004-2008, I built up where I had about a thousand readers a month, so that was good. I had a thousand unique visitors.

Brian Clark: Right.

Michael Hyatt: Then something happened the next year. I hit this inflection point where I averaged that year about 20,000 unique visitors a month. It got picked up by my Lifehacker, Huffington Post, and a few other sites that really skyrocketed my traffic.

Then it has grown exponentially since then and I was able to step out as you mentioned three years ago to pursue this growing dream inside of my heart to be a speaker and a writer and create online courses and all of that. That’s what I do today. Today my site gets almost half a million unique visitors a month.

Brian Clark: So you’re the typical ten year overnight success. People always think that, “Oh, he just came out of nowhere.” No, he’d been doing it and putting in the work.

Michael Hyatt: Putting in the work.

How to Become the Writer You Want to Be

Brian Clark: That’s great. That story is so common. And given also that you were the CEO of a major book publisher at the time, it kind of eliminates the excuse of “I don’t have time for this.”

Michael Hyatt: Well I say to people because we talk about that all the time. When I speak and people say, “Well, if I could do this full-time like you do it, I would have plenty of time to do it.” I’m going to tell you something, and this is a dirty little secret, it’s honestly harder for me to discipline myself to write now when I’m less busy than it was back then when I was so busy.

Brian Clark: I feel the same way.

Michael Hyatt: Do you?

Brian Clark: When I am pressed to the limit, I am exceedingly productive. When I have all the time in the world, I get what really needs to get done. But sometimes, you’re right, you’re not pushed to the point where you just go from thing to thing to thing. It’s an odd phenomenon of the human experience I think.

It’s interesting to me because you just basically said you spent your whole life in traditional publishing and traditional media. That is a space that has struggled and sometimes has found itself really far behind the curve with this internet thing, even twenty years later.

Michael Hyatt: Yep.

Brian Clark: And yet your message was always, “Hey, the old way is not going to cut it anymore.” How did that happen to you? Was it because you had that position of leadership within a traditional media company you said, “I see the change, I see it coming?”

Michael Hyatt: Well, what I’d love to say is I’m a profit and I saw it all coming and it came out just like I expected.

Brian Clark: Go ahead.

Michael Hyatt: But honestly, it was when I got involved in blogging and I think really the shift in my thinking happened in 2008 when I got involved in Twitter. All of a sudden I saw the potential to influence people on a pretty large scale.

It happened to me one time in 2008 when Publishers Weekly, which is the main trade journal in the publishing industry, did an article about Thomas Nelson and they got all the facts wrong.

Normally what would happen in the old days, is I’d write a letter to the editor. I’d complain and they would do some sort of quasi retraction on page 32 buried in between everything else. So I said, “Wait a second, I’ve got a blog.” At the point when that article came out, I was getting about 20,000 unique visitors a month and they had about 20,000 people subscribing to their magazine. I said, “Let’s forget that kind of old media way of doing this and I’m just going to write a blog post correcting the record.”

Brian Clark: Excellent.

Michael Hyatt: And I did.

Brian Clark: Right.

You Have Full Permission to Start

Michael Hyatt: And it was awesome. I mean it kind of went viral. I realized suddenly that I didn’t have to go through the gatekeepers anymore. The playing field was level and the lights went off in my head. My head about exploded.

I thought, “If I could help authors create a platform where they can get directly to the people that they want to influence and connect with, that would be awesome.” At the same time all of this is happening, I’m seeing in my own publishing house where we’ve got an editorial process where people submit their book proposals. We review them and we turn down most of them.

With increasing frequency, we were turning down really good book proposals. These were really well written manuscripts on the fiction side because the authors didn’t have a platform.

We’d always said, and it’s kind of a truth that’s often said in the publishing industry, that content is king. I realized that platform had become queen and that unless you had both, you really didn’t have the same chance as an author that you might have had twenty years ago.

On the flipside of that, you should actually have a greater chance because now you don’t have to rely on somebody to choose you or give you permission. Now you can take the bull by the horns. I think I mixed about three metaphors there.

But you can take the bull by the horns and actually create this platform and connect with the people that want to hear from you. I think that’s just an awesome unprecedented thing that still makes me go “wow.”

Brian Clark: You talk about authors with platforms. You know Wiley is a great example of a house that really grew because it exclusively went after people with existing platforms. It was like shooting fish in a barrel compared to the usual struggle, regardless of how good the content is to actually get that thing some traction.

Michael Hyatt: That’s so true and it’s such a good strategy. We kind of did that even at Thomas Nelson before 2008 because we would identify people that had large speaking platforms. Or we saw they had a television show or a radio show.

The problem with that is that every publisher is competing for those and it gets very expensive, very fast. There’s supply and demand. We started intentionally going after bloggers. I remember the first guy I got into a negotiation with was Robert Scoble. Remember him?

Brian Clark: Yes, of course.

Michael Hyatt: He’s still blogging today. I thought, “Oh my gosh, this guy has an incredible platform, we’ve got to publish him.” We ended up losing that book. I can’t remember if we lost it to Wiley or somebody else, but we lost the bid.

I had this relationship with Robert and I saw the potential of that. We ended up publishing Hugh Hewitt, another early blogger. I thought, “Man, if we can go after these guys, they’re not even on the radar of most publishers.”

You know the crazy thing? That’s even true today. I hear about people. I know our mutual friend Jeff Goins, he got his first book deal just because a smart publisher stumbled on his site and said, “Whoa, this guy has got an audience.”

Brian Clark: You know we’re both friends with Seth Godin. You get Seth talking about his frustration with the boat that was missed repeatedly by traditional publishing and he’ll talk your ear off.

I suppose it’s frustrating especially when you’ve been on the inside. Seth’s relationship, and your relationship there, you probably want to pull your hair out. I think that’s one of the reasons I stayed outside of it the whole time. I knew that if I built my own audience, I could accomplish what I was trying to do. You know?

Michael Hyatt: Absolutely.

Brian Clark: I just have that kind of personality that hates to ask anyone’s permission to do anything anyway.

Michael Hyatt: Right.

Brian Clark: Let’s talk about platform as we approach 2015. I love the fact that you take it back to old school and if you wanted people to hear you, you had to somehow rise a bit above the crowd. You could stand on a small wooden stage or literally a soapbox in the square.

Michael Hyatt: Right.

How to Build Your Own Online Platform

Brian Clark: And you would draw attention to yourself and have an audience for whatever it is you needed to say. Today in the tech media when we talk about a platform, we’re talking about Facebook, Amazon, and these masters of the universe. It’s these Silicon Valley companies that people do flock to.

That’s because it does provide the perception that here is where the people are so here is where I need to go stand. That’s until you realize you don’t own that platform and the rules can change or it can be taken out from under you, not metaphorically.

What’s your thinking these days? What are you telling your people as far as a personal platform? What’s the mix of distribution and ownership?

Michael Hyatt: I have this model in the book, and I think I originally got this from Chris Brogan and a friend of mine named Jon Dale. I’ve modified it and created this soup of my own.

Essentially it begins with a home base, which is your blog or your podcast. But you’ve got to have a place in cyberspace that you own and control. You can’t have happen to you what happened to a friend of mine who was in the conference business. Thirty days before his biggest conference, he didn’t have a mailing list really and his blog wasn’t that significant, he was doing everything on Twitter. He was counting on Twitter to get the word out.

For reasons he still doesn’t understand, his account got suspended and he was essentially out of business. He didn’t control that platform and when the rug was yanked out from under him, he didn’t sell the tickets and it was catastrophic to his business.

You’ve got to build your house on a lot that you own. You can’t build it on a rented lot. I think blogging personally, you know it’s kind of my thing, but I think it’s more important than ever. Now it’s cool that we have all these different social media channels, but as it turns out, you still have to have something to say.

I think this is what a lot of people forget and this is why Copyblogger is so important. That is because it helps people express it. It helps with whatever it is they have to say in a way that’s compelling.

Just because you have access to these channels doesn’t mean anything if you have programming so to speak, or if you don’t have content that people actually want to consume. Podcasting wasn’t on my radar when I wrote the book. Now it’s a huge part of what I do.

Podcasting generates probably about half the amount of traffic as my blog does or the consumption is about half of that. I think there’s probably about a 20% overlap. There are just so many opportunities for us to own a place in cyberspace and really set up shop so to speak and have our own business.

Brian Clark: Your podcast is really excellent, by the way. Let’s talk a little bit about that.

We obviously share that same text base. That’s whether you want to call it blogging or not, but the medium that I embraced and felt most comfortable with to start Copyblogger was obviously in writing. Our audience is primarily made up of readers, and yet you cannot dispute that readers to some extent are in the minority. Audio, with its on-demand transportable nature, is really too compelling to pass up.

Why Podcasting Is So Important

When did you start your show? And what was your thinking about “Okay, I wasn’t thinking about this when I wrote the book, but now I’ve got to do this?”

Michael Hyatt: Well, I’ll tell you where it began. It started in 2011 and so it was, or maybe it was 2012 now that I think about it. It was in a conversation with Dan Miller, the author of 48 Days To The Work You Love.

And Dan was podcasting, and Dan said to me, “You’re missing a huge opportunity.” He said everything you just said, Brian, that with increasing frequency people are listening and consuming media through audio or video. You’ve got to be there in a podcast.

What he did was give me the vision for connecting with people in a very intimate way. I know that the reason sales happen is because people trust you. The way that people trust you is they have exposure to you and you create a relationship. I saw that podcasting was an opportunity to do that.

I will say this, after I started, it was a more daunting task than I realized. It became a huge effort for me. With writing, I’ve been in periods of my life where I’ve blogged every day for long stretches of time and I could do that, but podcasting once a week was difficult.

I had to learn that. I had to learn how to do the prep and I had to learn to outsource the production. The way we do it now is optimal because we batch produce them. I have a cohost now, Michelle, and we do thirteen episodes in a day and a half.

Brian Clark: Oh, wow. How long? Your shows are like what, 20-30 minutes?

Michael Hyatt: Thirty minutes.

Brian Clark: Thirteen in a day and a half?

Michael Hyatt: Yeah, can you believe it?

Brian Clark: John Lee Dumas does something similar to that and it’s crazy. How do you keep your energy up?

How to Get the Hard Work of Podcasting Done

Michael Hyatt: Well, I personally believe that energy is a caused thing. In other words, you’re aware of it and I can get through a day and a half. I’m an introvert, so I’ll be crashing after that day and a half.

Brian Clark: Exactly.

Michael Hyatt: But I can keep it going. I’ve got people in the studio that are saying to me, including my daughter who runs my business, saying “Dad, your energy is flagging.” Or “Why don’t you stand up and do some jumping jacks or run around the block or something because we need the energy up.” So we’re conscious of that, but we have to be intentional.

Brian Clark: Nice. That is interesting. I’m hearing more and more about the batching approach. I have taken to putting recording time on my calendar. I can adjust it if I have a guest or something like that. But that something is going to be recorded every day.

To me, that’s been working so far simply because it’s hard to give up a whole day. And maybe that’s just my own limitation. You know how you place, “I can’t do that.” Of course you could do it if you really wanted to.

Michael Hyatt: Right.

Brian Clark: That’s interesting and definitely something to think about. Tell us a little bit more about the show, and how you positioned it. It has a different vibe to it and yet it all ties together with your body of work.

Michael Hyatt: Well if I had to criticize myself, you know if I was a consultant to myself, I’d say, “You’re not nichey enough. You’re too broad. You’re covering too many topics.” That’s because I deal with personal development and leadership and productivity and platform stuff, and occasionally publishing. To me, it’s all under the rubric or the umbrella of leadership.

Brian Clark: Yes. So there is self-leadership, and then there is team leadership and then there is public influence. To me, all those work together and I’ve been really intrigued for a long, long time about this idea of how can you succeed at business, but not lose at life?

I knew so many people in the corporate world, particularly that they had tremendously successful careers, but they were working eighty hours a week. Their health had fallen apart, their most significant relationships were in turmoil, and I said I just don’t want that.

As I moved into this online space, one of the things I got introduced to early on was this whole idea of being a lifestyle entrepreneur. That was really creating a business that serves your life and not the other way around. I’m just utterly fascinated by that.

I still think that’s the biggest revolution that’s happening in our culture right now. For the first time, people can be entrepreneurs without having to go raise a lot of capital, without having to take extraordinary risk, and to do it in a way that serves their life. Now it’s going to take some time and I don’t think it’s probably wise for most people to just step out of their job and try to do this. I didn’t do that. I built it for a long time before I did that.

Brian Clark: Right.

Michael Hyatt: But it’s possible and that’s got to be a first in the history of the world.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I agree. Building a software company out of a blog, refusing to write a book against conventional wisdom instead of giving all the content away for free, and yet I never had to raise money. It’s doable.

That’s why even though I’ve never felt comfortable talking about myself. That was the early days of Copyblogger, “It’s not about you, it’s about them.” I took that very seriously, almost to the point where I didn’t realize that sometimes people do want to know a little bit about you. You have to continue to infuse yourself in it, but I suppose that came through no matter what. You’re right, absolutely.

Here’s the thing that I think is interesting, even though you do come at things from a rather broad brush, they all do point to this concept of leadership. I’ve found that people want to build the audience, they want to have the platform, they want the benefits that come with that. And yet when you use the word “leader,” they get squeamish. Right?

What else are you if someone follows you? It could be contextual leadership. I’ve been following Seth Godin since ’99.

Michael Hyatt: Me too.

Brian Clark: I can call Seth or email him, but I just read his blog. That’s because whatever he’s thinking is going to inform me in some aspect.

On the other hand, I may need a mortgage and I go follow someone and see the kind of information they have. That’s a very contextual transactional form of momentary leadership where I may say, “You’re the person.” Right? That’s what we’re talking about here. It’s leadership.

Michael Hyatt: It is. I think anytime you’re seeking to influence somebody else, whether it’s through your writing or through your podcasting or you’re a public speaker or a book author or whatever it is, you’re a leader. You might as well own that and you might as well be a good one because we’ve all known leaders in our lives whether it was people we worked for or people we worked with that were crappy leaders.

That also has an impact. The bottom line is there’s a ripple effect. You’re going to have an impact. It’s either going to be for good or for bad. You’re either going to influence people intentionally or you’re going to influence them unintentionally in ways that probably won’t be good for them and may not be good for you ultimately.

Brian Clark: Let’s shift gears a bit. I want to talk about Platform University, which is your membership program. Now obviously your books, specifically Platform, have propelled your public speaking career. You have live events. I just missed you here in Colorado. I was in Dallas, you were here.

Michael Hyatt: That’s crazy.

Brian Clark: But you founded Platform University in 2012, almost concurrently or closely after the release of the book. I think that’s so smart because you see authors. They write the book, which is like bleeding a turnip, it’s just hard work. They put it out there and then they’re like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.”

I remember having a conversation with Tim Ferriss back before he became capital Tim Ferriss. And the book, you know, it was Scoble who really broke that book. Do you remember that?

Michael Hyatt: I do.

Brian Clark: It was a blogger who really made the 4-Hour Workweek take off. There’s a lesson there somewhere. I thought I had Tim’s business model figured out. I’m like, “Well, 4-Hour Workweek, this is great, but a lot of this information, you know it evolved so quickly. You’re probably going to follow this up with a training or a membership site, right?” He just looked at me like, “No, I just wanted to write a book.” And I’m like, “Oh.”

The Online Business Model That Works

Michael Hyatt: Yeah, a huge missed opportunity. I’ve recommended that book to so many people. I’ve probably read through it four times myself. But a membership site for him would have been really cool, and for the rest of us that would like to get the latest and greatest.

Brian Clark: So did you already have the plan or did it occur to you shortly thereafter?

Michael Hyatt: Once again, no plan. I really didn’t have a plan. I didn’t even understand membership sites. I think I was a member of a couple.

I’m the guy that subscribes to it and then forgets about it and it keeps hitting my credit card and I keep thinking, “I’ve got to get off that, I’m not using it.” But when I met Stu McLaren, do you know Stu?

Brian Clark: I know the name, but I’m not placing it.

Michael Hyatt: Well Stu is the co-found of WishList Member, which is a big WordPress plugin for membership sites. Stu met me at a conference where I was speaking with John Maxwell.

It was his event and he said, “Can I have dinner with you?” I never say yes to that. I’m an introvert and when I leave the stage, I want to crash. But I said yes for whatever reason. This guy has become an incredible business partner, but he gave me the idea.

He said, “You need a membership site and here’s what is possible. If you’re serious about helping people at a deeper level, build their platform and really succeed at it, you’re not going to do that through a book.” He said you might introduce them to the concept, but let’s be honest, how many people follow through after reading a book?

All you’re going to do is use that as a lead generator to get them into a membership site or a conference where you can really help them and go deeper. He gave me the vision for it and we launched that. I think we launched it in the Fall of 2012. Now we’ve got about 5,000 members and it’s a very robust community and I love it. That’s where really 90% of my attention goes these days, is in creating the content for Platform University.

Brian Clark: Excellent. So in past shows, we’ve had some guests and we’ve talked about various topics related to online courses or membership sites. One topic being, “what’s the topic?” We covered that.

With you and with your book, the topic was obvious. How did you then take the source material and add value? Of course the elaboration is one. Did you go into multiple media formats? Did you create access to you in the form of a forum? All of the above? What was the value add?

Five Things that Add Value to Your Membership Site

Michael Hyatt: Great question. What I didn’t want to do is just regurgitate what was in the book so we divided it up. We said we want new content that’s posting every week, it is new video content that posts three out of four weeks.

I’ll tell you what we do on the fourth week. So I said, “Let’s do the first week, I love to interview people, so let’s have a master class once a month with somebody that I would like to learn from. I’ll ask all the questions that I would like to ask.” Week one is the master class.

We’ve had some tremendous guests, Pat Flynn and Amy Porterfield and Dave Ramsey, and tons of people there. The second week, we do something called backstage pass. All this again, is video. So I have a camera crew from Toronto that comes in once a quarter and we do all this in batch format.

Basically I let you look over my shoulder and I teach you how I do something. This is really how the sausage is made. Whether it is the dashboard that I use and the metrics that I pay attention to or how I’m able to do social media in twenty minutes a day, it’s that type of thing.

Then week three, we do what’s called a member makeover. That’s where our members submit their platform to me, and my daughter now does this with me too, but we just do a ScreenFlow screencast. This is where we look at their website, we look at their social media presence and we basically critique it for about thirty minutes. It has turned out to be the most popular thing that we do at Platform University because people can then apply it to their own platform.

Then in week four, we do a live Q&A call, which is audio only. It is usually the topic of the master class. Sometimes I have the master class guest on that Q&A call as well. Then we have a forum. It is this very robust discussion forum as well. Those are the five components.

Brian Clark: And just to clarify, it’s not just for authors.

Michael Hyatt: No.

Brian Clark: Which I think was your genesis, but you realize everyone selling anything, including themselves, needs a platform.

Michael Hyatt: Absolutely. We have financial advisors, we have corporate marketing executives, we have mortgage brokers, we have retailers, insurance salespeople, authors, speakers, coaches, consultants, and all of the above.

Brian Clark: Michael, I think I’ve figured out why even when we’re at the same conference we don’t see each other. That’s because after each of us speaks, we go hide.

Michael Hyatt: Are you an introvert?

Brian Clark: It makes perfect sense. I thought I was the only one because we do have some extroverts in this industry and I know we have to tolerate them.

Michael Hyatt: I know. I don’t see how they do it because I can fake it for a while. A lot of people think I’m an extrovert.

Brian Clark: Well, it doesn’t mean that you’re shy or that you can’t stand up and deliver. It just means you’ve got to go recharge.

Michael Hyatt: That’s it, right there.

Brian Clark: Yep, excellent. Michael, thank you so much for your time. I think this has been instructive. I know again as you said, I wanted to find out more about you and that’s what the fun part of doing these interviews is for me. It’s either catching up with old friends or making new ones and sharing it with the audience. Thank you so much for coming on.

Michael Hyatt: Thanks so much for having me on. Keep doing what you’re doing. It really matters.

Brian Clark: You as well. Thank you so much.

David Siteman Garland on the Infinite Scalability of Online Courses

by admin

It’s the ultimate Internet dream: create something once that sells over and over again, even while you sleep. And what better product than information itself?

Turns out, it’s not that easy for the idle dreamer. And often, Internet entrepreneurs work 16-hour days in order to “make money while they sleep.”

The good news is that the dream has shifted. Instead of hucksters offering “no work Internet cash machine” models to gullible business opportunity types, the concept of an “online business” has become a viable thing that experienced professionals and committed entrepreneurs explore and attain as part of the legitimate business world.

David Siteman Garland discovered this for himself thanks to his popular podcast, The Rise to the Top. He was constantly asked by his audience for the secret to creating a popular and profitable show, and David’s answer was always the same — it’s the art of the interview. So he created a course on the topic, and the rest (including his podcast!) is history.

In this 35-minute episode David Siteman Garland and I discuss:

His non-entrepreneurial path to online business
How he decided to build The Rise to The Top
The continuing rise of the mediapreneur
Why you don’t need to produce new content forever
Why he quit his incredibly popular podcast
The power of the podcast interview format
The infinite scalability of online courses
His very best advice on creating an awesome interview
How to start developing your own online courses

Listen to Rainmaker.FM Episode No. 20 below …

Download Audio Subscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

*Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and Internet entrepreneurs.

The Transcript

David Siteman Garland on the Infinite Scalability of Online Courses

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

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

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

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

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

David Siteman Garland: There you go, perfect.

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

David Siteman Garland: Yep.

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

Who is David Siteman Garland?

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

Brian Clark: Neither was I.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: That’s excellent.

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

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

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

How David Siteman Garland “Rose to the Top”

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

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

Brian Clark: That’s how you do it.

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

Brian Clark: Awkward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How a Small Spark Can Become the Beginning of Success

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

Brian Clark: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

David Siteman Garland: Right.

Why David Ended His Podcast and Started an Online Course

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

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

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

Are You a Mediapreneur?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

How to Know When to Change Direction in Your Business

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

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

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

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

David Siteman Garland: Exactly.

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

David Siteman Garland: For sure.

The Power of Content Curation

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

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

David Siteman Garland: That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

David Siteman Garland: That’s right.

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

How to Become an Authority

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Of course.

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yeah.

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

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

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

David Siteman Garland: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Why You Must Listen to Your Audience

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: That’s not a subtle sign.

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

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

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

What’s Your “Green Light” Moment?

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

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

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

The Top Two Tips for Giving a Great Interview

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Siteman Garland: Four even I think possibly.

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

David Siteman Garland: Agree.

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

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

Understanding the Value of Online Courses

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

David Siteman Garland: Right.

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

David Siteman Garland: A lot.

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

David Siteman Garland: Absolutely.

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

David Siteman Garland: I have one of those.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

The Best Advice for Finding Your Online Course Topic

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yes.

Fun Fact: Competition in Your Market is a Great Thing

David Siteman Garland: Fun fact.

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

David Siteman Garland: Absolutely.

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

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

Brian Clark: Yep.

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

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

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

The Most Important Question to Ask Your Audience

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Just send me a fruitcake or something.

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

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

David Siteman Garland: Exactly.

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

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

David Siteman Garland: I’ll hook you up.

Brian Clark: You can hook me up?

David Siteman Garland: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Excellent. Talk to everyone later.

Pat Flynn on Entrepreneurial Inspiration and His Profitable Content Strategy

by admin

In 2008, Pat Flynn was happily employed by an architectural firm. And then, like a lot of people in 2008, just like that … out of a job.

It was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Since that point, Pat has built a business that supports his family through blogging and podcasting. And he’s just getting started.

Rather than some “Master of the Universe” type, Pat shares with you that (like most of us in this industry) he was initially scared and winging it. But it wasn’t long until he had the confidence to take the next step, and then the next … all by simply putting in the work and being consistent.

Listen in to Pat’s story and the specific steps he took to go from broke and unknown to running his own new media business. This was my first conversation with Pat, and I was impressed by not only his knowledge and business savvy, but how genuine he is.

In this 42-minute episode Pat Flynn and I discuss:

His primary (and very simple) content strategy
Why getting laid off was the best thing that happened to him
The critical role of mindset in business (online or off)
The podcast that inspired him to start up
Why he started a second, 5 day-a-week podcast
How much he makes from each of his podcasts
The real power of a podcast-centered content strategy

Listen to Rainmaker.FM Episode No. 19 below …

Download Audio Subscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

*Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and Internet entrepreneurs.

The Transcript

Pat Flynn on Entrepreneurial Inspiration and His Profitable Content Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is Pat Flynn?

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Wow.

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

Brian Clark: Right.

A Proven Online Business Model Relentlessly Serving Your Audience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: Right.

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

Pat Flynn: Right.

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

Pat Flynn: Right.

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

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

Brian Clark: Nothing to lose is a beautiful place.

How Fear Can Help Drive Your Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: Oh, that’s cool.

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

Pat Flynn: Exactly.

You Have to Make a Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: No.

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: Yes.

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

Pat Flynn: Right.

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

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

Why Pat Flynn Started Podcasting

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

Brian Clark: Yes.

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yes.

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

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

The Critical Importance of Quality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yeah. It can be that way.

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

Brian Clark: Right, I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yeah.

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

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

Pat Flynn: Ask Altucher.

Brian Clark: Exactly. Right.

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

Brian Clark: Oh really?

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

Brian Clark: How nice of him.

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

Podcast Content vs. Written Content

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: Right. Got the crazy hair.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: There is nothing more credible.

Pat Flynn: Right.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yes.

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

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

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

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

Two Necessary Tools of Success

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

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

Pat Flynn: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: I have two children, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: It scares the crap out of me.

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

The Value of Producing Online Courses in Today’s Market

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: Right.

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

What’s in Pat Flynn’s Future?

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: Right.

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: Right.

Brian Clark: Thankfully that has never happened.

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

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

Pat Flynn: We are up to something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: Bring it, Brian.

Brian Clark: I know.

Pat Flynn: I’m looking forward to it.

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

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

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

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

Pat Flynn: Of course.

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

by admin

You’d expect a guy who’s started five multi-million dollar businesses from scratch to know a thing about marketing that works. And then, of course, he’d write the book on it.

In this case, the guy is Jay Baer, and the book is Youtility, a guide so useful for effective marketing it’s becoming a franchise unto itself. In his spare time, Jay is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, podcaster, angel investor, new media personality, and restless entrepreneur who can’t help but add just one more project to his portfolio.

I asked Jay to be the first in a series of Rainmaker.FM interviews that illuminate the path of content marketing into the future. You’ll notice some common themes that turn up time and again among those who have already successfully built audiences, and Mr. Baer sets the stage perfectly.

In this 33-minute episode Jay Baer and I discuss:

Jay’s path to a bestselling business book
Why podcasting could be the future of content
The wonders of “Geographically Agnostic” businesses
The strategic basis of my entire career
How startups can profit from the concept of Youtility
Why Jay doesn’t write as much as he used to
How to turn one piece of content into seven
The long bet that Jay is making on podcasting

Listen to Rainmaker.FM Episode No. 18 below …

Download Audio Subscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

*Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and Internet entrepreneurs.

The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Baer: Ten.

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

Why Good People Are Good to Find

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

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

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

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

Jay Baer: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Anyway, thank you for that summary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Baer: It was 2011.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Decline of Online Reading?

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

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

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

Jay Baer: Of course.

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

Jay Baer: Right.

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

Jay Baer: You have to.

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

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

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

Brian Clark: I do too.

How Your Business Can Move Vertically from One Strong Product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Baer: Yeah.

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

The Power of Generosity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shifting Landscape of Multimedia Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yeah. Ours too.

Jay Baer: Yours is as well.

Brian Clark: It’s like a magazine.

Jay Baer: Exactly.

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

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

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

Brian Clark: I love it.

How to Repurpose Three Minutes of Content Seven Different Ways

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yep.

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

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

The Secret of Keeping Up with the Modern Day Consumer

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

Brian Clark: That sounds like me.

Jay Baer: All the time. It’s crazy.

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

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

Jay Baer: Yeah.

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

Jay Baer: Right.

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

Jay Baer: Absolutely.

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

Jay Baer: Yep.

The Undeniable Benefits of Podcasting

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Exactly.

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

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

Brian Clark: Yep.

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

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

Jay Baer: Yep.

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

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

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

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

Understanding the Long Game of Content Consumption

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Marketing and management, right?

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Genesis, right?

Jay Baer: The Genesis Framework of course.

Brian Clark: Synthesis hosting.

Jay Baer: Yes, Synthesis hosting and Genesis.

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

Jay Baer: Of course I am.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Baer: Yep.

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

Jay Baer: It is on the list.

Brian Clark: Of course I looked.

Jay Baer: Of course you should.

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

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

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

Jay Baer: You too.

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

The Show Notes

The Transcript

Behind the Scenes: 2014 in Review and the Road Ahead

Why 2014 Was Such a Strange Year Around Here

The Biggest Rainmaker.FM Episode of 2014

The Next Big Project We’re Working On

Brian (Finally) Reveals His New Curation Project

The Future of the Rainmaker Platform

The Content Trend You Need to Focus on in 2015

The Show Notes

The Transcript

Seth Godin on Stepping Up and Making it Happen

Who Is Seth Godin?

How Seth Got His Start

The Impresario Concept

The Biggest Challenge with Seth’s New Book

Who Seth Wrote This Book For

Will College Serve Any Purpose in the Future?

What’s Next for Seth Godin?

The Show Notes

The Transcript

Michael Hyatt on Building a Media Platform and Becoming a 10-Year Overnight Success

Who Is Michael Hyatt?

How to Become the Writer You Want to Be

You Have Full Permission to Start

How to Build Your Own Online Platform

Why Podcasting Is So Important

How to Get the Hard Work of Podcasting Done

The Online Business Model That Works

Five Things that Add Value to Your Membership Site

The Show Notes

David Siteman Garland on the Infinite Scalability of Online Courses

Who is David Siteman Garland?

How David Siteman Garland “Rose to the Top”

How a Small Spark Can Become the Beginning of Success

Why David Ended His Podcast and Started an Online Course

Are You a Mediapreneur?

How to Know When to Change Direction in Your Business

The Power of Content Curation

How to Become an Authority

Why You Must Listen to Your Audience

What’s Your “Green Light” Moment?

The Top Two Tips for Giving a Great Interview

Understanding the Value of Online Courses

The Best Advice for Finding Your Online Course Topic

Fun Fact: Competition in Your Market is a Great Thing

The Most Important Question to Ask Your Audience

The Show Notes

Pat Flynn on Entrepreneurial Inspiration and His Profitable Content Strategy

Who is Pat Flynn?

A Proven Online Business Model Relentlessly Serving Your Audience

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

How Fear Can Help Drive Your Business

You Have to Make a Choice

Why Pat Flynn Started Podcasting

The Critical Importance of Quality

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

Podcast Content vs. Written Content

Two Necessary Tools of Success

The Value of Producing Online Courses in Today’s Market

What’s in Pat Flynn’s Future?

The Show Notes

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

Why Good People Are Good to Find

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

The Decline of Online Reading?

How Your Business Can Move Vertically from One Strong Product

The Power of Generosity

The Shifting Landscape of Multimedia Content

How to Repurpose Three Minutes of Content Seven Different Ways

The Secret of Keeping Up with the Modern Day Consumer

The Undeniable Benefits of Podcasting

Understanding the Long Game of Content Consumption

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

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