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The Transcript

How Online Courses Accelerate Any 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 RainmakerPlatform.com.

Robert Bruce: You ever notice that famous writers, famous actors, they all seem to have an FBI file?

Brian Clark: That’s weird. Over the weekend while I was contemplating whether or not Ringo Starr should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, well, he’s in. He’s also going to be the last living Beatle. Ringo, of course, is leading a charmed life. Not to denigrate him, but he s the ‘lessest’ Beatle, I guess.

Somehow I end up on John Lennon’s Wikipedia page and was reading up on how Nixon tried to deport him, and he had this FBI file forever. It wasn’t until Clinton that they finally declassified it, and it said nothing.

Robert Bruce: They got nothing on him.

Brian Clark: They had nothing on him.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I found a similar one for Charles Bukowski, and then it took me down the rabbit trail. Anyway, do you think you have an FBI file at this point?

Brian Clark: Yeah, but it has nothing to do with being famous. More like actual criminal activity, I’m sure.

Robert Bruce: Right, right. Well, now we don’t need them because the NSA just records everything anyway.

Brian Clark: Exactly.

Robert Bruce: It’s the next generation.

Brian Clark: I don’t even know why we record these things. Let’s just talk, and hey guys, could you send us that file for Thursday? That’s a good idea.

Why Free Courses Are the Best Lead Generation Tool

Robert Bruce: All right, we’re continuing to talk about online courses, and how they can and do accelerate, you were saying, just about every business model. Let’s start with a big, fat number, which is $107 billion in sales related to online courses just this year.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Speaking of business models, a lot of people, I think, would love to be in that business, the online course/membership site business. As we ve discussed in the past, recent activity has pretty much legitimized this beyond any sort of accredited institution type thing. In fact, it’s those institutions that are having the most trouble. They’re outrageously expensive and generally behind the times as far as cutting-edge goes, so that’s a whole different issue.

It’s a staggering amount of money — $107 billion related to the sale of online education in 2015 alone. Now, in 2007, when we launched Teaching Sells — which is basically the intersection of instructional design and direct marketing, basically how to create online courses and sell them — the amount of time I had to spend persuading people that people would actually pay for online education is humorous now. But it was a different time. I was talking to bloggers. Everything is free. Everything is ad-supported. Everything that we predicted back in 2007 has happened in spades. It’s a big deal.

You see guys like Chris Brogan, and David Siteman Garland — they’re effectively orienting their entire careers around online courses at this point, because it’s a big deal. We talked about lynda.com last week.

Robert Bruce: That s $1.5 billion alone there, right?

Brian Clark: Well, that was the acquisition by LinkedIn, but like I said, I think lynda.com is not Harvard or even University of Phoenix. It is a commercial site that had the cutting edge in the technology topics and design and coding and all that kind of stuff. There’s no normal institution that could possibly compete with them. The other interesting thing about lynda.com is that — even though Lynda and her husband at the beginning did, in fact, create training content in the form of, what was it, technical textbooks and manuals and stuff like that — it wasn’t until they adopted our favorite model, the impresario model, that lynda.com took off.

Why You Don t Have to Create a Lynda.com to Succeed

Robert Bruce: Let’s talk about that for a minute, because I think a lot of people are sitting here, or might be sitting here thinking, “Yeah, okay great numbers, big numbers. I see how this could work, but I’m not an expert in any of these things,” which really was one of the major things addressed by Teaching Sells back, again, in 2007. What is the impresario model, and more importantly, what does it mean to somebody who may be thinking, “Man, I can’t create a lynda.com?”

Brian Clark: Well, yeah. You can, actually. Maybe not to that scale, but if you’re trying to make a great living, you don’t have to get that big. There are a couple of venture capital education sites that I’ve seen. Education is the big thing. Effectively, commercial sites are going to — in some respects — replace other traditional institutions of learning because it’s more effective, it’s more affordable. It’s everything.

But, all of these sites are not the experts. What they are, are delivering the platform for experts. Again, you can do the same thing with your own Rainmaker site, if you will, of aggregating the talents and expertise of others. You’re the one that knows how to do that stuff. They don’t, but they know their stuff in whatever the subject matter is. The dean of Harvard is not teaching all the classes.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. That’s a perfect way to look at it. What about this idea? We’re hearing a lot about the idea of online courses as content marketing, using online courses for lead generation. It s very popular to talk about right now. But again, this is something that was addressed quite a while ago, in fact.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I’m very pleased to see that it’s catching on with other people. I know I saw Derek Halpern talking about online courses as lead-gen. Chris Brogan was sharing that some of his students were all for creating a course, but they couldn’t figure out how to build an email list to sell it. The answer is the same.

If you think about how a blog is viewed, or a free ebook with an opt-in is viewed these days, it’s not regarded as valuable. Yet, with the explosion in paid, online education, free online courses are perceived as valuable. It goes right back to what we’re talking about, about the logged-in experience and all the benefits you get with marketing automation and whatnot at that point.

The reality is, you’re creating a valued experience, as opposed to something where people are like, “Yeah, this kind of dicey,” or “I’m going to download this ebook, and then I’m going to unsubscribe.” To top it all off, they never even read the ebook because it’s just sitting somewhere on a hard drive. The world has shifted in that way.

Our Lead-Gen Strategy (That Works) from 2012

Brian Clark: If the market values online education to the tune of $107 billion in 2015 alone, what do you think you should be using as an enticement to get people into your audience in the first place? Now, I know you remember the first time we used an online course that way. That was in 2012. What was that course?

Robert Bruce: It was called — you and I put it together — How to Profit from the Digital Revolution. It’s funny, because in those days, we talked about specifically what you just mentioned: ebooks and apps and the idea of getting that opt-in and stepping it up with a course.

What we did, it was a free course. There were three parts to it, basically introducing and expanding on the idea of selling digital products, selling products online. That’s all it was. It was three seminars that you and I did and packaged up. We had a really nice landing page. But the whole point there was to introduce this idea is this thing itself was lead-gen, moving toward our product at the time, which was Premise.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Which was an earlier version of the membership and landing page capabilities that are much more superior than Rainmaker because it’s a hosted solution, as opposed to a plugin. That’s the problem with WordPress plugins. You have to make sacrifices for every configuration and install out there. Of course, when you host it yourself, you’re able to control it and deliver a better experience, such as the new learning management system that we have.

I think some people see using online courses this way, as lead generation or as content marketing, as a new thing. It’s not really new, but it works, and we’re still using it to this day. That’s a good indication of how powerful it is.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, so we did that, the How to Profit from the Digital Revolution course in 2012, but you did this an entire decade earlier in more traditional business. Same concept, though. What happened there? Tell us that story.

How I Used This Same Strategy a Decade Earlier

Brian Clark: Yeah. I think sometimes people look at things we do and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s fine for some software or whatever,” and I’m like, “No, man.” I was doing this in 2002 when I started a real-estate brokerage. I’ve often talked about what I had learned effectively in the 4 years of failure and then discovering what I was actually doing, which we now call content marketing.

When I looked around, I said, “Okay, I want to do this, but I don’t want to do it in the field of law.” I looked at real estate. I saw what was happening with the MLS coming online. I looked at the way realtors were marketing, and I’m like, “Oh, this isn’t even fair.” They didn’t know how to use landing pages. They weren’t using email at all.

But I took it up to the next level, based on what I knew about content, and built this site that was effectively the Wine Library of real estate. It was designed to educate people to the point of comfort, to where they decided that my company was the best one to call.

I would try to segment my people. Stuff we talk about people should be doing now as the best practice, I was doing back then. You basically had first-time home buyers and relocation people. Those were my two big segments.

I created courses that were dripped out by simple auto-responders at the time. I certainly didn’t have the technology we have now. Effectively, it was the same thing, and when you look at 2002 and how much value I was delivering compared to the RE/MAX agent with the Glamour Shot, it wasn’t fair. But, that’s how I was able to build. I got advice from people when I told them I was getting my license and going to start a company. They were like, “It’s gonna take you four years, and you’re gonna starve, and this and that.” I’m like, “No, I think it’s going to take 30 days,” and that’s what it took.

Robert Bruce: Wow.

Why People Choose to Buy from You

Brian Clark: The relocation course dripped out over a year, because my research showed that someone starts doing online research for homes before a relocation up to a year in advance. I knew that was my sales cycle. With first-time home buyers, it was quicker. They would usually decide to work with me, and my company within 30 days. You have to understand whom you’re talking to. That is what I was using. It’s effectively the same technique we advocate today, yet you don’t see that many people doing it.

Robert Bruce: Real quick. As in the Premise course, in the Profiting from the Digital Revolution course, you and I did three intensive webinars on selling digital products online. What’s an example for the first-time buyer? Do you remember what you did in terms of offering them for lead-gen in that package?

Brian Clark: Well yeah, it was educating them. The most prevalent initial question is, “Can I get a loan? How does that happen? What kind of loan should I get?” Then I touched on issues about negotiation, inspections, and all of this stuff that’s kind of scary to someone’s who’s never done it before. Frankly, no matter how many homes you buy, it’s a big pain.

It was basically just getting people to feel more comfortable with the process, but also being the person who delivered that information. You know. We’ve been talking about being the authority that creates, yet it was so funny how resistant people were to sharing basic information, especially in a licensed industry.

Robert Bruce: We started in 2012, we jumped back to 2002, now let’s jump ahead one more time to 2014 and the New Rainmaker free course.

How We Launched the Rainmaker Platform with a New Podcast

Brian Clark: You’ve come in almost shaking your head several times. You thought I was insane to launch, effectively the future of the company, with essentially a podcast that morphed into an online course.

Robert Bruce: And a brand new podcast, no less.

Brian Clark: Yeah, but it worked.

Robert Bruce: Yep, and we wrapped up the first seven episodes. You ended up doing a couple of webinars on top of it that became the entire free course that led everyone eventually to the Rainmaker Platform.

Brian Clark: I think that the next question that’s going to come up, obviously — we’ve got a lot of content creators out in the audience. They’re like, “Okay. I know how to do this.” Other people are like, “I’m not necessarily a content creator,” or “What do I use? What’s the proper educational materials?” It’s the thing that people are looking for before they decide to buy, to put it at its most simple terms.

When we switched away from the Internet Marketing for Smart People newsletter, the opt-in concept, and in 2013 switched to MyCopyblogger, that was a huge job, but we didn’t create anything new. All the ebooks were updated and repurposed, reformatted — I guess is the best way to say — content that I built the blog with, right?

Robert Bruce: Right. Exactly.

Brian Clark: We transformed it into ebooks, made sure everything was updated and nice and beautiful. But still, there was that 20-part course. You get the enticement of all this great library of content, but it’s the course that kept them subscribed and engaged on the list. I think if we did MyCopyblogger over, and I think we’re probably are going to soon, I think we could structure that more in line with what we’ve seen work, especially with the New Rainmaker course and all that.

Why You ve Likely Created a Valuable Online Course Already

Brian Clark: The point being, if you’ve been creating content for a while, you’ve probably created the foundation, the cornerstone of what we’ve been preaching for years. If you’re not creating cornerstone content, which is the content people need in order to do business with you, then I guess you need to start.

I think a lot of people out there could just look at their archives and say, “Oh, yeah. I could totally put this into a free pay-wall situation.” Drip it out using basic technology that we offer in Rainmaker. They’d have an excellent lead-generation thing.

MyCopyblogger — I say this over and over and it always blows people’s mind — but a 400 percent increase in opt-ins, I don’t care how much traffic you have, that is something you want, when you can convert more of your site traffic into enduring audience by email.

Robert Bruce: That’s the repurposing of content in order to build a course side of things, but if you don’t have that big archive going back, you don’t have a lot of great stuff, there’s the idea of okay, you’ve got to create some new content to build these courses that you’re thinking of. You’re going to talk about specifically the podcast method, but go back to lynda.com, that example.

It s either bringing people in, experts in to talk about things, or even just a series of simple interviews with the heavy hitters in your industry answering these questions.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I think that’s probably the approach I’ll take for something like Further. Do expert interviews, and offer that as a course content with gluing it together. It’s effectively an act of curation. We’ve talked about how podcasting is curation as long as it’s in the interview format.

With New Rainmaker, we started it as a podcast very deliberately, very strategically. I knew what I wanted to say. We did an episode a week, where I had, for the first time ever, scripted out what I was going to say and tried my damnedest not to sound like I was reading. That was hard. It’s hard to do. It takes work.

Anyway, we put it out there as a podcast. We grew an audience from the podcast, and then we just reformatted it into a course. Now, the enticement to get people who’d already heard some of it. Everyone kind of freaks out, they’re like, “Why? I can’t take something I’ve already given people and put it into this other format.”

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. That’s what I thought.

Brian Clark: I’m like, “Man, you ve got to understand. You wish everyone listened to every word you say. It doesn’t happen. It just doesn’t.” You’re actually packaging something up into a more user-friendly format. You’re dripping it out. People understand what they’re in for. They have their expectations. You deliver consistently.

All I did was take those seven episodes. We transcribed them. We cleaned everything up beautifully, and I added the three webinars. But that was also the launch mechanism for the Rainmaker Platform. Now, that course continues to work for us.

I think it s probably the best job we’ve done of explaining effective content marketing, the whole media-not-marketing thing. It continues to work and result in people taking the free trial for Rainmaker Platform, and buying. It’s an amazing thing. Yet we had to create that content new, but we created it and freely distributed it first to get it working for you in that context. Then you put it to work for you long-term.

Of course, you can just sit down, from scratch, and create a course like this. I’m just trying to say you’ve probably got some existing stuff out there that you may be able to work for. Look at what I’m doing with Further. I’m effectively creating an audience by reading books and explaining them as I educate myself, right?

Again, it seems to me that anyone should be able to do a similar thing. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You need source material. You need to acknowledge it. Do not claim something as your own if it’s not yours. It doesn t matter.

Robert, remember the early days of Copyblogger? I never said I was Joe Copywriter. I said, “Here’s what Bob Bly said,” and “here’s what Clayton Makepeace says,” and “here’s David Ogilvy, the man.” It was always pointing to my mentors in the educational sense, but who got all the benefit of that? Me!

That really ticks me off because we see people doing that, even with our stuff, claiming it as their own. We don’t say anything because, whatever. It’s kind of pathetic, and people know better, and someone might call you out. Just because we don’t, doesn’t mean someone else might not.

Robert Bruce: Yep. If you want to take a look at exactly what we did for this New Rainmaker course, it’s easy to do. We’re talking about signing up for the course itself and just seeing precisely step-by-step.

Brian Clark: The interesting thing is it’s very educational, but it’s also a demonstration of exactly how we did it. It’s not the only way you can do it. It’s a good way. It works.

Again, remember back to the real estate example. This can work in any business model in which you need to attract people and incubate them or nurture them, whatever the language may be in your lead generation world. Until they’re ready to buy, this is the way for them to grow in their confidence in order to do the transaction, but more importantly, grow their confidence in you. That’s the key. That’s why people buy from certain people over other people.

Robert Bruce: If you want to check that out, head over to Rainmaker.FM.

Brian Clark: No, no, no. You forgot, FreeCourse.FM.

Robert Bruce: Oh, yeah, that’s right! I just wrote you this last week. Go to FreeCourse.FM, and you can sign up. It’s free registration. You’ll see the big green button there. Take the course. Learn from it, and learn from how we did it. Look at how we laid everything out and how it works.

Brian Clark: But also, keep in mind that if you’re interested in courses as an actual business that you charge money for, we’ll be talking about that in quite a few future shows.

Robert Bruce: Yep. All right Brian, anything else before we sign off on this one?

Brian Clark: No, I think that’s what we needed to talk about for today. But, I’m excited about what we’ve got coming up. There’s just so much exciting stuff happening right now, in the world of social media, a lot in the world of paid content, in the world of content marketing.

Doesn’t it feel like a lot of the silliness is going by the wayside? We’ve seen some silly stuff over the last five years of people building on Facebook and getting screwed — just this and that and making silly mistakes — and we’re sitting here going, “No, man.”

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: It just seems like a lot of it is shaking out, and people are getting serious, and I m so happy about that.

Robert Bruce: All right. Thanks, Brian, and we’ll see you all next week.

Brian Clark: Take care.

The Transcript

How to Escape the Social Media Swindle

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, a 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: Are you ready to log in?

Brian Clark: You talking to me?

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Are you ready to log in?

Brian Clark: Someone had an interesting weekend, I take it.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Well, it’s Monday. I’m trying to get back in the game here.

Brian Clark: But it’s not Monday. It’s Thursday.

Robert Bruce: It’s Thursday. That’s right. Actually, it’s whatever day listeners of New Rainmaker are listening to this.

Brian Clark: What is it that you like to say? Wherever and whenever you are?

Robert Bruce: Out there on the Internet. Yes.

Brian Clark: That’s right. That’s your phrase.

The Proliferation of the Logged-In Experience

Robert Bruce: We’ve been talking about this ‘logged in’ experience. We’re doing a mini-series. This is number two in a mini-series of looking at membership sites. We also have a nice little surprise today, Mr. Clark, and that is somebody joining us from the well-known Mainframe podcast on the Rainmaker.FM Podcast Network. That’s Chris Garrett, our Chief Digital Officer. Chris, did you make it in?

Chris Garrett: I am the token geek today.

Robert Bruce: Token geek.

Brian Clark: You’re always the token geek.

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

Brian Clark: Actually, remember in Office Space when the one guy that they’re like, “Could you tell us what you do?” And he walks the plans to the engineers from the customers, and then it turns out he actually has his secretary do it and he doesn’t do anything.

Brian Clark: No, that’s not Garrett. Garrett wishes that were his job. It’s a little more complicated, though.

Chris Garrett: Yeah, right. That’s the dream.

Brian Clark: But he does translate for us quite well.

Robert Bruce: I don’t think there’s anything in this company that you don’t have your hands in, in some way. Right, Chris?

Chris Garrett: I just interfere in everybody else’s business.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. Hey real quick, how’s The Mainframe going over there? You and Tony Clark, our Chief Operating Officer, are co-hosting The Mainframe. How are things over there?

Chris Garrett: We’re having a lot of fun, and we’ve had some nice feedback. I’d like to unseat Mr. Damien, but we’re doing quite well.

Robert Bruce: Join the club.

Brian Clark: I know. That guy, he’s rogue.

Robert Bruce: You know, I was thinking, you do have direct access to the servers, or at least the folks that do, right?

Brian Clark: Wait a minute, Robert. Oh, you want to fix the stats. You don’t want to just kick him off. Actually, we could just kill his show, but I don’t think that would be in our best interest.

Robert Bruce: Delete. Well, for those of you who are fans of Chris, which are many, you should go over to Mainframe.FM. Check out what he and Tony are doing over there.

Chris, thanks for hanging out with us today. We’ve got some good questions for you, too. Like I said, we’re continuing this mini-series on the idea of membership sites.

Brian, you started last week with the general idea of this ‘logged in’ experience. One thing that struck me towards the end of that episode, you talked about the true nature of a site like Facebook. We think of it as a social media site, which it certainly is, social networking site. But you argue that the real nature of it is a membership site, which I’ve never really thought of before if I’m honest, but we opened up with this idea of the logged in experience. There are several aspects of that. Why don’t we do a quick little recap.

Brian Clark: So we talked about Facebook. Basically, you have to register to gain access. If you’re not logged in, your experience is not the same. So, in essence, it operates like a membership site even though it’s primarily a social network. I’ve actually got an even better example for you this week, which we’ll get to in a second, kind of tied into some recent news.

The basic premise, and this is something we acted on in 2013 when we shifted our email strategy, was that the advent and the mainstreaming of social media, the proliferation of apps, and certain sites that deliver premium content, whether paid or free, have transformed the way we think about the online experience. That really comes into this, whether you’re logged in or not. Whether you’re registered for access or you’re not. I think we did cover some of the psychological aspects of that. We can go fairly deep down that rabbit hole, but you get the idea that — what is it?

Fear of missing out is the dark side of social media. That you’re always worried something’s happening that’s cooler than what you’re doing. I think there is some aspect of that — this velvet rope syndrome — that when you interact with a site and you realize that there’s an experience waiting that requires registration, that is much more compelling than opt-in or, for most situations, just a newsletter.

There’s got to be more. We’ve known this for years with the whole ethical bribe, free e-book stuff that isn’t as effective anymore. I think things have shifted to a new level. Let me give you some examples about this that build on what we talked about last week. Membership sites have been around since the ’90s, started off on the seedier side of the Internet, and then slowly made themselves into a mainstream concept. I think that’s the important lesson here.

Why Big Companies Are Sick of Social Media

Brian Clark: I saw something really interesting from Forrester, who obviously reports on the enterprise level, that big companies have grown completely disenchanted with social media. Number one, I think it’s fair to say a lot of them took the wrong approach for about five to seven years there as far as trying to treat the outer fringes of the audience like they were in a ready-to-be-converted mode. As in, “Become our customer,” after you gave us a Facebook ‘like.’ Didn’t really work that way. That’s a very cold relationship. It still counts as part of the audience, but until you bring them in closer to you, you’re not going to get the kind of response you want.

Number two, of course, is that email is 40 times more effective for converting into sales than social media. That’s pretty huge right there, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that. We’ve got the Zuckerberg bait and switch. You’ve got to pay on Facebook to reach your audience. On Twitter, it’s not really that much better because not everyone’s paying attention at the right time. Unless you do a Guy Kawasaki and tweet out 15 times in repetition, which does work by the way, it’s still disenchanting.

So you’ve got these big brands who are going back old school — everything old is new again — with branded communities. ‘Community’ has been a buzzword on the Internet since the BBS days. It’s always been over-hyped, but these branded communities are essentially what we’re talking about here in the sense that they’re driving people back to their own sites. They’re getting them to register to participate. Usually there’s a form involved. There’s a Q&A function. There’s content. Actually, when you combine all three of them together, as this Forrester excerpt of the report reveals — we’ll link to that in the show notes — it goes beyond evangelism and advocacy into you can actually convert prospects into customers.

We certainly know that. When you bring them in at that level, they’ve come on the other side of the rope. You’re now able to communicate with them directly by email. It’s interesting to me, just as we’re starting to really hit on this change in the way a great website should work, that the enterprise level, which is usually forever behind the rest of us, they’re actually moving in this direction and having legitimate success. There’s more to this than just the scrappy small companies.

Robert Bruce: What does this mean to let’s not even mention the idea of ownership of the community itself. We all know you mentioned the Zuckerberg bait and switch.

Brian Clark: That’s the point.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: They’re completely frustrated, and I don’t blame them. We, of course, have been preaching this ad nauseam, but I think this is a good sign. Remember when Gary Vaynerchuk’s book came out and he really emphasized interaction at the social level. Really that’s kind of falling apart. I think there were some very smart people with some ideas that turned out not to be right. We have always been strong on home base. Own your property. Bring the audience to you. All of that. We stayed the course, but I’m feeling better that there’s some sanity returning to the world. Facebook’s going to take you for all you’re worth.

Robert Bruce: Garrett, what do you think of the enterprise waking up to this idea of owing their own and developing their own branded communities?

Chris Garrett: It’s like Brian just said about owning the real estate, owning the asset. When you own the real estate, then you control what that member sees. You can put nudges into taking actions. They might upgrade their account, or they might buy something from you, which you can’t do in Facebook as well. You could do some targeted ads, but you’re not in control of the experience as much as if you owned it. If you do that well, then the social proof and the other members will actually sell for you. You don’t even have to step in explicitly.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s a great point because Facebook benefits from the logged in experience, not you. They’re there. They have the user relationship. They’re logged in. They get to follow them all over the place, serve them targeted ads, and determine what they see in their news feed. You guys remember the psychological experiments they were basically performing on Facebook users without their knowledge. That was interesting.

Chris Garrett: Yep.

Brian Clark: Facebook owns that relationship. They’ve made that abundantly clear by saying, “You now get to pay us to reach that audience you built over here on our land.” Again, Chris is right because, when you own the property, there are all sorts of ways to heighten the experience that you can’t do otherwise.

A Major Content Acquisition, and What It Means for You

Robert Bruce: A very interesting purchase took place recently and that was LinkedIn acquiring Lynda.com, a massive education site. Let’s talk about that for a little bit, and also what it might mean for smaller organizations.

Brian Clark: Lynda.com has been a site that we have followed and admired since the beginning of Copyblogger. I’m pretty sure the early version of Teaching Sells pointed to Lynda as a great learning community. They just got so big. It’s amazing. Then, of course, what was the acquisition price? $1.5 billion? That’s a lot of money for a membership site, but that’s exactly what happened there.

This is going to become my new example of an overall logged in experience type play. Because think about it this way, LinkedIn has the Pulse service, which is freely available content. It started out in their Influencer program, and then they opened it up to others. So you have all this freely available content that’s being shared on LinkedIn, but also across the web. Then you have the original logged in experience, which is a business networking function combined with the 21st century resume, if you will. Again, you don’t get to do all that stuff until you register for access and log in.

Now there’s another component. Now, with the edition of Lynda, they have a paid business training and lifelong learning environment that complements. Something we’ve been talking about since 2007 is, as technology increases, as business models change, as the pace of everything intensifies, you’ve got to be constantly learning. So the reasoning given behind the acquisition of Lynda from LinkedIn was “always be learning,” which again, another play that we did in Teaching Sells a long time ago. This is a good thing because it legitimizes this type of non-university-backed online training because I don’t see any of the universities at the cutting edge.

It’s always been the practitioners, and that’s what Lynda latched onto. In a way, it continues to validate the people who want to make their own online courses, their own membership sites, because this is the way education happens. Therefore, building up your own authority as a subject matter expert or being able to produce sites that rely on the expertise of others, like Lynda does, that’s going to become a crucial opportunity. Lynda’s not going to extinguish all the training programs out there. We already know that today. I think it just legitimizes it.

The structure is what interests me. Freely available content, an initial free logged in experience leading to a paid logged in experience. That’s Copyblogger, MyCopyblogger, and Authority. It’s the exact model we’ve had in place for over two years now. Now, I’m not saying LinkedIn ripped us off. No. I doubt that very much. This is what’s happening. It’s not a Copyblogger thing. It’s a web thing. It’s an Internet thing, and it’s incredibly important. Chris, you’ve been around with us forever, both before you joined the company and then after, how do you see this all playing out?

Chris Garrett: I look at it as your career is the ultimate fear of missing out. If you see other people progressing in their careers past you, you’ve got to look at why they’re getting ahead. You’re going to look at the certifications, the training, the skills on their LinkedIn profile, and you’re going to want to upgrade. But you’re not going to go back to university. You’re going to tactically add those skills and that experience. I think it’s a really smart move, but it validates what we’ve been doing all these years of highly focused training from people who know what they’re talking about. You’ll get the benefit of selling what you know. They get the benefit of all that experience, and they’ll upgrade in their career or the business. I think it’s a wonderful validation of everything we’ve been doing.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Here’s another interesting thing, because I think you’re right on the business front. I read an interesting article that said, “Relationship, skills, and personal development are the fastest growing segments of online education.” Again, not from a university because that stuff doesn’t get taught at university. This article was focused on very smart, very tech savvy people who just aren’t all that great with women or men, as the case may be. It’s become a boon for people who are into things like reading body language. Not the shady seduction courses that we saw about five years ago. More legitimate stuff, but effectively the same topic when you think about it. So it’s not just business.

Why You Should Build and Offer a Free Course Right Now

Robert Bruce: One thing I keep hearing more and more is this idea of, “My children probably will not go to college or university,” but more than that, it’s the idea not so much in the future of a degree that you earn from a university, but a collection of very specific skills that you bring to a project or a job. That’s Lynda.com, right?

Brian Clark: Yeah. The whole concept of ‘just in time learning’ too.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: I get what you’re saying because by the time my son, who just turned 10, is of college age, can you really afford to spend 4 years … On one hand, yes, I want him to, to get a true classical, liberal education, so he can learn how to think, and how to create, and expand his knowledge. But the stuff that’s going to get him a job is probably not going to come from there.

Robert Bruce: OK, what does this mean? Maybe a couple of ideas for smaller organizations that are not in the $1.5 billion acquisition game?

Brian Clark: Well look, this goes back to the 400% increase in email opt-ins effectively by switching away from opt-in and going to a content library concept on MyCopyblogger. We’ve now refined that with the New Rainmaker free course to where instead of a collection of e-books, we’ve gone to a dripped-out online course where the lessons come every few days. And that was phenomenal. That actually was a big part of the launch of the Rainmaker Platform.

We’re getting more sophisticated in how we’re thinking about it. A lot of what we talk about on the show going forward will be what we’re doing and how you can do it as well because the tech is getting easy. It just comes down to strategy and what works and what doesn’t. Rule number one is still build your email list. But doing this whole concept as one project is going to build your email list faster, and you’re going to be in a position to do some really cool stuff that you wouldn’t be able to do with your email list alone. I know Mr. Garrett is quite smart on this topic.

Chris Garrett: I think one of the basic things that we’ve seen is the difference between the library and the class. A library will get people to join. A class will get people to stick around. Part of growing an email list is keeping people on that list, keeping them engaged, keeping them interested. Keeping them looking forward to the future of what’s coming next because, otherwise, you get a high conversion rate, but then you lose everybody within the first week. You need to keep them sticking around long term and actually engaging with you more and building a relationship with you.

Brian Clark: I will say we didn’t experience that problem with MyCopyblogger because it was the e-book library plus a dripped-out course. But that was the old school way. We just delivered it by email. With New Rainmaker, we did it the more sophisticated way. Now with the addition of the marketing automation/adaptive content features, frankly it’s going to get even more personalized, interactive, and effective.

The First Major Transition of Further.Net

Robert Bruce: Speaking of engagement and continued engagement, Brian, you’ve been talking about the first major transformation of Further.net. It seems that it has everything to do with interactivity.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Further.net, for those who are not up to speed on that, has started out as a curated email newsletter. Very simple in a topic that I have no known authority on, and I’m quite candid about that. Started it over three months ago, and it’s funny because the issue this week basically points out the power of teaching as a way to learn and how the act of retrieval and elaboration in the scientific parlance really makes you learn stuff for real, as opposed to the illusion of mastery that you get.

Maybe you read a book three times, and you’re like, “I must have this down.” Studies show actually you probably don’t because simple re-reading doesn’t really go over it. Anyway, long and short, I’ve been doing this curated newsletter. The features are usually me explaining something I learned from a book. Intensified learning. It’s weird how curation can make you an authority when you weren’t before by the simple act of explaining things to an audience.

When you really think about it, what does Malcolm Gladwell do? He takes all these really dense research abstracts and reports. He boils it down for the layperson. He makes it engaging and entertaining. Then he goes and gives speeches for a 100 grand a pop on this stuff that he taught himself by writing a book. It’s the exact same principle. Anyone can become an expert on anything, and my favorite way to do it is not to write a book. It’s to drip out content on a regular basis.

Anyway, that’s what it started with. Now that we do have the LMS, and we’ve already got the membership features, and now we have marketing automation features, what I’m looking to do is make Further go beyond just the email newsletter. Yes, that will be the reason why you stick around, but I’m thinking of doing some sort of 30-day challenge. Further basically covers personal development, so I’m thinking of something such as, “Develop a new habit in 30 days with the Further challenge,” and they register for it.

It’s part education, part accountability and interaction, which we can do with a combination of the LMS and membership features, obviously, which have been around forever, and then the new marketing automation. I haven’t got it all down, so this may be, again, one of my free consulting segments when I kick it back to you guys. Anything pop to mind?

Robert Bruce: Electroshock therapy.

Brian Clark: That would be awesome because if they don’t do it

Chris Garrett: That is doable.

Brian Clark: Garrett, is that in the next release?

Robert Bruce: It is doable. Coming in Rainmaker 2.0.

Chris Garrett: We can totally do that. That would be fun.

Brian Clark: How would you see that working? You’ve got modules and lessons for the education that prompts an action. Therefore, I want to kick it over to them to do the thing, and then also have a way of testing their understanding of what they’ve learned before they go do it. Again, solidifying that learning.

Chris Garrett: Yeah, we do have quizzes and assessments coming, but what you can do right now is you can give people encouragement when they take the actions that they’re meant to take and nurture them to take those actions if they don’t take the actions.

What Marketing Automation Means for Your Business

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s a basic simple adaptive content function of the automation, which is if someone doesn’t respond to this week’s or this day’s lesson or action item, you can send them one message of encouragement or motivation to do it. If they do it, then you can send them a note of encouragement for having done it and encouraging them to keep going. It’s simple, but over the normal email auto-responder experience, it’s kind of cool.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, and that being the point, just so people following along, we’re talking about all of this being automated.

Chris Garrett: Yes. If they do not take the action, I would leave them on the current list, the current auto-responder, which nurtures them and keeps giving them reasons to take the action and encouragement to do it. If they do take the action, I would put them onto another list that says, “Well done. Congratulations. This is what you need to do next.” Keep it going. Keep that momentum. So you’re always moving people forward, or further, and the existing people are getting a response to keep it going.

Brian Clark: You’ve got it.

Chris Garrett: You can give them targeted call to actions as well. Because if they’re not in the engaged group, you’ll want to keep giving them more nudges, and more prompts. That’s not necessarily a sale in terms of dollars. It’s a sale in terms of action.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Let’s tie this up with how this relates back. Yes, I am choosing to do it with a free membership concept, but there’s a very good reason for that from a personalization and experience standpoint. It comes full circle back to this logged in experience. Early marketing automation or anything that is an, ‘if-then’ situation, where you can serve up something custom, at its most primitive level, obviously can be done. But we now live in a multi-device world. What happens, Chris, when you cookie someone on the desktop, but they’re trying to come back to you on an iPad or their phone?

Chris Garrett: I saw this over and over again with these big guru launches, the big sales funnels, where I would sign up to something on my phone, and I would click the link. I would do everything they asked of me, but I wouldn’t view any of the content because I wanted to view it on my desktop. I get back to the desktop, and it wouldn’t let me in because I didn’t have the cookie. That is frustrating. You’re screaming at the screen.

Brian Clark: See, that’s what I’m saying. They talk about 1.0 and 2.0, or whatever, but I’m really looking at this as the pre-logged-in cookie world and a much more sophisticated world based on the logged in experience. Again, there’s a reason why the social networks are some of the biggest email marketers in the world. There’s also a reason why they know more about what you do then you do. It all comes down to this post-cookie world we’re living in.

Chris Garrett: It’s also that example of the company knowing the customer and knowing what they should know about the customer. A few times, I got excited about an upgrade of a product I already had. Really, they should give you an upgrade price, or they should give you at least a message saying, “Knowing that you’ve got version 1, this is what you can see different in version 2, and this is the reason to buy.” It’s not that experience of going from device to device. It’s also personalizing it to me in a way that’s good for customer service, and I’m more likely to transact with you.

Brian Clark: Right, and also once you get someone to register, you can do all sorts of things to get them to choose their own adventure, if you will. Identify what type of person they are in the context of the site. “What do you aspire to do? What’s your goal? What’s your problem?” Then all of a sudden, you can put them on different paths that way as well, which is not the same thing that you can do with other technology.

Robert Bruce: All right, gents. Anything else on the marketing automation or adaptive content, or are we going to save it for another time?

Brian Clark: Well Jerod Morris and I are doing a webinar on the 27th April. The post came out on Copyblogger this week. But if you’re interested in these new marketing automation and learning management system features that I’ve been furiously playing with and giving Chris all sorts of wonderful feedback, every time we do a release, we’re already planning the next release. And that’s good iterative development. We get feedback from customers. I happen to be our prime customer in a lot of ways in that, if I can do it myself with my schedule, then it’s working well.

If you want to see a demo of these new features, which are part of the new Pro plan — you can’t buy the Pro plan on the site right now. Existing customers are getting an upgrade option that’s kind of sweet. It’s a one-time charge instead of a recurring higher price, which it will be when it does go live.

So two things you want to do right now. Start your trial of the Rainmaker Platform if you don’t have it yet. If you’re currently a standard customer, you’ve already been given an opportunity to upgrade. Number three, sign up for this webinar, so we can walk you through more of the ‘why.’ We’ve touched on some stuff here today, obviously. Then also a direct demonstration of ‘how.’ — all in one free webinar.

Robert Bruce: You can sign up for the Rainmaker Platform at Rainmaker.FM/Platform. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Platform. Mr. Clark, thanks for putting all of this together for us today. We’ve got a few more of these. What do you think about this little series? A couple more left?

Brian Clark: Yeah. I think we’ve been getting good feedback. Some points where people aren’t getting what we’re talking about. Hopefully, this episode cleared it up. Even though we jumped all over the place between the enterprise, to LinkedIn, to what we’ve been doing for a couple of years, I think you can see the pattern. We’ll continue to explore that a bit.

If there’s anything that you want to know in particular, drop us a note in the comments. I’ll make sure and try to get that answered for you. But yeah, I’ll be back. I think we’re going to be talking about this for a long time. It’s not a series or a tactic. It’s more like, “This is how things work,” or “This is how your prospects, your audience expects things to work.” As the tech gets more sophisticated, it’s going to be an expectation, and I’m hoping to get people ahead of the curve because the curve is moving pretty quickly right now.

Robert Bruce: If you want to leave a comment on this episode, or any other of New Rainmaker, you can do that at NewRainmaker.FM. Mr. Garrett, thanks for coming by today and dropping your wisdom. Really appreciate it, man. You’ve got to do this more often.

Brian Clark: Yeah, thanks, Chris. This was cool.

Chris Garrett: Always a pleasure.

Robert Bruce: For those of you who want to catch Chris Garrett and Tony Clark on The Mainframe, you can do so at Mainframe.FM.

Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next week.

The Transcript

Why Every Great Website Is a Membership Site

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, a 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.com.

Robert Bruce: So you’re back in town. I suppose this means I have to give the keys to your show back to you?

Brian Clark: Well, I’ll let you stay in the room, metaphorically. But yeah, I kind of got used to it.

Robert Bruce: Being away?

Brian Clark: No, I kind of got used to the show.

Robert Bruce: Oh.

Brian Clark: I did enjoy being away, but it only takes a few days on the beach for me to get crazy bored and I’m ready to get back. So that’s a good vacation.

Robert Bruce: And you came back with a good deal here, a good idea. We’re going to do a series of short episodes about membership sites.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I think some people are coming to this topic with certain expectations. And those are correct, but it’s also a lot bigger than that. That’s reflected in today’s show title. It’s a different way of thinking, but it’s very in-line with what marketing has become — and I mean from the solopreneur up to the biggest corporations on the planet.

Robert Bruce: You like to tell this story about Procter & Gamble, speaking of biggest corporations on the planet. You tell this story about P&G to illustrate this idea of ‘media not marketing.’ Which, by the way, I think is one of the smartest, most powerful concepts you’ve come up with. But you’ve got another one from P&G.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Just to bring people up to speed, and thank you for that. Again, I already gave you a raise. I’m not giving you another one.

Robert Bruce: Damn it.

Why the Media Approach to Marketing Works

Brian Clark: OK. In the original New Rainmaker training course — which all of you can sign up for free. We’ll put it down in the show notes — it really kind of dives down deeper into this media not marketing thing as a way to understand what’s known as ‘content marketing.’ One of the examples that I use when I go out on the road and give presentations, is several examples of people who created media content to accomplish what marketing is supposed to do, and it works much better because no feels marketed to.

So the Procter and Gamble story. Always in my presentations, I lead with this one before giving other examples. I say, “Here’s a story about a brand that turns to a new technological medium to create content and build an audience in order to build its business.” And then I say, “Well here’s the twist. That company was a detergent company from Cincinnati. The new technological medium was radio. The content was the original soap operas named after the detergent company’s line of business. That company was Proctor and Gamble.” They basically created the radio versions of soap operas, carried that into television in the ’50s to reach their demographic — much like we do now online.

How innovative was that for the 1930s? The bigger lesson when we talk about digital sharecropping and owning your own assets and all that stuff, by the 1970s, the soap opera was the most lucrative form of television on the planet. Not only did Procter & Gamble become this huge conglomerate, they also owned some very, very valuable intellectual property that served them well. That’s my normal Proctor & Gamble story, but they’ve actually given me another example of this whole concept of avoiding the appearance of marketing but getting marketing done — or at least what marketing was supposed to do originally.

Robert Bruce: So what’s the more recent example that you came across? I think this was from last summer.

How a Major Corporation Killed Their “Marketing” Department

Brian Clark: Yeah. I just now came across the story, but it did happen in summer of 2014. Basically, Procter & Gamble removed the word ‘marketing’ from the entire business. They changed all the marketing departments to ‘brand management,’ and every marketing director is now called a ‘brand director.’ That just may seem like semantics and just a bunch of hogwash that we wouldn’t care about.

But it is exactly in-line with the same sort of thing that they were trying to do when they originally created the soap opera, which is, they’re creating an experience for their audience rather than just doing marketing, which is messages that promise an experience. “Once you buy, we promise you will get this benefit,” and “you will be taken care of and this and that.” Guess what, that gets tuned out. The experience has to begin before the purchase.

Robert Bruce: So it’s more about creating experiences, and they’re illustrating this and kind of putting their money where their mouth is by things like removing the word ‘marketing’ from their titles. This idea of experiences over content. But it’s still that strategic content that’s going to get you where you want to go, right?

Brian Clark: Well, technically, all marketing collateral and advertisements are content. But what are we talking about? That’s why I don’t say ‘content.’ I say ‘media’ because people know what that means. We’re talking about media content, or entertaining, engaging, and yes, educational — at least in this context — content that people actually want instead of marketing.

Marketing only promises an experience. Most people are like, “I don’t believe you. I’m not going to listen to your spiel. What have you done for me that’s of value?” That’s another core word in Procter & Gambles’ decision. It’s all about creating ‘value’ and creating an experience that emanates from that value.

The One Word That Epitomizes Great Content Marketing

Robert Bruce: So we were talking earlier about a very specific word that epitomizes the experience that best works for content marketing. What is that word?

Brian Clark: It’s very interesting. Of course, this has been a slow evolution over time, but the word is ‘belonging.’ People want to belong. That’s the experience that they’re seeking: “Do people like me do this type of thing?” Our friend Mr. Godin tapped on this with his book Tribes. Even before that book was The Culting of Brands, which was an older book which I would suggest everyone pick up. Kind of dicey on the topic, but it’s exactly right.

Number one, it says that most cults aren’t evil, which is kind of controversial I guess, and that brands should emulate that sense of bringing people in and the sense of belonging. That’s how evangelism occurs as well. We have all these kinds of religious concepts, but that’s who we are at core. It all ties back to the way we talk about audience.

If you’ve ever seen one of my presentations — or again, taking the free New Rainmaker course — you’ll see these concentric circles that represent the audience experience. On the outer reaches, the cold outer reaches, are social media followers. Someone may follow you on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean they feel like they belong with you in that sense. But as you move in closer in the inner circles, it gets much more warmer, an intimate relationship. That’s what you’re trying to do.

You’re trying to attract people in closer to you and create that sense of belonging as an aspect of them becoming part of the audience. Of course, the audience experience doesn’t end at purchase. In fact, that’s what everyone is aiming for. Retention. Subscription based models. Trying to get the Automatic Customer is another book I just picked up and I’m going to dive into. It’s basically about someone who becomes your customer every month or every year because they’re on a recurring subscription or something similar.

Robert Bruce: So maybe we could look at this another way. ‘Audience’ is the preferred word that we’ve been using for a long, long time. But look at it as maybe audience, and then ‘true audience’ as the person moves in closer into those concentric circles.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I think that’s what Godin was trying to get at with Tribes. You may be part of the audience before you’re all in. That is a good way to think about your content marketing strategy. How are you trying to serve people with value in a way that makes them say, “Yep, I’m in the right place. This is my people”?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. Also briefly on the cult thing for those who may be offended by that or think it’s overly religious or whatever, take a look at the Final 4 that’s going on right now. Any sports team or any hardcore believers.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. All sports are cult.

The Holy Grail of All Revenue Models

Robert Bruce: This kind of really nicely folds into the idea that we work to create a paid membership model. This idea of belonging. This idea of these concentric circles, of bringing the audience in closer and closer, from cold to warm. But there is a type of subscription revenue that’s the Holy Grail, right?

Brian Clark: Well everyone wants recurring revenue. Historically, I don’t think there was such an emphasis on this, but this has been happening over time. It’s accelerating. Again, I think it’s tied to this concept of belonging on one side of things, and the other is just cold, hard cash reality, which is, those are very stable business models. Now think about the electric company. They’re a monopoly. You probably hate them. They probably don’t do a great job, but they bill you every month. If they don’t, or you don’t pay, you don’t have lights.

OK, so that’s an old, old model, almost out of necessity. But think of the advent of cable television where something that had been free, was now not only paid, but you paid every month or you lost access. So now we accelerate all the way up to Spotify, and Netflix, and Amazon Prime. Basically, things you used to own or watch for free have become things you belong to. They are membership communities.

I think the biggest revolution that we’re seeing from the way you and I grew up is the fact that we lease our music if you no longer buy downloads. It took me the longest time to quit buying from iTunes. When I want something, I want it. Even though then, under that arrangement, Apple could probably screw me over.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: This goes back about 10 years ago. There’s this book called The Age of Access. It’s basically predicting this trend, that more and more of what we spend our money on is about purchasing access to things as opposed to owning them. This is way before the sharing economy, and this is before Netflix and Spotify and all this. And it nailed it. In our Teaching Sells program from 2007, this was the big theme, and it turned out to be dead on. It turned out to be dead on about online training. People will pay for information if it’s packaged the right way. If it’s creating access to something more than just raw data or words. You know what I’m saying?

The Power of the “Logged In” Experience

Robert Bruce: Yep. This goes to what you’re calling the “logged in” experience, which I love. It’s something that the mainstream — I hate the word ‘user,’ but in fact, it’s actually quite fitting on some of these services — but the user or the customer or the prospect is ‘logged in.’ We know it. We know what this is about.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s a registration and access concept, yet it’s not about paying. So here’s why I’m saying, “Every great website is a membership website,” because this concept of access has permeated us psychologically thanks to the way everything has developed. One big component of this ‘access mentality,’ even in situations where you’re not paying money — it’s not a subscription model, or it’s not yet — but the beginning of the experience is being ‘logged in.’

Why Facebook Is Not — Primarily — a Social Network

Brian Clark: Another thing that I always hit my audiences with is, “What is Facebook really?” And they just kind of look at me like I’m an idiot because it’s a social network, right? But what is it really on the web or with the app? It’s a membership site. Without access and registration — registration and access, I should say, to go in the correct order — your experience is not the same.

You’re like a little kid outside the candy store window looking in, drooling. You don’t get any of the goodies unless you are logged in. You can’t log in until you register, and of course, that means providing an email address. A good email address because you need to make sure that you can get access if anything goes wrong.

Look at MyCopyblogger. It’s been two years now. That was our hypothesis, that the mainstreaming of social media and these other access and belonging concepts, even in the world of free stuff, would be much more powerful than, “Opt-in to my newsletter so I can spam you.” Number one, you have low trust over here with opt-in, and number two, the world shifted. It shifted to an access and registration kind of mind set. That was our hypothesis with MyCopyblogger. You know the results. Why don’t you share those?

Robert Bruce: Well before that, I really like this because you said, “What is Facebook?” We call it a social network. It’s this thing we all know about. But, really, what this does, when you think of Facebook as a membership site for me, it takes away some of the scary, big, overwhelming idea of, “I must build a membership site.” Whatever that is for somebody coming into this. But it makes it easy and accessible. Back to MyCopyblogger, you know that turned into — are we talking about the conversion?

Brian Clark: Yeah. Absolutely.

Robert Bruce: Over 400% conversion.

Brian Clark: 400% increase in email subscribers compared to the Internet Marketing for Smart People newsletter approach that we did. That always blows everyone’s minds, and it’s just cold, hard facts. But we upped the value. We created a velvet rope experience, meaning, “If you’re on the outside, you don’t get all this stuff.” But once you register, then the experience changes. You go behind the wizard’s curtain, if you will.

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: It’s been amazing. I don’t think it’s any coincidence, since email is our sales engine, that the year after we did that and we were able to launch Rainmaker — which of course we did with email when it started getting really serious — that’s why revenue grew by 35% in 2014. There’s a correlation there between a much bigger email list and more money.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. And this is the point.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s the point. Here’s one final thing to think about, and then we’re going to end this. And we’re going to dive deeper on each of these things as we progress through the next few episodes. We’ve been talking about ‘adaptive content,’ which is a form of marketing automation. We just released the pro features of the Rainmaker Platform to existing people who had pre-purchased access to Pro.

And it really is made much more powerful by the logged in experience. With that log in, and that registration, just like Facebook, when you’re logged in, Facebook knows all sorts of scary things about you. Right? So we’re not advocating scariness, but how about enhancing their experience in a personalized way based on who they are, what they’re interested in, and what they’re doing?

Most marketing automation right now, “Oh, they clicked this link, or they did that, so therefore I’m going to send this message so that my sales team can talk to them,” right? Not knocking that. That’s incredibly powerful, and Rainmaker does that as well. But the logged in experience, we’re going to elaborate on this over the next several weeks.

Robert Bruce: Alright, if you want to experience a logged in experience and get back to what Brian was talking about the stories about Procter & Gamble earlier in this episode and freely access the 10-part course that we mentioned, go to Rainmaker.FM. Click that big green free registration button you’ll see right under the header at the top of the site. You’ll get everything for free, the 10-part course, and use it also as an opportunity to see how we’re doing this. How we’re using and playing with the ‘logged in experience’ as Brian s talking about. Brian, anything else before we shut this one down?

Brian Clark: Yeah, don’t ever steal my show again. Unless I ask you to because I want to go on vacation.

Robert Bruce: You just can’t leave town because you never know what’s going to happen.

Brian Clark: Exactly.

Robert Bruce: Alright, we’ll see you next week.

The Transcript

How to Become a Digital Media Showrunner

Robert Bruce: This is New Rainmaker with Brian Clark, but with Robert Bruce and Jerod Morris. What happened? We stole Brian s show, Jerod.

Jerod Morris: We did. I’m just excited to be the latest cog in the Copyblogger employee-generated content machine man.

Robert Bruce: Did you hear that? Did you hear my outburst?

Jerod Morris: I did. I get why that’s a good term. I liked your description of why it’s not good.

Robert Bruce: I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Sometimes it gets to me. I shouldn’t say those things out loud, but there you have it.

Jerod Morris: No, you should. You love people, Robert, and that comes across, and that you respect the human condition.

Robert Bruce: Yes. And art in general.

Jerod Morris: Yes.

Robert Bruce: What are we going to do with this show today? We have Brian s show hostage? We can do anything we want. We can burn it to the ground. We can create something great out of it. What are we going to do here? Brian’s in San Diego giving a speech. He’s out of town. He can do nothing about the content of this episode.

Jerod Morris: We could toss Fight Club and Big Lebowski quotes back and forth, so he listens to it.

Robert Bruce: That’s the problem. See? Then he’ll like that. It might be an opportunity to just completely … Anyway. I’m sure those will be in there anyway.

OK. Jerod Morris, VP of Rainmaker.FM. You have had some changes in your job description and in your daily professional life occur in the last few weeks. You want to talk about any of that? Some interesting stuff going on for you.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. After spending a couple of years over there on the Copyblogger blog side, I’ve come over to the Rainmaker side, which is bittersweet in a sense because I’m not getting to work quite as closely with Demian and Stefanie and the people I was working with there. There’s always a little sadness there, but I’m excited about the new opportunity. I think I wrote in an email recently that it’s exciting to work for a company where you can leave a position that you love so much and still be even more excited about what you get to do next. Obviously, I love podcasting and audio and everything about the platform. I’m excited to be able to spend more time over here working on it.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. The good news for Copyblogger and the Copyblogger audience is Pamela Wilson is taking over, over there under Sonia Simone and with Stefanie Flaxman and Demian Farnworth. Could you say that maybe that’s even a better deal for the Copyblogger audience?

Jerod Morris: Without question. That s one thing that makes it a good move to make. As you look back and you say, “Oh, yeah, that place is going to be an even better shape now.” She’s going to do the job 200% better. It’s good. It’s better for all.

Robert Bruce: In all fairness, I felt the same way when I handed you the keys over there. Yeah, I think it’s a good deal. I’m certainly very pleased that you’re coming to Rainmaker.FM and the Rainmaker Platform. It’s going to be an interesting year, my friend.

Jerod Morris: It is.

Robert Bruce: We’ll see what’s in store. On that note, you and Brian have been wrestling with a concept that is going to be the topic of this episode of New Rainmaker. It’s interesting because it has roots in what has come to be known as ‘old media.’ This idea of the person, specifically television, the person that puts it all together is the creative force and the visionary force behind a particular show. Let’s just talk generally about this concept first.

What a Showrunner Is and Does

Jerod Morris: Like Brian said on the last episode of New Rainmaker, it was really inspired by television. It’s really a television reference, this idea of a showrunner. I don’t recall really being that familiar with it before just a few years ago when Breaking Bad got huge.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I think of the same thing.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. And Vince Gilligan, obviously, was the showrunner. I was, and still am, a huge fan of that show. That’s where I really first became familiar with the term. You got Matt Weiner on Mad Men and a lot of these other ones that, like you said, they’re really the driving force and the visionary, the person that executes and makes it all happen. I think for any type of show or media property like this — like what we’re producing with Rainmaker.FM — having that one person, the showrunner, obviously, it’s worked out great. You think of some of the best television shows ever in history, and they’ve got specific people behind them that you associate with them. I think there’s a reason for that.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I think the first time I became aware of this word was when Dan Harmon, I think, was he fired from Parks and Rec, or am I getting all of this wrong?

Jerod Morris: It was from Community.

Robert Bruce: Community. Right. It kind of bubbled up this idea of the showrunner, bubbled up into the popular culture and more into the mainstream. I don’t know if it’s a new term necessarily or it’s been around for decades, but I like this concept. You’re coming out with a new show, and in fact, it’s already out by the time this airs.

Jerod Morris: Yes.

Robert Bruce: It’s called the Showrunner. I want to know why you decided to name it that.

Jerod Morris: I like the idea of what we just talked about, of that person executing their vision for this content property because I think it’s a very empowering term. First off, I liked it because of the Breaking Bad reference because, frankly, when I think showrunner, I think Breaking Bad. So any time I get to associate something with that, I like to do it. More than that, really, I knew I wanted to do a show about podcasting and try and transfer some of the lessons that I’ve learned about podcasting to others and, also, just have a vehicle to go learn more.

So I knew I wanted to do that kind of show, but I wanted the idea of it to be something that really empowered people, if they have something they want to say and a reason to say it, to really get out there, have the tools and the motivation to do it. That idea of a showrunner is really empowering in that sense because you realize you can take this and stir it in whatever direction you want as long as it’s audience-focused. I think the best TV shows have done that. I think the best podcasts do that. All of that gets encompassed in that term. That’s why it just seemed to fit so perfectly.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I don t, and I know you don’t want, this to be a big ad for your new podcast, but this is a really cool concept. It goes to the heart of everything we talk about all the time, this idea of becoming the producer of your own media, building your own media asset, building your own audience over time. I think that’s what’s going to be so cool about your show. You shot the first episode to me and a few other people, and it s really, really good by the way.

Jerod Morris: Thank you.

Robert Bruce: This is a really important concept to grasp. I like the hook that the word ‘showrunner’ gives to it because it really does make it a shortcut to this concept of building your own media asset. It’s a podcast about podcasting, right?

Jerod Morris: Mm-hmm.

Robert Bruce: We’ve had these discussions over and over again, but tell me why you think we’re betting so big on audio content specifically now.

Jerod Morris: I think there’s really two reasons. Number one is simply looking at what’s already happened, looking at the boom in podcast listenership and subscriptions. You guys have read the stats off a couple times already on New Rainmaker. I list them in the first episode of Showrunner, so we don’t need to get into those. But people know. There’s a billion downloads on iTunes. People are listening.

The thing is when you look into the future, you look at every social and cultural and technological trend, and it really does seem to suggest that this on-demand audio content is, not just the present, but really the future of content consumption because it fits in to so much of what we desire individually, which is content on-demand and content that is convenient — basically, education or entertainment, depending on our mood or our goals, when we want it, where we want it. There’s no better way to get that than with audio content.

Back when Copyblogger started, text was really the way to go. Because even back then, there were podcasts, but the audience wasn’t necessarily ready for it. We’ve had this convergence of there’s more content, there’s a receptive audience. That’s just going to continue to grow, which is what makes right now really a good time to get into it because it’s not so saturated that your voice can’t be heard. But the audience is growing so much that, depending on what audience you choose, there’s a really great opportunity to get out there and start building an audience, or furthering your audience with audio content.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. I think we and others have made the case that audio is an extremely legitimate and powerful way to reach the audience that you’re looking to reach. Again, this idea of a showrunner is a great metaphor to wrap your head around — what you’re doing when you create a new show that the sole purpose of which is to power your business.

We’ve talked Rainmaker.FM as a network, as a whole that, first and foremost, we want to please, delight, entertain, instruct our audience. We want to give them all of that as much as we’re able. It’s not perfect all the time by any means. There’s that piece. We want to grow that audience. It freaks people out sometimes. Even now, even after everything that we and others have done with things like Copyblogger and content marketing in general, that a couple of conversations I’ve had is that the whole purpose of this network is to build the audience in order to build our business, which, content marketing 101. And that’s an indirect way of giving people what they want, and then giving people what they want on the free side and on the pay side.

Jerod Morris: Yeah. The other thing, too, is with the reasons for why podcasting is growing, and on-demand audio content, and why we’re betting on it is because our company has basically been built on building connections with an audience. There is a next level of connection that you can build through an audio podcast that you just can’t with text.

Text is great, but there is a larger length between the content creator and the person consuming it. If I’m listening to your podcast and you’re right there in my ears, again, it’s like you’re sitting next to me on my drive to work or strolling with me when I’m walking my dog. There’s that connection that is really big. Obviously, that’s big when it comes to building an audience.

Like Michael Hyatt said on a previous episode of New Rainmaker actually, when you start talking about for business and for sales even, building that ‘know, like, and trust’ factor is so important. Even just looking at podcasts from that standpoint because it allows for deeper connection and allows for even more of that ‘know, like and trust,’ it can really help you with those goals as well. It’s just a very holistic content medium for any type of content marketing strategy.

Robert Bruce: Let’s say we’re speaking to somebody who’s bought in. They see what so many businesses and individuals are doing with audio, with podcasting. They see what we’re doing, and they say, “OK, I get it. I think that looking around at my own audience is something I need to do or it’s just something I really want to do.” There’s a lot of passionate audiophiles out there. Old school radio fans, which I certainly am — I know you are — that want to be a part of this and part of the future of audio content. Give me a short list. What are the basic elements of a good showrunner?

The Four Elements of Being a Good Showrunner

Jerod Morris: There are really four that stand out to me. Number one is being audience-focused. That’s the most important thing. I really think that as people look at what topic they want to run their show about, there’s really two different ways to look at it. You can look at what you’re excited about and interested in creating content about, but then there’s also the element of how can you really impact an audience with it. I was explaining this to someone the other day. I could do a podcast about Fantasy Football because it’s interesting to me and I would like talking about it, but I don’t really care if your Fantasy Football team does better on Sunday because of my advice.

Similarly, I love podcasting. I love talking about it. It’s very interesting, but I do care if you launch a podcast because of something I said or your podcast gets better because of something I said. I think choosing a topic where you have that extra layer of audience focus and care is very important. I think the best showrunners come from a place of that audience focus. I also think there’s a commitment to quality, both just in terms of audio quality and the presentation. That is very important because, when that quality is not there, it puts up a barrier between the content consumer and the content creator that doesn’t allow you to maximize the connection that makes podcasts so powerful.

Perseverance is obviously very important because, as you well know, when you’re doing a show, there are going to be some tough times in there. And you’ve got to keep going because that’s how you get better and that’s how you develop the fourth element, which is authenticity. Ultimately, that’s what takes a showrunner from just someone who has a podcast to a showrunner who’s connecting with an audience, is the ability to be truly authentic behind the mic to the point where whoever is listening really thinks that you’re just there talking to them. That’s where you really develop that connection.

Wrapped up in those is consistency and reliability, which is important because you ve got to show up as expected, and people have to know they can count on you. Really, to me, when I look at it, if you have those four things, then you’re really going to succeed in the long term as a showrunner.

Robert Bruce: What do you think the deal is with consistency? We all know that it is utterly important, and I could argue that it may be even the most important thing even above ‘you’ve got to have a plan, you’ve got to be getting better at what you’re doing,’ of course. But consistency sometimes directs both of those things. What do you think about consistency in general in terms of how important is it to building an audience and then, of course, building a business? Certainly as related to podcasting, what we’re talking here, but even just generally?

Jerod Morris: It’s essential. Frankly, that was a frustrating realization for me as a showrunner because I am not someone who has always functioned well with a set schedule. But I realized that part of the reason for that is the content creation was coming from a more selfish place, because I think really what separates your ability to be consistent is when you’re there and you know people are counting on you and you’re focused on them, then you’re going to show up at the time they expect you to. If it’s just more based on you and ‘when I want to talk about this and my schedule now,’ you almost fight the consistency. I’ve done that with shows, and those shows have not caught on. The shows that are consistent and people know where to find you and when, they catch on.

I don’t think anybody would say, “I don’t trust him because he doesn’t show up consistently, or he missed this episode.” I think there’s a subconscious element there that can put a barrier up between that know, like, and trust that you’re trying to develop. Again, it took me a while to realize that. I had to really fail on some other shows not doing that to see it. I have come kicking and screaming, but realizing that, it’s essential. I really believe it.

Robert Bruce: The older I get, the longer I do this stuff, the more that I see online and the stories that I read about people doing their own thing and in various disciplines and in various markets, I don’t know, man, I think consistency is the thing.

Jerod Morris: Yeah.

Robert Bruce: It’s so general. It’s so broad. You can write it off as whatever. That s great advice. Give me the nitty-gritty. Give me the tactics. Give me the strategies, which are also very important, but it just keeps coming back to this word ‘consistency’ for me.

Jerod Morris: It does. People need to know what to expect from you.

Robert Bruce: What did you say in one of your shows, four years, I think, you’ve been working on it, and just now it’s starting to catch on. You had talked about the idea of every year, at the end of every season, you were like, “OK, guys, this is it. I want to quit. Maybe we should wrap this thing up.”

Jerod Morris: Yeah. The site is AssemblyCall.com. It’s basically a postgame show for IU basketball games. A couple of guys and I who had worked on another site together started on a whim four years ago with just this idea of, “Hey, it’d be nice if after the games, there’s a place to go hang out online and talk about it and break down the game.” We just started it with no idea for what the schedule would be like. There’s a built-in consistency that’s required there because you basically have to show up after every postgame show.

We realized pretty early on that, to build an audience, we needed to be there every game. And for the most part, we were, but there would be some games off, that kind of thing. But over a three-, four-month spin, however long the season is, it’s hard. Especially because we didn’t have any business goals with it. It was like, “Let’s just do it.” And, like you said, at the end of every season, I’ve always been exhausted and wanted to quit and didn’t think that I would come back and do it the next year, but I have.

Finally, this season, this fourth season, our audience has skyrocketed. We finally got smart and decided to build an email list and do all the things to really connect with people and take it to that next level. I always think back to if I had quit a couple of years ago, just everything that would have been lost because I have people who email me from all over the world that are stationed everywhere that are like, “We are so glad you do the show because it allows us to connect with back home, and we miss it. It’s like hanging out with old friends. Thank you so much.”

It took us a while to get to that point, but I’m so glad that we kept it going. Probably no project that I ve ever been on has taught me more the lesson of perseverance, both in what it teaches you and how much better you get and just the kind of audience commitment that you can develop over time. They’re like, “Wow, these guys are really committed. They keep showing up.” You develop a community that way.

Robert Bruce: So we’ve come at the next question a couple of different ways already, but I want to specifically ask you who you think should consider becoming a showrunner. In the sense of building their business, building an audience, who should consider this path of the showrunner?

Who Should Consider Becoming a New Media Producer

Jerod Morris: I think anyone should consider it because the potential is too great. Now as for actually doing it and who should decide to do it, there are a couple of questions to ask. It was actually on a recent episode of Hack the Entrepreneur by Jon Nastor, who’s going to be my co-host on The Showrunner, he had Brian Kurtz on. He was talking about this 100-to-zero mentality of really just focusing on giving and not expecting reciprocity in return.

When you’re going from considering to deciding, if you have a topic in mind and if you have a mindset where you really feel like that, like “I want to put this content out there just to help people to put it out there.” Yes, of course, in the back of your mind, there may be some business goals there, but is that what’s driving it? Is that genuine desire to help and to give driving it? And if that is, then that’s a checkmark that maybe you should decide to be a showrunner.

The other one is — I was thinking about this, this morning actually — podcasts are kind of like relationships. It always starts out great, and “You’re in love, and this is so much fun. And you think, ‘this is never going to change. I can do this every week,’” of course. But just like with any relationship, it does change eventually. Some harder times come. The big question is, can you work through them? That’s what makes a relationship sustained. And I think it’s what makes a podcast sustained because it’s, ‘Are you willing to roll up your sleeves and just do the work of showing up and producing the content?’ If you just think about what podcasting will be, right, the commitment, the work, even maybe the frustration you’ll face, I would say if you haven’t done a show, multiply that by 10, and that’s what it ll actually be.

If that makes you run for the hills and if that really scares you, then maybe it’s not right for you right now. The timing just isn’t right, and revisit it at a later date. The thing is, if you do decide that you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and do it and put in the work, then think about what your expectations are for the benefits and the connection to you and an audience and all the good things that can come from a podcast. Take what you think and multiply that by 20 because it far outweighs what the negatives are. But sometimes you have to slog through a little bit of mud and frustration to do it, just like a relationship. Some of the most rewarding relationships I’ve ever had have had tough moments, and you fight through it. Ultimately, you see that it’s worth it.

If you really have a topic and a mentality of being audience-focused and you go into it with your eyes relatively wide open about what it’s going to take and you’re willing to do that, then I think that ll allow you to have the long-term success you want. If you can answer those two questions in the affirmative, then you should start a podcast.

Robert Bruce: It makes me think, well I’ve been thinking lately about radio and television in general, specifically radio because, of course, podcast is the cousin of terrestrial radio and will become more so as we move along here. But I look at some of those — I love talk radio. I love NPR, like so many. But you look at some of these talk radio schedules, and the general concept is a person, a host, that is on the air for three hours a day, live by the way, five days a week, three hours a day, five days a week for, in some cases, 10, 15, 20, 25 years and longer. I’m not going to name any names because then we get into polarizing conversations about politics and personalities, which probably would be a great conversation, but we’ll have that another time. But you look at actually who is the King of All Media, always his name escapes me.

Jerod Morris: Howard Stern.

Robert Bruce: Howard Stern. Wait a minute, no. I’m thinking of the King of All New Media, Adam Carolla, right? Sorry, I got that wrong. Carolla was being interviewed somewhere. This is last year. He said, “I think that if you’re going to consider doing a podcast, you should do it daily.” He had a couple of specific ideas about that. Now, I don’t think that, that is applicable to everyone certainly. The idea behind it is what I like.

Carolla comes from old media. He is a hard-working son of a bitch that brings that to this new form, a relatively new form. What is he doing? He’s doing daily. His shows are longer, five days a week. He never misses one. All of that can seem scary, like, “Okay, I get it,” to somebody who may be thinking about this, “But I got a business to run. I got other things to do. I am not a professional broadcaster,” or in this case, a professional podcaster.

My point is there’s a lot of lessons there that we can learn. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, for instance, but there’s a lot of lessons there about work ethic and why and how this stuff works. I know you’re a fan of radio, terrestrial and otherwise. What are some of the lessons? Are there a couple of lessons you can glean from? You ve got to have some great sports shows that you’re addicted to, right?

What We Can (and Should) Learn from Traditional Media

Jerod Morris: One of the most successful sports talk radio stations ever is The Ticket here in Dallas. I am not a fan of Dallas sports teams. I’m not from here. Yet I listen to the show religiously because I can even listen to them talk about Dallas sports teams that I don’t care about, and it interests me. It’s because of the authenticity that just flows out of the radio, and because this is a station that started 20 years ago, a lot of the guys who started it are still there.

They have what even the more polished and buttoned-up ESPN shows don’t have, which is guys who have just been together and know each other, and there’s inside jokes that you have to listen a while to get into. Just that experience of listening and becoming a fan of this radio station that I would ve said, “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to listen to this,” really showed me that when you take a long-term mentality, the kind of connection that you can get with your audience.

The other thing is, like you said, from these guys who go on the radio every day for three hours or who do a daily show, I think what they’ve learned and what they show and what I learned from doing this postgame show is, when you hit that record button and it’s on, you’re there. You’re laid bare a little bit, and that is frightening. Especially if you’re doing something that’s not scripted and a postgame show where you can’t even prepare, it’s like, “This just happened, and we’re talking about it two minutes later.” There’s no preparation.

I don’t know if anything else has taught me more about myself and the fact that I’m actually capable of more than I think I am than that because it’s that moment of just the spotlight s on. You’re naked there. What do you have? Sometimes it’s been terrible. Sometimes I don’t have a lot, and you stumble through it. But you find a way, and you realize even your worst fears aren’t that bad. The benefits and what you get out of it so far surpasses what you think.

When you hear these guys on The Ticket who talk about what they’ve gotten from the station, how far beyond their wildest dreams it came from, from when they started it, that’s what you hear. There’s something about audio where you get that connection. When you get it, it’s like when a baseball player, they talk about hitting the home run, and they hit the sweet spot of the bat. You can’t necessarily feel it, yet at the same time, it feels perfect because you just hit so perfectly. That’s what it’s like. That’s why it makes all the hard work well worth it when you build that connection.

Robert Bruce: Alright. I’m going to serve up a big fat softball to you right now. We’ve talked about all of this — the benefits of being a showrunner, who might want to consider becoming a showrunner, why you want to do it. If somebody wants to start a podcast and they want some help in the beginning stages and as they move on to middle and more advanced stages, how does somebody become a showrunner? What’s the easiest way?

A Simple Shortcut to Becoming a Showrunner

Jerod Morris: The way that you become a showrunner is record your first episode and put it out in the world. At that point, you are a showrunner. Now, to get to become an accomplished showrunner and a good showrunner, obviously, you keep going from there because what you have to realize when you put that first episode out there — and I realize for me and a lot of shows, there’s been a big barrier just to getting the first one out there — but you just got to realize the first one is going to suck. It’s going to be terrible. It may be good in relation to others, but for you and what your expectations are, it’s going to suck. It just will.

Still, at that point, you’re the showrunner. Now from that point, then, it takes time to improve. Really, it takes session after session, stepping behind the microphone, prepping for interviews, fumbling through the editing process, fumbling through the promotion process, all of that, to make the mistakes that teach you the important lessons. That’s how I’ve learned most of this.

Now, Jon Nastor and I, who are running The Showrunner podcast, we’ve taken the liberty of doing a lot of that for you, fumbling through, making all the mistakes. I think that’s why we’re excited about creating the podcast and creating the course because it’s that ability to help show people where some the landmines are. Maybe help you avoid some of the mistakes, and allow you to learn the lessons without some of the mistakes so that you can get to that point of being more comfortable as a showrunner, better as a showrunner, more successful a little bit quicker.

You’re going to have to go through some of it on your own. No course can teach you how to get comfortable behind a microphone. You just have to do it. Understanding you’re going to suck, realizing that you got to make mistakes to learn the lessons, if you can find a way to learn some of those lessons without having to make the mistakes yourself, that can accelerate your process to achieving whatever your goals are for whatever show that you want to get out there into the world.

Robert Bruce: Like I said before, I got the sneak peek of the first episode of The Showrunner. I was extremely, extremely impressed. It was one of the best pieces of content that we have ever produced and second really only to the opening episodes of New Rainmaker, if I’m honest. You agree, right?

Jerod Morris: Oh, without question. Absolutely.

Robert Bruce: Thank you. Thank you. But this is a great podcast. It’s covering all of these things, teaching you to become a showrunner. Like Jerod said, they made the mistakes. Allow them to guide you through a less treacherous path on your road to becoming a showrunner. If that sounds good, if you want to do that, go to Showrunner.FM. That’s Showrunner.FM. As we record this, there is no email signup form on that page, but this is a little lesson in hanging it all out there. By the time you hear this, dear listener, there will be an email form that you can sign up and get updates to The Showrunner. Also, we’ll let you know, when the time comes, for the course that Jerrod Morris and Jon Nastor are putting together as we speak. How’s that going by the way? How’s the course coming along?

Jerod Morris: It’s going really well. Really, really well. Some the modules Jon has already developed are really good. We’ve already recorded some episodes based on those. It’s just going to be really helpful, useful, practical information for people and then with a little dose of the inspiration that you need.

I think sometimes we can overlook that a little bit. I guess it depends on someone’s perspective. Maybe getting behind a computer to type, that may be harder for some people than getting behind the microphone. For most people that I talk to, that step of getting behind the microphone and opening up and talking can be a fearful one. I’m certainly mindful of that. We want to make sure that you get those little doses of inspiration and motivation to keep it going as well.

By the way, thank you for the kind words on the first episode. It was, in part, inspired by those early episodes of New Rainmaker. I have a new-found appreciation for what those take, and certainly, we can’t do an episode like that all the time because what that takes to produce, it s very, obviously, time intensive. But I think it’s worth it. You get a lot out of it. I hope that we’ll be able to do more episodes like that in the future because it was so much fun to do.

Robert Bruce: If you want to hear that episode right now, head over to Showrunner.FM. It’s ready for you there. Sign up for the email list for The Showrunner specifically. Hopefully, by the time this goes live, the =”https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id980796147/” target=”_blank”>iTunes link will be available for you as well, but that’s at Showrunner.FM.

Jerrod Morris, I am Robert Bruce. On behalf of New Rainmaker with Brian Clark, I want to thank you for coming on here and letting me grill you with a few questions. I really appreciate it, man, always. We got to do this again.

Jerod Morris: Absolutely. We do. Does this mean that the show art for New Rainmaker this week is going to have our pictures on it?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I think we need to swap that out, at least for the week because I don’t think Brian gets back until Tuesday, so we’re good. We can do whatever we wanted. Thanks, man. Dear listener, thank you very much. We always appreciate you coming around. We’ll catch you guys next week.

The Transcript

How to Start a Podcast Network

Why Our Grandparents Were So Much Cooler Than We Are

Robert Bruce: I’m reading a glossary of hard-boiled slang. This is an age, Brian, when a telephone was called a blower. A $100 bill was called a century. Death was the big one or the big sleep. Coffin is a Chicago overcoat, gun is a heater, and typewriter is a mill.

Brian Clark: This is why you make Ron Swanson look like a modernist.

Robert Bruce: It makes me realize how much style our grandparents had and how boring as hell our language is today.

Brian Clark: You think so?

Robert Bruce: Do you think about that? Have you thought about these things?

Brian Clark: Just a personal preference. You are into that retro stuff.

Robert Bruce: I don’t know if it’s retro. I think it should have lasted. I’m going to try to bring it all back.

Brian Clark: One man crusade.

Robert Bruce: Alright. We’re flipping things around a little bit today talking about the podcast network, specifically how to launch a podcast network.

Brian Clark: Yeah, a little behind the scenes episode that we do periodically after we do something and the dust settles, which I’m not sure the dust has actually settled. It’s even been 10 days.

Robert Bruce: It’s like a pigpen around here still. I’m not going to tell you that, even though I just did. We’ve talked a lot about why podcasting, why a podcast network. We’ve been talking about that for some time on this podcast and off. But we wanted to go, like you said, behind the scenes, talk specifically about what we did to make this happen and a little bit about what’s to come

Brian Clark: This episode, contrary to what people may think, I’m not giving the answers here. Robert, you are giving the answers here. I remember when we had the conversation, and I said let’s do it. Then you spent the rest of the day on the phone, calling people to see if they were interested, and they were. Then you spent the next three months on the phone, which you hate by the way.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, it continues. Yeah, that’s true. It’s a lot of coordination. It s all about people. In this case, it’s all about our people.

Brian Clark: We’ve done some big projects in the past. I remember the whole MyCopyblogger initiative where we switched from newsletter to the content library. That was a pretty massive project, but I think I had my hands all in there in your business, so to speak. This time, I did my best to stand back. Trust, but verify.

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

Brian Clark: Watch. Advise. Tweak.

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

Brian Clark: But really, you get the props. Well, a lot of people get the props because it was a major team effort, but you were the — I would ve called you the project manager, but I know you like to be called a producer, of course.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, it really is about, as you’ll soon hear in this episode, the coming together of all these different people, and it’s kind of staggering. The different kinds of skills, talents and everything that came together to make this happen. In our case, the way we did it, it was something that we, as a company, could do. But we’re also going to talk about how to do this on a medium to even a much smaller scale as well, and why it applies to those of you out there that are thinking you may want to do something like this.

Brian Clark: We’re going to say what we did, but then we’re also going to try to extrapolate that out into general principles. If you had to boil it down to one big secret shortcut to successfully launch a podcast network, what would that be?

The Shortcut to Launching a Successful Podcast Network

Robert Bruce: Here’s a short answer. You’ve got to faithfully serve your audience with a media-based approach to content for about nine plus years, and then you send them an email letting them know that you’ve started a podcast network.

Brian Clark: That’s so wrong. I mean, it’s right in the sense that we’re not trying to discourage anyone, but on the other hand, if you don’t have an existing audience, start today. If podcasting is the way you want do that, many, many people have built really amazing audiences just from one podcast and then added on from there.

We did it a different way. Not all our existing audience is audio people. It’s not like the entire Copyblogger audience is tuning in, but enough of them are to provide a catalyst that got us noticed a little bit in iTunes. I’ll let you talk about that, Robert, which helps us reach a new audience.

Despite the fact that it seem like we had this complete unfair advantage, which we never really apologized to, because we worked our butts off for almost a decade just on this. Never mind the six years before that. Start building your audience today. It’s our hope that this show will give you some insight how you can get rolling by leveraging multiple shows as opposed to just one, if that’s what you’re thinking about.

Let’s talk about how you put this together from our perspective, internally. Our company has its own unique characters, many of which are now hosting shows, and Demian. What the hell?

Robert Bruce: I don’t know.

Brian Clark: Demian s show is a home run.

Robert Bruce: I got to say, though, did I not call it?

Brian Clark: We used to not let him out in public. Now we’re letting him broadcast, and he’s killing it.

Robert Bruce: He is wildly public.

Brian Clark: I know.

Robert Bruce: Did I not call it, though? Did I not call it?

Brian Clark: You did call it. It helps that it’s four times a week.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right.

Brian Clark: Frequency, there’s a lesson right there. John Lee Dumas was the man there. He just went out every single day and built this huge audience with frequency. Because showing up in iTunes, the more you hit publish, the more often you’re getting downloads., you’re getting exposure, and it really amplifies itself. That’s one tip right there.

The Critical Components of an Audio-Based Network That Works

Robert Bruce: I’ve broken this down into five basic things that you want to think about, look at. Most of them are going to be, if not all, relevant no matter what size project you’re thinking about in terms of the context of this podcast network. But it’s production, talent, technology, design, and promotion.

On the production side, that’s everything that it sounds like. It’s getting the shows produced, edited, transcripts, working with hosts, talking about their shows, getting the sound equipment together. This was kind of a monster job. First time, in some cases, I’m thinking maybe even in most cases, people working in audio, at least at this level, getting them set up to where they’ve got a basic, little, simple studio and a good microphone and good decent microphone technique.

This is going to be interesting, though, because I’m actually blown away with the quality of the sound that’s coming out. We’ve had some glitches. We’ve had some things that we’re trying to iron out, and we will. But the thing here is that I think about, in six months, when these people become more seasoned, and it becomes a part of their daily practice or weekly practice, it’s worth going through these bumps here. You’re going to see not only that, but like a comfortability behind the microphone that just takes a lot of time to get to.

Brian Clark: It’s interesting to me, we have a lot of people in the company that we thought were naturals to be hosts. They did, and they stepped up. But were you a little surprised by how nervous and — what’s the word I’m looking for here — because people like Sonia, I didn’t think twice about that. She’s going to show up, and she’s going to knock it out of the park. But she was a little nervous about it.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I haven’t talked to her about that, but I think that was a bit across the board. Frankly for myself, too, I knew that these people were going to deliver, and we’ll get into talent in a moment. I knew it. But I was surprised at the level at which they deliver — not because of anything about them or past performance — but just simply because this is a brand new thing. It’s in the DNA of what we do as a company all day, every day, but it’s still different. Yeah, I was surprised at the level of how well things turned out overall because it’s a hard game. You turn on that microphone, you hit the record button, and most people, if not all people in the beginning, you freeze up. You sound like an idiot. The hardest thing is just to be yourself for some reason, but it just takes time.

Brian Clark: Well, what’s interesting to me because I don’t even listen to these current shows because I hate listening to myself, but I need to start because you get better that way. The interesting thing to me was that you said, You ought to go back and listen to us in 2010 because we were terrible. I’m like, “Really? We were that bad?” You just said, “Trust me,” or “Go listen.” I said, “No, I’ll trust you. I think that would just ruin me. But it’s everyone. You get better at it. The more encouraging thing recently was we just hired a new production assistant, Caroline, and she listened to the show for the first time. She’s like, “Wow, that’s not bad.” I’m like, “What were you expecting? Oh my God.”

Robert Bruce: It’s the idea that, too, this is media now. This is audio. This is radio. We’re not at the level of the major global players yet, but this is the future of it all. If you’re going to play, you ve got to play. Is there a lot of room to improve and grow and make things? Absolutely. There always is. But, if this is the future of audio, which we think it is, then you want to go big at all times. One last note on the production side of things, we’ve also done something that we’ve rarely done and I don’t think we’ve done, at least on a regular basis, we’ve outsourced the audio editing – so we’re not doing that in-house. It’s a decision we made early on to free up more time on the creative and creating media side.

But I’ve got Kelton Reid and Clare Garrett on the production side, who developed this entire workflow that every single episode for three, four episodes a day now, Monday through Thursday, which will rapidly become more, everything goes through this workflow. Every episode has about 15, 20 tasks attached to it that need to get done. Some smaller, some larger, and it’s working perfectly.

Brian Clark: You know what just occurred to me, that might make a great infographic.

Robert Bruce: That’s actually a really good idea. Alright, Kelton, if you’re listening – wait a minute – he doesn t have any time.

Brian Clark: Yeah, but I mean, that would be incredibly useful for people.

Robert Bruce: That’s a really good idea.

Brian Clark: One of our designers can probably visualize that better than I could. I was just thinking as you’re describing it, I wish I could see that, because when we talk about it, most of the time you say, “Don’t worry about it,” and I try not to because it’s working. I’d only worry if it doesn’t work. That kind of workflow, that kind of process makes anything doable. It’s just a matter of sitting down. I remember you and Kelton sat down early on, before we did anything and said, “What’s the process?” It took a while. It evolved. It s tweaked and all that, once you get into the trenches. But you started with a plan that made it manageable.

Robert Bruce: Kelton’s a pro. I mean, he’s been handling all of our multimedia stuff for Authority and company-wide for a while. A look at any one of his spreadsheets will make you want to run crying to your bed.

Brian Clark: I don’t do spreadsheets.

Robert Bruce: Me neither. Anyway, big props to Kelton and Clare on the production side. Yeah, that’s a really good idea. By the way, for those listening, that’s a lesson. An infographic out of a workflow that we created for the podcast network — repurposing content, useful interesting stuff. Almost anything you can do, you can make something else out of it.

Brian Clark: Yeah, Everything s content is our motto.

Robert Bruce: We’ll go through these other ones. Talent, I mainly put this under the category of the hosts themselves We’re in a situation, again, we go back to that unfair advantage where we look around our own company. We see all of this incredible talent that is available to us, and there’s more out there. There’s more coming. Not everyone’s in that situation. We’ll talk about that a little bit later.

Brian Clark: Well, I don’t know. I just think we think differently about people. I mean, who would look at Sean Jackson and say, “We got to give that guy a show.” But we know Sean is a character, and he knows his stuff. Sean’s show is not out yet.

Robert Bruce: He’s insanely talented.

Brian Clark: He’s our CFO.

I’m going to disagree. I think with a shift in mindset, you could find people in any company. I think most companies are just like, “I’m not putting Jane from accounting on the mic,” because they don’t trust her. That’s the issue. It’s not that there isn’t talent that can be developed, it’s just mindset.

How a Smaller Company Might Approach Creating Content Like This

Robert Bruce: Here’s the way to think about it because we’re still in the idea that, especially you and me, our generation, we remember the old days of radio. We remember the professionals of broadcast terrestrial radio, and we can’t get that out of our head. But Jane from accounting is a professional in her area, obviously, and she can talk about all kinds of things that are useful, related to whatever your business is. But here’s the thing. In new media, people don’t want the golden-throated radio professional anymore.

Brian Clark: Oh yeah, what about you?

Robert Bruce: People want to hear Jane.

Brian Clark: Says the guy with the golden voice, right. Yeah, thanks.

Robert Bruce: They would rather hear authenticity from her or him, talking about what it is they do, and hearing the secrets and tactics and strategies within the job they have.

Brian Clark: This is this whole concept of employee-generated content, which you hate that term. We hate most of the terms that we operate under in this industry, so why not this one? Tell me what your beef is with it briefly.

Robert Bruce: Well, we talked about this a couple of episodes ago. I get where it’s coming from. I don’t think it was meant to be offensive, but this is just completely offensive to me, employee-generated content. No, what we have here in our case is a number of extremely talented human beings thoughtfully creating media for their audience. This is not employee generated like they’re some kind of computer, right? It comes from user generated content. I get it. It s a nice acronym, and it’s a nice connection. But no, these are real people, with real jobs, doing real work, that have interesting and useful things to share, and they’re taking the time.

I talked to Stefanie Flaxman yesterday. She’s the host of Editor-in-Chief. She was laughing because we had a conversation sometime last year. I said, “Hey, Stefanie. I really like you to write more for the blog, for Copyblogger.com.” She said, “Well, I really don’t want to, but of course I will, because I d rather focus on these other areas of the job.” We kind of came to an understanding that worked. She told me yesterday, she says, “Wow, I just realized you got me to write again without me even knowing it, and I’m loving it,” because she’s writing scripts for her show.

I think about Demian. Demian now is doing 500 to 1000 word essays, audio essays four days a week. That’s not employee-generated content. That’s an extremely talented individual with years of experience creating media that people can use.

Brian Clark: All right. Duly noted.

Robert Bruce: Shall I leave it at that, geez? Technology.

Brian Clark: Technology, that’s the easy part.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, this is the easy one. There’s a couple of facets to this, but the short answer is we’re using the Rainmaker Platform to deliver this entire podcast network that you see. Media files that are larger than what we usually deal with, the servers are running effortlessly. The ability to create a new show in — I think it takes me five minutes if we wanted to spin up a new show — about five minutes outside of show art. The ability to schedule things out — all of the things in the podcasting area that the Rainmaker Platform does. Create the iTunes settings within the platform itself. It’s all in there.

But the cool thing here, Brian, that we’ve been finding out is that because we’re eating our own dog food, because we’re using the Rainmaker Platform to create this podcast network, which is a big part of the future of media for our company, we’re seeing what needs to be tweaked. We’re seeing some things that need to be fixed. We’re seeing some things that need to be added.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I started using the platform over at Further, and that’s allowed me to see things that I would like changed. But we’re going hardcore with Rainmaker.FM. You would think we’re pushing the platform to its limit. We’re finding that it’s doing just fine, but we do find things as users instead of the people marketing the thing. We’re going, “Wait, wouldn’t it be cool if it did this, or this is not quite right.” It’s been pretty interesting.

Robert Bruce: Obviously, that makes the platform better and better and better for our customers as well, which is the most important thing.
Next is design. We’ve talked about Rafal Tomal and Lauren Mancke before. Lauren headed up all of the show art for each of the shows. Big job kind of all at once. She, in my opinion, delivered spectacularly. Rafal, of course, on the site design at Rainmaker.FM, always amazing and always seems to get where we want to go without us spelling it out. Props to the two of them for really delivering, in a lot of ways, the personality, the feel and the usability of the site.

Brian Clark: It’s basically the Genesis Child theme, which is what runs on Rainmaker and of course that is the foundation of our whole StudioPress line of designs as well. There are a ton of qualified designers out there. We just happen to have two wonderful people who work for us in-house. If they try to leave, I’m going to throw a fit.

The interesting thing as we get a little deeper here is that it’s not just podcast network functionality that you’ll see on Rainmaker.FM, in fact, you’ll see us use the platform to the full degree once you get into the business models that we’ve got cooked up so far, but we’ll talk about that in a minute.

Then, promotion, that’s how do you get the word out? How do you make a dent in iTunes enough to where iTunes starts working for you?

Robert Bruce: The short answer is how we answered your first question to me, which is you’ve got to serve an audience. Build an audience over a period of time, and then let them know about it. But again, what if you don’t have an audience? What if you have a smaller audience, and you’re thinking about launching something like this? Well, we go back in the archives. There are all kinds of promotional strategies that we’ve talked about in the past — starting from zero — but basically reprinting what you did in 2006, Brian, with Copyblogger.

The Business Model(s) behind Rainmaker.FM

Brian Clark: There’s another aspect of this that’s kind of unique to podcasting, which is why I called the podcast interview an act of curation, that also taps into the audiences of others. How many stories have we read where a podcast starts from nothing, like Jon Nastor, and John Lee Dumas?

It’s an interview format, great positioning, unique, great host, great conversation. Through that process of tapping into outside experts, those people tend to also promote the episode. Showing up, doing the work, and then being smart about politely asking, “Hey, the episode is up. I’d love it if you shared it with your social network. Thank you so much.”

It’s simple. Most people will do it because they’re also promoting themselves as an authority in whatever the field may be. There is benefit there. A form of influence or marketing is simply also how you develop your initial content strategy.

Robert Bruce: One thing on this building an audience for nine plus years, our joke at the beginning there, it’s not a joke. We understand that, that is what we’ve done, and it took us this long, like Brian said. We don’t apologize for that because it’s been a long road of a lot of hard work. Really, if you want to break down to one year or even six months, or three years, whatever it is, it really does come back to that — to do the work and to show up over time to build the audience. There are things you can do, there are tactics and strategies you can do to accelerate that, but really, that is the answer. We always come back to it, and we won’t apologize for that because it is hard work, and it really is just, that’s the answer.

Brian Clark: But totally doable at the same time. I mean, learning a language is a hard work. Learning rock climbing is hard work. Starting a successful podcast is hard work. All of it is within your ability to do, though. You just have to put your mind to it. There’s certainly a lot of guidance. This isn’t 1998 when we were just making it up as we went along. It’s almost like there’s too much information, but you can find some technique or approach that gels with you, as opposed to having to follow us, or Joe Blow, or whomever has the approach that worked for them. There’s a lot of different ways to do it.

That takes us right into the business model. We are content marketers. This network is built on the Rainmaker Platform. Sales of the Rainmaker Platform, or actually pre-trials, because we’re only 10 days into this, have increased by a substantial percentage. When it comes down to it, the network could be killing it, and if our business objective wasn’t being met, then what’s the point? Well, interestingly enough, even if that wasn’t working out, there’s just so much more here, and we’re really finding ourselves in a position where we’re looking into doing things we’ve never done before, like accepting sponsorships.

Why We Might Accept Outside Sponsors Sooner Rather Than Later

Brian Clark: In the first week we got hit by three major companies trying to sponsor the network. Not us reaching out. Not us saying we want sponsors. They just came to us. Two of them we had to say no to. Third, we may say yes to. That’s a fascinating thing because they’re like, “Do you have a rate card?” I’m like, “A rate card? Yeah. Let me cook something out.” You know what I’m saying? I had to do some research because that’s not what we do. We sell eight figures worth of our own stuff a year, but we don’t sell advertising. Yet let’s talk numbers.

We did 100,000 downloads in four days, and that’s only going to grow. It’s a possibility. It’s interesting because, on one hand, you could get an outside sponsor, and that covers all our internal production cost, which we were just going to write off as an expense. It’s a marketing expense for us. Content production and distribution is how we advertise, if you want to put it that way, but it’s way more effective than that. The cost of doing this is really, really not an issue at all in our budget. It’s kind of amazing that you can create this kind of reach and impact, and get inquiries from people who want to pay you money just to mention their name, but that’s what’s happening.

Anyway, we’re going to keep apprised to the whole sponsorship thing because it’s new ground for us. I’m sure a lot of you out there are interested in it. If you look around, podcast sponsorships are hot because they work. It is direct response advertising if it’s done right. People in our industry, people outside of our industry are showing up and trying to land on every show they can because it’s working. That’s kind of amazing, although that’s another reason why we’re effectively our own sponsor. It’s working for us, selling more of our own stuff. The question is, do we have room to bring other people in. I think we’re going to be very, very selective about it. If it’s the right fit then, why not?

Robert Bruce: Definitely. That’s probably an episode in and of itself in the future. But it was a flattering surprise to us, not ultimately a surprise to get those inquiries, but we had talked that we’re just not even going to think about sponsorship for a good while, if not ever.

Brian Clark: Well, yeah, but we talked about if we expanded beyond digital marketing to just marketing and sales, which the Rainmaker brand could do, at that point, you’d be silly not to. I just didn’t expect people to come to us week one. We don’t even have a month under our belt. Anyway, more on that in future shows.

Robert Bruce: One quick backtrack in the advertising and sponsorship of our own products. You’ll notice real quick on Rainmaker.FM, there’s a couple of things going on. Right now, we’re talking about the Authority Rainmaker event and you’ll see that in the little drop down bar at the top of the site. As you scroll down, you’ll see a couple of places on show pages and episode pages. You’ll see a banner right above the footer at the bottom. The idea there I think is obvious, that this is what the network, in this case, Authority Rainmaker is what is bringing the Rainmaker.FM network to you at the moment.

Brian Clark: Ticket prices go up on March 31st. Keep that in mind. We’d love to see you in Denver. You don’t want to miss Jerod s podcasting presentation, which I worked on it with him. Completely changed his topic, realizing that podcasting needs a real big drill down.

Robert Bruce: Anyway, AuthorityRainmaker.com. On Rainmaker.FM, all these places that you see, where that’s being sponsored right now, those can be changed at any moment. It can be worked differently depending on our goals, our needs.

Brian Clark: We can do that without a designer, right?

Robert Bruce: That’s right.

Brian Clark: That’s awesome.

Robert Bruce: There may be one place that we still need to get, but anyway, that is the idea. Anyway, a note on that. The other thing that we’ve got coming up is paid courses. Jerod is going to kick this off. Do we want to say the name of his coming show?

Brian Clark: Well, it’s interesting because with the existing membership capabilities and then the new learning management system that will be out in a matter of weeks, Rainmaker is also an amazing online course and membership site platform. Of course, you also can use a member area for lead generation like we do with the free New Rainmaker course — all of that. But that’s another big aspect of why, even from practical standpoint, why we launched this site on the platform because audio listeners are natural prospects for audio and video training. They learn that way. It’s still portable. It’s still on demand. It’s still all of that good stuff from the free end.

Jerod is actually going to be in the next round of shows that we released shortly. Robert, you know details on that probably by heart, but that’s called The Showrunner, which is a nice nod actually to television. Why do we always mix our metaphors with our names?

Robert Bruce: I don’t know, that one was yours, I think.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I loved that.

Robert Bruce: That’s one of the better names on the network. There’s no doubt.

Brian Clark: Yeah, then a lot of people are already saying, I don’t know how to do this podcasting thing. Thanks for example — this episode, but I need to know things so much more in depth than this. Yeah, we got you. We’re going to work on that kind of training. That’s the obvious starting place, but really, we can do just about any topic in more detail.

Why We Developed the Shows We Have (and Will Have)

Robert Bruce: Think about each of the shows, and we did plan this, not perfectly, some kind of perfect master plan, but it was always in our thoughts. Any one of these shows can also become a paid course. Think about Rough Draft with Demian. You can take that in a nice short, crisp writing course. Stefanie Flaxman with Editor-in-Chief. There’s an editing course waiting to be had there. Sonia Simone, Confessions of Pink-Haired Marketer. The things she’s talking about, it’s a no brainer. Plus she’s so good at it anyway. Anyone of these things, the MarTech stuff that Chris Garrett and Tony Clark are talking about, not that we are going to do a course for each one of these shows, but you can see where all of this leads directly into a business model.

Brian Clark: Just like with the podcasting course, it’s going to come from customer feedback. We’re going to see where people are getting stuck on the free materials, and then that’s an indication to dive down deep and do something more thorough, more in-depth, and higher value.

Robert Bruce: In a show like Pamela Wilson’s Hit Publish, that is such a produced show as it is, like we talked about last time with the early episodes of New Rainmaker. That is a free course waiting to happen, leading into some kind of a paid course.

Brian Clark: Yeah. We’ve been doing that since 2010, when we first launched our membership site software Premise, which evolved heavily into becoming what’s in Rainmaker. We demonstrated that by doing a free course. It built an email list, and it’s still active to this day. Remember, what was the name of that? Is that some sort of an authority?

Robert Bruce: Digital corporation.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that was cool. I’ve noticed that other people are catching on to this. I think Derek Halpern was doing free online courses as a way to build a list. Hey, yeah, exactly. Because that’s more likely to work because it’s higher value, and it’s access and registration — all these things we ve talked about, how we increased our opt in rate by 400 percent, it’s because of a different experience, but also higher value content.

Out of the podcast, for people who aren’t with us right now listening, we can put together all these different free courses. We can tie it into a free member area like we already do with the New Rainmaker course. It becomes lead generation or audience building really for that particular show, or for the Master Feed digest, whatever the case may be.

What s Coming For Rainmaker.FM

Robert Bruce: Let’s spend just a couple of minutes on what’s coming for Rainmaker.FM.

Brian Clark: Well, you tell me because I keep asking you what the schedule is. I’m over here debating. I have two other podcasts I want to start.

Robert Bruce: Well, get in line, buddy.

Brian Clark: I know. I know. I’m no longer important in this company.

Robert Bruce: Well you got a real zinger coming up.

Brian Clark: Maybe, I think so. I think so. Here’s an interesting thing, so Further is the curated email newsletter that I launched, that’s now got thousands of people on the list, but I’ve always been wanting to launch a podcast. Instead of just launching a podcast, I built a specific list of people who are interested in that subject matter. So guess what, when I do launch the podcast, I’ve got at least a Minimum Viable Audience to get that rolling. There’s a strategy for you out there. Figure out a way to build an email list before you launch the podcast. Then launch the podcast by email, send them to iTunes, and you’ll get that nice spike.

But the other show that I’m thinking is kind of like my defining, I always say further is my overarching word that drives me, but this other word — which actually it’s always other people in the company that pick up on these things I say, and they’re like, “We should do something with that.” Like Gardner took No Sidebar and ran with it. Anyway, I’m thinking of making it a short daily show because I ve got to do something to catch Demian. It’s just not right.

Robert Bruce: No, it’s not. Obviously, more shows are coming in different formats, which is also going to apply probably to yours, Brian, which I think is important to think about. You could do just an entire network of interview shows, certainly. But we want to experiment with different formats. We want to have a wide range of things for people to listen to. Right now, we have eight shows in production that are on the way. There are a couple that will come out before, but all of these will be out by the first week in May.

There’s another show that is pending, or in talks with somebody outside of the company to start. Overall, you and I had a conversation about how big should this thing get. I think it’s a fun thing to talk about. It’s not necessarily the most important thing by any means, but I think that brings us to 19 shows by the beginning of May, if all of these work out and if we can do it, which should happen.

Brian Clark: We kind of consistently have eight shows in the top 20 in our category in iTunes. So if you had 20 shows, it’s not going to happen. There are some people who are rock solid.

Robert Bruce: Right. Things will even out.

Brian Clark: Right there along with them, as opposed to thinking we’re going to knock anyone off like Michael Hyatt or Pat Flynn. Besides, those are our friends anyway. It’s not really that kind of competitive situation, but it is very powerful when your shows occupy that kind of real estate. But not every show is going to make it long term. But that is a conversation for the future since you got to let people, like you said, six months minimum to let people find their legs and really start rolling. It’s amazing how much better you get by being consistent, week in, week out, day in, day out, if that’s what you’re going after, and you’ll get better. You just do.

Robert Bruce: More courses coming, obviously. We talked about that briefly.

Brian Clark: We don’t know what those are yet, but we’ll figure it out from you guys. Leave comments if there’s a particular topic that you want to drill down on. That’s always helpful.

Whether or Not It s Time to Hit the Road

Robert Bruce: One thing that I’m really excited about is what you and I are calling the Rainmaker Roadshow. We have this idea to go to smaller venues — and probably larger cities to start just because it makes more sense audience wise — but to record live shows in these kind of smaller venues.

Brian Clark: This is another one of our ideas that we’ve been talking about forever in various context and never do, but it is cool. It’s cool to put on a larger event like Authority Rainmaker, but it’s really cool that you show up in a city, contact people you know there, get 100 people to meet up, hang out, have some refreshments, and then we got to figure out how to set up mics and all that kind of stuff. I’m sure you and Jessica could fix that up.

Robert Bruce: Jessica’s got all that handled, yeah. If you think about the nature of a podcast audience, this audience that you’re building in this format, you’re already seeing it on a bigger scale like with Dan Harmon. It’s now on Netflix. Dan Harmon’s documentary of the tour of his podcast.

Brian Clark: Doesn’t Wait Wait Don’t tell me! — you know that show on NPR. They go around different places. They have a live audience. I love that they have that audience. That’s so cool. That’s one thing you don’t get when it’s just me, and you talking to each other.

Robert Bruce: It’s one of the most rabid fan bases of all shows on NPR. But this is just cool. Obviously, you run into things like budget again, but there are all kinds of ways around this. Number one, you’re creating a piece of content.

Brian Clark: That’s another place where you could bring in sponsors. Obviously, the platform is going to be a sponsor. Again, it’s a marketing cost for us, a content marketing cost, but bring in Shure microphones, which we all use and love.

Our (Loosely Held) Plans for the Future

Robert Bruce: We’re going to start working on the Rainmaker Roadshow, so keep an eye out for that. Of course, in terms of what’s coming in the next months and years, we’re listening to what you want, what the Rainmaker.FM audience wants.

Brian Clark: Always, always. That’s why we never have any truly definitive plans that are more than a month out.

Robert Bruce: Right, right.

Brian Clark: Because it changes, and it should. It’s adaptive. Robert, thanks for the insight. I’m still not sure how you pulled it off.

Robert Bruce: My secret weapon is that EGC, Brian, that employee-generated content.

Brian Clark: I think it was a combination of coffee in the morning and bourbon in the evening from what I understand, but that’s another show. On the Roadshow, people will get to meet Robert.

Robert Bruce: No, they won’t. I’ll be recording from the hotel room.

Brian Clark: Oh, no.

Robert Bruce: You can be live down in the bar.

Brian Clark: That defeats the whole purpose.

Robert Bruce: It kind of does. Thanks to everybody involved in this entire project. There’s a lot of people and really, that’s what it boils down to is these people in this company and the audience, as always, that listens. You quoted something from Henry Rollins the other day on Twitter that I thought was perfect. Now, I want to try to bring it up so that I don’t butcher it.

Brian Clark: That was from an interview he just did at South By in Austin. And it was such a perfect quote. He told me to email him if I came up with any points that I wanted him to focus on and I’m like, Here, I’m just going to repeat your words back to you. You say this again.

Robert Bruce: That’s right. He said, The only reason I get to do anything is because I have an audience, and I need them more than they need me.

Brian Clark: It’s just so how much I feel as well. I know that I worked hard to build an audience, that we re continuing to work hard to build an audience, but it doesn’t matter. We still owe it to them, as opposed to them owing us anything. Thank you, Robert, for your hard work. Thank you to everyone in the company. But thanks to all of you out there for putting up with us and tuning in, and hopefully you’re learning something. We’re going to keep trying hard. Stick with us.

Robert Bruce: If you want to get what you’ve got coming to you with the show, the easiest way to do that is to go to NewRainmaker.FM. That will take you to this show’s page. Or if you want to check everything else on the network, go to Rainmaker.FM. You can subscribe by iTunes. You can get it by RSS, and you can sign up to the 10-part course, that we talked about a little earlier, that will likely change the way you think about online marketing.

Brian Clark: If I can ask for one favor, if you dig the show and you’re enjoying it, please go over to iTunes, give us a rating or write a review if you have some time. Just something short expressing your thoughts. We look at those. Sometimes we’re getting useful feedback that we can incorporate in the show. Other times, it just makes our day to see that you guys actually like what we’re doing. If you can, no pressure.

The Transcript

How to Build a Profitable Email List with Social Media Advertising

Brian Clark: Hey there, Rainmakers. Welcome to the show. I am Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media. Today’s episode is another one in the series that I’m calling free consulting. I have a specific thing I want to learn more about, and I think about who’s the smartest person I know for this topic. That person today is Noah Kagan because we want to talk about using Facebook ads to build our email list.

You guys know, I launched a new curated email newsletter on personal development called Further. It’s doing fine organically, but what if I’ve got more money than time at this point? How can I use advertising to grow that list smartly? Well, that’s what we’re going to ask Noah.

If you’re not familiar with Noah, he was actually employee number 30 at Facebook but that’s not what I want to talk to him, because what he did after he left Facebook was build AppSumo, which is a huge gigantic email-powered business, kind of like Groupon for web developers and online marketers. People like us. Now he has branched out and expanded that into a business that is way beyond the Groupon model. We’re going to talk to him about that a little bit. In fact, why don’t we get Noah to tell us. Noah, how are you?

Noah Kagan: Good, Brian. Thanks for having me, man.

Brian Clark: Thanks for coming, man. Hope you appreciate being our victim in our free consulting. I want to know something, and I want to share it with them. It makes for a good show.

Noah Kagan: Wow. I’m not getting paid for this. I ll help you out.

Noah s Story

Brian Clark: I forgot to mention that part to you. Why don’t you tell people a little bit about the story. Obviously, you were early on in Facebook. You were early on at Mint, and now you’re your own guy as a founder of AppSumo. Give us the sketch of how you got here.

Noah Kagan: Yeah, man. I’ll start with the AppSumo part. Everything else is kind of online. I think what’s interesting is that I started seeing all these web apps come out, and I was like, “Man, one of the hardest things for every single business online is marketing.” In my previous business, I kept getting shit on, and I was a credit card payments guy for Facebook games. We did all the payments, and everyone hated us because they’re like, “You re a payments guy, we don t care about you. Get us more customers.”

Noah Kagan: So I wanted to do something that was more on the top of the funnel, which was getting people customers. We realized with AppSumo, if we created some type of distribution that everyone would actually like us and be like, “Hey, promote our products,” and the customers would be like, “Oh, cool. Thanks for discovering cool things for us.”

So we ve spent the past four years building that up. Ninety percent of our business comes through email. That’s not something I ever really did before or thought of, but I basically became a super huge email advocate, which is, in my opinion, the number one way to communicate with your customers.

Brian Clark: Absolutely.

Noah Kagan: Since then we’ve built tools. We basically took all the tools we’ve been building at AppSumo and put that into a tool kit called SumoMe.com. Those are tools that we’ve been using internally to grow our own email list and get more traffic.

Brian Clark: Excellent. We will link that up in the show notes, so everyone can check that out. I actually have someone who produces a site for me who is recommending SumoMe tools, and I was like, “Yeah. I know that’s Noah, right?”

Noah Kagan: Awesome.

Brian Clark: It’s cool though.

Why You Should Focus on Fundamentals Instead of Facebook

Brian Clark: Okay. I kind of set the stage. I have this new email newsletter. It’s curated. It’s really just fun for me. It’s like my personal blog. By the way, why did you name your personal blog OkDork?

Noah Kagan: I bought it in 2000, which now is 15 years ago. I thought I would buy domains and get rich, and that was one of the names I came up with. I have that one. I have everspeed.com, and the only one I’ve ever been offered is for Community Next, which is a Jewish group in Michigan. They offered me a $1,000 for that. I never got rich off domains, but that was one of ones I bought.

Brian Clark: I had the same idea. Usually, I would buy domains as a placeholder for an idea, and if I decided to do it, you do it. If not, you let it lapse. But no one’s ever paid me a substantial amount of money for any of them. I had actually do the work of building sites out of them. What a pain in the arse.

Noah Kagan: I think that’s a key thing that maybe it should be the theme of Facebook ads, and in general, is that you read articles where this guy or girl buys domains, and they made a shit load of money. Then you do the exact same thing that you’ve read, and it doesn’t work out. I think that’s kind of the same that I’ve noticed with Facebook ads.

You read this article, 2,000% return when I bought my Facebook ads. You copy them, and then it doesn’t work. So the thing to understand is why is it not working for you and then how can you improve that? Or are there other ways that you should be considering, just versus doing what everybody else is telling you to do.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s why this show is going to be about the fundamentals. Facebook changes all the time. Tactics change all the time. Even you’ll tell us that your own approach that works will stop working at some point. You have to continue to reiterate on it.

Is Facebook Now a Pay-to-Play Platform for Marketers?

Brian Clark: Here’s really where I want to start out because I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook, mostly hate. We killed the Copyblogger page because we get traffic from Facebook, but it’s by other people sharing. Our page, unless we paid, really did nothing. On the other hand, I have a local Boulder site, and it does wonderfully on Facebook, organically. I can’t really figure that out, but for the most part, it seems that the sentiment is Facebook is now a pay-to-play platform for marketers. True?

Noah Kagan: Yeah. A concept that I have always been surprised at is that I pay to tell everyone to go to Facebook, and then I have to pay to tell everyone to come back to me. With email, what I’ve realized is it’s the most control you can have in communicating with your customers. You’re married right, Brian?

Brian Clark: Yes.

Noah Kagan: You don’t have someone else talk to your wife, do you?

Brian Clark: I haven’t worked that out, but no.

Noah Kagan: You talk to her yourself. And that’s what Facebook is doing. They’re talking to your customers, so you don’t even know who really gets to see it. It’s, 4,000 people today saw your boosted post. I think what Facebook is good for is actually what you pointed out about your Boulder site, which is for organic or social reach — it s able to spread something, but in terms of a marketing channel that you want to be wary of giving someone else control of your business and of your outcomes.

Brian Clark: Yeah. We call it digital sharecropping, and home-base is always your site with your list, but it seems that you have been incredibly effective at taking Facebook traffic and converting it into that higher value email relationship. That’s why you’re on the hot seat today.

Now you wrote a great article, we’re going to link this up to about a year ago about how you spent $2,000,000 on Facebook ads and built massive lists and what you learned from it, which was very useful. A year later, where are you at today with Facebook as far as your own advertising and what you think about where the platform’s headed?

How to Convert Social Traffic into Email Subscriptions

Noah Kagan: Specifically for Facebook, we’re spending only $3,000 a month on Facebook. That’s $36,000 a year, which is much less. I think at our peak when we were doing somewhere between $200,000 to $300,000 a month. It’s dramatically gone down for us. I think what people have to do with their marketing is consider the effectiveness. If I have $300,000, what is actually the most effective way for us, at that time, which is growing our email list. Right now it’s trying to get people to install SumoMe.com. I basically take $300,000, and I say, “Which will help me get the most amount of people to install it?”

Facebook actually hasn’t been that. It’s very expensive for us. A lot of the traffic is mobile, which converts pretty horribly. A lot of it’s international. It converts horribly. You have to be careful of that. You have to look at, Are there other channels I could spend that on? What more people need to do is sponsor smaller sites. Instead of going to Facebook, go to JonLoomer.com, who s a great guy for Facebook ads. For us, WordPress sites are great. Go sponsor smaller WordPress sites, instead of just Facebook as the only way of thinking about how to do your marketing.

Brian Clark: Here’s my dilemma and my scenario. I’m starting off with a new list, small project, so I don’t think the over-saturation issue would affect me. Here’s my problem, because you, like I, are an ROI marketer as everyone should be, but think back to when I started Copyblogger. For the first 18, 19 months, I didn’t sell anything. All I did was build audience. In that period of time, I figured out what the audience wanted to buy. We built it, sold it, and the rest is history. We have done that every year since.

I have that same mentality with this new project, and yet, like I mentioned, at this point I’ve got more money than time. Advertising to build that list — because I know how valuable that audience will be to me to figure out what to sell them — yet that means I’m coming out of pocket with no chance for immediate ROI. Would you ever do that yourself?

Noah Kagan: No.

Brian Clark: I knew you’re going to say that. That’s generally how I feel, too.

A Longer (More Profitable) View of Social Media Advertising

Noah Kagan: I’ll tell you why. Sometimes, just knowing that people do a certain tactic is just as important as knowing why they’re doing that tactic. When you’re starting a lot of new businesses out, it’s easy to just spend on ads because you don’t have to kiss anybody’s arse, and that’s why I loved it for AppSumo. We did no content marketing whatsoever, and content marketing is all the rage, which is also the same thing as blogging. The point is we didn’t do any of it because I didn’t want to have to go write a post and hope someone would link to it and hope I’d get in a directory or any of that stuff. I was like, “If I buy ads, I can just put in 10, and I get out 20.” It scaled really well.

The difference, though, is that if you go and spend money on ads and it’s not working, 1) you might actually think it s your product that’s off. You’re like, “Well, no one really wants this,” which may not be the case. So you’re like, “Oh. Well no one’s clicking and buying and doing whatever I want them to do. Well this product s wrong, which is not true.

Secondly, you’re spending a lot of money that you don’t really know if there’s going to be an ROI on. You’re going to get a 1000 emails subscribers. Great job. Are any of them going to buy, Who knows! What we’ve encouraged people to do and what I personally encourage people to do — is go validate with offline or one-to-one or other methods, so you’re confident you ll make that money back before you start spending money on advertising.

Brian Clark: When you started AppSumo, were those effectively affiliate offers?

What You Should Do If an Ad Spend Is Profitable

Noah Kagan: When we started AppSumo.com, just like Groupon, we basically lined up exclusive deals. So I would come to you and say, “Brian, you sell your course for a $100 or your web product for a $100. We’ll sell it for $50, and then we split $25-$25.” So I would buy ads. I’ll give you basically the general metric that I was targeting. If you had a $100 product, I sold it for $50, and I get 50% margin. That means I had $25 profit, gross profit. Are you still with me?

Brian Clark: Yeah. Of course.

Noah Kagan: I basically, on Facebook ads, would spend what it would take to get $25. If I could get within $25 of profit within 30 days from those people, then I would say this is a good ad spend, and I would spend as much as I can until it taps out. I just want to repeat that because I think that s a little unclear. It s like, “What the hell is he talking about?” Two things. One, when someone comes to your website to make a purchase, only about 2 percent around there are going to purchase. So you need to collect email addresses. SumoMe.com does that, or there are other tools you can use to do that.

So collect email addresses, which will get you another 10 percent. What we did is that, even if people didn t buy right away, I basically looked at, from that spend on that day, how much money came back to me in 30 days, and if it was at least the amount of money that I needed. If I spent $100, and I got my $100 back from selling four of those products, I was like, “Awesome.”

What I think most people do is they are kind of like, “Oh, okay. I think it s working. Fine, but what you need to do — and what’s the ideal gold mine — is that let’s say that it’s $25 for a product. I spend $25 that day, and I make back $25 right away. I basically go and spend unlimited. I think what happens to too many people, Brian, is that they spend it, they make a little bit of profit, and then they keep it that way. If I find that there’s any profit, I basically try to maximize it and turn up as high as I can. That’s why we got to $300,000 right away.

How to Make Sure Your Ad Campaigns Will Work

Brian Clark: That’s a truism from old school direct marketing. Once you figure out how to make an ROI, you try to buy as much ad inventory or whatever the medium is, as you can. Sometimes, the frustrating part is you can’t buy enough.

Noah Kagan: There’s other ways, too, that we figured out. One thing that most people do when they have profitable — like I saw this guy today, and he was talking about how he had a profitable ad campaign. I was like, “Why are you only spending 50 bucks?” So ways that you can expand that, or you can do manual bidding. So instead of letting Facebook decide how much to bid for you, just make a higher bid. What that will do is you’ll spend more, which reduces your profit but you’ll spend a lot more money, so you actually get to grow more.

Secondly, one thing that was really helpful for us was international spend. We literally tried every major country. My favorite ones outside of the Tier 1 countries — Spain, Germany, France — any of these European countries that do have money. Maybe avoid Greece for now, but that actually was ways we could actually expand our budget when it was working.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. Let’s assume we do have a product to sell. We’re able to calculate whether or not we’re actually making money. Of course, we are funneling them into email because that raises your conversion rate, as you already pointed out. You basically say Facebook has the ability if you’re trying to build a list, that you can choose specific conversion at the site. In this case, that would be the opt in, but you actually advise setting up click to website. Why?

Noah Kagan: Think about it. What is Facebook’s goal? Facebook’s only goal is to make as much money as possible. They will, from an advertiser’s perspective, do whatever it takes to spend the most money. If your ads will spend more money than the other advertiser, they’ll spend all your money. If it’s like, “Great. It’s an opt in.” Perfect. They’ll do that. I like to do it where I have the control, instead of Facebook, so that’s why I generally will choose a click to website.

What I d recommend, Brian, is that, ultimately, from someone beginning out, if you’re just starting your website, “Don’t sweat if it’s OCPM or click thing or it’s an optimize thing or whatever a thing.” Just start with the most basic thing so that you can get a sense of, “Hey, I spent a $100 this month, and I wouldn’t really spend more than that. That s how much I spent when I first started with Facebook ads for AppSumo. And see, How much money did I make back from these people? I generally recommend also collecting email addresses because most people don’t buy right away. The nice thing with email is you can say, “Hey, here’s some free things and also here’s that product that maybe you were still interested in.”

Why Noah Suggests Using Retargeting for Product-Based Campaigns

Brian Clark: Yeah. I want to talk a little bit more about budgeting in a minute because you have some really interesting ideas about how you make sure it’s going to work before you hit the gas.

Before that, I played around with the Ad Manager a bit, and it really comes down to getting the right interest group targeting. You ve got this amazing demographic information. You have the ability to target people who like, for example, Tony Robbins. I would be the anti-guru version of what Tony Robbins talks about because I’m not trying to make myself that guy, but it’s the same topic. Personal development — health, wealth, wisdom — all that kind of good stuff.

I played around with it, and I did try to target against other people who are interested in certain pages in more general topics. But until you really get into spending, you don’t know what’s working or not. How do you choose your initial interest group targeting?

Noah Kagan: What I would actually recommend is not any of it. For someone who is really just starting out, Brian, what I’d actually recommend is more of custom audience or focusing on retargeting, if you have a paid product. Oh wow, we’re actually spending a lot more than I thought and yet look at this — I’m pulling up my Facebook stuff, so I could speak more accurately to what we’re doing.

What I recommend is don’t go and try to get new people when you already have 80 percent of your traffic not converting to your email or purchase. So spend time on just retargeting your custom audiences. I use Perfect Audience for my retargeting, but you can even just do it directly on Facebook. I would start with that. There’s way more complicated things that people will tell you how to scrape stuff and blah blah. I’m not going to go into that. For the most basic level, do a pixel on your site, and retarget those people as your first version for your ads. Why try to go out and get new people when you already have people who have heard of you?

Brian Clark: That’s a good point because even if you’re doing really well on conversion, 90, 80 percent of people have left for one reason or another. You’re saying, “Go ahead. Those people had some interest because they clicked through in the first place.”

Noah Kagan: Or they found your content. Exactly. When you start setting up your actual ads that are new, your retargeting stuff — once you got it working — will always be paying dividends. We have retargeting ads for our Monthly1K.com course. I haven’t actually looked at them in six months. Maybe even longer than that.

Brian Clark: Right.

Noah Kagan: Because it started working before — and you probably should go check it more often than that — but the nice thing with retargeting, once you hone in on the ROI. So I spend a $100, and as long as each month, I could see that the pixel is firing and I am making over a $100, then I just keep it going. If I cared a little bit more, if that was my priority, I would go back and try to tweak that a lot more.

The thing I would say with, you know you were saying, “All right, fine. You got the retargeting going but now, what should I actually do to get new customers hearing about me?” What I personally like doing — and I’m going to give you some strategies — we should talk after this, just remind me if I don’t bring it up about what stuff, stuff that’s kind of interesting to the advertiser. There’s some creative things that have worked for us, but specifically on the targeting, I always recommend doing some kind of targeting, less than 10,000 people. Really, really, really small. Why? Because I want to know that it really works before it’s super big and I have to cut through all the shit to get to the actual one that’s going to be working.

If I were you, what I always do, and what works for me, is I look at my best spending customers. If you have a business already, take your best 20, 100 — I took the best 100 of AppSumo, and I just manually looked them up on Facebook. You can search their email addresses. You can search them in LinkedIn.

Then what I did is I created a Google spreadsheet, and I basically just listed all their different attributes. Where are they from? What’s their gender? What s their age? What’s their profession? Books, movies, companies they like, blogs they like, people they like. You’ll basically get a pretty clear picture. Maybe you don’t want to do a 100 because you’re lazy. Fine. Do 10. Do five. Do even one if you’re super lazy. Then you’ll find very, very odd patterns. And the more narrow you get, I would do under 10,000 people, the better.

When we started out, MacHeist was the big one. The best one is someone who s a little identical to you. MacHeist was like an arm for Mac, so I just targeted them super aggressively. I was like, “If you love MacHeist, you ll love AppSumo. Here’s an Apple logo. We were very aggressive. Then over time, we found out that Tim Ferris audience really liked us. They liked all the products. I was just like, “If you have love Tim Ferris or Tim Ferris book, you ll like this.

Then you start looking at like, “All right. What are the other things …” and you get a little broader. But I would say, in the beginning, you want to go as narrow as possible. Just looking at your top five people if that, to understand their preferences. Let’s do an example. Who is a reader of yours or a listener of yours like? What’s that prototypical person or a person who like, “Oh, man. John blah, is that guy.”

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s hard because people know me for something else. There are a lot of marketers on my list just watching what I’m doing. I actually invited them to do that as a kind of a case study. So I don’t have that much of a feel because, effectively, all I ask for is the email address, and I’m going to start figuring that out.
I think the key advice here that I’ve heard from others lately is that you have actual people who are perfectly the persona that you’re looking for. What you have to do is figure them out first, and then go to Facebook or whatever the advertising platform is.

Noah Kagan: Yeah. I mean, just take your last subscriber even for your site. I would just take them, search their email address on Facebook, and you’ll actually be able to get it. There’s some other tools online now. I’ll send you a link afterwards where you can search someone’s email, and it will basically go scour the web for every type of personal profile information about them, which is kind of creepy now that I say it out loud.

Brian Clark: It very much is.

Noah Kagan: But it’s more just to get an idea of you re looking for patterns of cross references. Some of my favorite things are what are the blogs that they’re reading? What are the magazines that they read? Books are huge one. If you have narrower book, like they all love a certain type of copyright conversion marketing, like maybe they like scientific advertising. Those are the kind of jackpots you’re looking for. When you start targeting TechCrunch or Mashable, or even Social Media Examiner, they re so broad and big that it’s going to be a lot harder for you, versus, let’s say if you’re trying to do WordPress hosting, I would target WPEngine.

Or if you re doing WordPress hosting, maybe like Chris Lema’s fan page. Just try to start super narrow in the beginning, and that’s what I would do. Basically, what I do from there is once I find that it works with them, I max out that budget. And then I’ll go to the second tier, and I ll start to test out with smaller amounts, which stuff works.

I think what s really telling is, people hear me talk, “Oh, I spent millions of dollars literally,” but I started out the first month with a $100 or $400. The second month, once I saw it working, it was a $1,000. It wasn’t like, Oh, it worked overnight. It took a few months for us to get it in. Once we got it in, it was $50,000 a month, and then it kept rising.

Brian Clark: I think you’ve really already addressed this, but you’re effectively saying, Start with very small amounts of money, very small slices of an audience, then see if it works, and then try to see if that also scales up.

Noah Kagan: Yeah. There are things that I pulled back, so we’re going from thousands a day, to now I’m doing a 100 a day. It was because we saw that for what we’re promoting now, which is mostly SumoMe, just the CPA got to be $50, something pretty high, where at that point, we didn’t really know our lot, so I don’t feel comfortable doing that ad. If I know that it works, then I’ll go back and spend aggressively.

Things I think are interesting, like News Feed was a big thing for a lot of people. That’s when I started really getting back into Facebook a little over a year ago or two years ago. Then mobile is another thing that a lot of people are, besides app installs, so much of Facebook, probably 30 to 40 percent of their traffic has got to be mobile traffic. So as an advertiser, I think that’s something you have to be very, very concerned about because if you’re going to be doing ads to mobile, you’re probably going to get a really crappy conversion, and you’re going to be spending a lot of money for things that aren’t converting.

Brian Clark: I don’t think I ever opted in to an email list on my phone. It doesn’t feel right. But then again, I’m an old guy, so maybe the younger generation is more comfortable with that.

Noah Kagan: That’s what I want to say for marketing. We all have the same time, so what is the most effective use of time? Is it actually doing Facebook ads? Is it doing a blog post? Is it sponsoring an Instagram person? I think what people need to do is spend time thinking about where they’re going to get the most leverage before they go and say, “Oh. Facebook ads, I can just put in money and get email subscribers.” It’s look like, How do you know that? I would test some small amounts, and see what actually works before I would go and just commit 100 percent to Facebook.

Which Social Ad Platforms Have Performed Best for Noah

Brian Clark: Have you tried anything with Twitter, which I found the ROI on is really bad compared to Facebook, but again, it could be contextual. Organically, Twitter is killing it for me, but that’s my biggest audience. Have you tried any of the other social advertising platforms?

Noah Kagan: I’m not sure if there’s a platform I haven’t tried. I ve spent about a $100,000 on Google. Just to give you some background. I spent a $100,000 on Google. I probably made about $15,000 back. That’s not a good return for the people doing math.

Brian Clark: That’s weird because Google is always the hardcore ROI marketer s first move. Search intent and all that.

Noah Kagan: I think what people have to think about, what is your product and then where is the mind of that customer? If you’re on Google and you’re looking for a solution, you’re not looking for a same day, a weekly special on web tools. You re not thinking about that. But on Facebook, you’re browsing your ex-girlfriend’s photos, and you’re like, “Oh cool. There’s some new web app. I’ll check that out.” It makes a lot more sense.

The same thing with Twitter. I ve had some horrible success with Twitter. Not horrible success. That makes no sense. I ve had some horrible times with Twitter where they’re not a direct response thing, but for content advertising, Twitter is going to be great because people are used to going to Twitter, reading a blog post, and then coming right back to wasting another 15 minutes. The same thing with I had a course called Email1K.com, which is a totally free course that shows people how to grow an email list, and that worked really well on Twitter. Because it was just like, “Oh cool.” Really easy to click, add your email and you’re done, and go right back to browsing it.

How to Successfully Advertise on Twitter

Brian Clark: Did you use Twitter cards with the subscription button right there?

Noah Kagan: We did. I can’t say it’s a game changer, but yeah, it worked well enough. We were fine with it. I think what you have to consider is where is the intent and the mindset of the person you want to be taking action? Even on Facebook, one thing I was going to mention to you, Brian, in terms of two strategies that have worked well of things to advertise. Advertising content has actually worked pretty well. So taking a piece of content — and not making it seem like an ad — but take a blog post that’s really popular or a post that s converted people, and just advertise that instead of creating a landing page or putting them into an opt-in page. I ve had really good success with that.

I ve also had really good success from Twitter and Facebook on advertising contests. Contests are good because, for some of them, you don’t have to pay out right away. You pay out the prize over many years, or you pay out in installments. Advertising it actually is a great way for it to go more viral and get a really effective CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), or CPE, (Cost Per Email).

Brian Clark: Obviously, I m always a content guy, but it’s interesting of course that the same thing we teach people about what’s the right social network? Well, it depends. Who are you trying to reach? That’s absolutely the same thing with advertising except the stakes are just a bit higher when you start burning cash.

Noah Kagan: The thing to add to that, Brian, you re very right, your cash is at stake. In addition to that, what you have to consider is everyone s already doing Facebook. Everyone s already doing Twitter. A lot of people are doing Google already. They re a $100-$200 billion plus company. Where are people not advertising? That’s actually where I have some of the best success with spending money for results. Are there new networks like SnapChat that haven t been tapped out fully? Are there smaller bloggers? Are there new directories? The places where people haven t advertised yet, I’ve always had the best success.

Two Surprisingly Successful Recent Ad Campaigns

Brian Clark: It’s interesting because you ll see MailChimp and SquareSpace, heavy podcast sponsors. They re everywhere. You would imagine it s got to be working. You would hope that they actually care. I don t know about SquareSpace. They buy Superbowl ads.

Noah Kagan: I mean, I buy Senior Citizen home ads. I was talking to one — I don t know if I m allowed to mention his name — but it s a pretty popular health supplement company. He said that he gets 95 percent of his revenue from podcasts, and it s because he sponsors all the major podcasts. So I can t say 100 percent that it s working for everybody, but I m saying that s a channel that I would even consider.

What I look for in advertising, besides that it s ROI, is that it s scalable and repeatable because if you can do it one time, fine, but if you can t scale it or repeat it, like Reddit, for example.

In the beginning of AppSumo, I spent a crap ton of money on Reddit ads because not as many people were doing it, and it was really cheap. There was a lot of traffic, and over time, I couldn t repeat it. No matter what I did, no matter what we advertised, or which subreddit, it just stopped working. That s what happens with ads. When there s a short line at the grocery store, everyone moves into that one.

Brian Clark: So you re saying the actual popularity of the platform impacts your advertising just because of the sheer volume of competitive messages.

Noah Kagan: Yeah, because if you are advertising to Tim Ferris fans, and I am too, then it s just going to get more expensive until a point — for a certain person, it s profitable, but for other people, it won t be.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that s interesting. All right, Noah. I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing your wisdom. A lot of good stuff. A lot of things to digest. I would take this show as a starting point. Do your research. We re going to link up some of the resources that Noah already mentioned, including SumoMe, for you to check.

What s coming up next? Anything you want to preview or tease at?

Noah Kagan: We re developing out SumoMe. Besides even using SumoMe, I think everyone in general needs to build their own email lists. Facebook and Twitter are good backups to amplify your messages, but as things get more locked down, you basically want to be able to connect directly with your customers. Possibly the next thing we re not working on, but someone is — is being able to mass text message your customers, not in an annoying way, but in a permission way where they re looking forward to hearing from you.

Brian Clark: Yeah, there s a lot of people I think working on that. Anyway, thanks, sir, very much for your time.

Noah Kagan: Alright, brother.