SEO Podcasts

Behind the Scenes: The Launch, Membership Sites, and What Punk Rock has to do with Content Marketing

Robert Bruce: This is New Rainmaker from newrainmaker.com. I am Robert Bruce. Today, Brian Clark and I are discussing a number of things including this very podcast, the launch of the Rainmaker Platform and a brief overview of the potential of the membership site as a business model. Brian, first of all, happy 27th birthday to you man. It’s amazing what you’ve accomplished in so little time.

Brian Clark: Exactly. Twenty-seven, Forty-seven, it all feels pretty much the same. Except, you don’t feel old until you do something like pull your chest muscle raking leaves. And you’re like, “wait a minute, that wouldn’t happen to a 27 year old.” So it’s only small differences.

Robert Bruce: I can’t believe you just admitted that on air.

Brian Clark: I know, I know. Well, I’m showing my vulnerable side. It’s a very strategic thing.

Robert Bruce: Let’s get into this first by talking about the first public launch of the Rainmaker Platform this week. How do you feel it’s going so far?

Brian Clark: Just so you know, we are recording this on October 1st (2014), my birthday was technically yesterday. The launch ends in two days but once you’re hearing this, it will be over. I can tell you I don’t know exactly what the last day will look like. They’re always huge.

We’ve never taken away anything with regards to Rainmaker so it could be pretty epic. I’d say it’s a smashing success so far from what we’ve seen. It’s been a really, really strong response and we’ve had a lot of positive feedback. That’s from the 2.0 version of the platform that was literally the result of all the wonderful feedback that we got during the pilot program. I can’t say enough about how invaluable that was.

There’s stuff that we improved that we weren’t thinking of originally. For example, the whole landing page builder. We weren’t even going to build that.

That was an inspiration that happened in part to feedback and in part by Bryan Eisenberg’s Ten Critical Elements of a Landing Page. Right? I asked, “Why don’t we just have a builder that builds those ten things?” And there you go, it was born. I’m probably going to have to pay Eisenberg some sort of royalty.

Robert Bruce: Don’t say that. Don’t say that.

Brian Clark: Things are going really well. We’ll know more Friday, but as you are listening to this, the pilot program is over. Hopefully you got in if you were inclined to do so.

Robert Bruce: If you didn’t, one of the things we talked about last week is how you wrote this great article, looking at the future of Rainmaker. Some of the features that are upcoming for the platform are included in that article. Let’s go through some of those really quick for those who are still taking a look at Rainmaker and thinking about dropping into the free trial. What’s coming in Rainmaker?

The Future of the Rainmaker Platform

Brian Clark: We already added an affiliate program, which is indispensable to some of the stuff we’ll be talking about on this podcast in the next six months. That will be while these other features are built.

All of these things were things we knew we wanted to build. That desire has been reinforced by the feedback and the enthusiasm we’re receiving about them. In general, there will be more themes, more landing page templates and the things that people would expect.

The improvements to the analytics with the customization and advanced power that you can get out of Google Analytics is really cool. I think some people feel like that they have to go to a third party analytics program, and that’s not necessarily the case. I think we’ll also be looking at future integration partners with some of the obvious players out there for small business people. What else do we have, Robert?

Robert Bruce: We have a lot of stuff on the social media posting and scheduling and incoming content front.

Brian Clark: I know that those are features driven by Mr. Robert Bruce as much as anyone else because you want them. You want the social media scheduling and posting from inside the CMS, which I think makes a lot of sense.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: If you would, please talk a little bit about these curation tools that both you and I are going to geek out about.

Robert Bruce: The idea was to take some of these things that we really think are just features. It’s mostly three pieces right now that we’re looking at and talking to Chris Garrett and our Dev Team about, which is basic social media posting and scheduling.

So you’ve got something whether it be links or basic status updates. You want to be able to connect to your social networking accounts and schedule posts to go out at certain times of day. There’s going to be a lot of cool stuff in there.

Again, it will be integrated in the dashboard and connected to every other part of the Rainmaker Platform itself. One big piece of that is also then, how do you find great stuff to share and talk about things within your industry that you want to post? So we’re going to build the Rainmaker Reader. Google Reader died about two years ago, I think.

Brian Clark: I think it’s one year, but I’m not sure.

Robert Bruce: I can’t keep track of anything anymore. When that went down, that left a huge hole in that aspect of finding great content. And a lot of great readers have popped up.

But again, we’re going to do it right. We’re going to build the reader that we want integrated into the Rainmaker Platform itself. One of the things Garrett and I have been talking about and with you as well Brian, is this idea of these services are really cool, but you end up using 25% of it, or only 10% of the actual features.

These are the things that you actually want to use in a lot of these services, so that’s where we’re going to focus. We’re going to focus on the stuff that we need and want at first. And then of course, we’ll listen to all of your feedback about what might be better, what might work better, and what you want. We’re really focusing in on the very best of all of these types of services being integrated into the platform.

The last idea of what we’re working on and going to execute eventually is this curation to content tools. This group of tools will allow you to bring stuff in an RSS feed, post it and schedule it within the Rainmaker dashboard. For instance, if you are doing an industry newsletter, you want to easily be able to copy, paste, and grab all these links. Then you’ve got to go back and grab the headline so you can work with dumping it into a post.

This is going to most likely be a set of smaller tools that will allow you with basically a click, to send it to either a new post or a new article, which is your newsletter, or to add it to an existing newsletter article that you’re compiling over the week. This is going to do a couple of other things as well, but the Rainmaker Curator, as I’m calling it is going to help in collecting that information.

We’ve seen this boom the last few years again. What is this? The third or fourth coming of email, I think? Email marketing?

Brian Clark: Right.

Robert Bruce: But these newsletters are powerful. A lot of businesses are benefitting greatly from putting together a really solid newsletter, both for the audience and for feedback on what they’re doing. This will make it so much easier to compile that and put it together.

Brian Clark: There’s a smart way to curate so that you’re creating original content. You’re also creating a new webpage with it. You’re making it sharable.

These are the best practices if you’re going to do email curation, but there’s no tool out there. The only one I’ve seen is a custom tool that actually Andrew Norcross built. So we’re going to make that standard in Rainmaker.

There are a couple of other things. Of course marketing automation has gone from this very expensive big business thing, and now it’s just becoming the way things ought to work. It’s creating a better experience for your audience, for your prospects, and for yourself. We’re going to make that a part of Rainmaker in a very affordable fashion as opposed to some of the expense we see out there right now.

Finally, which is pertinent to what we’ll be talking about on the podcast, is evolving the internal course creation tools in Rainmaker into a true learning management system. Going back all the way to 2007 in Teaching Sells, we’re teaching people true instructional design for e-learning so you can create these high value paid courses. This is where you need an LMS or a learning management system to go with that. So that’s also coming. We’ll talk about all this stuff later., but it’s pretty exciting. It’s hard not to geek out about it.

What You Can Learn from the New Rainmaker Podcast

Robert Bruce: Alright, let’s move on by doing a little talk about this very podcast, New Rainmaker. You know, things that we’ve been doing or in some cases not doing. Let’s look at the approach we’ve taken with it so far and what we’re thinking about in the coming weeks and months. And more specifically and most importantly, what it might mean for listeners of the New Rainmaker broadcast.

Brian Clark: So we’ve done two shows before this one for the so-called Fall season. I think we’re just going to be powering through every week from here on forward. Right, Robert?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I think death or dentist are the only thing that will keep us from our appointed episodes. Yes.

Brian Clark: I’ll do a podcast before going to the dentist any day.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: So the first two episodes were our very short storytelling format, and we have a guest authority. I would basically interview them and we’d get a transcript. Then I would edit that down, write an intro and Robert would usually edit from there because he was the one narrating. They were really fun to do. For seven or eight minute episodes though, it takes a decent amount of time.

I don’t think we did enough of them to have a workflow where we could just crank those things out, but it was fun. I don’t know if people like them because it doesn’t really seem like we’re getting a lot of the response we got in the Spring with the initial Rainmaker podcast.

Robert Bruce: It was a little bit of a cricket situation, which is fine. That’s a part of the nature of exactly what we’re doing is to do it and then report back to you and see what works and what doesn’t.

It was interesting to me because you hear so much about, “Hey, it’s got to be short, it’s got to be this, or it’s got to be that.” There are heavy duty opinions about the way things need to be, but you never know until you try it.

Brian Clark: Especially looking at how popular This American Life and the NPR podcasts are.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

We Want to Hear from You!

Brian Clark: But who knows? Okay, so here’s what we want from you guys who are listening right now: stop by in the comments and tell us what you thought about those. “I was busy. I didn’t listen to it. It was okay.”

We want to hear from you because when we have guests in the future, I might want to stick with that format. I think it’s more interesting to me (I could be wrong), only that you have that short story format as opposed to your typical interview.

We’re really interested in what you guys respond to and that’s why we don’t worry about experimenting and being inconsistent. That’s because we try things so you learn. That’s pretty much our goal here. We’re willing to look completely foolish if necessary if we can figure something out from it. So stop by, let us know what you thought about that.

We launched the podcast in January 2014, and then we had seven educational lessons. We had three behind the scenes episodes and then we did three webinars. We outlined in the course that was a strategy to create week to week content, and then turn it into something else. In this case, it was the first New Rainmaker training course which was really popular when we assembled it that way.

That’s still our long-term strategy. We want to create content in a serial form that is telling a bigger story. When we’re through with that part of the story, we can always package it up like we did that time. We could do some webinars and it could lead into a paid launch, and all sort of things.

The initial thing obviously was leading up to the pilot program and the public launch of Rainmaker. That has happened. So Robert, it feels like we’re at this bright line moment where we can go forward and do whatever we want.

Robert Bruce: Yes, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Brian Clark: Nice.

Robert Bruce: Not necessarily.

Brian Clark: Never mind what I said about feedback, Robert.

Robert Bruce: Forget that. Comments off.

No, that’s exactly right. We talked about having the bigger picture in mind, but also back to more of this informal talking that you and I have done in the past that folks seem to enjoy. The other day you and I were talking about opening it up for good old fashioned Q&A, and answering questions directly mixed in with whatever form the interviews take in the future. That’s the big idea.

But yes, the idea of having a strategy for a period of time where we layout several episodes that then we can bundle up later is there.

What Henry Ford Can Teach You About Reimagining Content

Did you ever hear the story of Henry Ford and the crates that the motors came in for the Model T?

Brian Clark: I don’t think so.

Robert Bruce: He did a deal with whoever the engine company was to build the motors for the Model T. In that contract, he wanted them to build the crates that the motors would be shipped in. These crates had to be oak and they had to be cut in this certain way and they had to be assembled in a certain way to very specific specifications.

So the motors would come and they would be taken out of the crates. The crates would be disassembled in a very specific way. Eventually, all the parts of those crates would then go into and become the floorboards of the Model T.

Brian Clark: Nice.

Robert Bruce: The motor company didn’t care because they just wanted the contract for the motors and they think, “Oh, yeah, we’ll give him his crates.” That illustrates this perfectly. We’re looking for ways to package this up into something bigger down the road or useful that might be broken out in different ways.

Brian Clark: Nice, nice.

Robert Bruce: A big part of the future of the Rainmaker Platform is going to be this reseller program. You had a chance to talk publicly about it on a great Carrie Dils Genesis Office Hours show last week and we got a really nice response from that. Quickly, would you share what this reseller program is going to look like and who should care?

Brian Clark: It’s really interesting because Carrie invited me onto her show, Genesis Office Hours. Basically, we have this amazing community of designers who build on the Genesis framework, which is kind of the backbone of StudioPress. Then StudioPress is the backbone of the design aspect of what is now Rainmaker.

I was like, “Yeah sure, I’d be happy to come on.” Then it turned out we got the public launch going and then my brain immediately shifted to this reseller program. That’s because we are building out this amazing technology for resellers that allows you, as a consultant or a designer or as a small digital agency, to create these really sophisticated sites with all the features that you know about it in Rainmaker.

You can do this literally at the push of a button. There are going to be all sorts of ways to build out specific types of sites. It’s really cool stuff. We’re aiming for November 1st to release that technology, which is really the backbone of the reseller program.

We can’t launch the reseller program really without that. So we’re building that and we’re finishing it up as we speak. But in the broader concept, during the initial podcast run and the first course, that is still available if you guys haven’t checked that out. Robert what is the URL for that?

Robert Bruce: That is newrainmaker.com/training-home.

Or, if you go to newrainmaker.com, click the “More” tab up in the top nav and you’ll see “Training”.

Are You a Producer? Our Reseller Program Might be for You

Brian Clark: Effectively, what that course was about was a different way to think about content marketing. Right? Media instead of marketing.

I think we got our best response in all the years of trying to teach this stuff. It seemed that a lot of people had the light bulbs go off. They got the difference between keyword stuff “content,” as opposed to really trying to build an audience and tying that in with your business model.

And then thinking about what’s my “Love It or List It” for what I sell? What makes me authoritative while also giving people what they want? One of the models I touched on in that context is that yes, there are a lot of capable people who can do this stuff themselves. I think those are a lot of the people that are now rushing into Rainmaker because it’s the perfect tool for the person with that kind of skill set.

The broader market out there is people for whom WordPress is out of the question. And even Rainmaker would not be something they want to really get into because they don’t have the content creation skills and they’re just not going to.

We’re really seeing an entire industry that already exists. It’s the idea that you have professional content creators, and media producers effectively who are aiding the small to medium size business, and the real money is actually in the recurring content creation fees.

They may come to you for a website or design. That’s where Rainmaker comes in because that takes the Dev headache completely out of it. “Yes, I can build that sophisticated site for you with membership capabilities and all that stuff.”

So the designers, the writers, the other content creators in other mediums, and then the general entrepreneurs who see the need to serve these businesses, they’re what I call “producers.” Right? These are the people for whom this reseller program is for.

At the heart of it is this great technology, but you’re going to hear both on this podcast and in very specific training, that we’re going to put out that we’re going to teach people the business models, the skills, and how to make the connections with the team you need.

How the Media Producer Model Works

Let’s say you’re a designer and you’re the point of sale. You usually charge money to create a website or at least the design for the website. And that’s it except that they keep coming back to you for tweaks and free work and all. It’s terrible, you know?

Really what you are is the point of sale for what they really need, which is content creation. So you could be partnered up with writers and you could have a small formal digital agency. It could be a completely ad hoc thing. It’s like the Hollywood model where the writers, the designer, and the strategist come together for a project and then they disperse.

I really think that’s how it’s going to work. And we see Rainmaker and this reseller technology at the center of that to make everyone more money. Yes, we get to make money too, but that’s how it’s supposed to work. Right?

Robert Bruce: There’s a lot of talk floating around about membership sites in the last year or so in particular. There has been a spike in interest in this model. This is something that you’ve actually taught and practiced in business for what, seven years? What’s the big idea here with membership sites?

The Membership Site Business Model

Brian Clark: Yeah. So the membership site goes back to the 90s with our friends in the adult industry, who at one point were the pioneers of everything. But when you think about what a membership site is, it’s a way to keep people away from content until after they pay you. And then they’re allowed access in.

That’s a really big and important concept, which is the concept of access. So yes, back in 2007, the very first thing that was launched off of Copyblogger was Teaching Sells. That is a massive course that teaches every element of from designing meaningful courses, business models, marketing, the technology you need to effectively make it all happen.

Ever since that time, people have been saying, “Awesome thanks, give us the turnkey platform to do this with.” It took us a little while, but you can see how far back the roots of Rainmaker go. We really got serious about it in 2010 when we formed Copyblogger Media. So Rainmaker in one sense is the solution and the missing part.

We used to have to patch everything together ourselves. I remember Tony would explain, “Here’s how you take aMember and here’s how you work with Moodle and here’s how you do it with WordPress.” It was a mess.

I think a lot of people were more than able to do the content creation, and the technology just buried them. And that is unacceptable anymore. The premise back in 2007 was online advertising sucks, you’re not going to make any money with it, and you need to sell content.

A lot of people believed me and a lot of people didn’t. That was okay because at the time that was very unorthodox thinking. Where are we now seven years later, when The Guardian isn’t going to ditch ads because they need to make revenue any way they can. Their primary business model is going to be virtual events and membership programs.

Effectively, it’s patronage of your subscribers instead of everything is free, and we’ll make up for it with advertising. That’s what Teaching Sells, the original report, predicted in 2007.

Again, some people thought I was crazy but e-learning is a real thing. Everyone knows online is the future of all sorts of education. A lot will be free, but a lot of it won’t be and that’s still the best way to get into a business if you are not currently. Whether you’re working for someone else, or maybe you have a client model and you want to move on, this is what we’re going to be talking about a lot on this podcast and in other venues.

I read another great article that basically said, the modern journalism site which of course we’re talking about BuzzFeed and the like, they treat content as a service. That’s not the way newspapers have technically thought. In other words, they actually are taking into account who their audience is, which are the things we’ve been preaching since day one. And it’s just the reality of what things are.

The flipside of that is that you don’t have to be the guardian. In fact, they’ve got bigger problems than most people because of the legacy issues getting started. Now that the technology is taken out of the way of creating these membership sites and online training programs, it really just comes down to finding your niche, as it always has been.

The Evolution of the Membership Site Model

And there’s some really cool stuff about how the concept of what we think of as a “membership site” is really evolving. It’s any sort of barrier to access that facilitates doing business with people. It does this in a way that’s a higher value, or premium, and that kind of thing. The most interesting thing about this Guardian article, which is why I use it as an example, but they’re going to be doing these virtual events with a membership concept. That is something we covered in Teaching Sells years ago.

I can give you a great example of someone who built an amazing business out of this approach, which is Mike Stelzner, Social Media Examiner. He used to be a Copyblogger writer. I remember he came to me one day and he said, “I’m thinking about this site. It’s like Copyblogger, but it’s about social media, do you think it’s going to work?” And I’m like, “I’m sure it’s going to work.” That was an understatement.

His business model was putting on (he now puts on maybe the largest social media event but certainly a big one), a live event. He started with virtual events. Basically what Mike did was he built up his initial audience and then he went to everyone in the industry and was putting together a conference. This was like you would do with a live event, except it was virtual.

He took the webinar approach and it was a very logistical planned out executed thing. He got all these people to contribute and he had an affiliate program, so all his speakers promoted the event. It was a success. The next virtual event he did is where he really started to make money because he had a thing.

So what does a virtual live event become when you do the next one? Well, that becomes archived membership content. You can see that what Mike did before he got into live events, he built membership sites. But it was positioned so differently that you didn’t see it that way. I immediately recognized what he was up to and I think I had him share about it, specifically in Teaching Sells, to talk about it.

I want to talk a lot more about that event because we’re going to start doing those for very specific reasons. I think that will be tied to the training for the resellers on business models. It’s also of course, a demonstration of the Rainmaker Platform because we can do all of that from our affiliate program to everything with Rainmaker, which is cool.

I want to talk about that as a business model for people who are considering Rainmaker, but maybe haven’t pulled the trigger yet. That’s because people out there who’ve got organizational skills, they’ve got drive, and they’ve got ambition, but they’re like, “I’m not an authority about anything.” One of the business models, or many of the business models on Teaching Sells talk about, “You know what you’re good at? You’re good at building these type of sites. That’s what you’re good at.”

The “Impresario” Concept Explained

This is a concept that I refer to as the impresario approach, which I love that word. It’s an Italian word and basically it means organizer or producer. We’re right back to that producer concept, but in this context, historically that was a person who put on operas and plays.

Seth Godin loves to use the word now to mean a person who makes things happen. Right? And really, what is the internet except for connections bringing things together? It can be a really interesting model when you realize that every time you arrange one of these events, you are creating content that you are then able to build on going forward. This is just like Teaching Sells grew over time.

I think we’re going to focus on that topic quite a bit as we go forward with the podcast and try to give you some really useful ideas about, “Okay, how would I go about starting that type of business?” Right? So I’m pretty excited about that.

Robert Bruce: What about live events that say, take place in like Denver perhaps in May of 2015?

Brian Clark: Hypothetically speaking?

Robert Bruce: Hypothetically speaking.

Brian Clark: That is an excellent point. We did put on our first live event, so we graduated from virtual to live as well. And if you have those aspirations, then you can certainly do that with this impresario concept that we’re going to be talking about.

But we put on our first Authority event. Seth Godin opened it up, Darren Rowse another keynote, Bryan Eisenberg, Ann Handley, Lee Odden, it was everyone I wanted in the last eight years to one day be able to invite to speak. I don’t know Robert, what was your impression of how the crowd reacted?

Robert Bruce: Maybe the best thing to do is just take a look if you search the hashtag on Twitter #authority2014, you can see for yourself. I think people had a really good time. The single track idea was “particularly loved” I think.

Brian Clark: Yes.

Robert Bruce: It was where everybody is seeing everything all at once and to a certain degree, no matter where you are in the conference.

Brian Clark: Our man Kelton put together a nice little highlight reel from the last event, which was pretty small. We limited it to 400 people. Again it was a single track where we’re all together, we all learn together, we all experience together and we all go to the parties together. People really seemed to like that, I know I did.

I really don’t like how dispersed everything gets when you have these massive events and you have to pick and choose, “What do I want to learn more instead of just getting everything?” In an integrated format, which I think is also important too. There’s a logical beginning and end in the way that we build things.

So yes, we’re doing it again in May in Denver again. This time, we are going to a larger venue, which is the Ellie Caulkins Opera House. It is a magnificent and beautiful venue. That was the vibe we were going for. If we’re going for single track, we wanted to have this beautiful room that was made for large audiences to participate together in (speaking of impresario, right?). I didn’t even make the opera connection there.

Robert Bruce: You’re actually 147 years old, aren’t you?

Brian Clark: Yes, that’s exactly right. I guess this podcast will be the first time we mention this because we’re putting together the early bird pricing and all that good stuff as soon as we can. But I just today locked down our third of

Robert Bruce: Are you really going to say this?

Who’s Speaking at Authority Rainmaker 2015?

Brian Clark: Well, yes. Okay, let me say what I know for sure. Dan Pink, who is a wonderful man and author of too many amazing books to count, actually the first book I ever appeared in, Free Agent Nation. Dan and I met in Austin back in 2000 and I introduced him to MIGAS and he interviewed me for his book. That was when I had just figured out how to use content marketing to sell legal services so I wouldn’t starve. His last book, To Sell is Human, is obviously right on point for the theme of Authority Rainmaker, as it will be known this year. He is going to open up the show.

On the second day, the opening keynote will be Sally Hogshead, who not coincidentally you just heard from on the last podcast. She is an amazingly smart person. Her work on fascination and focusing on your differences as your ultimate strength, which was just barely touched on in the podcast, is something we’re going to expand quite a bit on that.

Then I’ve been working for three weeks trying to get a specific closing keynote. Today I got a “yes.” I do not have a contract, but I don’t think there’s going to be a problem. I’m going to try to get the contract done before this airs (if not, you will not be hearing this because Robert will edit it out), so our closing keynote is a personal hero of mine, and Robert’s as well. Henry Rollins, the former lead singer of Black Flag, spoken word artist, self-publisher, film, radio, and television star. He now has his own show on the History Channel titled Ten Things You Didn’t Know. Look at that. It’s a list format. I wonder why they chose that, Robert?

Robert Bruce: You know what? I’m so sick of lists. No, we were just laughing about this. It’s that the complainers that hate these list posts, they need to bring it up with Mr. Rollins.

Brian Clark: Well, they’re going to have a chance in Denver, May 13-15, 2015. So May 13th is a Wednesday. That will be similar to this year, where the opening reception was legendary in itself. We do like to throw some good parties, and this year will be no different.

The 14th will be the first day of content and that will be the one Dan Pink kicks off. The 15th will begin with Sally. And Henry will close and take us into the weekend, which I can’t even believe I get to introduce Henry Rollins. I’m done, this may be it.

I guess at this point, we’re going to sign off. Make sure you stop by the comments and give us any thoughts you might have as far as the podcast, or the platform. We’d love to hear about the direction we’re going in, questions about membership sites and online training courses that you’d like to see specifically addressed. I can almost guarantee you we’re going to cover everything pretty comprehensively given that again, Teaching Sells was the original thing, and it is just as relevant today as it ever has been.

Robert Bruce: Thank you for listening to New Rainmaker everybody out there. We appreciate it if you do like what’s going on here as always, let us know by dropping by iTunes. You can give us a rating there as well. As Brian said, please drop any notes you have about the discussion in this episode in the comments of this post.

And maybe even more importantly, if you want to go even further into the things we’ve talked about on New Rainmaker and will continue to talk about as we go forward, head over to newrainmaker.com. Sign up to get those two weeks of training that will likely change the way you think about online marketing. It’s absolutely free. It’s at NewRainmaker.com. In the Nav bar, hit “More” and then click “Training.” Brian, thanks man. We’ll talk to you next time.

Brian Clark: Thanks everyone.

Keep Them Fascinated: How to Discover Your Winning Difference as a Content Marketer

Robert Bruce: Back in 1976, the music industry was in a full-tilt disco craze.

All the smart money was chasing new disco acts based on the success of tunes like The Hustle, and Jive Talkin by the Bee Gees. Rock was dead, they all said, and this before Saturday Night Fever brought disco to middle America.

But then a band out of Boston (named for the city itself) turned that wisdom on its head.

Boston founder Tom Scholz struggled to get a record deal. And even after he signed with Epic, he got nothing but hassle from the label as he fought to release the band s eponymous debut.

Eventually, Scholz prevailed and Boston was released, and it was a massive success. It remains one of the best-selling debut albums in U.S. history, with over 17 million copies sold.

Of course, the bandwagon ensued. Boston spawned an entire industry genre (poetically known as Corporate Rock) as music marketing executives scrambled to produce loads of radio-friendly rock for the masses. The corporate rock trend continued throughout the 80s and into the 90s, reaching ridiculous extremes with packaged metal hair bands.

Then in 1991, 15 years after Boston, history repeated itself. A band from Seattle did something that wasn t supposed to work.

If you owned Nirvana s first album Bleach, and someone told you this act would become the biggest band in the word and dominate the radio waves with their next work, you d have laughed. A band like Nirvana was not supposed to be on the radio, much less become incredibly popular.

One irony as we talk about differences Boston s More Than a Feeling and Nirvana s Smells Like Teen Spirit are musically very similar songs. The difference Nirvana made, however, was in the contrast they posed to the hair bands of the day, as well as making punk rock accessible.

Another bandwagon ensued. Soon we had Clear Channel alternative rock stations (whatever that means). Rock music was fundamentally changed.

Until, of course, Britney Spears and the boy bands became the next different thing.

The point?

You can try chasing trends by being a me too marketer. The legendary players, however, come not from chasing what s happening, but by running in a different direction.

Author and entrepreneur Sally Hogshead has committed her career to helping people discover their winning difference. And a content-driven approach to communicating that difference is amazingly powerful because it makes you fascinating to follow — to the right crowd, that is.

Here s Sally …

Sally Hogshead: Anytime you communicate, you are creating content. That content is either adding value or it s taking up space. When we went inside companies and we began studying what the difference was in the communication patterns of the high performers, we found that there was a specific thing that they did differently.

The high performers within organizations and small businesses know exactly how they add value and they have a specialty. In other words, they re not trying to be all things to all people. They don t water down their communication. They re very clear that they specialize in one specific form of communication. They re not trying to be great at everything. They re trying to be extraordinary in one particular way.

Robert Bruce: And what s the benefit of this focus on adding unique value? Does it really make a difference to be different in a really useful way?

Sally Hogshead: People are more loyal to them. People refer them and they stay with them. They buzz about them in social media. As a result, they can charge up to 400% more for their products and services.

Robert Bruce: The common advice at this point is usually that you ve got to become stronger, faster and better than the competition, but could things work out better if you didn t focus on those macho notions at all?

Sally Hogshead: If you focus on your strengths and you re trying to outdo somebody else, then you re going to stay on the hamster wheel. There s a different way. Instead of focusing on your strengths, focus on your differences. If you focus on your differences, it becomes much easier for you to carve out a place in the market. It becomes much easier for you to stop trying to outdo other people and to be put in a competitive position.

Over the last decade as I ve been studying the science of fascination and what types of messages are most fascinating, what I found is that when your listener is in a state of fascination, they re more likely to buy from you. They re more likely to like you, trust you, believe you, and follow you. They re more likely to post about you in social media. They return to you for more because you re adding intense value through this focus.

Robert Bruce: Hogshead is the creator of The Fascination Advantage® Assessment: the world s first personality assessment that measures what makes a person most engaging to others. Unlike other personality gauges, this test is not about how you see the world but how the world sees you.

Sally Hogshead: There s a specific way that the world sees you at your best. When you can identify exactly how people see you at your best, in other words, what type of communication do you naturally use, then your communication becomes much more fascinating. You become much more likely to earn people s intense interest.

Anytime you re creating any type of content, whether it s email or even a conversation, if you understand how the world sees you at your best, you can focus on those areas where you are most likely and most efficiently going to add value.

Robert Bruce: When you take a media approach to online marketing, you uniquely position yourself to get somewhere. In many cases, the content you create is the very thing that sets you apart in your industry and sets you up to accelerate business in surprising ways.

New Rainmaker is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform the complete online marketing and sales website solution that gives you the ability to attract and fascinate the people you want to help. Take Rainmaker for a free test drive, and get more power and less hassle from your online marketing efforts.

Visit newrainmaker.com to get started today.

The New Rainmaker broadcast is written by Brian Clark and narrated by me, Robert Bruce.

A special thanks to Sally Hogshead for lending her expertise to this episode. You can find even more from her at sallyhogshead.com.

Until next time …

The Key Element of 21st Century Persuasion

This is New Rainmaker, and this broadcast is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the next generation online marketing and sales solution that lets you build your business, instead of wasting precious time and money fiddling with technology.

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Robert Bruce: Back in the 1950s, a bedridden man faced certain death from inoperable, terminal cancer.

Tumors the size of oranges had invaded the man’s neck, groin, chest, and abdomen. The patient’s only hope was a new experimental cancer drug called Krebiozen (also known as “Substance X”).

Three days after the initial treatment, the man was out of bed and joking with his nurses. As treatment continued, his tumors shrunk by half.

Ten days later, he was discharged from the hospital the cancer was gone.

Strangely enough, none of the other cancer patients treated with Krebiozen showed any improvement.

Stranger still, a few years later it was conclusively determined that Krebiozen had no therapeutic value whatsoever.

Welcome to the power of the placebo effect. And more importantly, the power of belief.

According to Seth Godin, the placebo effect is a change in the human brain that’s caused by marketing. Consider the case of Riedel wine glasses, one of Godin’s favorite anecdotes demonstrating the power of belief in a commercial context.

Riedel produces a highly successful line of glass-blown wine receptacles designed to deliver the wine’s “message” via the carefully-crafted form of the glass. In other words, the shape of the glass makes the wine taste better.

Skeptical?

So was Thomas Matthews, executive editor of Wine Spectator. Premier wine critic Robert Parker, Jr. was also initially unconvinced.

And yet Matthews, Parker, hundreds of other wine experts, and thousands of customers now swear it’s true. Taste tests throughout Europe and the U.S. proved time and again that wine expensive, inexpensive, and middling tasted better in Riedel glasses.

Except it’s not true. At least not empirically.

When subjected to double-blind testing that doesn’t let the taster know the shape of the glass, people found no detectable difference in taste between glasses. Objectively, the shape of the glass just doesn’t matter.

But subjectively, when belief in the glass and the experience of the glass are added back in the mix, it matters. And the wine does taste better to these people, just like the placebo effect can make people well.

But when we say “belief,” in the context of commerce, what are we really talking about? We chatted with Tom Asacker, author of The Business of Belief, for his thoughts.

Tom Asacker: When we make any decision in life, we have come to the conclusion that whatever that choice is, is the appropriate choice for us given our place, time, circumstances. So that in essence is what a belief is. The word “belief” comes from an old word, root of the word “lief” which means “to wish.” So to believe something is to wish that it is right, is appropriate, is the best choice. So our beliefs are driven by our desires to have the right choice for us as individuals.

Robert Bruce: So how does belief relate to trust? And which comes first?

Tom Asacker: I’ve been asked that, for the distinction between belief and trust more than one time. And the way I think about it is that belief is something that comes before the actual experience. So I would say trust is one step beyond belief and that some type of experience has been validated for us.

Robert Bruce: And what does this have to do with persuasion? Well, we do what we believe in so if you’re looking to inspire action, you must first inspire belief.

Tom Asacker: what we desire is what we end up believing. And what we believe is what we end up doing. So it’s desire, belief, action. And then the action either reinforces the belief, supports it, encourages more of it, or it doesn’t.

If you can discover desire, you win.

Robert Bruce: So what’s the key to modern persuasion? How do we discover what people desire in the first place?

Tom Asacker: if you think about it: sell, persuade, even influence, they don’t seem to get at the essence of what’s required to move people. Especially when people are inundated with choice and then they’re very skeptical.

Then you have to really understand what’s going on inside of them so that you can align what you’re doing and complete that story in their head that’s already partially there.

Robert Bruce: It turns out that understanding your audience determines your ability to move them to action. And that takes good ol’ fashioned research but the payoff from what you discover is powerful.

But here’s the thing it’s much easier to discover and align your media content with the existing beliefs and world views of your prospective audience. In other words, discover desires and then fulfill them.

Tom Asacker: Let’s give them a “reason to believe,” and what they typically are saying, “let’s give them information to rationalize their decision.” Because their real reason to believe something is their desire for it.

If we go into an organization or if we’re marketers talking to a particular audience and we’re trying to get them to believe in something for which they have absolutely no desire to believe, it’s an impossible task because desire is what leads to belief.

Robert Bruce: Discover your prospect’s problems and desires, use search engines and social media to discover the actual language they use and the world views that come attached create engaging online media content that moves them toward your solution and their satisfaction.

That’s how modern persuasion works. You’re telling your audience the story they want to hear, and then providing the perfect ending.

You can get all of this done with the Rainmaker Platform. Start your free trial today, and get more power and less hassle from your online marketing and sales website, without breaking the bank.

Visit RainmakerPlatform.com and get started.

The New Rainmaker broadcast is written by Brian Clark and narrated by Robert Bruce.

A special thanks to today’s featured authority, Tom Asacker. For a deeper understanding of belief, pick up a copy of The Business of Belief anywhere books are sold.

And, if you find these New Rainmaker broadcasts useful, please let us know by leaving a rating and a comment in iTunes. Thanks.

Until next time …

The New Rainmaker as Magical Mentor on the Buyer s Journey

Robert Bruce: What do the actors Laurence Fishburne and Alec Guinness have in common?

Aside from being very good — and very successful — at what they do, they’ve both played a very particular kind of role in their careers. You might know them better as Morpheus and Obi Wan Kenobi, respectively.

These are roles that strike at the very heart of our desire for adventure and change.

They also happen to strike at the heart of what makes a business truly great and profitable.

This is New Rainmaker, from newrainmaker.com. I am Robert Bruce and today Brian Clark follows an ancient thread that began thousands of years ago, but has critical relevance to how you can build your audience — and your business — today.

Stay tuned

Brian Clark: Thomas has a problem.

His problem has come to define him. Night after night, he searches relentlessly online, looking to solve the dilemma that occupies his mind and robs him of sleep.

Despite the impressive search tools at his disposal, it s social that starts him down the correct path. A friend of a friend leads Thomas to a new social hub, where a mysterious woman named Trinity seems as if she knows him.

Trinity turns out to be the person that leads him to the man who would become his mentor, a man named Morpheus. Thomas knows this is what he needs.

Morpheus makes Thomas Anderson also known by his online handle Neo a proposition. Stay in his ordinary world, or discover the answers and solutions he s sought for so long and be utterly transformed.

Neo decides to make the commitment. Not just because he trusts Morpheus

But because he believes in Morpheus even more than he currently believes in himself. Thanks to the help he receives, Neo eventually comes to also believe in himself, and that is the true goal of his journey.

Yes, this is the how the film The Matrix begins and develops. It s one of the most beloved science fiction movies of all time, and it s a classic example of a story that follows the timeless Hero s Journey paradigm as outlined by mythologist Joseph Campbell.

Yeah, that s cool Brian so what? Well, hold that thought for a bit, as we take a quick look at how the classic sales funnel works in a media-first strategy.

The New Rainmaker Funnel

Brian Clark: The concept of the sales or purchase funnel dates back to 1898, when a guy named Elias St. Elmo Lewis mapped a theoretical buyer s journey from attention to the point of purchase. Surprisingly, no one seems to call it St. Elmo s Funnel, which seems to be a missed opportunity.

The funnel isn t a perfect metaphor for the sales process, as we ll discuss later. But most people are familiar with it, and frankly, it works just fine at illustrating the buyer s journey with a media-first approach as long as you update the elements.

Most sales funnel concepts start with the attention of the prospect, and that s the first mistake when applied to today s buying reality. The first element at the very top of the New Rainmaker funnel is actually Unaware.

Thanks to the research and networking capabilities of the Internet, the sales process often begins before the prospect is aware that you exist, and certainly before you re aware of them. More importantly, you have to understand the way the prospect views the world and relates to the problem or desire they have before you can consider how to attract and hold their attention.

Next comes Attraction, where traditional sales funnels typically begin. Online, this means your content comes up as a relevant result for a query in a search engine.

Or, it could mean that the prospect spots your social object content because it s shared within her social networks by your existing evangelists. It could even mean an extremely well targeted advertisement that offers desired information instead of a product or service pitch.

Following Attraction down the funnel is a P word, but it s not pitch it s Permission. We re building an audience here, because audience is a business asset that provides returns over and over again for the long term, as well as the short.

If that sounds squishy to you, just realize that the most grizzled of pay-per-click direct sales veterans have learned that you sell more by getting people to opt-in to a permission-based content stream than you do by selling immediately. This is the way of the new rainmaker.

Finally, we have Conversion, the point following Permission where your goal of acquiring a customer or client becomes reality. As I mentioned earlier, the sales funnel is designed to illustrate the journey taken by a typical buyer, and this is the destination.

Let s talk more about journeys. In addition to picking back up on The Matrix thread, we ll touch on Star Wars, too.

Content as Mentor: Facilitating the Buyer s Journey

Robert Bruce: Four and one half billion dollars. According to the best information I could find, that’s the current worldwide total box office gross of the Star Wars movie franchise.

Yes, that number was billion, with a “b.” And that doesn t count related merchandise and all the rest.

Where did the basic idea for this massive financial and cultural hit come from?

Here’s Brian …

Brian Clark: In the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell identifies a monomyth that has a fundamental structure shared among stories that have survived for thousands of years.

Campbell s identification of these enduring, identically-structured myths from disparate times and regions has inspired modern storytellers to consciously craft their work along the same lines, which is also known as the hero s journey.

Most notable among those inspired by the hero s journey is George Lucas, who acknowledged Campbell s work as the source of the plot for Star Wars.

This same structure has been used by companies as diverse as Apple and Subway to create amazingly effective advertising campaigns, because the monomyth mirrors the way we view our own journey through life.

As a digital media producer, you can also consciously incorporate the hero s journey into your content creation. In fact, it s the exact way that people view themselves moving down the proverbial sales funnel, and it s your content s job to facilitate the journey.

Getting back to The Matrix, what was Neo really searching for night after night?

He was driven to solve the riddle What is the Matrix? but he was specifically looking for Morpheus the mentor who would help him answer that ultimately complicated question.

Again, I sense your impatience with my pop culture analogies, young Skywalker. Hang with me.

Let s see how the classic elements of the Hero s Journey match up to the New Rainmaker funnel. I think you ll be amazed at the congruency.

The classic Hero s Journey follows these initial steps:

Our would-be hero starts off in the ordinary world of their lives. Suddenly, a call to adventure occurs that draws this person toward taking the heroic journey that is their destiny.

Initially, there is resistance to the call, due to skepticism or uncertainty. Then, just at the right moment, a mentor appears.

This guide often possesses some sort of supernatural abilities that make the journey possible. With the help of the magical mentor, our hero crosses the threshold from the ordinary world into the world of transformation.

So, put simply, the Ordinary World is the Unaware phase of the funnel. This is the life your prospect leads before deciding to seek some form of transformation, and this is the worldview you must seek to understand to best guide them on their journey. They may have the specific problem or desire at this point, but they ve not acted affirmatively to deal with it.

The Call to Adventure is the Attraction phase. Either through a self-directed search, or a call presented by sharing on a social network, or even the right advertisement at the right time, the idea that the problem can be solved or the desire satisfied has been presented. Resistance to the call is likely present and that informs you as to which type of content will combat the initial resistance and propel the journey forward.

Meeting the Mentor corresponds with Permission. At this point, the prospect knows, likes, and trusts you enough to look to your content as a guide. They opt-in or register to find out more, and they provide permission for you to contact them over time. This is the pivotal point that determines who and how many will choose your product or service as their solution.

Finally, your content helps the prospect Cross the Threshold into the world of transformation, which is Conversion. This is where they believe that your product or service is the solution, and proceed through the rest of the journey as a customer or client.

Let me repeat Conversion is not the end of the journey. It s simply an important inflection point of what will hopefully be a longer-term journey together. Too many people have a mentality that neglects the value of nurturing customer relationships, opting instead for the frustrating (and expensive) task of hunting for others.

Now all this talk about business storytelling makes more sense, especially when your content strategy aligns with the most powerful story structure of all time. But is a funnel that best way to help you tell that story?

For the answer to that, let s look again to The Matrix.

Once Neo find his mentor, Morpheus makes him an offer involving a choice between proceeding, or turning back, on his journey. If he takes the blue pill, he goes back to his ordinary world. Or, he can choose the red pill, and find the answer to the question that drives him and open himself up to transformation.

Isn t that the essence of making an offer to buy? And yet, in the film and in business, the journey continues.

The sale is a major conversion point, sure but hasn t the process of conversion from unaware to believer been happening gradually all along, not just at the moment you offer something for sale? And doesn t the process continue beyond the first sale, at least for smart companies?

It s time for a better model.

Beyond the Funnel: The Circles of Belief

Brian Clark: As I mentioned earlier, the sales funnel may not be the best way to think about the New Rainmaker conversion process. Not just because it s well-worn but rather because it doesn t truly reflect reality in two important ways.

One, the funnel is supposed to reflect the fact that there are a bunch of people at the top levels of the funnel, but a much smaller number actually convert to customers and clients. In physical reality, a funnel passes through everything that enters it — it just reduces to a smaller stream at the narrow end and slows things down. This is not how it works in business.

Two, as alluded to earlier, the funnel model implies a one-time conversion event which ends the process. In modern business, this is not how it works either.

I ve started thinking in terms of circles instead of a funnel. Concentric circles, to be precise.

Circles are concentric to one another when they share the same center point. And here s a fun fact the meaning of medium (the singular of media) in the original Latin is center.

For our purposes, the center point of these concentric circles is your business as media producer, and each circle represents a varying degree of belief. You create media content that draws people from the outer circles in closer to you at the center as their level of belief increases.

If that sounds out there, no worries. It s actually very simple.

Imagine seven concentric circles. The two outermost rings represent Attraction in the funnel, but they re more powerful in this context.

The outer ring is your followers on social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Despite all the fuss about social media, this is your coldest circle, meaning those who trust you the least, assuming this is the only circle they currently occupy.

The next ring in from social is search. This is a higher value discovery channel because of the focused intent of the searcher, but also a higher belief channel, because after all — if Google believes your content is the best answer to the question, so likely does the searcher. Building up your Google+ following will have you appearing more prominently in relevant results for these people — an example that illustrates how social and search will continue to integrate more tightly as we move forward.

The ring inside of that shifts from Attraction to Permission, and represents your general email and RSS subscribers. In other words, if you publish regularly on the open web (and whether you call it blogging or not), or you have a podcast or video show, this is the group who has raised their hand to have this content delivered to them by you.

Next up is one or more email sub-lists designed specifically for focused lead generation and conversion. These people have opted in to be further educated, but also with a corresponding interest in how your product or service can solve their problem or satisfy their desire.

The remaining interior rings represent the various client or customer relationships you can create. One-time customers are great, but repeat and recurring customers mean you re running a smart business. And don t forget that often, acquiring a customer with a gateway product means you re simply breaking even on attracting them in order to sell your higher value solution next.

I ll illustrate all of this clearly for you in two upcoming webinars. Just remember that not everyone moves into the inner circles (not even close) but the better you are at inspiring belief with the value you deliver and the authority you demonstrate, the more people will gravitate closer to you and your solution will become central to them.

As long as you never forget rule number one, that is.

You re Not The One They Are

Brian Clark: In The Matrix, Morpheus helps Neo at all costs because he is The One essentially the “messiah” of the Matrix. It s no mystery why the film employs the hero s journey format, given that the stories of Christ, Moses, and Buddha (among others) follow the same structure.

The point here is not to delve into religion (although all this talk about belief, evangelism, and conversion may have you thinking otherwise). The point is rather that your prospect is the hero the main focus of the story.

Helping your prospects makes them into the saviors of your bank account. This is your primary role.

The mistake most often made in marketing is thinking of your business as the hero, which results in egocentric messages that no one else cares about.

The prospect is always the primary hero, because they are the one going on the journey — whether big or small — to solve a problem or satisfy a desire.

Instead of egocentric, think concentric, and help the hero on their journey by guiding them closer to you and your solution.

By making the prospect the primary hero, your brand also becomes an important hero in the prospect s story. By accepting the role of magical mentor with your content, your business accomplishes its goals while helping the prospect do the same, which is how business is supposed to work, right?

The hero s journey is so powerful because it resonates with us at a fundamental level. Or, as author Steven Pressfield puts it, we are born with the hero s journey tattooed on our psyches.

This, again, is a benefit of media over marketing.

With a media-first strategy, it s easier to focus on telling a story over time that focuses on them. With marketing, on the other hand, you re tempted to make it directly about you. Bad idea.

At the risk of mixing movie metaphors, remember this easy rule of thumb from the ultimate Hero s Journey film, Star Wars:

The prospect is Luke Skywalker. The solution provider is Obi-Wan.

What s that? Oh did I refer to you young Skywalker earlier on?

You noticed that, huh. Well The Force is strong in this one clearly.

Robert Bruce: This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.

You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill — you stay in Rainmaker-land and we show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Choose wisely, my friends.

Thanks for listening to New Rainmaker. If you like what you re hearing and you haven’t already … go sign up to get everything — including the two very important webinars we’re about to record, that will only be available to email subscribers — at newrainmaker.com.

Behind the Scenes: How the New Rainmaker Strategy Evolves in Plain Sight

Robert Bruce: So we missed last week. What happened? What’s been going on?

Brian Clark: Can I just blame it on you?

Robert Bruce: No. No, I’m not going to allow that this time.

Brian Clark: Oh. Well.

Robert Bruce: Because this actually has to do with you.

Why We Missed Last Week’s Show

Brian Clark: Well, that’s true. Actually, I’m impressed that we went on a run and were consistent. As you know (but no one else seems to know), since early February I’ve been sick with this weird … not normal sick.

I’ve been every form of normal sick with one unifying, really crazy, weird sickness that has been a really trying experience. Basically, I was in Austin doing a live training event. I basically got the flu. So I did 10 hours onstage in two days, suffering from the flu. I made it through it and it was all cool, and I was all proud of myself.

I never really got better from that, because then I went to Las Vegas to speak at the email summit, and that’s when things got really weird and I got hit with vertigo.

Robert Bruce: Vertigo.

Brian Clark: Yeah. So it’s not just an Alfred Hitchcock movie. It’s basically, everything spins around and you can’t walk straight, can’t think straight and can’t do anything. You get very nauseous. During the first few days of that, I was bedridden.

Finally, I went to the doctor, and they were like, “Well, it’s either a virus and it’ll clear up, or it’s this other thing. If I make this adjustment on you, it’ll go away in a couple of days.”

Well, it turns out it was probably the virus thing. In hindsight, if I would have gotten really strong antivirals, at that point I would have been laid up a couple days. I probably would have been better.

Instead, it’s been weeks. And then to top it all off, because it attacks your immune system in addition to your vestibular system, I’ve gotten every possible sickness that two little kids, little germ factories, biological warriors if you will …

Robert Bruce: … dragging that into the house …

Brian Clark: … that drag right into the house. So yeah. It’s been five weeks of suck.

Robert Bruce: I’m thinking maybe that’s a good enough reason.

Brian Clark: I was trying to make it. That was the badge of honor. But doing half-days of work would basically exhaust me. So last week, I had a really rough week. And we moved into our new house at the same time.

So come on people, please give me a break! That’s a good excuse. I mean, in the realm of excuses.

Robert Bruce: Maybe we’ll do a poll or something at the end of this program.

Brian Clark: Yeah. “OK Brian, we don’t care, suck it up next time.” (Laughs)

Robert Bruce: Moving, on top of it. I forgot about that.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that was fun. That’s always fun. I’d like to use that as an excuse alone.

What We’ve Learned so Far About Maximizing iTunes

Robert Bruce: Okay. So we’re back. This is episode eight of The New Rainmaker podcast. We’re doing another behind-the-scenes episode here. We’re going to talk about some specifics of what’s been going on since we last did one of these.

We’re eight episodes in now, and I just want to ask you what we’ve learned in those eight episodes …

Brian Clark: Well, starting off with an audio focus. I think we talked about in the last behind-the-scenes, that audio is really just the beginning point as opposed to the goal. A lot of people doing podcasts right now, I think that is what they are thinking. “Let’s put on a podcast!” Which is important, and we’ve leaned some interesting things about that.

You also have to keep in mind, and I think this behind-the-scenes episode will make it a little bit clearer in anticipation of the webinar that we do, where we lay out our entire content and traffic strategy in detail. This is going to be a warm-up for that, as we’re in the midst of doing it.

The thing I’ve learned with audio, and specifically iTunes, as an audience-building and discovery platform, right? So you create content, you are distributed by iTunes. iTunes, depending on how popular you are, will rank you and expose you to people that have never heard of you before, which is amazing.

That’s of course how the social networks work, too. Here’s the tip I would give people about iTunes: If you have any existing audience or customer base, or people that you have an existing reach with, if you want to do well on iTunes, make iTunes the only audio channel you offer.

We’re offering MP3 downloads and we’re offering transcripts as of the first day. We’re offering Stitcher, SoundCloud, and iTunes, right? We’re doing great in iTunes, by the way. If we really wanted to own iTunes, we would only own iTunes.

I’ve seen some people, Robert you know our friend Ben Settle he’s always focused on email, so he’s got a fairly significant email list. He drives them all directly toward iTunes. And he’s kicking ass in iTunes, because it’s very focused, right? iTunes basically operates on usage, listening data, ratings, reviews and all that kind of stuff.

If you’re concentrating all on iTunes, you’re going to get the most performance gains from iTunes. That’s just a hint, or a tip, if you’re starting with audio. Make iTunes or it could be SoundCloud or Stitcher, I suppose. But iTunes is the big daddy.

Robert Bruce: Choose one.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Robert, you’ve got insight on the numbers, iTunes is still the big platform.

Robert Bruce: They came out and they made a big deal, Apple did, last year, promoting the fact that there were over one billion subscribers to podcasts on iTunes alone. That’s a staggering, staggering number.

So if you were smart about it, and you wanted to do this hyper-focused, driving everything and everyone to iTunes which then you turned into something else it’s obvious that the audience is there. It’s there in almost any category you want to talk about.

We’re talking one billion total subscribers to podcasts alone. I like to bring up, again, this idea that that number is, I’m guessing it’d be just the start. It’s still hard to get through the process of subscribing to a podcast in iTunes for the average person.

Brian Clark: Right.

Robert Bruce: We’ve got all these options and we want to really, really make something happen there. Even if you’ve got a smaller audience, you can make something happen on iTunes by driving everyone there. Our focus has been on the email list first and foremost, and then giving these options elsewhere as well.

Brian Clark: That’s important. Email is higher value than any social network, iTunes, RSS or anything else. And even that’s not really what we’re trying to accomplish, now, is it?

Robert Bruce: No.

Brian Clark: We’re trying to gain customers, and maybe different levels of customers, which we’ll talk about here. As a discovery channel, iTunes could put you in touch with people who have never heard of you before. Then you can use the recordings like we have, to say, “Hey, you get more stuff at newrainmaker.com if you subscribe by e-mail, stuff that won’t be delivered by iTunes.” It’s a really nice, congruent strategy between the two.

What if You’re Starting with a Small Audience?

Robert Bruce: So you’re talking about focusing and driving your audience to, in this case, iTunes. That’s easy for us to say. We’ve got a fairly significant audience that we can drive traffic to those places. What if you don’t have an audience or a customer list? What do you do then?

Brian Clark: If you’re a startup or a completely new endeavor, I would want to one more time say you do want to let them know about it. Even if you haven’t been doing any sort of audience building or content marketing and if you have existing customers and you’re creating high-value content, you do want to let them know about it.

They become your advocates. Not only do you have the ability to talk to them, but they have done business with you and hopefully are very happy with you. Don’t forget about that if you have an existing business.

That said, even if you did eight episodes of content that’s focused on your prospective customer or client like we’ve just done, it wouldn’t matter if anyone heard any of them, necessarily. Like I said when we started off, it’s really just step one. It’s content creation. That’s often the hardest thing.

Once you have something to work with, you can do a whole lot more with it. So again, at some point we’re going to teach all of this step by step. We’re also demonstrating what we’re teaching by doing it at New Rainmaker. So what’s next? This is our eighth episode.

The Next Stage of Evolution for New Rainmaker

You’re about to see the home page of New Rainmaker shift from “join our podcast,” or, “get episodes by email, get some webinars by email.” It’s going to shift towards “get the New Rainmaker report.” That will be housed in a content library, much like MyCopyblogger is, if you guys are familiar with what we do at Copyblogger.

We have a whole bunch of ebooks behind a free paywall, if you will. You have to register, but once you do, you don’t pay money. You do get access to the ebooks. So we’re going to shift to that focus.

Now you’re saying, “Oh, so now you’ve done eight episodes, and now you’re going to have to write this report, and you’ve been sick, you poor thing,” is what you’re saying. I hope. Right?

Robert Bruce: No.

Brian Clark: Still no sympathy, right?

Robert Bruce: Crickets. I think it was crickets.

Brian Clark: (Laughs) No, I’m not writing anything, because I already wrote it, or we already created it. It’s episodes 1-4 of New Rainmaker.

The True Power of Repurposing Content

Robert Bruce: All right, so let’s be clear about this. We talk about this a lot. Repurposing. Is that what we’re getting at? Would you describe the process of turning these four episodes into a report?

Brian Clark: Well, you take the first four transcripts which, by the way we did it, were fairly close to report quality. I actually had Sonia edit it because I wanted an outside eye. You could do the same thing with a freelance copy editor or actual, more substantiated editor. It’s as if they’re doing a book chapter or four book chapters, which is really the closest analogy to what each episode has been so far. As a chapter of a book.

So we created that content once. I had someone edit it at a very low investment, and now it’s a repurposed form of content. And you’re like, “Well, wait a minute, how does that make sense? The content’s already out there.” Right. Well, not everyone wants to pay attention. The hook of a podcast is not what gets some people’s attention, right? A lot of people aren’t paying attention and haven’t read the transcripts.

So now, the existing audience that’s listening to this may say, “You know, I wouldn’t mind having the first four episodes in a nice, readable, comprehensive format because there was some good stuff in there. I want it all in one neat package.”

It has value for you guys, but the other value, of course, is that that’s a completely different enticement to opt in and to register at the repurposed. It goes from email opt in to the registration concept, to the content library concept. And of course, the Rainmaker Platform. That’s what it does. That is how you do advanced lead generation.

But you wouldn’t use that just for a podcast, right? We didn’t start out that way. Now that we have some content to repurpose into a report, we have our first piece of content and high-value content, for the New Rainmaker content library.

So that is the next step.

Is Repurposing Content Really a Good Idea?

Robert Bruce: I feel like there might be a concern out there about this repurposing strategy. I think we tend to think as people that are creating content on a regular basis and creating media … it’s like, “Okay, I already did that, I don’t want to re-do it and get it in front of what largely, in the beginning anyway, might be the same group of people.”

What do you say to that feeling of, “Is this really a good idea, this re-purposing thing?”

Brian Clark: That’s why people run out of things to say. Again, what is your goal here? Is your goal to create content? Look at a film producer. What is their goal? It’s to make a film to make money, right? So here we are, new media producers, we create content in order to make money. We just have a different business model. So there’s that aspect of it.

We will go through this and we will emphasize that these initial episodes that you create, that you should put a lot of thought into what they are. If you do that well, you are creating material for yourself that can be used in all of these various contexts.

Let’s not flatter ourselves. Even with our audience, only a small percentage is paying attention to what we’re doing at New Rainmaker. I accept that. It’s fine. It’s great. It allows me to up the bar each time I repurpose. When I repurpose content, I get to make it better than it was the first time because I’ve had time to think about it.

I’ve gotten reaction from the people who did pay attention to it, and maybe they said, “I’m not so sure what you mean here by ‘media’ instead of ‘marketing.’” This has all been invaluable to me. It’s been so helpful getting feedback for the last eight weeks? Right?

I don’t know if a lot of people have that concern. I think the opposite concern is there, which is, “how in the world do I keep coming up with new stuff all the time?” I think what we’re trying to demonstrate here is that if you create really great content from the up-front by doing the necessary research and thought, then you can take that content, and you don’t have to create new content.

It’s based off your eternal themes. The themes that really matter to getting across to your audience. Again, you start a podcast. You take X amount of episodes from the transcripts. You turn that into articles. You can turn it into guest posts or you can turn it into a report like I’m doing.

A Real Example of Repurposing

Say for example, you’re a service business. This report is used as enticement to register, or opt in, containing a soft “how can I help you more,” service pitch at the end.

It’s all the marketing some businesses have to do.

This is effectively what I did with my real estate businesses before Copyblogger. I created content, I repackaged it and put it in different streams. I got people to follow me over time until they were ready to do business. I never had to do a hard sell. It’s just like an automated lead generation machine.

As we go through this further, you’ll see that everything we do is designed to create that process.

Not that you ever just set it and forget it, because maybe next year your eternal themes are changing. It’s evolving with your business and it’s evolving with the industry you’re in. It’s evolving with all that good stuff. This is designed to get maximum impact out of a certain amount of content as possible.

Why We’re About to Focus Heavily on SlideShare

Robert Bruce: All right. Let’s move on to ways to drive traffic and lead generation. We’re going to talk specifically about SlideShare. Do you have any initial thoughts on this?

Brian Clark: Well, compared to Twitter, Facebook or whatever, there are two social networks that are highly business oriented. Therefore, you’re not surprised that they’re more welcoming to business content, and they do much better from a lead generation standpoint.

Those two are LinkedIn and SlideShare, which is now owned by LinkedIn. It actually has been for a little while. The other thing that’s interesting to me about SlideShare is that it’s a copy writer’s dream, or a writer’s dream. Again, if you’re a producer and you’ve gotten your ideas out there, but you’re not a writer, that’s okay. You can work with someone to take those ideas and just repurpose it into various formats.

Before we go off and start creating Slideshares to try to drive leads back to our site, we had to repurpose the site into a high-converting mode. That’s why first we did the podcast, and we’re continuing with the podcasts. That’s ongoing.

We did the initial episodes of the podcast in order to make that into a report, which becomes the enticement to get the report. And then receive the podcast going forward. So the podcast and the audio content, becomes your follow up material. But you’ve already got that in process, you know?

So instead of just doing a podcast, you’re doing an entire system of things that, at each level, allow you to attract more traffic, build an audience faster, and keep them engaged as you continue into the future. First thing, we’ve got to reconfigure the site, which again, it’s like Rainmaker Platform was designed to do.

Then we take aspects of the content we’ve already created, the juicy, cool stuff or the stuff that gets our point across on various topics the best, and we turn those into slide presentations.

Robert Bruce: You pretty much covered everything I was about to cover there.

Brian Clark: (Laughs) I apologize! You got really excited because you just didn’t really give a crap one way or another when I said, “Hey, we’re going to start doing SlideShare,” and you’re like, “Okay.”

We’ve never done that. This is a whole new thing. Copyblogger has never done anything in SlideShare, so we’re making it up as we go along with you guys.

Robert Bruce: Well, it really got my attention because obviously, social networks are very important as distribution. But SlideShare, your interest in SlideShare was what interested me. And for all the reasons you just laid out. I think, it’ll end up being an important thing for us.

I want to reiterate what you said about how we’re going to approach it.

Our Initial SlideShare Strategy Explained

Robert Bruce: When you look at SlideShare, just take a look over there at SlideShare.net. There’s a little drop-down in the top menu bar. You can go by featured SlideShares, popular, or most ‘likes.’ They’ve got it laid out pretty simply.

When you look at what’s going on there, it’s very simple to see right off the bat what works and what doesn’t.

We’re thinking about things that are image-heavy, of course. Just like a really great slide presentation. You want to go image-heavy. You want to go copy-short for the most part. There are a lot of these up there that are somewhat successful with heavy copy.

Brian Clark: Right! I remember when you sent me your first draft of the first one you wanted to do, and I’m like, “no, you’ve got to look at some of these. They only have a few words per slide.”

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: But it’s Copywriting 101. You know, copywriting, the purpose of the headline is to get the first sentence read. The purpose of the first sentence is to get the second sentence read.

So when you apply that to SlideShare, the purpose of each slide is to get the next slide advanced. I saw demonstrations about people who would use very short bursts of enticing copy to get you to hit the next thing. And the next thing you know, your finger is just moving. Advance, advance, advance.

It’s very engaging because it’s not a lean-back experience. It’s a lean forward. I want to see what the next slide says. And when it’s really well done, it’s fascinating. The next thing you know, you’ve gone through 70 slides and read the entire thing.

We’re going to embark on this, and then we’re going to tell you what we found out, if we failed, and how we had to adapt to figure it out. Just by observing, I think we’ve learned some things that we’re sharing with you right now that may help you if you want to get started.

Robert Bruce: How I’m going to approach this in the simplest possible terms is a combination of distilling the very best parts of these first eight episodes that we’ve done, and everything we’ve learned to tell very short stories. Combining that as a copy approach, and with really great design, we’ll get back to you with the results. I think it’s going to be, at the very least, it’s going to be a cool test of these.

Brian Clark: Right. Of course, SlideShare is just one way that you drive traffic. Remember, we are going to optimize this site for registration, for opt-in and for audience building by e-mail. So don’t forget to do that.

Robert Bruce: SlideShare does not become your primary platform, just like anything else.

Brian Clark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. SlideShare is pointing back at something and the thing you point back to should be as optimized as possible for your goals. Of course, that’s how Twitter works. That’s how Facebook works. That’s how LinkedIn itself works. That’s how good old-fashioned outreach works.

Copyblogger was built, basically, on creating content, and then hustle. Get out there and get people to notice somehow. The better the content, the easier it is; but you still have to get people to notice somehow, right?

Outside of creating content you can either spend time or money, or a combination of both, to get awareness to that content, right? So we’re using something like SlideShare. Remember when I told the story of how we use Digg? You put the content on the social platform and you get the traffic back to your site.

In those days it was going directly to the article, so it was really hard to optimize that for opt in. The Digg crowd would turn on you and bury you, right? So you had to live with the fact that you weren’t going to convert that directly to email, but that strategy was to attract links.

With SlideShare, you get to point people back to whatever you want! It has that same viral vote-you-up-to-the-front page aspect to it, just like current Reddit does, except SlideShare is business friendly.

If you have great content, they’re happy to let you develop leads out of it. Hooray for business! And this is interesting, coming out of eight years of dealing with social media as it emerges. It was very anti-commercialism or anti-business at the beginning. Even Facebook is still like that to a certain degree.

Here we have LinkedIn and SlideShare, and they’re like, “Hey! All you’ve got to do is do something fantastic, and we’re happy to let you build your list.”

A Different Way to Approach Advertising

Robert Bruce: What about the next step too, of possibility, which is with advertising? We’ve thought a lot about it. We’ve been dancing around it for many years. But what are you thinking these days?

Brian Clark: That’s what I just said. It’s either time, or money, or a combination of both. I will say, again, in the early-days, Copyblogger never paid for advertising. I spent a lot of time.

Now when I build my Boulder site, I don’t spend any time. I spend money. You know? That’s not to say because I’m the richest guy in the world. That’s to say that if I have things structured in a way that I know I will get a return on my money, then I don’t care. I think most business people are like that.

What scares them away from advertising is either not enough resources, not enough cash to begin with, or more likely, it’s “I don’t want to lose my money.”

So another thing that we are going to demonstrate for you, and this will be part of the entire Rainmaker content and traffic strategy, is that once you have optimized your home page, it’s kind of like going back to the beginning of Copyblogger.

Remember, it keeps coming back to the report that you created out of the normal content that you created. I started writing Copywriting 101. Right? As a series of ten posts. Each one was content as a post.

Then I aggregated them all onto a content landing page. That got shared and linked to, which made it rank very high for copywriting. That brings in traffic to this day. But now it’s an ebook. See how the cycles work?

Well, with New Rainmaker we’re doing this on a very expedited level so that you can see how to do it. Once you get a page that focuses on getting people to register and opt in, then you can smartly send advertising to that page. The new social network advertising programs, like LinkedIn, now has sponsored posts. Twitter, obviously and Facebook. They are very effective at advertising content.

If you’re selling content, you’re going to do great. And what are you doing? Are you really selling content? No. You’re paying to build an audience faster.

I’ve done it both ways. But if you can either get a return on your money, or you can break even on the advertising part and then sell something later, that is a lot easier.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: It’s a lot easier to go out there. Especially for me, because I don’t like to cold email people. I don’t like to do all that stuff. I did it, you know. Sometimes we do things that aren’t our favorite thing to do because if you’ve got content that you worked hard on, you want people to see it. You get over your distaste for promoting it because you think it deserves to be seen.

Pay Attention, This is Very Important

Robert Bruce: You put it even more succinctly recently, saying that we should use paid traffic (advertising) not to sell product, but to build an audience.

Brian Clark: Absolutely, because the audience has value that goes beyond the one-time sale. The audience I built at the beginning of Copyblogger has supported this business through the launch of how many different lines of business?

Every product we launched was purchased by a portion of the audience and/or spread by the audience. So advertising a product is very short-sighted. It’s very expensive, especially when you’re using the social networks where all the people are. It’s very expensive, and unless you have a product to upsell, which we’re going to cover, that’s it.

If you only have one thing to sell and you just spent all this money to sell it, your margins are probably a lot thinner than if you took a smarter approach. We’re going to be experimenting specifically with LinkedIn sponsored posts. We’re going to try some stuff with Twitter. We’re going to try some stuff with Facebook.

And we’re talking about demonstrating this to you in the context specifically of New Rainmaker. It’s in a combination of that and then a very step-by-step methodology about how you go about this. That will be in this upcoming webinar. We are talking a lot about it right now. We’re actually going to go into much more detail than this behind the scenes.

The Art of the Upsell

Robert Bruce: All right. Talk a little more about what you just said: The idea of selling something, and then having an upsell right after

Brian Clark: As I mentioned, if you have a service business, just having the report with the opt-in, with the soft-sell offer of your services may be all you need.

There is one step further that we’re going to go. We sell a relatively expensive compared to a one-time service or an ebook or something like that product called the Rainmaker Platform. Right? So we’ll experiment with upselling not even upselling.

We’re mentioning creating exposure for the Rainmaker Platform at the end of this free report that we’re doing. We are, after all, in the middle of launching the Rainmaker Platform. But there is a better way to do that.

Right now, this is episode eight. We’ve got a couple of more to do. Then we’re going to do these really high-value, intensive webinars. So you’ll see, once we get there, that you’re really going to have eight audio episodes with transcripts that lead the way to the more detailed, step-by-step instruction that we provide in the webinars.

That is essentially how we are educating you guys and leading up to the introduction of the Rainmaker Platform. That’s so that you will be educated enough to say, “Hey, this looks great. I understand the philosophy. I understand the methodology. I know what to do. Sign me up!” Great.

Then we just throw all this away and start over, right? No. What have we just created? I just created a course.

You’re like, “Wait a minute! Are you telling me you’re going to sell the same content that you just gave us for free?”

Absolutely I am.

That’s why we paid a lot of attention to detail about what we wanted to say and why we tried to do a different kind of production that was very engaging to listen to. I love the fact that everyone most everyone I guess there’s been one person who said they hated jazz.

Robert Bruce: Who is it? Who is it!

Brian Clark: I know! I know! I didn’t want to tell you that because I thought you’d flip out.

For the most people, they were like, “Wow! That’s really interesting to listen to! I like listening to that.”

The Pricing Strategy

Brian Clark: So you take the transcripts, you turn them into the e-book or the manual. You’ve got the audio version. We literally created an audio book. Then you’ve got the really high-value webinars. These webinars are going to be the type that get sold around the web for $97, just for that one webinar.

But we’re going to have the whole package. At that point, you can do two things. One thing that you do is, you sell that as a course. I’m not going to sell it for $97, or $1,000, or some of that crazy stuff that people try to get away with. It’ll be more like $20.

You’re like, “Twenty dollars? Why would you sell it so inexpensively?” Because that’s not what I’m selling here. I’m selling the Rainmaker Platform. I need you to understand this stuff, just like I need you guys to understand this stuff before you’re ready to buy the platform.

In this case, once we’ve gone through the initial launch it is much more high-value to have a very focused list of buyers who paid you $20 and invested in learning, than it is to just do straight opt-in lead generation. Added to that, the best time to present an offer for the Rainmaker Platform is right after they’ve purchased the course.

Now you’re like, “Wait a minute! Shouldn’t they go through it first?” No, that’s the second offer.

Actually, presenting someone with the actual tools, the mechanism by which they can make all this happen, when they’re really fired up about the fact that they’re going to learn to do all this stuff is actually the greatest moment to do an upsell.

That’s what we’re going to do.

And we’re going to show you how it works, and we’re going to tell you what happens. The reason I’m telling you this now is for you to start thinking about: What do you sell? What information product could you sell at a lower price that naturally supports what you’re ultimately selling?

I can think of a lot of service professionals, consultants, et cetera, who could write a great book and they could sell it. And that, literally, gets a highly qualified list of educated people that are more likely to do business with them.

But if you’re selling software or if you’re selling an expensive course or a live event, or training, et cetera, leading with a low-cost e-book or course that you create from the content that you’ve been creating all along is a very smart way to go. You’ll build a smaller list, but those are buyers.

Always Go With Your Buyer

I told Robert early, it’s literally the difference between our existing StudioPress customers and our MyCopyblogger list. Our MyCopyblogger list is incredibly valuable to us, but Robert, which one?

Robert Bruce: If we had to choose?

Brian Clark: If you had to choose.

Robert Bruce: You’ve always got to go with the buyers.

Brian Clark: You’ve got to go with the buyers. People who buy from you are of an infinitely different character to you than someone who has only opted in for free content. Now, they’re both valuable. But there are degrees of value.

Robert Bruce: They are talking business, here.

Brian Clark: A buyer is your favorite kind of list.

Clarifying the Repurposing Process

Robert Bruce: Before we wrap up here, I want to circle back around and talk about one thing. I want to talk about this entire process leading up to this product, which then sells the product.

It begins way, way back with the idea of these scripted podcasts that we did. I hope you’re able to see the through line through this that Brian just described. And not that everything was laid out and everything was perfect from the beginning, but we spent the time creating those scripts for those initial podcasts.

We knew we were going to get here at some point. And Brian did, obviously, most of the heavy lifting in that. The point being, you’ve not just made your way with some rambling audio that may or may not be useful to you. From the very beginning you’re creating the product that you will then use weeks or months, or maybe even years, later.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. Again, this step may not be necessary for every business. Like I said, with my real estate businesses, I never sold a low-cost book, or whatever. I could have, actually, because that model depended on buyer agency.

There was a lot of information that people would be willing to pay some money for, just to be educated on. It had independent value to protect yourself as a real estate consumer. For the most part, because the commissions in real estate are so high, I would give that away. I would educate them, and then just say, “Hey, so if you want to put this in practice, I’m your guy.”

I can tell you it works like a charm. But if you’re selling something else, there is no better time, or no better person, to sell the next thing to, than to someone who’s already bought something from you.

Robert Bruce: So, we’re very grateful that there’s been a lot of interest in what’s coming next with the Rainmaker Platform. People have a lot of questions about what it is, when it’s coming. Let’s talk a little bit about that.

A Short Preview of the Coming Rainmaker Platform

Brian Clark: Okay. So you know, before this show, as loosely formed as it is compared to our normal episodes, we have seven things that we were going to cover.

Number seven is the platform itself. My notes here, I realize that we would spend the next hour if I went over all of it. And I don’t think people want to hear about it. Well, some people might want to hear about it.

I think there’s a better way to get in that detail. But effectively, the Rainmaker Platform is everything that we use on Copyblogger. It’s what we use on StudioPress. It’s what we use on New Rainmaker.

It is our custom online marketing platform that is built off the core of WordPress. And so people are like, “Well, oh, so it’s WordPress.” Then I’m like, “Right. The New York Times runs on WordPress. Time.com runs on WordPress.” You don’t really think that’s the WordPress that you get when you push a button at BlueHost or something.

It’s a highly customized version of WordPress. That’s what we use ourselves.

What we’re trying to do, and God knows how much we’ve spent ourselves developing what has become our platform, but the great thing is over time, we’ve been selling the pieces of this thing individually.

Of course, we’ve got Genesis and all the StudioPress designs. We’ve got our Scribe content marketing software, and we’ve got Synthesis hosting. We’ve got a big portion of what we’re doing here, like the feature that I focused on most in this element, is what we used to sell as Premise.

We took Premise off the market, and here’s the reasoning behind that. So you hear me say that, and you’re thinking, “Well, I could just buy all the parts and put it together myself.” Absolutely. That’s how we got here.

We can’t give you, with the parts, what we actually use. The reason why is because it’s not in a hosted-controlled environment. The way we run a site is completely controlled. Everything is controlled from plug-ins to themes to WordPress itself gets updated.

It’s not like Robert goes through and is checking plug-ins and going to see if it’s been hacked before he upgrades to the new version and all that kind of stuff. No. That would be horrible. You would never expect an organization to run that way. And yet, despite all the wonderful things about WordPress, that’s exactly how a business runs with off-the-shelf WordPress.

Whether or not you’ve augmented WordPress with one or more of our products, we can’t give you the exact experience that we ourselves use unless it’s a hosted turnkey platform. And that’s what Rainmaker is. Not only do you get all the functionality of all those different parts, you get a completely different user interface.

You get advanced analytics that are piped in right through the dashboard in ways that WordPress doesn’t do. You get reporting functions that WordPress doesn’t do. Because that’s how we run our business, right?

If you’re primarily doing lead generation because you’re a service business, well that’s the equivalent of My Copyblogger. If you’re running a membership program, that’s the equivalent of Authority. If you’re selling software or e-books, or other digital goods, that’s the equivalent of StudioPress.

You can see what I’m getting at here. If one of these things is the type of business that you have, then except for hard e-commerce, I think that covers everything.

Eventually we’ll talk about hard e-commerce. But you get what I’m saying if that’s what you’re in the business of doing.

Finally we can give you all of that, and yet, you’ll see that because we’ve already built everything and we’re able to put it all together, we’re also able to do it at a price that is not at the highly expensive levels that you’re seeing out there in other solutions of this kind, without naming names. HubSpot.

Robert Bruce: You said you weren’t going to name names.

Brian Clark: Oh, did I? Tourette’s, again.

Robert Bruce: Something came out.

The Case for Building Your Business on Open Source Software

Brian Clark: I mean, there are other things out there, and HubSpot. Good people. A lot of friends over there. But they built a solution in a way that I don’t see as optimal.

Number one, it’s proprietary. I would never use something that, at its core, wasn’t open source. You look at Red Hat for Linux, right? Linux is a free operating system, but the business world wouldn’t touch it until Red Hat packaged it, supported it, made it friendly, and became a billion-dollar business out of it. Billions, actually. Right?

That is even at the enterprise level. People understand that at the core, open source will win. That’s because you’ll never beat that community or that army of developers. They can’t be beat from improving the core technology in a way that no proprietary solution will ever be able to keep up with.

But, just like with Red Hat, and just like with my examples with The New York Times and other high-power publishers who use WordPress at the core, off the shelf is not going to work.

Instead of taking 70 million dollars in venture capital and building a product to sell, or I should say, a software as a service to sell, which is what SquareSpace did, which is what HubSpot did, which is what Compendium did.

We started a blog.

We basically started as content publishers and marketers, and then built everything we wanted to make WordPress work the way we wanted it to work. And this is the natural result of that. We made 7.2 million dollars last year using Rainmaker, not by selling Rainmaker.

Robert Bruce: I want to point out, too, as we’ve been looking at it and using it here for a bit of time before the launch. All of that powerful functionality as we’ve talked about describing it as a position between something like a SquareSpace, and you said HubSpot as well.

Brian Clark: Well the goal is, and I mentioned those two because it’s very powerful like HubSpot. It’s not as expensive as HubSpot. On the other hand, and this is really the hard part, the power was actually easy. It’s the simplicity.

Robert Bruce: Right. That’s what I was getting at.

Brian Clark: Right. The simplicity is what SquareSpace offers, even though it’s an underpowered product. You can’t do real content marketing with SquareSpace. That’s why they have such a high churn rate and have to do Superbowl commercials. I don’t know anyone at SquareSpace, so I don’t have to be nice to them.

So it’s very pretty, and it’s sold with a lot of money, but it’s not really going to do the job. Of course, you get something like HubSpot which is very powerful and very expensive. It’s really aimed more just below the enterprise market, I suppose. So there’s this huge middle part where people, businesses, are completely left out in the cold except for the DIY market.

Brian Clark: You know that we build our company around with WordPress. But you talk to people all the time, Robert, and they say, “Just let me create content. Just let me run my business. I don’t want to mess with the WordPress update.”

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

Brian Clark: I don’t want to mess with getting hacked. I don’t want to mess with wondering if my site’s going to go down if Robert tweets it.

Robert Bruce: I’m not sure how to take that. I think I do now.

Brian Clark: (Laughs)

Robert Bruce: All the power, and everything that everybody wants and loves about WordPress without any of the headaches, is really what we’re getting at.

Brian Clark: The other complaint that we see the most is, “God, can’t someone do something about the WordPress interface?”

Robert Bruce: Well, yeah.

Brian Clark: We did that. We can’t stand it either. Wait until you see it. You’re just going to go, “OH! Yeah! There you go!”

Robert Bruce: In a lot of ways what it should have been for a long time.

Brian Clark: But that’s the beauty of open source. The developers of WordPress are building a CMS. They’re not necessarily thinking, “What’s the business case?” That’s not how open source projects work, okay?

Two Big Reasons Why We Built Rainmaker

Again, that’s literally the role we have performed for the last eight years, which is, “Okay, we had this amazing thing, but it’s not going to work, number one, because there’s no support.

And number two, because it’s too hard for “regular people,” of which we, at least me, you, Sonia, Jerod, Demian we can’t call ourselves “normal” in the psychological sense. But we’re normal (chuckles) in the technological sense, in that we are not technologists.

We are regular people who create content and need to use technological tools in order to publish it.

That’s always been the thing with me. All of this crazy ride we’ve been on has me going “I can’t do anything with this! Let’s build something that lets ME do it!” Right?

That has been the model of our company the entire time, and now we get to Rainmaker, which is literally something I can build an entire site with, without anyone.

Robert Bruce: Something we could talk about for the next three hours.

Brian Clark: Yeah, we’ve got to stop now.

The Rainmaker Platform Launch: What’s In It For You

Brian Clark: There will be more information coming out in more detail than you’ll ever want as far as all the different features, everything it does and being able to see it in greater detail.

For now, because of the way we’re releasing this in batches, basically we’re offering our best price that’ll never be this low again. You don’t have to do bug checks. It’s not going to be like beta, like that.

What did I say earlier about the hardest part? The hardest part is making sure that no one to the greatest degree of certainty that we can provide is confused whatsoever about how to do anything that they want to do. That is the hardest part.

That is why we’re willing, as we always do, to give our early adopters the best price in exchange simply for “What would you do better? Where are you getting hung up? What did we guess at and maybe not get completely right?”

That is golden, and it’s worth it to us. You get first shot at the product. You get a price that is never going to be lower, and you get it locked in forever, even when we add the really huge next level of features, which I won’t talk about now.

That’s really, I think, the selling point to me if you’re interested in this. The introductory price is good enough for what you’re getting, but you’re getting the next level, which will be another whole level of pricing. But we won’t raise the price for you guys.

Robert Bruce: To get in on that initial list all you need to do is go to newrainmaker.com/platform, and everything will roll out to your inbox. Brian, anything else on all of this before we wrap up this episode number eight, behind the scenes?

Brian Clark: Stick with us. We’ve got a couple of great lessons that you’ll see are getting much more specific. We’ve moved from general theory more and more towards how it works, and that will continue.

Regardless of whether or not you ever buy Rainmaker, you’re going to get what we consider a world-class education in how this whole media approach to marketing thing works. So at a minimum, we certainly hope that everyone is getting something out of that.

Robert Bruce: Thanks for listening to New Rainmaker. If you like what you’re hearing, please let us know by heading over to iTunes and leaving a rating or a comment there.

If you found this broadcast independently floating around somewhere else out there on the internet, go ahead and sign up to get everything. Free e-mail updates for future episodes, transcripts, videos, and upcoming live shows at newrainmaker.com.

The Critical Thing You Need to Earn Targeted Traffic Today, and into the Future

Robert Bruce: There is nothing new under the sun. What was old, is new again. It’s all been said and done before true in your university philosophy class, and just as true in your media strategy.

If you’re working too hard trying to keep up with every new tactic and technology and social network that bubbles up online … this episode is for you.

This is New Rainmaker, from newrainmaker.com. I am Robert Bruce and today Brian Clark makes the case for the one thing you need to relentlessly focus on in order to drive prospective customers to your business, no matter what Google, Twitter, or Facebook do (or don’t do) in the future.

Stay tuned

Brian Clark: What would you say about an SEO strategy that involved creating content a specific audience wanted … and then used social media to publicize that content in order to rank well in search engines?

Well, if you’ve been paying attention over the last few years, you’d say … That’s what SEO is, Brian . Google is looking for “signals” that people like content before they’ll rank it prominently, and that starts with social media distribution.

Like, duh … that’s why they launched Google+ in 2011.

Okay, I’ll give you that one. But I’m talking about 2006.

Back in those days, Facebook was still primarily in dorm rooms, and Twitter was considered ridiculous to the extent it was considered at all. It was before social media went mainstream, but we still had social media.

Back then it was mainly about blogs, but “Web 2.0” was accelerating the coming culture of sharing with social media news and bookmarking sites. The two primary platforms at the time were the former versions of Digg and Delicious (which has now been ruined by Yahoo!).

Digg in particular was a force to be reckoned with, sending tens of thousands of visitors in a massive stampede … if you made the home page. TechCrunch was literally built on the back of Digg, with its tech news focus and acerbic voice.

Here’s how it worked. Members of the Digg community submitted content for general consideration. The content either got voted up (a “digg”) or down (a “bury”). Many websites (including Copyblogger) had “Digg” buttons on their pages, similar to what you now see with Twitter, Facebook, and the rest.

Long story short, enough “diggs” and your content made the Digg home page, and the stampede began. But that wasn’t why many of us wanted to make the homepage.

The real reason to make the homepage was links. Bloggers trolled the Digg homepage looking for interesting content to blog about or add to their link posts.

And naturally-obtained links remain the signal Google loves most. We were using Digg as a content publicity engine. The content was high quality, that wasn’t the problem … the issue was that all things made equal, content with the most links wins Google.

Today, the strategy remains the same … only more so. Content sharing brings you traffic via social media, which gives your content exposure that becomes the catalyst for search rankings that bring you targeted traffic over the long term.

Links are still a big part of what Google is looking for, but that is evolving as the web itself evolves. But the thing that ties it all together, back in 2006, today, and into the future?

It s a personal media brand established by a digital media platform. When it comes down to it, this is what drives traffic over time, both from social media and from search engines.

1. Become a Social Object with Digital Media

Robert Bruce: So we see that the overall strategies that actually work to develop valuable and targeted traffic don’t change much over time … even if the landscape changes radically.

But what can this look like in the real world?

Here’s Brian

Brian Clark: My friend Hugh MacLeod of GapingVoid.com nailed the essence of social media marketing years ago. He said “We use other people’s stuff or other people’s content to socialize. And your stuff’s either a social object or it’s not.”

A social object. Something remarkable that gets shared via social media. Think about it that way, and you’ll never create marginal content to simply fill up space on a web page again.

Hugh’s thing is cartoons on the back of business cards, which became the basis of his blog back in 2001. But he also writes fantastic content with insights like the one I just shared with you.

Now he makes a living selling his art, and he’s a bestselling author as well. Another example of the media-first strategy doing the job of marketing, except with much better results.

But let’s get back to the “social object.” How does that work?

Sharing cool content is a sign of status in social media. That could be the latest cat photo, or it could be the really useful industry information that no one else has seen yet.

As Brian Solis smartly says in his book The End of Business as Usual, we are now trying to earn relevance among an audience with an audience of audiences. That requires a new strategy, and that’s what New Rainmaker is all about.

But what an opportunity! The fact that engaging one person can lead to the engagement of their social media audience, and so on and so on … that’s the power behind the “media not marketing” approach.

That’s what traditional marketing is supposed to do … but this is no time for tradition. This audience is not only free to change the channel they are the channel!

When you look at it that way, people are not only doing you a favor when they share your content you’re doing them a favor by giving them something great to curate. Just never take those favors for granted.

The key is to consistently do that favor for people by consistently creating relevant, engaging content. When people find a source that gives them great content to share, they’ll return to you and share time and time again.

Just ask our own Robert Bruce, who curates content for Copyblogger’s social media streams. Once he finds a good source, he’ll continue to mine it for gold on a regular basis:

Robert Bruce: Yep. Robert here … and it’s the truth.

Brian Clark: A brand is a promise. A personal media brand is a promise of consistently great content from a certain person on a collection of related topics. It’s the digital demonstration of expertise, or authority.

And a digital media brand is the platform that becomes known for its collection of personal media brands. These are the people who consistently deliver great content. It’s the collective authority of those people that make a site authoritative itself.

Content is the root social object, but transference occurs to people and companies. The new rainmaker makes this happen, just like Gary Vaynerchuck created simple video content that turned him into an Internet celebrity while increasing wine sales by $42 million.

Makes sense, right? But what does that have to do with Google?

2. Google is a Mean High School Girl

Brian Clark: At the foundational level, the key to understanding Google is summed up in two short quotes from two smart ladies:

The first is from Rae Hoffman, otherwise known online as Sugar Rae. She said: “Google doesn’t want to make websites popular, they want to rank popular websites.”

The other quote is from Sonia Simone, Copyblogger Media’s Chief Content Officer, who said: “Google is a mean high school girl.”

Put succinctly, Google wants you as soon as you don’t need Google. The only way to attract the mean high school girl is to feign indifference and just go about being your bad self, and it’s the same with Google.

That doesn’t mean that you’re not making all the right moves for Google to eventually love you and rank your content higher than the competition. In fact, a smart content-driven audience-building strategy sets the stage for high search rankings from the very beginning.

Before we tackle that, let’s take a brief walk through the history of Google’s approach to search. As you’ll see, Google has tried to emulate offline authority as a way to best rank web pages from the very beginning and that’s an approach that has continued to evolve in sophistication to this day.

3. A Brief History of Google

Brian Clark: In the beginning, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had an idea about search that was very different from the way search engines worked at the time the idea was that some web pages were more important than others, based on something other than what was on the page.

They decided that the thing that made a page more important was the number of links pointed at it. And Page and Brin saw that it was good.

But … after not too long, webmasters figured out that you could buy, trade, and build links to any given web page pretty easily. And so Page Rank was gamed.

Then Google took it a step further. They decided that some websites were more important than others. The age of the domain, the number of pages, and the number of links coming into the site (as a whole) made a site authoritative. And Google saw that it was good.

In response, venture-capital-backed startups figured out that you can purchase aged domains and built massive sites that ranked for all sorts of long-tail searches. These were the dreaded content farms. And so site authority was gamed.

Google struck back with updates named after adorable animals beginning with the letter P. Panda killed the content farms that strayed outside of a defined niche, while Penguin targeted unnatural links of all sorts. These two updates and others were then rolled into a complete overhaul called Hummingbird and made permanent, along with a shift toward natural language search.

But the future of Google’s algorithmic goal of mimicking offline authority is not found in an update named for an adorable animal. No, it’s something called Authorship.

Google Authorship links your content to your Google+ profile, establishing you as the creator of a particular piece of content and showing your photo beside it in the search engine results, among other benefits. It ties identity to content.

What’s the bigger picture? Well, based on a patent filed more than a decade ago, it seems Google is moving toward something that’s being called Author Rank, where great content from a certain person on a collection of related topics is ranked higher than someone with less authority by the algorithm.

Where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, in my definition of personal media brand a few minutes ago.

Coincidence? Probably not.

Remember, Page and Brin’s idea from the very beginning was to emulate offline authority in the search results. Authorship and so-called Author Rank are the logical evolution of that goal, and as it evolves, it looks like this is what will get it right.

4. Seven Steps to Building Digital Media Brands

Robert Bruce: Are you seeing the importance and more importantly, the future of building a personal media brand here?

From before the web existed, to the early days of search, to Google’s current focus on the authority of the individual content creator … it all comes down to you.

So, let’s bring this home, how do you go about building a personal media brand, one that begins to earn the business every entrepreneur, artist, and/or small business owner wants? Do you need to buy a radio station? A printing press? A cable network?

Here’s Brian again …

Brian Clark: Remember, a digital media platform is powered by one or more personal media brands. These are the people who have become important to an audience of audiences.

So how do you make this happen as a producer? Here are the primary 7 steps:

1. Find out what topics people want, and the way that they talk about them
2. Create great content on those topics, using their language
3. Gently tweak that content so Google knows what to do with it
4. Grow the authority of your website (aka digital media platform)
5. Build strong, relevant social media networks (Google+ is crucial)
6. Write at other authoritative websites, and point back to your own
7. Cultivate real-world relationships with influential people in your field

Wait a minute (you may be thinking) all this Authorship stuff is new. And Author Rank hasn’t been implemented yet as far as anyone knows.

How do you know this will work with Google?

Because those are exactly the steps I took to build Copyblogger, starting before social media went mainstream. And it’s the same steps I take when building any site today.

It’s not that this is a new approach that just started working. It’s always worked when building an audience, because it’s a media approach. And it works whether Google ends up liking you or not.

But like a mean high school girl, Google likes you because you became popular on your own, and you don’t need her.

What’s changed is that the non-media shortcuts and tricks to game Google don’t work as well now, and will work even less in the future. SEO grew out of glitches in a new technology that Google works tirelessly to eliminate …

… and by the looks of the number of SEOs now calling themselves content marketers, I’d say the glitches are harder to find.

Sure, the devil is in the details. And we’re here to help with that. But for now …

Media first.

Audience first.

Build your digital media brands first.

And then Google asks you to the prom. Sweet.

Robert Bruce: Thanks for listening to New Rainmaker.

If you like what you’re hearing, please let us know by heading over to iTunes, and leaving a rating or a comment there.

And, if you found this broadcast independently floating around somewhere else out there on the Internet, go ahead and sign up to get everything free e-mail updates for future episodes, transcripts, videos, and upcoming live shows at newrainmaker.com.