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The Transcript

Is Creating Online Training Programs a Viable Business Model?

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Brian Clark: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I am Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media. This week, instead of flying solo, I’ve decided to start at least a one-week tradition of having a rotating co-host. Today’s victim is Sonia Simone, chief content officer of Copyblogger Media, longtime co-conspirator way before we actually formed the company in 2010 — going back to Copyblogger, Teaching Sells, and all of that good stuff. Sonia, how are you doing today?

Sonia Simone: I am fantastic. Thank you for asking.

Brian Clark: It is wonderful to hear your velvety voice because you also have a great voice. That guy who also has a great voice

Sonia Simone: That traitor.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I don’t know how many weeks I’m going to keep talking about him ditching me, but it could be quite a few.

Sonia Simone: I think you could milk it. I think you are not even close to saturating that.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I feel that way, too.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Brian Clark: It’s evergreen really.

Sonia Simone: It is.

Brian Clark: All right, so as you know, your Copyblogger post today linked to my last podcast. I was honored.

Sonia Simone: It did indeed. Yes, it did.

The Prediction about Online Education That Came True

Brian Clark: Online courses, online education and training — obviously, we always love to tell the story that how we met was you were one of the first people with your credit card in hand saying, “Go ahead and sell me something already,” back in 2007.

Sonia Simone: That’s right.

Brian Clark: That was Teaching Sells, our instructional design meets direct marketing uber course. Do you remember that it was actually that course where someone gave us a review and they said it was ‘Internet marketing for smart people.’

Sonia Simone: I do.

Brian Clark: Not as a compliment, but we took it as a compliment because we were like “Yeah! Smart people only, please.”

Sonia Simone: You know what? You’re right actually.

Brian Clark: Instead of feeling shame and dumbing it down, we actually co-opted that, created another course called Internet Marketing for Smart People, which I thought was so us.

Sonia Simone: It is us. It’s a little offensive, but not very offensive — snarky.

Brian Clark: If you’re playing the populous card, like a lot of the Internet marketing crowd does, because, of course, they’re going, “You can do it.”

Sonia Simone: Right, and we’re like, “You can do it if you’re smart.”

Brian Clark: You ‘can’ do it — just like you can graduate from college — but maybe not if you can’t. It’s just amazing to revisit slightly to see the mainstreaming of this. I don’t like to sit there and say, “Hey, I called it.”

Sonia Simone: You did, though. You did call it, actually.

Brian Clark: It’s still one of those things where you’re right and you’re like, “Wow, I didn’t know I was going to be this right.”

Sonia Simone: I know. It’s true.

Brian Clark: It makes sense because on-demand — reacting to trends, to market, fluctuations, to disruptions — everything’s moving so quickly. I don’t think academia could keep up 10 years ago, much less now. That’s what’s really driving this, and it’s only going to accelerate. The whole concept in that Fast Company article — I don’t really like the terminology. I think it’s pretty weak. I think this futurist guy is dead on about this is a real gig. It is now, but only more so by the time we get to say 2020, 2025. The whole concept of the ‘freelance professor,’ how does that strike you?

Sonia Simone: I don’t love ‘freelance professor’ for a lot of reasons. I like your old term ‘entreproducer’ because I think you want to not forget that this is about a business. It is about teaching, but absolutely, equally, it is about business and about producing a result somebody else wants. Also, maybe because it’s just because too many people called me ‘Little Professor’ when I was a child. I have trauma from that, so that could be the source.

Brian Clark: Is that why you call me ‘Professor Clark’ when I get too esoteric?

Sonia Simone: It is. That’s right.

Brian Clark: That’s not a compliment, either — just in case there’s any confusion.

Sonia Simone: No, you have my story. That’s my story.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it is a business, and I did like that he said you need course materials, a plan, and a marketing plan. That’s what really set me off on this. You’re not going to get away from understanding the marketing component of it. The big thing about Teaching Sells, which was amazing to me when I was creating it, was that the intersection of direct marketing principles — which everything you sell online is direct marketing. Don’t think about junk mail. That’s not what it means. It means direct to the consumer, or customer, or client.

The principles, especially of copywriting, are applied in instructional design because that’s what gets adult learners to pay attention, to retain information, to stick with it — all of these things. Even if you say, “I don’t want to be a marketer,” or “I don’t care about selling,” creating great training is a component of exactly the same elements of retaining an audience and their attention in order to actually get some value out of it. It really is doing a great job of teaching people that builds your business in the long-term.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, most, maybe all smart marketers and salespeople have known for a long, long time, well over 100 years, that in order to have something that is marketable or sellable, you need to have a transformation that you can offer the person you’re selling to, while teaching has the transformation baked into it. The whole point of teaching is to create a transformation. That’s one of the reasons it’s such a strong model. It’s very easy to explain to somebody, “I am going to teach you to do something you want to know how to do.”

Brian Clark: Also something we talk about a lot, ‘baking in’ — it’s not just knowledge. It’s the benefits.

Sonia Simone: The benefits of knowledge, yeah.

Brian Clark: Guess what? Those are the same benefits that go on a sales page.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Brian Clark: You really can’t separate the two. I always was proud of Teaching Sells and how well it integrated it together because humans just naturally compartmentalize things. “This is that, and this is the other.” No, it’s really one thing, and it’s all related anyway.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Brian Clark: You and I have created many courses together. I still remember that time we created that freelance X Factor course, and I had to rent a room in Durango, Colorado, because I was there for the summer. My kids were little maniacs running around the place we actually were staying in, so in order to have quiet

Sonia Simone: You were in a closet in an office building or something crazy.

Brian Clark: I know. But, hey, we got it done.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, that was a good course.

Sonia’s Move from Freelance Copywriter to Course Creator

Brian Clark: Many years of education courses and all that. I want to talk to you a little bit, because you created in the time that we’ve known each other — this was before Copyblogger Media, though — you created your own course called Remarkable Marketing Blueprint. Is that correct?

Sonia Simone: That’s right.

Brian Clark: Oh I got it. You did that all by yourself. I remember you just went off, and then a long time later it was done.

Sonia Simone: I did, yes.

Brian Clark: Talk about that process as tackling what was a really big project. That was a good-sized course.

Sonia Simone: It was. What I wanted to do when I left the corporate world — and I have talked to other places about my serious post-corporate traumatic syndrome — I left the corporate world. I needed to make money. My husband stays at home full-time with my son, so it was all on me. My idea was I was going to be a freelance writer. That was okay.

I did moderately well at being a freelance writer, but I hated the ‘you don’t kill, you don’t eat’ mentality. It was not emotionally a great fit for me where I had to close all these new clients, and I was always prospecting. It wasn’t well-suited to me, so I did take Teaching Sells. I was one of those people who messes up your server by refreshing the order page two times a minute trying to wait for it to open — don’t do that, guys. It’s annoying.

I put this course together to teach people some of the things that I had, had to teach myself in order to be a good marketing writer — how to market stuff, how to sell things if you’re not the $10 million marketing budget company. It was revolutionary for me. It completely transformed who I was as an independent professional. Instead of constantly prospecting and talking to people who weren’t ready to move forward and closing people and all this stuff, I said, “Here’s a thing. Here’s what it will do for you. Here’s what to do next.” A bunch of people bought it, and then they gave me whatever it was, $27 a month.

It was a great deal. It really changed my business. It really changed my relationship with my customers. They created this whole identity. They called themselves the ‘Remarkables,’ and the first group were the ‘Remarkable and Originals.’ That was an identity that they had that many of them carry.

There will be people listening to this podcast who’ll say, “I’m a Remarkable.” It was really a great experience professionally and personally in terms of satisfaction, in terms of my ability to help people. It was just cool, and fun, and awesome.

Brian Clark: I remember the community you built there

Sonia Simone: It was intense.

Brian Clark: was rapidly pro-Sonia.

Sonia Simone: As they should be.

Brian Clark: You have that effect on lots of people. You come across so nice, but behind the scenes

Sonia Simone: Brian knows how evil I really am, but I do get [inaudible 0:11:22] very nice.

Brian Clark: When Sonia goes on a rant, just duck. What was the hard part about it? Again, it seems to me the content was so right up your alley. Was producing it the biggest challenge?

Sonia Simone: Producing it was great. I had to get my act together, but that was fine. That was all good. The site was really tough. I’m still so grateful to this day for the wonderful developer who was able to help me out with it. But even so, I think it took us about two months to get the site together before I could make any money. I was spending money.

Brian Clark: This was WordPress plus plugins?

Sonia Simone: WordPress plus proprietary membership plugins was what this was.

Brian Clark: Yeah, we won’t name which one.

Sonia Simone: No, we won’t name. There were a couple at the time. They all had issues, and I encountered the issues. It took a long time to get it together. During that time, I was spending money developing the site, but I wasn’t getting any revenue. We had security issues. Some kind of creepy Russian hackers were putting porn into my member library. I don’t know why. To this day, I’m not sure why — “Why are you doing that?” — but they did. That was great. We were playing whack-a-mole with security.

It didn’t work the way I wanted it to work. There was a lot of manual work to make sure that, if people left the course, like stopped paying for it, that we would stop giving them access to it. Just things like that, that today we have some tools — you know, cough, Rainmaker Platform — that make that really easy. It was not easy.

Brian Clark: That’s such a familiar story. When it was just me and Tony — and then later you joined us with Teaching Sells — Tony was gluing together, duct taping. No one would ever tell me just how fragile these sites were. They looked pretty, but they were built out of all these different parts. Also, in the original version of Teaching Sells, remember how Tony had to try to teach people to build an LMS out of what was it, Joomla and Moodle?

Sonia Simone: Moodle, right.

Brian Clark: Later we could finally get it done with WordPress, pretty much with the stuff you use, but of course, there were issues. People were always asking us, “Oh my gosh, you’ve taught me things that I didn’t even imagine I could know about creating instructional content and about marketing it. Just give me the technology platform.”

Sonia Simone: Right.

Brian Clark: That’s going to take a while. In fact, it took, oh, I can’t even do the math, seven years.

Sonia Simone: Yeah. There have been platforms, and those platforms had issues because it’s hard. It turns out when we set out to build it, it’s like, “Oh, this is actually really hard.”

Brian Clark: It took a while. It either takes a ton of money or it takes time. We were bootstrapped, so it took some time. Anyway, I mentioned that last week. At least, at this point, Rainmaker takes care of those headaches, and now it’s become essentially a part of the Teaching Sells experience that we’ll be doing next month.

Sonia Simone: Yes.

Brian Clark: Anyway, I think one objection people have when they hear us talk about creating the marketing blueprint, or a Copyblogger course, or even the New Rainmaker training course that is a lead generator for Rainmaker.FM. Like, “Yeah, that’s fine. You’re selling courses, marketing about marketing, blogging about blogging, content marketing about ” — you know, very meta.

That is something we’ve been dealing with for a long time. Sometimes it’s frustrating to always feel you’re being self-referential, but the real opportunities, business is going to remain a very big on-demand training realm.

I remember back in 2007 when we talked about the three big areas. They were business, personal development, and technology. I think that remains the case today. There’s so many other topical areas that people are making not only money, but a living, a good living.

Sonia Simone: A good living, yeah.

Brian Clark: Yeah. You’re like the curator of online education and membership sites that shouldn’t work — or at least that they’re real topics for real people that don’t involve this meta aspect to it. Give us a few of your favorite examples.

The Improbable Sports Training Program That’s Killing It

Sonia Simone: One of my favorites, he was a member of one of our early communities, The Third Tribe. That was the first marketing thing he ever bought, so I claim all credit for his success. That’s not fair or reasonable. I’m just making a joke. His name is Will Hamilton, and he has a site called FuzzyYellowBalls.com.

The thing I love about this site is it was a long-time truism in direct response that you could sell all kinds of things to golfers, but there was no money in tennis. You could not do tennis education. You couldn’t do tennis direct response because tennis players didn’t spend money. Will’s doing unbelievable things with this site. It’s opened all kinds of doors. He makes a great living off this business.

Brian Clark: It’s always the one that I’m like really? Tennis?

Sonia Simone: Yeah. Since Will showed it could be done, I think that other people have come up as well in tennis, but really remarkable story with that.

Other Examples of ‘Non-Meta’ Training Programs

Sonia Simone: Another one was one of my Remarkables, a woman named Wardee Harmon. She put together a natural cooking site. She had a real interest in — very on-trend today, she was ahead of the curve at that time — organic food and respecting the dignity of the food.

Brian Clark: I wouldn’t be surprised if my wife was a member.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, and if she’s not, she should be because it is so up her alley. But she did this natural cooking class online, and we all thought, “Well that’s a good idea.” From the beginning, we were all a little startled at how well it did. People were waiting for it. She was an early presence, and she just destroyed it with that.

My friend Ruth heads an institute called the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, so straight-up, hardcore Internet marketing, right? They do extremely well with courses, and Ruth — I know Ruth, she’s a friend of mine — has a very businesslike approach to teaching courses in behavioral medicine. She just did a course on meditation with Tara Brach, who’s a wonderful meditation practitioner.

They just do really, really well with these courses with a businesslike approach to teaching. It’s a combination, in their case, of professional development for therapists, but also, a lot of non-medical professionals like me will take these courses because we want to know more about trauma or the science of the brain or meditation.

Membership Sites for Kids? (It’s All About the Parents)

Sonia Simone: I’ll wrap up with one that my son encountered that was very cool, which is a company called Youth Digital. They teach kids my son’s age — my son’s almost 10 — how to code in Java in order to make Minecraft modifications.

Brian Clark: Yeah, my kids, I don’t know if it’s the same course, it may be. But both of my kids all of a sudden have figured out that you can make the stuff that is Minecraft.

Sonia Simone: Right.

Brian Clark: They’re just fascinated by it. It’s like Legos in digital world.

Sonia Simone: Yeah. That’s a real case where people would tell you, “Oh, you can’t make any money with Minecraft education because there’s so many YouTube videos.” These guys, I don’t have any connection to them other than my kid is a junky for this course. He can’t wait to get home and start learning Java, but it’s very well done. It’s done for kids. It’s got great sense of humor. It’s comprehensive. They have good support, and they’re just selling the heck out of this course. I think it’s $200 a pop for something for kids, so kids can play with a toy.

Brian Clark: It’s educational and that type of purchase — this is valid actually because learning to code is awesome — but we all bought Baby Einstein CDs to make us feel better about parking the kids somewhere. You’re selling to the parents.

Sonia Simone: Yes, exactly. You’re saying, “No, it’s a good thing that they spend all day every day on Minecraft. It’s education.”

Brian Clark: I will say that out of all the games my kids try to play, Minecraft is actually probably the best for them.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I’m telling myself that story.

Sonia Simone: Yes, I am, too. I’m right there with you.

Brian Clark: Alright, I don’t know, Sonia. You being on here made this very easy. In fact, easier than Robert. Now I’m going to just change my story and say good riddance to Mr. Bruce. I may just hit up Sonia Simone. You’re like, “Wait, what?! You’re giving me more work to do?”

Sonia Simone: Bring it, bring it.

Brian Clark: We’ll see. If I can’t find other victims, though, you’re going to be my default.

Sonia Simone: I’ll be the default victim. That seems congruent with my general role in the company.

A Free Webinar for Creating Online Courses

Brian Clark: So you and Chris Garrett have a webinar coming up. Is that related to

Sonia Simone: Yeah, the webinar, it is an educational webinar designed to give you what you need to know to become a customer. I’m not going to hide that. That would be silly. It’s a webinar about the things that we have seen — Chris also was an early Teaching Sells customer — but we have been teaching people for quite a few years now how to do this.

It’s a webinar-based on some of the things we’ve seen people do that slow them down — so mistakes people make when they’re trying to build an online product or an online service. The things people do that make it very unlikely that they’re going to be able to have this popular, successful, easy, fun, sustainable business. We’re going to be talking about the mistakes people make when creating products online. It’s going to be, well, it’s coming up, so it’ll be June 16th at noon Eastern.

Brian Clark: Well, we’ve got still a couple of weeks, but we will put a link to that in the show notes, so you can sign up from there. That sounds pretty interesting because the webinar, of course, is going to give you a lot of high-value content with respect to things to avoid, especially if this is your first rodeo in this arena.

Sonia Simone: Right, right.

Brian Clark: Whether you decide to go with Teaching Sells or not, it’s going to be solid, but of course, I’m sure that the benefits of the whole course will be demonstrated at some point.

Sonia Simone: Exactly.

Brian Clark: All right, Sonia, thank you so much for coming. Enjoy the rest of your day, and to all of you out there, thanks for tuning in. If you have a chance to drop by iTunes and give me a review or a rating, you can even talk about how much cooler Sonia is than me. I will take it as long as it’s on this show. Thank you very much, Sonia.

Sonia Simone: Thanks. It was fun. Thank you.

The Transcript

The Transcript

Behind the Scenes: Authority Rainmaker, the Next Wave of Rainmaker.FM Shows, and the Departure of Robert Bruce

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Robert Bruce: Sometimes I think I’ve had it with this computer stuff.

Brian Clark: It’s going to make your job difficult to do.

Robert Bruce: I know. That is the only problem. I got an email from somebody this morning saying something. Then an hour and a half, two hours later, I got another email from this person saying, “I know you opened my email. Why haven’t you written back?”

Brian Clark: Seriously?

Robert Bruce: Yeah. It’s one of these tracking things. These little tracking dots that everybody uses now.

Brian Clark: That’s awful.

Robert Bruce: I’m sitting there thinking, “How, in what universe do you think that makes me want to email you back now?”

Brian Clark: Exactly.

Robert Bruce: Right? I don’t know.

Brian Clark: Do I know this person?

Robert Bruce: No. It was something else. Someday I am going to end up in the mountains of the Oregon Coast Range. Well, we can take it offline, but we need to figure out how to do that.

Brian Clark: Well, do they have Internet in the mountains?

Robert Bruce: I’m sure they do. I’m sure it’s expensive, but I’m sure they do.

A Look Back at Authority Rainmaker 2015

Brian Clark: I think it’s doable if that’s really what you want. You’re not worn out from sharing emcee duties from last week’s event are you?

Robert Bruce: Oh yes. I’m running on fumes.

Brian Clark: I’m a little, definitely felt good that Saturday morning. I woke up at 5 as usual. I’m like, “What are you doing? Go back to bed.” Next thing I knew, it was 9:45, which never happens. But I didn’t feel as bad as last year when I did it all myself, so thank you, Robert.

Robert Bruce: You’re welcome. It’s odd because it’s not like breaking rocks, obviously, but it’s the intensity of always waiting for the next thing. Wanting to do a good job, hoping you can pull it off, but you’re sitting back there waiting for your next queue, thinking about what you’re going to say — all of that stuff. Everybody is running around. It was fun.

I felt bad, though, because throughout on both days, I’d be running through the lobby or whatever and someone would stop me, and we’d get into a brief conversation. I was like, “I’m sorry. I got to go. Literally, I got to be backstage like right now, or somebody’s not going to get introduced.”

Hopefully, those of you who were in Denver, first of all, thank you for coming. Secondly, if I seemed rude — hopefully that was not the case — but I was being called backstage at all times for two days straight.

Brian Clark: You also were probably exhausted from the intensity of laughter after you watched Michael King try to slide across the stage in his socks and then wipe out — five seconds after I said, “Michael, don’t wipe out.”

Robert Bruce: Yeah, that was something. You called it.

Brian Clark: You got the video. It’s hilarious. “I got it, I got it. No problem.”

Robert Bruce: That’s the only reason I saw it. It was your video actually because I was coming on as he was actually doing it. I was in the wings when he went down.

Brian Clark: That was so great. Thank God he wasn’t hurt. He did break his mic pack or whatever, but that was one of the many highlights. But, yes, let me thank everyone who came out. It was a whirlwind, but it all just seemed positive. People were happy, and Jessica and Kim pulled it off without a hitch. Dan Pink was amazing. Sally Hogshead was amazing, Chris Brogan. Then, of course, Rollins comes in at the end. It was so interesting to see the mixed reaction of the crowd. The reaction was uniformly the same, but it depended on who you were.

The Amazing Henry Rollins Experience

Brian Clark: If you are a Henry Rollins fan, a Black Flag fan, a Rollins Band fan, whatever the case may be — like me — then you knew what you were in for, yet your expectations were still exceeded. I thought it was more amazing to see the people who were like, “You know, I knew who he was, but I didn’t really get it. Of course I was looking forward to hearing it because everyone said how awesome it was going to be.” Those were the people whose minds were blown.

Robert Bruce: Then, of course, his epic after greeting time. I think it was two and a half hours — I think it went, somebody said almost 8:00 — he was out there.

Brian Clark: I couldn’t believe it because I figured we got to get him backstage and get him to a car or whatever because the poor guy is going to get mobbed. Nope, he announces from the stage. “I will be out front, and I will talk to every single person who wants to talk to me.” I got to escort him out front, and I’m like, “Here we go.”

When you and I walked down the hall, we’ll constantly get stopped, and that’s very flattering and everything. But this was an entire mass of people. I got him far enough to where it could reach critical mass, and he’s just sitting there holding court — signing autographs, taking pictures.

He even for one guy, he said, “Record a message on my phone for my kids.” It was just the most perfect Rollins message. It said, “Don’t follow the rules, and do what you want to do and make your dad insane.” And the dad was like, “That’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Robert Bruce: That’s great.

Brian Clark: I’m like, “Are you sure?” Overall, it was a good thing. The first year we did it had this kind of special thing to it. In part, I think because we tried to produce a different event from the larger, multi-track events. We have a flare for theatrics this year with the stage setting.

The comments we got all the time were, “You are playing the coolest music throughout the entire show.” A little bit of that was me, but a lot of that was just Jessica. You can’t really touch her. She’s a former DJ. She knows her obscure hipster music fairly well.

I’m still reflecting on it, but it’s been cool to see various people doing wrap ups and reflection pieces. It’s all got that same vibe. People kept saying, “I found my people.” We heard that the first year, but to put on a little bit bigger event and have, still, people come away with that feeling I think is pretty cool. I think I need to do some thinking about how big do we ever want to make this thing. Do you at some point you lose that? What would be the point?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, because you hear it all the time. Things get too big and unwieldy and out of control, and people longing for the good old days when it was a small deal.

Brian Clark: We don’t do it to make money. I’ve said that over and over. We do it to break even, if we’re lucky, because we don’t skimp on food or AV or the experience at any case. If it’s really just to have people have that feeling of “I belong here, and that was fantastic. I’m inspired to go take it to the next level.” It seems to me that it makes sense that we don’t let it get too much bigger.

Anyway, I’m trying not to think about it right now. I can’t think about next year right now. I’m thinking about summer. I want to sit down. I want to stay at home. I want to write. I want to record. I want to create. And, of course, that’s how you set the stage for next year. That’s what you do, but it’s time to lay some new groundwork. I feel that way, and that’s, in part, coming away from my own conference as inspired and fired up as anyone. It’s not like I’m immune from it.

The fact that I got to drive Rollins the next day from Denver to Boulder for his show at the Boulder Theater. Me and Jerod and his fiance got to be Henry’s guests in the VIP sections. Only one there, velvet rope and everything, and you think his presentation at Authority Rainmaker was amazing. He went two and a half hours at the Boulder Theater. I don’t think he took a breath, and it was hilarious. When he’s unrestrained topically, he’s hilarious. He just meanders, tells stories, but it’s all perfectly orchestrated.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, it is incredible. I’ve never seen him live, but I’ve seen various versions of his shows over the years — the ‘talking show’ as he calls it — and it is really incredible. He’s got a really great thing going now because he travels the world. He has all these experiences. He sees all these places, and he goes to some pretty incredible places — both in the sense of culturally, crazy political things going on.

He doesn’t call himself a journalist. But he comes and he reports back, and he uses all that material in these live shows. But you’re right, to go two and a half hours without a stop, it’s just like a freight train.

Brian Clark: He doesn’t even really move. He stands in one place. He’s got the microphone cord wrapped around his hand. Anyway, let’s move off of this, but one last thing. During his presentation at the event, he made a reference to Henry Miller and said, “This guy just lives life and then writes about it.” And that’s what Henry does.

When I’m in the car with him for 45 minutes and he’s telling me stories about David Lee Roth and the Ramones and he’s got this great Guns N’ Roses … Black Flag loaned Guns N’ Roses their PA equipment. He said they were the most scruffy, attitude-laden, smelly people he’s ever met in his entire life. And he said 15 minutes into their set there are 35 people in the room — he said they’re going to be huge. I think he was right a little bit about that one.

That’s his whole life. What he does becomes his material. He just delivers it with a lot of amazing wit and showmanship that I don’t think people realize — just go online and look at Henry Rollins’ Spoken Word, and you’ll get some videos. I suggest the one where he talks about trying to compete with Iggy Pop on tour. That’s the funniest thing you’ll ever hear.

A Quick Rundown of What’s Coming on Rainmaker.FM

OK, what else do we have today? We’re already talking 10 minutes, and we haven’t got out of the intro. We’ve got more podcasts coming to Rainmaker.FM. Why don’t we talk about that?

Robert Bruce: We got a whole list of stuff. So right now we have 13 distinct shows live over at Rainmaker.FM, and that is not including, of course, the crowd favorite, the all shows feed. Yeah, we’ve got a number of things coming up here. I’m just going to list them out. We can talk about it, talk about the hosts a little bit, and then keep going.

In no particular order, we’ll start with Andrea Rennick is going to be doing a show called Humans of WordPress, and this will be interesting. A little bit different than anything that’s on Rainmaker.FM right now, but she’s going to be talking about WordPress, talking to big WordPress people, what’s going on in the WordPress universe, and as that relates to, of course, the DIY side of our business with StudioPress and all of that.

So that’s coming up. All of these, actually, this whole list is going to be coming out within the next month, month and a half, but that’s Humans of WordPress with Andrea Rennick. Then Mr. Sean Jackson– I think you still call him Action Jackson.

Brian Clark: Action Jackson. Absolutely.

Robert Bruce: He’s doing a show called The Missing Link. This is something that we went back and forth on, and you hit upon this idea of Sean — true to his nature and his interests — really focusing on the LinkedIn experience and as it relates to digital marketing and talking to people within LinkedIn, talking about strategy, of course, and using it. We’ve often said this is one of the most powerful social networks in the world.

Brian Clark: It really is given that it’s the only one that’s primarily business focused. I keep looking at LinkedIn. I’m seeing more and more original content being published over there. I’m not sure how I feel about it, but the smart ones are always pointing back to home base.

Really, it’s guest posting, yet instead of doing it at Forbes, Entrepreneur, or Inc., what have you — nothing against writing there, obviously — but it’s within a social network where people congregate to get smarter about their careers and about business. Then you’ve got all these content. Then, of course, that content is fueling the traffic back to their own site. It seems to me to be a fairly direct guest posting strategy. I’m looking into it more, but obviously I’m going to be listening to Sean’s show.

Robert Bruce: Jessica Commins and Kim Clark are going to be doing a show called Misbehavior. Love this show title. Jessica is a serious data nerd, and Kim is on the support — many, many different sides of this — but mainly the support side of our business. She runs things over there.

They’re going to be talking about all things data as it applies to business. One cool little tweak is, on a regular basis, talking about how deceptive certain statistics or certain numbers can be or the way in which people use them and what things really mean when it comes down to business.

Brian Clark: Lies. Damn lies and statistics.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, correct. That’s exactly right. It’s been around for a while. There’s one here that I’m not going to talk about, Brian. The only reason I’m not going to talk about it is because you, just a few moments ago, told me not to talk about it. Anything you want to say about that thing that I won’t talk about?

Brian Clark: Yeah, why do you always do that to me?

Robert Bruce: Wait, we’ll come back to this.

My New, New Podcast (Yes, I’m Starting Something Else)

Brian Clark: I am working on a new project, everyone’s like, “Wait, didn’t you just do that Further thing?” Further to me, at least now, is like my once a week personal blog. I’d write it if no one were paying attention because it helps me learn. Thankfully, I’ve got a nice email list that pays attention to me, but I have no idea about selling people anything or whatever. I hope to demonstrate the Rainmaker Platform a little bit more with my ideas that I have over there. Hopefully, again, this summer, I’m going to have the time to implement that stuff.

I think there’s something that’s more congruent with what I’m really good at. What do I have actual expertise in that I really want to do another podcast on. It’s not about just marketing. I really just intellectually need the ability to address a greater range of topics that are still relevant to the people I want to talk to — people like me, at whatever stage you’re at, that is essentially entrepreneurs of all stripe.

I’m not one of these people that thinks, “Well, freelancers are some lower life form compared to a ‘true entrepreneur.’” That’s BS. Anyone who’s making a living outside the system, they’re an independent economic agent. Hey, you got my respect, and 15, 16 years ago, my first success alone without a net was really a freelance attorney when you want to think about it. They don’t call them freelancers. But a solo attorney, it’s basically the same thing. You’re a gun for hire.

Now, somehow, I’m the CEO of an eight-figure software company. That seems like a gigantic leap unless you lived it, step by tiny step by tiny step. Anyway, I’m doing a podcast for those people. It could be a much larger project than that. I’m working out some details, so how about, I’ll talk to you guys about that one-on-one in a future episode.

More About What’s Coming on Rainmaker.FM

Robert Bruce: Books, books, digital books, print books, this idea of putting a book together to build your business, we have touched on this topic throughout the years, of course, but we’re bringing somebody in, a gentleman named Jim Kukral, which many of you will know. You guys go way back, Brian, I think.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I’ve known Jim forever.

Robert Bruce: I’ve known Jim for a couple of years. He’s going to do a show called Authorpreneur, focusing on the book business and as it applies to building your business with digital marketing from that angle. I’m looking forward to that one. I actually got a thing for some of these book podcasts that are going around. Of course, it’s been a number of years now, but with the ongoing evolution of the self-publishing revolution, as it relates to ebooks specifically, is really cool.

It’s kind of neat to see. It reminds me of the whole Napster era of everything in music changing. It’s now taken a few years — and it’s been going for a number of years, of course — but we’re still right in the thick of everything, of all of these changes happening in the book world. So Jim is going to do that one.

Then a friend of yours from Boulder, a gentleman named Doyle Albee, who I just had the pleasure of meeting a couple of weeks ago. Then I got to briefly meet him, sorry Doyle, a couple of times in Denver this last week — really, really cool guy, interesting guy. He runs a public relations company there.

He’s going to be doing a show called PR is Dead, which will be another of the great show titles in the Rainmaker.FM podcast network. Let’s talk a little bit about Doyle’s story, Brian, since you know him much better than I do.

Brian Clark: Doyle is like an old school. He’s been in the PR business forever, but of course, over the last five or so years, he’s really embraced content, audience, being able to circumvent the media by becoming the media. He’s actually going to write a book called PR is Dead: Long Live Public Relations. That distinction is the relations you have with the public is because they’re your audience, right?

When I first met him, I said, “You know, man, we never get mainstream coverage.” And he’s like, “So what? You have 300,000 people that pay attention to what you say. My clients would kill for that.” Of course, that doesn’t make me happy because I want everything.

Robert Bruce: You sound like a Millennial.

Brian Clark: But that’s the point. Of course, that’s been the point all along. Yes, we get ignored by the tech press because we never took venture capital. It’s just the way it works, but does it matter? Did it stop us from growing to $10 million a year? No. Anyway, that’s going to be a great show.

Robert Bruce: He told me he’s going to be looking at what PR means in this century and in the next decades coming up here because, traditional PR itself, the game has changed in terms of what is working and what people need in that context. I’m really looking forward to that one.

Scott Ellis, he is coming on to do a show called Technology Translated. Scott and you go way back as well, Brian, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah. He was in Dallas, or still is actually. He was always doing stuff on his own. I remember he came to our AgentPress workshop and he now has his own hyperlocal site. He worked with the people over at GeekBrief — Cali Lewis and John P. when they were working together. He’s highly steeped in serious media production from the video angle with GeekBrief and just from the hyperlocal text angle. All of that stuff, and he does great consulting work as well.

Robert Bruce: Next up is our very own Lauren Mancke. She runs things over at StudioPress. She is one of our great designers between her and Rafal Tomal. The title we’re still working on, but the concept is, again, the idea of the DIY side of our business, StudioPress synthesis, hosting your own site using WordPress and Genesis in a StudioPress theme on the Synthesis side.

She’s going to be talking about digital DIY issues, running a business, which she’s done for years, and putting the pieces together to do it yourself in the context of digital business and digital marketing. Of course, there’s going to be a lot of design-related stuff in there and how to make things work with your website, but mainly that big idea of doing it yourself online. This is kind of a recurring theme. There’s more and more of these shows popping up and interest in these shows. I’m looking forward to that one.

Our two friends, Tim Hayden and Greg Hickman, are going to be coming together to work on a show called Mobile Friendly. That is something that we’ve been working on for some time. Greg actually started this show, and they’re going to bring it into the network and work together on it. I’ve got a few things to work out there, but this one has the potential just because of the topic to be a pretty big show, and both of those guys know what they’re talking about.

Brian Clark: Yeah, it’s not, “Mobile is coming.” Mobile’s here, and it’s rolling over everyone. To a certain degree, responsive design and being mobile friendly to your users is a criteria that they’re going to judge you on. Google now judges you on it, but I think there’s a whole lot. You talk to Tim Hayden — he just lives and breathes thinking about the consequences and the ramifications of mobile first — and it will blow your mind. I’m serious. This is going to be a great show that I’ll definitely be tuning in to.

Robert Bruce: It’s been Rainmaker.FM all the time for some time here, at least you and I Brian, but we are getting to Copyblogger. We’re bringing Copyblogger over here in the form of what we’re calling The Portable Copyblogger. This is an idea that Pamela Wilson brought up. I think it’s great. We’re going to take select Copyblogger posts from the archive and newer stuff. We’re going to record them. Basically, do a voiceover, but we’re not just going to just do a quick and dirty thing.

We’ll rework those posts so that they actually work for audio. If it is something from the archives and stuff needs to be changed up or updated, we’re going to be doing that and putting it into a nice audio format. I like to think of it as hyper-mini audio books maybe.

Brian Clark: Hyper-mini.

Robert Bruce: Maybe something in there. Super short, because a lot of these, a thousand words can be read in what, seven, five, seven minutes depending on the speed? This will be a cool one. For those of you who would rather get Copyblogger native material in audio form as opposed to text, this one will be for you.

Then we’ve got a couple that will be a little bit later, probably the next two months or so. There are actually a number of these, but I’ll just go through one or two here.

The FAQ, this is something we’re just going to do a basic, really simple Q&A. We’re going to set up a system by which people can either call in or leave messages, leave questions for — somebody will host this. I don’t know yet who — but leave your questions for basically anyone in the Copyblogger organization. We’ll do quick Q&A show there.

Probably the big one of all, which I hesitate to even mention, but we’re going to do it in one form or another, the Rainmaker Roadshow. That’s going to have its own channel on Rainmaker.FM, but basically live shows. We haven’t worked out all the details yet, but we’re talking about basically sending shows out on the road to do live in very small places, live venues.

Brian Clark: It’s interesting because there was a podcasting table set up right in the front of Authority Rainmaker. What was his name? Clark something. Nice guy. Then, of course, we had Kelton and our video crew set up on the side of the house doing high-production video interviews, professional lighting, all that. It’s completely doable. Even if we — the conferences we go to — just set up shop. Talk to who’s there. I don’t know.

It’s an interesting concept. Again, I can’t think about going on the road right now because I don’t want to. Eventually, that will change. It is an interesting thing. We’ve been talking about this for a while. We just haven’t figured out how it’s going to work, but of course, it’s doable.

Robert Bruce: Yep. Then there are probably another ten or so in various forms of gestation shows that are coming up, but that puts us right between 25 to 30 shows. Frankly, that is about where I think I want to be for the moment — and really for the foreseeable future. Things will change. New stuff will come on, and as we get to moving toward — we’re not even close to it yet — but the one-year mark here, we’ll see where we stand in all kinds of ways. But that 25 to 30 number is pretty good.

You and I haven’t had that conversation yet. In one sense, it’s arbitrary. In another sense, I really want this first six months, even year, is to get to a really foundational, stable place with the network. Then, of course, along the way, but also you at some point really want to slow down, see where you are, and make those shows even better, the shows that are there. That’s the conversations I’ve been having with Jerod on the host relations, talent side and then on the production side with Kelton. There’s a lot of moving parts.

Brian Clark: We’ve only been doing this two months so …

Robert Bruce: Has it only been two months?

Brian Clark: It feels like a lifetime, doesn’t it?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Just two months. Finding things out just like we always talk about. Put it out there. See what works. See what doesn’t. You expand. You retract. The answers will make themselves.

I tend to agree with you at least for phase one, 25 to 30 really solid shows — that’s quite an achievement, and it’s a lot to choose from. From people we’ve already seen that some people are like, “I want to listen to all of them, but there is too much.”

I didn’t really anticipate that because the reason you have all these different niche topics and slightly different position shows is that you find the handful of them that really work for you. It’s a testament to maybe we’re hitting it pretty well and that we’ve got people who really do want to consume it all. And that’s hard.

The Showrunner course — just in its short pilot program — it did exceptionally well. I think our other theory that, yes, people want portable, on-demand podcast-level education, insight, advice — all that good stuff. But they’re also very hungry for in-depth, highly detailed, dripped-out courses that really drill down, take it to the next level where it’s not about, “Oh, that’s a good idea.” It’s more like, “Oh wait. OK. I got this blueprint for how to do this.”

It made sense to start with podcasting, especially with the experience Jerod and Jon have. I would expect to see more of that because we’re already getting requests for it.

Why Robert Is Betraying Me and What I’m Doing About It

Brian Clark: OK, so we only have a little bit of time left. I guess we should close with a dramatic announcement that you are a quitter.

Robert Bruce: Dammit. I was trying to do a drop the mic sound effect. Maybe I’ll drop something in there. I’m out.

Brian Clark: You are really taking my advice to heart. You’re just like, “I’m a producer, dammit.”

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

Brian Clark: “I m behind the scenes, I make more money than the talent. Therefore, I will not mingle with you little people anymore. ” Is that where you’re coming from with this?

Robert Bruce: Almost 100 percent wrong. No, actually it will be more. I’ll be mingling more with, as you say, the talent and the hosts. What was I thinking the other night? I feel like I’m more Rick Rubin than I am Jay Z these days. This whole putting this thing together …

Brian Clark: You actually look like Rick Rubin.

Robert Bruce: Well, I need to grow the hair out again, but maybe we can work that out — and the beard, too.

Brian Clark: I would agree with that. Yet, at the same time, listen to that voice. Listen to the insight, so your whole argument that, “I’m not good at this. Blah blah blah.” I don’t buy that at all. I, of course, do respect your wishes, but I can’t believe you’re leaving me to fly solo. All right, here’s the question we need to ask the audience.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, shoot. Oh, the audience — you don’t care about asking me anything.

Brian Clark: You’re gone. What do I care? Going forward, I can either just fire up Garage Band and just sit here and talk — which I find very difficult. We’ve talked about this for years. If it’s just me, I have a very hard time starting this show. I know we did it a year ago January when we started this podcast, and it was challenging. I think the output was good. We’ve had lots of compliments over time. I either go back to that, or I get another co-host. I’m not sure who that would be given that everyone is just as busy as anyone else. Maybe we should take comments on it.

Robert Bruce: Can I give my two cents here? Definitely take comments.

Brian Clark: Here’s your last meaningful statement on my show, Robert.

Robert Bruce: I think you could go either way. But I’d like to see you try the short-form monologue bit for at least a good number of episodes.

Brian Clark: We’ll see. Okay. This is my request to the audience now. Since Robert is ditching me and making my life more difficult as he always has, but not to this degree. I’m really going to ask that you go over to iTunes, give me a rating or a review as encouragement to carry on, feeling a bit weepy. Did that sound sincere at all?

Robert Bruce: Not at all. I was going to ask if you needed a hug, but that wasn’t going to come down sincerely, either.

Brian Clark: Okay, anyway. I’d still appreciate a rating or review.

Robert Bruce: You’re fine.

Brian Clark: I will be back next week without the traitorous Robert Bruce.

The Transcript

Will Millennials Kill Email Marketing?

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

How to Be in Two Places at Once

Brian Clark: Robert, you realize as this show goes live, you’re probably standing on a magnificent stage in Denver, Colorado. Dan Pink just left, and you’re introducing Scott Brinker. Yet, here we are in your ear.

Robert Bruce: Don’t you want to know how I’ve accomplished this amazing feat?

Brian Clark: Well, I know how.

Robert Bruce: How? No, it is extraordinary. It’s an extraordinary thing, Brian. We’re in Denver, and we’re also in your ear.

Brian Clark: On the air.

Robert Bruce: On the air.

Brian Clark: It s the magic of on-demand content. Who knows when we recorded this?

Robert Bruce: You think there’s some appointment viewing going on?

Brian Clark: Appointment viewing?

Robert Bruce: Listening, rather?

Brian Clark: I don’t know. I do know that as soon as it hits the feed, there are listeners, but usually the big chunk of people come when we send out an email. The conference will be long over by that time.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Speaking of appointment viewing, listening, and things like that, you sent me an article this morning, and it has to do with one of my favorite people groups, which is our dear Millennials, and their email habits.

The Key to Email Success with Millennials

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I saw I think Ann Handley, another one of our conference speakers — this is all getting quite congruent — but she Tweeted this. It’s a Marketing Profs article, and the title is Your Email Marketing Campaign Isn’t Attracting Millennials (for Good Reasons).

Now, I click over, hoping that this isn’t one of those silly pieces about how Millennials don’t use email. Thankfully, that is not even addressed, because that’s ridiculous. Millennials do use email, and they are power users, actually, of email compared to older generations. I think our habits as online people, publishers, and marketers, are more similar to Millennials than, say, some of our peers. Does that make sense?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: We’re constantly plugged in, and of course, we’ve been talking about lately how that’s probably not even a good idea for us. Anyway, so I Retweeted this article, and it got a lot of interest, but like clockwork, someone responded with, They don’t use email.

But it’s not true. They do use email. They’re checking their email constantly throughout the day. Here’s an interesting, fascinating statistic: 38 percent of all Millennials are freelancers. Is that amazing or what? Are you telling me that these people are doing business as freelancers of whatever stripe over WhatsApp, or text messages?

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: No. Email is the medium of business, which I offer is the reason why it remains and will remain the primary sales channel for online. Because that’s where people go to do business.

Why the Logged-in Experience Is the Answer

Robert Bruce: Yeah. That’s not just some abstract philosophy. Think about it. What is the one thing you need to sign up for WhatsApp? Certainly, there’s some different login options now. Sometimes, you’ll run into something where it’s only by Twitter or Facebook login, but the vast majority of services and products and business services that we use, you need an email to log in. Those services, those hot social services, all are run on email.

By the way, for those who think that Millennials are lost down the rabbit hole of the app economy forever and email marketing is irrelevant, just remember that email, on the phone, is an app.

Brian Clark: Email s always been a software application.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: On the phone, you’re right. It is an app. You can use whatever one is standard with your iPhone or your Android, or there are other email apps out there. Yes, it is an app, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not using email messaging. Because again, to interact with the world to any degree, but especially in a business sense, you have to use email.

The difference, or at least different from perhaps other generations for the most part, is that Millennials are constantly checking email as part of their daily life workflow. It’s more of a mash-up than a segregation between life and work. I think you and I probably resemble that, again, just because of the type of business that we’re in.

The Absolute Necessity of Mobile-Friendliness

Brian Clark: One of the primary reasons that’s pointed out in this article that people are not being affected by email marketing among other things, is that they’re not mobile responsive. We’ve talked about this before — that Google had to swing the big bat of Your rankings are going to drop in mobile if you don’t become mobile-friendly. Again, what is the actual point? The point is user-friendly so that people can actually consume your content and your messages. The fact that you had to be threatened with a ranking penalty doesn’t make any sense. The problem is that people can’t interact with your content in their preferred way.

Email Marketing 101

Brian Clark: According to the article, the Millennials are constantly on their phone. They’re constantly plugged in looking for relevant messages to them — not to you — to them: Marketing 101. Yet there are a lot of people that are still doing the spam-and-jam thing. They’re buying email lists. They’re sending unsolicited messages.

One thing that the article talked about that I don’t know is as crucial as they’re making it — and you kind of alluded to it — is consistent delivery, always showing up at the same time or scheduling an appointment.

Do Consistent Email Delivery Times Make a Difference?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: How do you feel about that?

Robert Bruce: I may be too old for this because now, all this talk of appointment viewing and the reality of the world we live in with Netflix and Amazon and iTunes and being able to watch what I want when I want, maybe just kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I have no evidence of this.

Rachel Burger, who wrote this article, is saying — back to your point, 38 percent of Millennials are freelancers — but of those working regular hours, 89 percent check their email long after the workday has ended. They’re practicing what she calls work-life blending, mixing play and work, so they become almost indistinguishable.

She makes a connection there that Millennials would prefer to have their emails delivered, that they have signed up for, consistently at a specific time. I don’t know about this. Consistently, obviously, is huge in anything you’re doing, but the specific time thing I guess I could see it, so I’m not going to rage against it.

Brian Clark: I know we aim for it. Of course, sometimes messages come when they come because that’s what needs to be communicated at that time. As far as content, for example, with the Further newsletter, I’ve never missed a Monday. I aim for around 10:00 a.m. Mountain time. But, for example, the last issue was a little bit later than that just because I’m abnormally busy right now in the run-up to the event and a lot of other stuff that we’ve got going on. I haven’t received any complaints if there is a window of time. I would imagine if I just totally missed a week or showed up on another day, people might start to wonder. I’m not convinced, necessarily, if I think that’s a good sign.

This is really going to get to the heart of the matter. If your content, your email, whatever the case may be, is anticipated, that is a damn good thing. It’s when something keeps showing up and it never gets read and finally they’re like, Uh, I’ve got to get off this list. It happens. You’re never going to connect 100 percent with people, but by and large, you know if your unsubscribe rate, your open rates, et cetera are healthy or not. That’s the key. What are you sending to people, Millennials or not, but especially, I think, Millennials? It’s interesting reading this article because I feel like it could be speaking about me.

We are digital natives of the first generation, even though we are older people now. Millennials are digital natives by birth, and that’s the difference. I don’t feel alien or very different from a Millennial in my online practices. It’s the same thing. If I’m seeing messages that I consider to be spam, or just not useful to me, yeah, I’m unsubscribing. That’s how it works. We people who have spent a lot of time online are very savvy about avoiding or routing around the damage of the Internet, which has been referred to in terms of censorship, but it’s also in terms of spam. We know how to avoid it.

Going back to the theme that we’ve had about creating an experience, specifically a registration and access, logged-in experience, which lends itself to all these great personalization techniques that Millennials also appreciate. People appreciate a more targeted one-on-one, feeling type message, right? Isn’t that just human nature, Robert?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and this goes to one of the core issues of business and life in general. It s Ms. Burger’s number three. Don’t assume you know someone, right? When we make assumptions about somebody’s life or somebody’s story, we are prone to make grave errors, both in business and in life.

Brian Clark: Has there been a more stereotyped generation than the Millennials since Generation X was stereotyped?

Robert Bruce: Right, slacker.

Why Millennials and Gen X Aren t So Different

Brian Clark: We were stereotyped. It happens to every generation, but I think more than anyone, the Millennials have been unfairly characterized in a stereotypical fashion. You’re right –that is the death of audience. That is the death of business, when you think someone is, some very shallow transparent stereotype, instead of a richly nuanced human being. We have generational characteristics. I argued that the Millennials are more like Gen X than people would like to admit — or is that the right word? I don’t know. All I know is that we went through a recession, and we were all upset and angry, and that’s where grunge came from. Then the Millennials have a recession that makes ours look like a day at the beach.

They should be the ones who are angry. I admire them because they’re optimistic to a degree, but they’re savvy, too. You know what I’m saying? They’re not going to put up with your BS, but they’re not necessarily raging angry about everything either. I think serving any generation, but especially the Millennial generation, well is just truly understanding who you’re trying to talk to and providing real value and experience. Whether it’s an educational, Here let me teach you this and I’m going to need you to register for it and you’re going to come back here into this training area, which is becoming ubiquitous with these larger learning programs.

I’m going to deliver you something that you value, that you look forward to. I’ll do my damnedest to be consistent and show up on the same day and time or whatever the case may be. I think if they’re anticipating hearing from me, or the organization as it would be, I think that’s the win.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

Brian Clark: If someone is looking forward to getting your email and you’re a few minutes late, I don’t think they’re going to get mad at you, but I think when you show up randomly with a message that isn’t anticipated or desired, that’s when you get marked as spam because it’s just easier.

Robert Bruce: The newsletters that I want to get, trust me — I always read them. It doesn’t matter what time, what place. But I think this is a good point: consistency, scheduled time, and specifically within the context of talking to Millennials. You’re right. If it’s something that I want, I’m going to read it, no question.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and that’s the secret. I don’t know how many times lately I’ve said it: It’s simple, maybe just not easy. It is simple. Everyone wants to take shortcuts, or they just want to send as many unsolicited spam messages as possible and hope something sticks.

Robert Bruce: It’s all about relevance.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and it’s interesting, because I talk to a lot of people that are in more traditional business sectors, and they don’t understand. They understand the concept of, if you have a bunch of people that you can reach by email, that’s a good promotional tool, but what they don’t get is actually how valuable that audience is and how much you should be focused on delivering value to get the sign-up in the first place. Being consistent with value is more important than being consistent on time. Isn’t that really what we’re both saying here? You’ve got to nurture that list. You’ve got to earn the right to send that offer.

Robert Bruce: No, it’s real simple. You’re right. It is simple, but it’s not easy. You’re sending really great education or entertainment, or whatever your thing is, to people that want to receive it. You know what? That can be a long, fruitful relationship for both sides, but then as you mentioned before, when the unsubscribes do come, you look at that as feedback, really.

Unsubscribes are a great thing because it tells you something, sometimes. You’ve got to look at the context of why and how and who. Don’t fear the unsubscribe because that person has decided at this point in time to take off. Well, they weren’t going to do any kind of business with you anyway, so it’s a good thing.

Brian Clark: Unsubscribes are a natural part of the process. What you look for is an alarming rate of people marking you as spam instead of scrolling down and hitting unsubscribe.

You may say that people just don’t care and they’ll just mark it as spam to get rid of it faster. But I’ve found that when a complaint happens, I’m always shocked. Like Really? Come on now. That was a pure content email. But it’s so rare that you don’t even think about it. That was just a person taking a shortcut. If you saw a lot of that behavior, that’s feedback you need to pay attention to, but unsubscribes in the normal course, as long as you’re not losing half your audience every time you mail, it should be a tiny percentage. But the bigger your list gets, the bigger that number is. It’s okay. It’s normal.

Let me leave you with this. Think about what kind of experience — educational, motivational, what have you — can you offer that is above and beyond just Sign-up for my newsletter. Even something like Further would benefit from me creating a front-end experience, a goal, a challenge of some sort that, Oh, and also you will continue to receive this great content weekly.

That’s the way to do it, and that’s the next step. If I make it through this conference alive, I may have some time this summer to do some projects, and we do have some stuff coming? Right.

Robert Bruce: Yeah we do. Let’s do this. Go to NewRainmaker.FM. Sign up for the email list there. You won’t miss a thing in terms of what’s coming.

Brian Clark: All right everyone, thanks for tuning in, and if you did happen to make it to Denver, you’re not listening to this right now.

Robert Bruce: You better not be.

Brian Clark: I will be talking to you in another context.

The Transcript

Does Audio Create Authority Faster Than Text?

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Robert Bruce: I’m recording this, Brian. Are you going to cough? Do you have a cough button?

Brian Clark: No.

Robert Bruce: Because if you cough, I mean, I can edit it out later.

Brian Clark: Wait, is this the opening of the show?

Robert Bruce: This is the opening of the show. Because here’s the thing.

Brian Clark: That’s wonderful.

Robert Bruce: We’re a week away from Denver, from Authority Rainmaker, and you’re sitting here coughing on this recording. It’s making me a little nervous.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I’m not sure what’s going on. You know, I got a Tweet last week. Someone said he didn’t like all the chitchat that you and I engage in. This is probably going to really impress that guy.

Robert Bruce: Wow.

Brian Clark: Yeah.

Robert Bruce: It s like a minute, compared to other things. Let’s just keep chit … No, we won’t keep chitchatting.

All right. Does audio create authority faster than text? Interesting question you’ve brought up here. What are you getting at with this question?

Brian Clark: When I write the Further newsletter, I’m constantly reading geeky psychological articles, which I enjoy quite a bit. I came across this article that said that the human brain detects confidence in the voice of a speaker in less than a blink of a eye — like two-tenths of a second, that fast. It was really interesting to me because basically, in this research study, they taped 64 electrodes to each subject’s head, and then they had people make statements. They were designed to either be neutral or unconfident, mostly confident, and then confident, and the brain activity spiked, just lit up, when confident speech was heard.

It was almost instantaneous. Nearly confident speech took a little bit longer to process. If you’re not quite as confident, it’s harder for people to assess. It was something like 130 milliseconds later. It’s just kind of fascinating to me that we’re hardwired to give our attention and to attribute influence to people who speak confidently, even though there may be plenty of people out there who know their stuff, but they don’t have that level of confidence. I can certainly see that coming in to play with podcasting.

The flip side to this is coming from a medium that’s been text-heavy since the beginning of the Internet, a lot of people don’t write with a voice of authority or confidence, even if they are. It made me think. Is podcasting or audio content really the cure or an enhancer of authority if in fact you know what you’re talking about and you can deliver it confidently? It’s an interesting question.

The Maddening Path to Mastery and Confidence

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Very interesting. It’s a tough one because — we ve talked about this a lot — the idea of turning on, sitting in front of a microphone, hitting record, is a completely unnatural act. Therefore, it can erode any confidence that you may have in the subject, even when you are an expert and when you are working on these things day in and day out over a period of years and talking about them.

Brian Clark: Yeah. In the research I did subsequently to finding this article — how do people become more confident — it s kind of like this chicken-and-egg situation. Become confident to do things that you’re not confident about. The only way to become confident is to do them anyway, which I think drives everyone crazy, but it’s true. For example, I was deathly afraid of public speaking before I started doing it about seven years ago, and you know from our private conversations, I dread it every time. I was like, “Why did agree to do this again?” Then you said, That’s what you said last year and the year before that.

I still get nervous but here’s how I get over it. Number one, I stick to topics that I know, obviously. No one wants to hear me talk about something I don’t know what I’m talking about. Even the minutia or the anecdotes or music references, I will go and research to make sure that I don’t get even the smallest thing wrong, because I don’t like it. I don’t like to make mistakes, even though they happen to everyone.

Finally, the finally component, if I can refer to our friend, Mr. Henry Rollins and his Writer Files interview, you remember the two words that he said were his favorite quote?

Robert Bruce: Oh yeah, right. No. Can we say it? I’ll have to bleep it out, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah, well, Eff it. That’s ultimately what I say in my head when I go up on stage. What’s the worst that could happen? Do your best. It’s always fun. When I get off stage, I’m exhilarated and I feel good, but what I found looking through the research is that you kind of just have to say, if not eff it, then What’s the worst that can happen? In making mistakes, it’s feedback. Right? You tried something. You fail. You learn. You try again. But if you can’t take that mindset, then confidence never really develops, because you’re always afraid of failure as if it’s going to physically hurt you, and in most cases, that’s not what’s going to happen at all.

Robert Bruce: It’s the old thing with podcasting in particular. How to get better, how to become comfortable, and yes, confident behind the microphone is to do 100 episodes. It s just to keep doing it, as painful as it may be. The question, too, becomes, though, is it something that you want to do, versus something that you think might help — whatever — your goals or anything? Because if it’s something that you’re not too sure about, obviously that’s going to affect how you do the thing. Maybe commitment is a part of that, as well. If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it, and then that becomes the long-haul-over-100-episodes thing.

How to Learn Any Topic at a Deeper Level

Brian Clark: Right, and the process of doing it, that’s so important. You’ve always said — go back to our first episodes of the podcast back in 2010 — we were terrible, and I take your word for it because I’m not going back and listening at this point.

Here’s something else that’s really amazing: when you are expanding your knowledge on a topic, let’s say you’ve got some baseline knowledge because you’re in this particular industry, in which you’re always learning new things. The best strategy for a podcast or a blog or whatever is to share what you know as you’re learning. You don’t have to hold yourself out as, I’m the premier expert on this.

No. Here’s what I know, and I’m sharing it with you so you know it. But there’s an interesting thing about that process. The process of learning and then explaining it to people means that you internalize that information at a much higher rate. It’s called elaboration. It’s a retrieval process. If you really want to learn something, you need to force yourself to retrieve the information. One way to do that is through quizzes and testing. We think about the test as determining what you know, but it’s actually a learning aid. The act of being tested and retrieving tells you what you don’t know, what you do know, and it solidifies the material for you at a higher level, which is pretty cool.

Through the years of Copyblogger and explaining deeper copywriting principles and content marketing, thinking deeply, and trying to learn more, I realized a long time ago that that was what made my game elevate much faster than if I were just a practitioner. The act of explaining forces you to understand the material at a higher level. You truly do become an expert, and your confidence level goes up. It’s maddening, but you’ve got to do it in order to increase your confidence, which increases your authority all in one big package. It’s kind of amazing, but the only way to get by it is to do it.

Now Robert, beyond this — just showing up and doing the work, which is simple but not always easy — you’re a trained actor. You’ve done voice work. You’ve done all sorts of stuff that perhaps the average person who’s thinking about getting into podcasting hasn’t done. Do you have any tips in that arena where you can enhance the confidence that comes across in your voice, or is that even possible?

4 Quick Tips for More Confident Speaking

Robert Bruce: Oh yeah, it definitely is, and I think it s my former life as an actor. There’s a couple of things. I’ll list off a couple of things and describe them briefly. The best thing to do is to go to NewRainmaker.FM, and I’ll leave a bunch of stuff in the show notes for this episode. The episode is titled, Does Audio Create Authority Faster than Text? Four quick things.

One is preparation. All of these are going to be obvious — I think relatively obvious, anyway — but in the context of podcasting and doing content — audio, video, whatever it is — preparation. Yes, in terms of the content itself, either making notes, or sometimes you want to script something out completely. The general idea here is know what you’re talking about. If you’re not an expert, necessarily, know the subject that you’re interviewing, which is another way to approach all of these topics and to slowly gain confidence in front of the mic or in front of the camera. Preparation, that’s number one.

Number two is to breathe. We’re not going to get into yoga and all of that stuff, of which I know nothing, but there are some basic breathing techniques that can be surprisingly helpful in terms of how it affects the voice. The one quick thing is you may have heard, Breathe from your diaphragm. What the hell does that mean? It’s this kind of weird statement that you hear every once in a while. The thing that helped me understand it was, as someone once told me, as babies, we breathe properly from our diaphragm. If you look at a baby in a crib sleeping, naturally their stomach is going to be going up and down, up and down.

If you don’t think about it, which is impossible now that I mentioned it, as adults, somewhere we transition to this idea of breathing more shallow and breathing from our chest. Our chest goes up and down as you take a breath in and take a breath out. When you’re on stage in front of the microphone, in front of the video, breathing obviously is the mechanism by which your words are delivered in that sense. You want to breathe from the diaphragm. One quick cheat on this is the next couple of breaths you take, when you inhale, expand your stomach. Inhale through the nose, expand your stomach, force it, even fake it, exhale. The stomach goes down. That is breathing, essentially, from the diaphragm. Again, I’ll leave a few notes on here.

It s kind of a weird deal, but it’s a physical act that enhances the speaking ability, and this is going back forever.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I had issues with proper breathing and too-shallow breathing. It’s kind of strange. You have to train yourself to pay attention to the breath, which I suppose meditation helps with to a certain degree. But it’s really when you’re in the act of your day-to-day life that you need to make sure that you’re properly breathing, and that can be challenging.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and you’ll notice in the context of this conversation, that your voice will become deeper and stronger in a sense when you’re breathing from the diaphragm. Again, more on that in the show notes.

One quick thing in terms of enunciation and pronouncing words properly and clearly. This one is a little bit of a catch-22 in the modern age. It’s Demosthenes’ stones. No, not those stones. It was — how far back are we going, back to ancient Athens? Demosthenes was a gentleman who grew up with a speech impediment, and through a series of events, he wanted to learn how to speak better. It’s a great story, I won’t tell the whole thing right here.

He put into his mouth a number of stones. Of course, if you’re going to try this, be very careful. You could easily get in to trouble swallowing stones. He spoke with these stones in his mouth, forcing his mouth to speak through them, and this helps with — over the long term — enunciation. You can use a cork from a wine bottle, any number of things that kind of obstruct the mouth and force it to work harder as you speak. Simple things like that can really help.

The one thing you want to be careful about this, though, is that we are in an age where the Shakespearean actor, though alive and well on stages around the world, in popular culture really does not hold the weight that it once did. A great example is Orson Welles. If I were to come on here and talk like Orson Welles — not like I’m talking like him now, I sound nothing like him — you would be disturbed and probably click off and run away. Now, you can see it.

Brian Clark: It’s more like, you have to be confident but you also have to be authentic. That s the balancing act.

Robert Bruce: Just look at television. Acting is a great corollary here because if you look at television these days, actors are more subtle. They’re micced, so they do not have to project to the back of a theater, but that is also affected the style of acting, which we’ve all become accustomed to and love in these shows. It’s very low-key, a lot of times, and sometimes you can’t even see their mouth moving in some cases, or understand the words they’re saying, I ve found recently. You want to be careful with using techniques like putting rocks or a cork in your mouth or something.

The last thing, number four, I’ll say, is mic technique. There are ways to approach a microphone that are very helpful in terms of sounding good. I’m still working with this. We all are. But I’ll drop a few notes in on that, but just simple things like talking around or over your microphone, not directly into it, speaking at a certain distance or distances, depending on what it is you’re trying to affect with the microphone.

That’s four things: preparation, breathing, Demosthenes’ stones, and mic technique.

Brian Clark: Just try saying Demosthenes over and over.

Robert Bruce: I know. That’s bad enough.

Brian Clark: Tough enough. That’s probably all you need to do.

Robert Bruce: Let me add a fifth one real quick here, Brian, which is the biggest one of all, which is editing.

Brian Clark: Yes.

Robert Bruce: You can take out all those screw-ups – ums, uhs — you don’t hear all this stuff because we take a lot of that out for your benefit, dear listener, but editing is a great benefit in confidence, as well. It helps to know that while you’re talking, while you’re recording, Oh, okay, this sucks. This whole section that I just spoke was horrible. I can take that out, which can help with confidence, as well.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That took me a long time to really realize that the magic happens in editing, and you can just completely screw up. You just can’t let it shake you, and start over again. Just pause, take a breath, and start over. The final product is really all that matters. No one has to know how many things ended up on the floor, metaphorically.

Robert Bruce: That old cutting room floor.

Brian Clark: All right. Well, this is an interesting topic. This is kind of fun to geek out about, but podcasting — as we’ve discussed over and over in the New Rainmaker free training — it’s the perfect source content because you get it out there. You get your expertise out there. It can be repurposed in to other formats as desired or applicable, and it’s completely doable.

But we had Jerod talking about the connection that you make with people when they can hear your voice and the nuance that can come across or gets lost in writing, or just, again, that a lot of people are not confident in their writing, and they tend to just slip into the passive voice and then come across as wishy-washy when they’re not at all. It’s just that not everyone is writer.

Anyway. If you’re on the fence about starting your own podcast, don’t let a lack of confidence stop you because the only way you’re going to get there is like us, maybe doing 20 terrible episodes. Who cares?

Robert Bruce: And twenty terrible more.

Brian Clark: What’s the worst that could happen?

Robert Bruce: No more chitchat.

Brian Clark: That’s right.

The Transcript

A Much Better Revenue Model for Podcasting

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at Rainmaker.FM/Platform.

Robert Bruce: Jerod, are you there?

Jerod Morris: I am here.

Robert Bruce: The last time you and I met — this was on this show, which is New Rainmaker with Brian Clark — he was not here, and we kind of made a thing of it. So it’s New Rainmaker with Brian Clark, with Robert Bruce, and with Jerod Morris. Now, he’s here. Queue the Empire Strikes Back music, right?

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Do we have a license for that because that would be awesome? Every time you introduce me, Imperial March.

Robert Bruce: Yes.

Brian Clark: That would be awesome.

Robert Bruce: Jerod Morris, VP of Rainmaker.FM. Brian Clark, Founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media. I’m Robert Bruce, also VP of Rainmaker.FM. You see, here’s the other thing. I’ve been thinking about titles.

Brian Clark: Yeah, both of your titles are stupid.

Robert Bruce: Well I found something. I don’t know where this came from — Silicon Valley Job Title Generator.

Brian Clark: Oh boy. This is going to get worse, real fast.

Robert Bruce: It’s really something. It’s like ‘Innovation Pioneer.’ Let’s see, ‘Engagement Superintendent,’ ‘Mobile Intimacy Evangelist.’ This is one of my favorites ‘Social Media Commander.’

Brian Clark: Nice.

Jerod Morris: Very nice.

Robert Bruce: ‘In-House Social Media Savant, on and on and on. ‘Reddit Directors.’

Brian Clark: We should make Jerod the ‘Rainmaker Education Savant.’

Jerod Morris: OK.

Robert Bruce: It sounds like he is going for it.

Brian Clark: Give or take the savant part.

Robert Bruce: Alright, gentlemen, we have been called here to discuss something. We’re calling this episode ‘A Way Better Revenue Model for Podcasting.’ Jerod, you have been up to some interesting things in terms of this podcast network. You’re pushing the envelope, sending out the first volley, if you will, for what may be coming for other shows and the network as a whole. Thanks for coming on. Brian and I are just going to grill you for a few minutes if that’s OK with you.

Jerod Morris: Perfect. Nothing I love better.

The Default (yet Difficult) Revenue Model for Podcasts

Robert Bruce: I wanted to frame this conversation around the idea of, when you think about podcast revenue, when you think of how podcasts have been monetized in the past, what’s the first thing that comes up?

Jerod Morris: Ads, sponsorships.

Robert Bruce: How’s that going for folks out there?

Jerod Morris: I think some people are having success with it if they have really big numbers, but for the most part, it’s pretty disappointing. Number one, the metrics haven’t been there to really give advertisers numbers that they can trust, so I think that they’ve been reluctant to pay well without having those metrics. That’s certainly something that, in the podcast industry, we’re looking to improve on. It just hasn’t been there, and I think people have left feeling like they’re not getting the revenue that they feel like they should be getting for what they’re investing — time and energy in producing their podcast.

Robert Bruce: Metrics are really interesting. We’ve had a lot of discussion and reworking of how we’re looking at our own metrics on Rainmaker.FM. Brian, we’ve had a couple of conversations with Chris Garrett about this, and we made the decision early on that we wanted to land on the conservative side of downloads and plays and things like that.

Brian Clark: Yeah, there’s all sorts of intentional and unintentional ways that your download stats can be artificially inflated. For our network itself, Rainmaker.FM, but also for the Rainmaker Platform and how it counts downloads, we wanted to make sure that it was legitimate because there are issues of caching and all sorts of things that can create duplicate downloads that aren’t real.

I had a brief conversation with Tom Webster of Edison Research. They are big, big, big in the podcasting and podcasting metrics. I got him and Chris Garrett together so that Tom could actually informally audit our download procedure. He gave us a thumbs up on how we approached it. So, good news there.

Robert Bruce: Advertising, definitely, like you said, Jerod, it’s the first thing that comes up when we think about money and revenue in relation to podcasting. Frankly, it goes back over a hundred years into radio. In one sense, it can seem like an easy way to get revenue going. Sometimes it can, but it’s really interesting because it’s a little deceptive that way.

There’s a lot of work that goes into developing relationships with advertisers. You’re talking about recurring billing, all kinds of things that add into the mix, which is totally doable. We’ve decided that we’re not going to look at that for the time being. Advertising has definitely been front and center when you think about these things with podcasting and money. Brian, we’ve been talking the last few episodes about something else, and that’s the ‘logged in’ experience.

The Very Profitable Future of Audio Content

Brian Clark: Logged in experience is an overall online marketing trend no matter what your business model is. In this context, especially with the way you led in with the episode with the dream of sponsorship and advertising, how it turns out to be harder and sometimes less lucrative than people were expecting. That takes me right back to 2007 when I was basically making the same argument to bloggers that, instead of relying on AdSense — otherwise known as ‘webmaster welfare’ — that they needed to create something to sell.

Robert Bruce: I don’t think I’ve heard that one yet.

Brian Clark: Oh, really? That s an old one.

Robert Bruce: All these years, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that. Wow.

Brian Clark: Yeah, online courses were the thing that we were teaching people how to do back then. It’s as true today as it was then except more so, because, again, this $107 billion in online education that will get sold this year alone, that’s staggering. That’s all happened in the nine years or so since we said, “Hey, this is what’s coming.” Let’s just cut to the chase. One of the best ways to monetize any content, but especially audio, is an online course.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, we have a real-time case study, Jerod, which is why you are here with us today. That is that you and Jon Nastor, your co-host of The Showrunner podcast, which is at Showrunner.FM if anybody wants to take a look — just launched The Showrunner Podcasting Course. Tell us briefly what that is, and then we’ll get into some nuts and bolts about how you actually built this thing.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, the course — basically, Jon and I have, over the last four or five years, gotten a lot of experience hosting podcasts — developing them, launching them, running them. Obviously, through that experience, we’ve gained a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge.

So as we started talking about putting together The Showrunner podcast — and it seemed like a perfect fit for him to be the co-host of that — creating a course and sharing with people what we’ve learned just seemed like such a natural fit. There are so many people out there who want to start a podcast, and they are maybe hesitant about it for a number of reasons.

Maybe they’re not sure about the future of on-demand audio, or they fear getting behind the microphone, or they fear how they can use it for real business purpose, on and on. They fear that the technical part will be too simple. What we’ve learned just by doing is that none of those are reasons not to start. There are so many reasons to start that if we can, through what we learn, help people just gain more confidence, gain the simple knowledge that they need to just go out there and start, then there are going to be so many benefits that people find from it.

Really, a lot of the early feedback that we’re getting from people is just loving that little push to get into it and realizing that it’s not this really difficult, hard, complicated thing. Obviously, it requires work ethic and commitment and a lot of that stuff, but that’s stuff that anybody can bring to any project. Instead of podcasting being this thing over here that only radio people, or only a certain type of people can do, we really want to show people how anybody can do it and use it as part of an integrated content marketing experience for their audience.

Brian Clark: All right. Jerod, I’ve created a lot of online courses in my day, dating back to 2002, paid and free even before Copyblogger. And quite a few since then. Mr. Bruce has been involved, so naturally, we micromanaged you during the creation of the Showrunner course. Is that correct?

Jerod Morris: No, you didn’t, which was phenomenal. Part of what made this such an energizing and just educational experience for me, and for Jon, was just the freedom to go create it — to really, as podcasters and thinking about what would have helped us when we started, really thinking of it from that perspective and allowing that to inform how we developed it. But, no, in terms of micromanagement, there was absolutely none of that, at all.

Brian Clark: Probably, you might have appreciated some. I don’t know.

Robert Bruce: Maybe a little help, guys.

Brian Clark: The reason why I find this particular episode to be so interesting to me, because we haven’t really got to talk about this much — you were working hard on it. You got it out. It’s in the pilot phase right now. We’ll talk about that a little bit more — but I really want to hear about your experience because you just got thrown out there like anyone else. No more guidance other than what’s been written over the years by us I guess.

You talked to Nastor, I remember you guys had a conversation when you found out he was joining Rainmaker.FM with Hack the Entrepreneur. Start there and talk about how you two decided you wanted to do this course.

How Jerod Built an Online Course from Scratch

Jerod Morris: I think two things happened simultaneously. When we started Rainmaker.FM, I knew that I wanted to do a podcast about podcasting to share what I had learned. That’s how The Showrunner podcast was born. Jon had, had ideas about doing a course. He’d been thinking about it, so when we came together and talked about it, it seemed like the perfect fit. We already knew we were going to have the podcast. We had the seeds of an idea for what to do with a course. It was just the perfect fit.

We knew that we could use the podcast, obviously, to start to build awareness, to build a connection with people, to demonstrate our knowledge and our experience that would then, obviously, lead the way for people getting into the course. That was the idea, and we were extremely excited about it. Then, of course, as soon as we got to go ahead to do the course, there was that moment of, “OK, what do we do next?” Now we’ve got this idea. Now we’ve got to take it forward, but that’s really what happened.

There’s a lot of potential there for it to maybe not work out as well as you hope, working with a new person and that kind of thing. But I think we immediately found out that we had really good chemistry, both in terms of hosting a show together and doing work together — which are two different types of chemistry. Then, also, just that our ideas and philosophies on it were pretty similar. There were some differences that I think are instructive but pretty similar on how we wanted to approach doing it. That really helped us to build that momentum early on.

Brian Clark: What were you thinking about in terms of what you wanted to be in the course. I know you’ve been looking around at other courses, and Jon has as well. But what were some of your ideas in terms of the curriculum, at least to start, because we’ll talk later about how this will grow into other things.

Why Podcasts Are Such a Great Fit with Online Courses

Jerod Morris: There’s a few different ways that you can take a course on podcasting. There are some out there that have focused a lot on the technical side and getting real heavy into the audio and going for that audio file type. We knew right off the bat that we weren’t going to go to that route because neither Jon nor I is that person. Obviously, we understand the importance of having a sound that is good enough. We know the basics of that. I think people need to know those, and we do teach those in the course.

But we also wanted to be much more about the theory of podcasting, the actual execution of it, the planning of it, and how it integrates into a bigger plan, a bigger philosophy. What we’ve both found is that, with any podcast that we’ve created, there always comes that moment — you get maybe 10 episodes in or 15, 20 episodes in — you get to this point where to do the next one, it becomes a little bit more difficult. You hit that dip a little bit.

What we really wanted to do is really teach people how to get over that because you’ve got a bigger goal in mind, because you’ve really learned how to connect with an audience, and they keep you coming back — really try and teach people how to do it over the long term. Not just get set up to produce episode one really well, but get people motivated, excited, and understanding what it takes to do it over the long term.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, you and I talked a couple of weeks ago about your idea for integrating the public show with the course itself. I think that would be useful for people to hear.

Jerod Morris: It’s funny, yeah. I actually just had a conversation today about how we’re going to change up the podcast a little bit more to do that. The whole idea of the public showrunner was obviously, to the podcast The Showrunner, again, is to demonstrate what we know and to give people that free value, and make sure that the podcast itself obviously, not everything is a big call to action for the course. It is valuable in and of itself. Anybody who just wants some really good in-depth information on podcasting, they will get it there.

It’s to use that then to build a connection with the audience members. Because when you’re going to develop a course you’re going to ask people to invest an amount of money in that course, they need a connection. They need to know that they can trust you. They need to be wanting to take that next step with you to go more in-depth. That was our idea with the show — to really to use it, obviously, for the motivation part, for the excitement, build the enthusiasm, also demonstrate what we know. Then get people connected to us to the point where they want to take that next step with us, and actually go into the course.

How to Make Collaboration Work

Brian Clark: Jerod, let me go back a little bit to the collaboration aspect because I know, if it weren’t for the fact that we have Robert and I generally doing this show, there’s a good chance the show might not happen. Not only with The Showrunner podcast — you’ve got collaboration there between you and Jon — but also, and I know this from experience having done it myself, it takes a special resolve whether to write a book or to create a course. It’s the same exercise.

You have to map it out. You have to execute it. You have to show up. You have to be disciplined. But I found when I’m collaborating it makes it so much more doable. Talk a little bit more about how you guys decided who was doing what, how you motivated each other — any insight you can give me on that. I think collaboration is a topic people are interested in, yet they get hung up on, “How do I find the right person, and how does it actually work?”

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I think the fear maybe with collaboration, especially with a new person, is that you can almost detract from each other if you don’t have a good working relationship. The great thing with Jon is that it was a 100 percent of me, a 100 percent of him, and somehow it became 300 percent. Our ability to work together really multiplied what we were able to do. It really evolved over time because we initially had this whole Trello board set up with the modules, and we split them up evenly with what each one of us was going to do in terms of creating the lessons.

When we first planned it, it was all about the content. We hadn’t yet really thought about the infrastructure of the course, the marketing of the course, getting all that together. As we got into it, I realized how much work that was going to be, so we had to shift a little bit. I ended up spending more time getting the course set up, using the Learning Management System (LMS) inside of Rainmaker, working on getting everything ready in terms of marketing, the launch, and all of that stuff — also doing a lot of editing for the podcast as well.

It ended up working out that Jon was able to spend a lot more time in this initial phase focusing on getting a lot of the videos and the actual course materials done while I worked on putting them together, getting the infrastructure of the course itself done. Now that we’ve got it ready, I’ll be able to start doing more lessons and more videos — which is the part that is really motivating and really exciting. We just had to evolve with it.

Obviously, the closer it got to the pilot launch, all these things come up that you don’t quite realize. There’s some last minute working, and the fact that he knew that I would stay up until whenever on the last week to get it up and I knew that he would, that was really motivating — knowing that there’s someone else out there really busting their butt to get this content out and I’ve got to do it, too.

That teamwork was huge. I really think that, as people get into the course and even get into the show, the kind of working relationship he and I have — that chemistry — is a big thing that people are attracted to that helps connect them to what we’re doing. A lot of that was just born out of a lot of work. We’d get on the phone late at night and pump each other up and even recorded it for one bonus episode. We tried to make it fun and actually invite people in.

Brian Clark: It’s all content.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I don’t want to do any work. “OK, let’s record ourselves complaining about this.”

Jerod Morris: Yeah. But we really do want people to see — because it is — it’s a podcast about podcasting and a course about podcasting. We want to show people a little bit behind the scenes how it actually works and relate that sometimes it is tough. Even when you’re really enthusiastic about a project, there can be moments where it’s tough and it’s hard to take the next step.

Brian Clark: Tell me about it.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. But when you’re committed to a bigger idea and you’re part of a team, it makes it so much easier to take that next step.

Brian Clark: So, Robert, Jerod actually beat you to the punch as far as creating a course out of our new LMS features of Rainmaker. I think you probably want to grill him for some information on that process.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, first, Jerod, let me ask you, would you call yourself a technically inclined person?

Jerod Morris: No. I would call myself the opposite of that.

Robert Bruce: OK. I’m going to give you a couple of softballs here, obviously. When you logged in to Rainmaker.FM — we just somewhat recently released the LMS features — had you been in there training with Chris Garrett for hours?

Jerod Morris: No. I was aware of it on a peripheral level, but no, in terms of actually building it into pieces, I was totally not familiar with it.

Robert Bruce: So you went in there relatively cold. Obviously, you’re familiar with Rainmaker. Tell us about that experience of actually the technical side of building the course, putting modules together.

How Jerod Built An Online Course From Scratch

Jerod Morris: The first moment was a little overwhelming. It was one of those, “Oh man, what did I just sign up to do?” When you get in there, if you just get into the dashboard and you see the pieces, for me anyway, the picture didn’t quite become clear. I wasn’t really sure where to start. My immediate first reaction was almost to go ask Chris, “Hey, can you help me out in doing this?” but I realized how silly that would be, and I trusted that our developers and our documentation writers probably did a pretty good job of walking you through this. I needed to just take a step back, take a couple breaths, and just take the long road to doing it instead of looking for the short cut.

Really, the first thing I did was just get into the Knowledge Base. What really helped, actually, is there’s a whole section there for the LMS about what you need to set up first, because I didn’t quite understand what the product was called and how that fit into an LMS — that you need to set that up first — and then getting the payment stuff set up.

Walking through it step by step, the picture started to become clear. Then I started to see the pieces, and then once you get a course created, then get the module created that goes with that course, and you start to see it come together, then the picture became clear. The nice thing was it was done all with the information that was just there in the backend. I just had to, again, slow down a little bit and make sure that I read instead of just trying to go out and do it myself, which is a problem I sometimes have.

Robert Bruce: Feedback from you, and I know I consulted with Chris Brogan like day one that the Learning Management System features were out — as always, we spot where people get hung up and what we can do better. I did the same thing. I went to the Knowledge Base. I was like, “Oh first steps. Thank you.” Then I went through it, and it was really easy. What we’re adding soon is this WalkMe technology where as soon as you access that feature set, you start getting prompts that tell you, “Do this first and now this.”

It’s the same information, but you would never have that moment of hesitation because you would be greeted by a very friendly interface. I think it’s pretty clear as long as you follow the steps, but I can’t wait until it’s even more intuitive.

Jerod Morris: It is. I did find it very clear — once I understood it. Now it’s nice because I can look at it and really have this sense of pride that I wasn’t out asking for all kinds of questions and all kinds of help. There may have been a few, but to be able to put that together, now the process is so simple. I’m already itching to go do this on some of my personal projects, too.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I got in there, on Further, because I have an idea for what I want to do with a course. Yeah, I was all excited because I can do it myself. Now, we do have to reveal that our very talented friend, Rafal, does do design work for you, but as far as I’ve heard, Rafal was the only person that gave you assistance building this and that we’re actually giving away the Showrunner CSS to anyone who wants it?

Jerod Morris: Yeah, that styling in there will be available to people who want to use it.

Brian Clark: It’s pretty nice. It’s simple. It’s clean. Just modules and lessons. That’s how the LMS works, so that’s nice. I’m going to have to snag that for Further. Yeah, it’s pretty good.

Jerod Morris: One thing Jon and I were talking about earlier today actually was how the way that Rafal styled it and laid it out with the sidebar, is one thing that really makes The Showrunner course different from other courses, especially in the podcasting space in terms of organization and being able to stay organized with a lot of different lessons and modules.

We have 10 different modules, each one has three or four lessons, and we’re going to be adding to it, but the way that it’s all organized and laid out, you can favorite certain ones, and you can mark them as complete, and do some things like that — what Rafal did there from a user interface and simplicity perspective really helped out.

Brian Clark: Yeah, also the approach to how the LMS works in Rainmaker is cool because a lot of online course builders, when you want to add a new content, it makes you go through the entire process from the beginning. With Rainmaker’s LMS, once you have your course created and the modules that go underneath it, you can add a new module any time you want immediately. You can add lessons to each module right there without going through this convoluted set-up process. Really, once you do it once, it really is empowering.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I will say this too about adding new modules. The fact that it uses the same standard paid to edit page as a post or as a podcast and it’s able to fit in to that construct, that’s very orienting. It was a feeling of safety for me. It’s like, “OK, now that I’m in here editing a lesson in a module, this stuff all makes sense.” So once the bigger picture all came together of how it fit together — which was simply a matter of going through the Knowledge Base — then actually being able to go in and create the content itself is simple because that’s an interface that everybody’s familiar with.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and you’re able to add any type of media that you want — video, audio, obviously. The other thing that we’re working on right now are these LMS templates. Just like our landing page templates, you have all these different styles. If for some reason someone doesn’t like Rafal’s, which I find hard to believe because I love it.

Jerod Morris: Who is that? Who?

Brian Clark: No, I mean having different options. As a beginning point, we’ve gotten lots of feedback about that whole side bar interface that pulls up the relevant content to the right, or I guess you could do it from the other side now. We actually used that meta for the free New Rainmaker course that we’ve had now for a while. It’s very intuitive, and it’s beautiful.

Robert Bruce: So I’ve got two more questions. One for you, Jerod, and then one final one for you, Brian.

How to Think Bigger about Your Own Podcast Revenue Model

Robert Bruce: Jerod, you and I talked a few days ago about the bigger idea of this ‘logged in’ model as it relates to The Showrunner podcast and the Showrunner course. You said something interesting that this is just the very kernel of what you hope the Showrunner course to be. You started talking about this larger vision for what a ‘showrunner,’ is and how that might affect the course in the future.

Brian Clark: Also, have you thought about how you would use, within the free podcast to paid course, the marketing automation features?

Jerod Morris: I have. Let me take that question first, Brian, because the marketing automation features in there are phenomenal. I actually already set one up to use as a test. Because what you can do is, basically, when people are logged in, now based on actions that they take, you can take actions. Jon and I want to have a few different little surprises or Easter eggs in there when people get to a certain page and complete that content, be able to send them an email. Maybe as a follow-up to provide some extra information or an extra push, whatever it is.

You can actually go, and based on actions people take, put them onto a different email list, segment them, so that you can communicate with them in a different way. Yeah, the marketing automation, we’ve just dipped our toes in the water in terms of how we can use it. My head is already swimming with ideas. I’m excited to get in there and do some more with that.

Brian Clark: That’s what I’m looking forward to playing with — you’ve got to build the course first. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m going to build a free course. The marketing automation features are crucial there because you are able to see the different paths, who’s a power user, and who hasn’t completed the lesson and tailor that experience for them individually — which is amazing.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, it really is. It allows you, again, to adapt to that person and give them something more relevant. You’re creating a course for a big wide group of people, and you try and make it as relevant to everybody as possible. The more you can learn how people use it and then take them on a path that’s relevant to them, obviously, the better an experience they’re going to have.

The whole idea of an audience experience, Robert, kind of hits on what I was talking about with Showrunner. When we first named the podcast that, I thought it was cool just because, as a Breaking Bad fan hearing about Vince Gilligan the showrunner, that was my first real introduction to the term, and I liked it. It was a cool term. I thought it was applicable.

As we’ve gone down the road now with The Showrunner, a couple of things have happened. Number one, really understanding the importance of connection and the creation of this audience experience. Someone on Twitter a couple of days ago who was running an event, just casually referred to herself as a ‘showrunner.’

She was managing this live event, and it really hit me that the idea of a showrunner — because when you look at it from a TV perspective, a guy like Vince Gilligan, he has the responsibility for this audience experience for the people who watch Breaking Bad. Someone who is hosting a live event, they’re in charge of this audience experience.

The Showrunner podcast, we’re in charge of this audience experience. ‘Showrunner,’ to me, it’s not about someone who’s in charge of a TV show or a podcast or anything. I really think on a larger scale, it can be applied to mean anyone who’s responsible for an audience experience. There are so many different experiences that that can apply to.

Brian Clark: That’s really interesting that you got there. Because when I first thought of using the term ‘showrunner,’ outside of television, obviously, it was the substitute for ‘impresario,’ which is the larger concept of putting together talent and resources and creating something new for an audience, right?

Jerod Morris: Yeah. The way that I’ve started to look at it, too, Brian, we did a presentation at Content Marketing World about the ‘producer, director, talent model.’ We’ve had this idea of the rainmaker, obviously, and I see that person like the producer. To me, I see the showrunner in that director mold, where they’re in between. They are both out there doing it and executing or putting the people in the position to do it, but also, there with the producer, like the person in your position.

You didn’t have specific input in this course, but obviously, there’s a vision that you’ve charted that we understand the course needs to go into that. You’re clearly supplying resources to help that course become a reality, so it made that presentation make even more sense to me, doing it this way. That’s why I really see podcasting being the first of these, but the term itself and what it can mean to people is so much bigger than that.

Brian Clark: That’s true. That just means your show has more legs. It doesn’t necessarily have to stick just to podcasting about podcasting. I’m just waiting to when I get to be executive producer, which means I do nothing.

Robert Bruce: OK, Brian, full circle here. This ‘logged in’ educational course — either free or paid — do you see this as a more profitable, better revenue model for podcasting?

Brian Clark: For anything really, but I think podcasting in particular because of the portable, on-demand nature of the audio. If your audience is used to that from you, with say your interview show or some other format and you’re able to take the topic you’re talking about and drill down in a much deeper sense, then you’ve got the perfect medium for a course.

Of course, get transcripts, and provide supplemental materials like worksheets and things like that, sure. But if you’ve got an audience that appreciates the audio foundation, then you know how to create premium content. That’s a wonderful thing. I guarantee you’ll make more money than most people make from sponsorships.

Robert Bruce: Jerod, any last thoughts on that?

Jerod Morris: Yeah. I completely agree. Obviously, with The Showrunner podcast, we’re creating audio content, and there’s a certain way that you can teach with the audio content. What the course allows us to do is hit people with different learning styles in different ways — to create the action guides and the checklist, to do things with videos. It really allows us to expand the way that we’re able to teach. The concepts are in many ways similar on the podcast, but in the course, we can go into more depth. We can do it in different ways.

Again, people who want to take that next step can. I agree completely. You know I’ve talked about this, Robert. The shows on Rainmaker.FM, there’s so many episodes I listen to and series of episodes, I’m thinking, “That’s a course right there.” That would be simple to translate into a course. I think it’s a natural fit.

Brian Clark: I tend to also use the podcast itself as a sounding board. You don’t go as deep on any one issue as you could, but you are getting feedback. You see where people are getting hung up. You know what to elaborate on. Of course, we’ve been doing that with text content forever. It’s really the same thing, different format. It’s just so much more.

When you can actually learn something valuable in a business or marketing sense while you’re out on a walk or doing something else that doesn’t require you to stare at the screen, it’s pretty valuable stuff. I think the market, the audio book market, is huge. That is the way a lot of people are learning, and as we move into this future of constant lifelong learning, on-demand education, just to keep up with what’s happening — it’s a big deal. It really is.

OK, Jerod, so this show is airing on Thursday, which is the day before you bump up the price on the course. Let’s tell people what to do if they’re listening to this and want to get in on this.

Jerod Morris: Yup. We’re currently in the pilot phase of the launch. That phase is going to last two weeks before we shut it down, really work with the people who are in the course, get some feedback, make some changes to it, and then reopen it.

The way that we’ve set up the pilot launch is this first week, the course costs $295. On Friday, that price will go up. Actually, after Friday, that price will go up to $395 for the last week before we shut it down, and then reopen it at the final full price of $495.

For people who are interested, we’re not circulating the link to the sales page, but if you go and sign up for The Showrunner email list, you will immediately get an email that gives you the instructions for the pilot launch. That email will come, you can go check out the page and see everything that’s in the course, find out all the details, and the purchase information.

Robert Bruce: You can sign up for that email list at Showrunner.FM, is that correct?

Jerod Morris: Yes. Showrunner.FM. It’s right there, right at the top of the screen.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and also on a related note, Jerod and I did a webinar on Monday that basically demos the LMS live for people, and also the marketing automation features. Assuming nothing went wrong with that recording, it should be in the show notes. Here’s something else that is time sensitive. You have until tomorrow, Friday, May 1st.

Jerod Morris: Correct.

Brian Clark: For both of these dates, if you start your trial of Rainmaker Standard by May 1st, Friday, then you will get the option to upgrade to Rainmaker Pro for a flat fee instead of the much more expensive recurring price — and people have been all over this. I’ve almost been shocked. But it’s a good deal. A lot of people are seeing the value in the advanced features, especially if they don’t have to pay forever — like they will normally when the Pro plan just becomes part of the day.

Now, there’s a twist here, Jerod, because I noticed that you’re giving an extended trial period of Rainmaker to people who sign up for the course.

Jerod Morris: We are.

Brian Clark: So if they sign up for the course tomorrow, they get a 60-day free trial period, which also qualifies them for the one-time fee upgrade. That’s the total package, but it’s still tomorrow, May 1st, so choose which way you want to go.

Robert Bruce: Jerod Morris, thank you for joining us today. You are the Harbinger of Disruptive Innovation at Rainmaker.FM.

Brian Clark: Was that another generated title?

Robert Bruce: Yes, yes. Brian Clark, the Digital Sultan of Rainmaker.FM.

Brian Clark: Sultan, like it.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I am Robert Bruce — let’s see if I can get a good one here — Online Space Sherpa. How’s that?

Jerod Morris: Can we just randomize these in our email signature, so there’s a new one each time?

Brian Clark: Yeah, that would be awesome.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, ‘Digital Lord’ was another good one. I might go with that actually. I’ll put this in the show notes. Hey, guys, thanks for doing this today. We will see you next week. Jerod, I’m sure we’re going to see you soon.

Jerod Morris: Absolutely. I hope so.

Brian Clark: Maybe in place of me, again, executive producer here I come.

Robert Bruce: That’s a good idea. That’s a good idea. We’ll keep the name, though, New Rainmaker with Brian Clark.

Brian Clark: Yeah, of course, and everyone’s like, “Who the hell is Brian Clark?”

Robert Bruce: Right. It will be an inside thing. He’s the Human Experience Evangelist.

Brian Clark: That’s right. That’s exactly right.