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The Transcript

Position Your Content Curation for Success With These 5 Essential Elements

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Robert Bruce: Brian, what’s going on?

Brian Clark: Busy, busy, man. This year is off with a bang.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, what’s the quick list of what we have going on right now? Some of which we can not talk about.

Brian Clark: Don’t make me do that. I’ll get stressed out and this whole episode will go down hill.

Robert Bruce: No, it will make you feel better to get it all out.

Brian Clark: Oh, really. Okay.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, isn’t that how psychology works?

Brian Clark: Thank you, Dr Freud.

Robert Bruce: Any time.

We’ve got Authority Rainmaker, our live event coming up in May, and we’ve got our super stealth secret project coming up shortly, that we can’t talk about but we will be talking about, and actually, we are talking about it, without talking about it. Does that make sense?

Brian Clark: Yeah, as far as I’m concerned, we gave it away last episode but let’s not say anything now. They’ll have to go listen.

Robert Bruce: Good point, good point. What else?

Brian Clark: We’ve got some virtual summits that we are working on, and we have got the Rainmaker Reseller Program that’s about to launch. It’s crazy.

Robert Bruce: And with all this going on, and all the normal stuff going on, you decide to start a new project on top of it. I don’t know why you do these things, but that’s what we are going to talk about today. Specifically how you are doing this project, which we have been talking about in the last few episodes, the curated email newsletter.

So we are going to start today with this series of episodes. We’ll see how many they become, about Further, your curated email newsletter. And this all begins around one of your favorite topics, which is positioning.

Brian Clark: Yeah. So as to your point, I do have a pretty full plate and I did add something else to it. I’ve got to tell you, I love doing this. I do it in my spare time. It doesn’t feel like work. Maybe just because it is new but really it’s because the subject matter is stuff that I am really into. I write the feature on Friday nights, I do the link sections on Saturday’s and I proofread it on Sunday and publish on Monday. It’s really not that bad.

Now the cool thing will be if you can do this kind of one time per week curation thing and have it actually drive your business model, then that’s a really cool thing. So that’s the idea. The premise that we are operating from.

So when you are thinking about, “Okay, how would I start a curation project?” a while back we talked about how to pick a topic, right? You have to pick something that is in demand, a lot of people want and then you have to come at it in a unique way. And that’s another way to say positioning. You know, from a sales perspective the old concept was a USP. We’ve evolved pretty far from that.

Seth Godin talks about the purple cow. The thing that just stands out in a sea of saneness. Well, that’s what we are trying to accomplish at the ground level. If we have chosen a topic and it’s got a lot of competition, how do we stand out and have it be unique to us?

Basically, that’s what we are going to be talking about today. The five things that you have to cover, that are kind of unique to a curation project and even some of the stuff applies to any kind of marketing.

The Two Keys to Building an Audience With Curation

Robert Bruce: Okay. So five elements to successfully position a content curation project like you have with Further. What is the first of the five elements?

Brian Clark: Well let me talk about the first two because they are closely related, but they are still distinct.

The first thing, as you might guess with any content, is value, usefulness. It’s got to be something that your intended audience values and wants to consume but otherwise may not be able to find on their own, or whatever.

That brings us to the second element which is closely related, specifically with curation, is convenience. So if you are following original content, you have to subscribe to 50, 100 sources to really understand what’s going on out there. That’s not going to happen. So most content discovery is really just kind of ad hoc. If it’s popular enough, it might bubble up to you, but you know, popular is not always the only criteria here. I think that’s why we really have this growing need for smart, human curators who by their own editorial taste and selection, bring attention to content that needs to be seen by people. Going back to that value thing.

So value and convenience are the two Cornerstone elements of any curation project. If you don’t have those two, you are not really going to succeed.

Robert Bruce: I get that, a convenience as well.

How to Make Your Content Curation Project Unique

Robert Bruce: The next item on the list here is uniqueness.

Brian Clark: The best way that I can sum this up is the theme of the publication. It’s the editorial positioning if you were starting a magazine. It’s kind of what do you stand for? Who are you? It’s the human element. It’s the voice of the publication.

Let me give you an example. So let’s say you’ve got two real estate brokers and they are both going to start content marketing, whether original content or curation. One goes the straight up utility authority route. “Here’s what I know. Here, let me share it with you. I’m the trusted advisor and I am going to prove it to you with my content before you hire me.”

Then, a different positioning. Same goal. Same perspective audience theoretically, is the “Here’s what they won’t tell you” guy. So he positions himself as, “Here are all the dirty little secrets in the brokerage industry. I don’t do any of this stuff and I am going to pull the curtain back for you.” Right?

Two ostensively same topics, completely different positioning and each will attract a different type of customer. Not either worse than the other, just different. And that’s really what we are talking about when we talk about theme. What do you stand for and how do you express that with what you reveal to the audience.

Robert Bruce: This has a lot to do with your own personality.

Brian Clark: I think it does because a manufactured thematic approach to your editorial curation is not going to fly. You are not going to feel comfortable with it. It’s not going to become natural. Your writing is going to be stilted.

I think the project has to be a passion of yours, as it is in my case, and then you have to bring yourself to the table and the way that you view the world. Then you end up finding an audience or building a tribe that you are already a member of. How many times have we talked about the advantages of that? And I always say, of course it’s possible to fake it, but why would you want to though?

Robert Bruce: Yeah, I think this is where a lot of people get screwed up with the idea of how can I become unique, and they really struggle with it. When sometimes the answer really is as simple and as difficult as just begin yourself as much as possible. Injecting yourself, your personality into the topic.

Brian Clark: Oh, absolutely. Everyone is already unique. Sally Hogshead who will be keynoting on day 2 of Authority Rainmaker. That’s her whole thing. She has got the data to back it up. It’s really kind of amazing.

The Design Philosophy That Works Like a Charm

Robert Bruce: Okay, let’s talk about the next item which is design, and you have strong opinions on this when it comes to a project like this. What do you think about when you think about design in a content curation project?

Brian Clark: Simplicity. We did talk about it in the introductory curation episode and I made some statement, you know, no sidebar, no distractions, no clutter.

Brian Gardner, our partner here at Copyblogger Media, listened to that episode and has just started a project called No Sidebar. Both metaphorically and literally, which I think is pretty cool to see happen.

But it also relates to language. You want a very clean, single purpose. Your goal here is singular and we’ll talk about that when we talk about the fifth element, but you are trying to accomplish one thing. You are not trying to have a multitude of options and flashing widgets and all sorts of distractions. You need a very clean, simple site.

If you look at some of the other curation projects from around the web you will see they have a singular focus. They are simple, not trying to distract you too much, but also in your language. They have an elevator pitch. What it is, succinctly and directly, then a call to action.

Robert Bruce: I saw you link to Dave Pell’s new redesign yesterday over at NextDraft.com. Very simple.

Brian Clark: Very simple. It’s a little more than he had before but I think he added all the right things.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: Look at all the media sources he has as testimonials. Now that’s the kind of stuff you add to your page once you have them.

Further is brand new. It’s nothing like that. We will talk about that in a second but yeah, it’s simplicity, because you have to nail how you communicate that value and convenience, and you do it in your own voice, which is the uniqueness. All these fundamentals are tied together.

So even though I am presenting them to you in five different parts, you have to be able to see them as a unified whole, which is kind of our theme. It’s all one thing. We always talk about that, even when it comes to things like SEO and content marketing, they are all part of one thing.

Robert Bruce: One of my favorite things about Dave’s new design at NextDraft.com is when you scroll to the bottom of the page. He has got a sub-head there. It’s the greatest thing I have seen in a while. In context to what he does, he says “I am the algorithm.”

So there he is speaking to uniqueness. I think he says directly, “I plucked the top ten most fascinating items of the day, which I deliver with fast pithy wit that will make your computer device vibrate with delight. No bots. No computer algorithms.” So he is fighting the man. He’s fighting the computer algorithm that we are used to, generating these interesting lists for ourselves. He says, “I am the algorithm.” I love it.

Brian Clark: Yeah, and we’ll take a closer look at language on Further in a bit, but I stole my favorite hipster phrase “handcrafted.” It means the same thing.

Robert Bruce: Nice. Yeah. What’s the fifth element?

Brian Clark: The fifth element is really simple. What’s our goal here? We are building a business asset, an audience, and it takes the form of an email list. Anyone who has struggled with, “I don’t understand how you can make money with curation, instead of original content” doesn’t understand that the goal in both cases is to build an email list, because whatever business model you end up in, that’s the medium by which people are going to transact with you. So the list is the thing.

Robert Bruce: And that ties in perfectly with the idea of simplicity because where is that simplicity leading us to in design?

Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. They are just basically one thing that we want people to do on this site and it’s as clear as day, and it’s even almost somewhat repetitive in some cases but not in a bad way. So singular focus.

Robert Bruce: This episode of Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, and today, instead of me talking about it, I thought I would let our customers do the talking.

I’ve just got a few quotes here from Rainmaker customers that I want to read to you.

Mike Davenport said, “With Rainmaker I have stopped worrying about my website, now I spend time working on my business.”

Another one. “It’s literally plug and play. I just wish I could get all those wasted hours back trying to do this stuff myself.” Ahmad Munawar.

Tessa Shepperson says, “I love the idea that I won’t have to do anymore updating or hunting around for plugins and then worrying if they work or not.”

And finally we will end this little section with Jane Boyd. “Oh Rainmaker, I love you. That is all.”

Find out if you’ll love the Rainmaker Platform with a free 14-day test drive. Start it up right now at RainmakerPlatform.com.

The Five Elements of Successful Positioning

Robert Bruce: All right Brian, let’s now move into a section where we talk about these five elements of successful positioning. And let’s bring them to your project, Further.net, so that people can see how you are actually implementing this stuff and deciding to play it out in real time.

Let’s start with talking about the title itself, Further.

Brian Clark: Yeah, so your goal with the brand you are trying to build is to create that instant mental engagement upon first interaction with the person you are trying to reach. You want them to look at the title or the logo, as the case may be. Maybe you have got a tagline in there as well, and they are like, “Hey, this is something for me.”

Now whether they sign up or not of course, has a lot to do with a lot of other things as well. But without that kind of instant engagement, you are kind of fighting an uphill battle.

So the idea with Further is, it has a lot of significance for me in a lot of ways. It relates to my own journey in a lot of ways, both as an entrepreneur, as a spiritual person, and in the last year, battling back from middle age, just getting healthy. You know, getting back in shape. I lost 30 lbs between my 46th birthday and my 47th, and a lot of this stuff I am writing about in Further is stuff that I actually explored and tried myself, but I am not really coming at it that way, as we will talk about in a second.

But is has a few overtones to it, that I think communicated pretty well just through the title and the tagline. It’s about motivation, longevity. Living a long, happy life. And if you want to get technical about it, in the Maslow sense, it’s about self-actualization. Being the highest and best you, you can be and continuing that pursuit throughout life.

It’s not necessarily about the young, it’s about ageing well and continuing to accomplish. I really decided to do this project when I was really concerned something was wrong with me because we had a few people talking about trying to acquire the company. We ended up turning them all down. This was a year and half ago. And instead of thinking about the millions of dollars I would get, all I thought about was “What am I going to do next?” And my wife is like, “Are you ever going to be satisfied?” And I’m like, “I guess not. I guess I’m just cursed.”

I started looking into the science and motivation. Dan Pink’s book, Drive is really good on this. And I realized, “No, this is just what it is.” If you stop trying to go further, if you don’t keep going, this is why people who retire, die early. This is why people who lose a spouse end up passing away soon after. They lose the will. They are not going further anymore.

So that’s what it signifies. From the feedback that I have been getting, people are like “Yeah, I got it.” And that’s good because it would suck if it didn’t.

Robert Bruce: That I would rather retire to a bar stool in Long Beach, is beside the point. This is really interesting.

Brian Clark: Well you are going further with your sclerosis.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Correct.

Brian Clark: In the very first issue I did touch on that drinking is actually good for you and that people who don’t drink die younger than those who do. Weird as hell. Isn’t it?

Robert Bruce: That is some science I can get behind.

This title thing is interesting because on one hand you have got like the Google, Yahoo, nonsense name thing but I think you’ve found something really interesting here with Further. It’s difficult because domains are gone. As we move further and further into the future, it’s tougher to find a good domain, even if you find a name that you like. And last week you hinted a little bit that you did spend a couple of bucks on Further.net but what’s your opinion on the importance of naming?

We know it’s important but can you also come at it if you can’t get to what you are really looking for, or say a name that you want? There are a lot of ways you can infuse your domain name with meaning, right?

Brian Clark: Well look at Copyblogger. At the time it was a contrast to ProBlogger and advertising based commercial blogging that meant you apply copywriting techniques to content, and you also sell stuff. And it had meaning. I don’t know if people get that meaning anymore but after 9 years, it’s a brand. It just stands for what it stands for. And that’s what you are trying to get to.

There were other variations of Further that I was able to pick up at normal price, but this is me being in this position and wanting to do this project, so I paid someone for Further.net. Honestly I would have paid for Further.com if they would have sold it to me and that would have been expensive. I’m just happy with an old school, original extension, one word domain. And it’s one word that has the most meaning to me seriously in my life.

Robert Bruce: And even if you have trouble getting to that one word, like Brian has done, I would suggest too that a lot of great work can be done in the tagline, in the rest of the copy, which we will talk about a little bit later.

How Brian is Positioning Further in a Sea of Sameness

Robert Bruce: But let’s move on to the next idea here, which is theme. When we think about theme. When we are developing the theme. What do you mean?

Brian Clark: Well as we touched in the first section, that’s kind of your unique voice and perspective, that you don’t try to whitewash down. You want to display it in every issue, or curated piece of content that you create.

So for me, Further when you think about it, it’s got that tagline of “Health, wealth and wisdom.” It’s essentially personal development. I have always had a love/hate relationship with these guru types. I had this one line in one of the early issues that got tweeted quite a bit, which was “Why do some people call themselves gurus? It’s because charlatan is too hard to spell.” And that was in reference to Dr Oz, who it turns out, 50% of what he says is either wrong, or just baseless. And yet people follow this guy’s every word. He’s got a magazine. He’s got a television show. Oprah is ringing his bell. I hate that. That’s me. Okay.

So Further is not about a guru, a cult, or personality. It’s not even about me. I am on this journey with the audience. I am learning as I go.

Now I have been reading in these areas for well over a year now, so I have kind of got that head start but that’s how you get enough of a start to get going. But every week in my spare time, the books I am reading, the magazines I read, podcasts I listen to, the videos I watch, are all potential material for Further and I’m discovering as I go along.

The theme is very much an emphasis on science and research. Not new age woo woo stuff and certainly not any sort of guru. Because when you think about it, and nothing against Tony Robbins, that man has certainly come a long way from infomercials, to the CEO whisperer. Good for him. I just don’t want to be Tony Robbins. But the topic, health, wealth and wisdom, go look at Tony Robbin’s product catalogue, it’s the same thing, except I’m trying to deliver the newest information, for free, and make sure I am emphasizing that it’s peer reviewed, scientific research.

How to Write and Test Your Site’s Copy

Robert Bruce: How are you messing around with language and copy over there at Further?

Brian Clark: I don’t know how many words there are on the homepage but it’s just a few sentences. And there’s an about page, which is a short article length and then there’s the actual content. That’s it. You know that I dwelled on every word, edited and massaged, and re-edited, and thought, and all of that stuff because when you go back to the themes of useful, and convenient and simple, you’ve got to be succinct. You don’t have a lot of time, and yet you are persuading someone to give up their email address, which is not necessarily an easy task.

In future episodes we are going to talk about how you up your odds there, but for now, it’s just the newsletter and the copy. So a lot of that is just based on how I feel about the project, the things I have read, the things I have observed. All the things we talk about watching social media. Picking up on desires and problems and complaints and dreams. And that’s hopefully expressed in the sparse language that I do have.

The second thing though that I am doing, which is really cool, and Rainmaker makes so easy is that I have been split testing. And I am really proud of our guys in development for this. I just really kind of got into it because there is enough traffic coming into the site to actually test something and I am just doing a test of the headline on the homepage. It’s a very simple variation but the headline at this point is “Live your best life.” And then I asked you, before we recorded this, “Hey, Robert, if I put “How to” in front of that, what do you think will win?” And your answer was

Robert Bruce: Got to be “How to.”

Brian Clark: I bet every copywriter on the planet would say, “How to will win” but, do we have to take that on faith? Even though it’s been true for hundreds of years?

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

Brian Clark: No, we don’t. We can actually test it. I’m still running the experiment because I want to get to a statistically significant result, but “How to” is winning fairly easily.

So if you go by the site, a week or so from now, and it’s “How to” you’ll know why.

Robert Bruce: The other interesting thing with copy and in particular on the homepage, is the length of copy. This is something that comes up all the time. People ask a lot, “Should we go long copy or should we go short copy?” And like you said, you’ve got the about page, you’ve got the actual articles but they are not prominently available. I think they are in the nav.

Brian Clark: It’s a great point, but what do you think I can test next? What I can do, is take the about page copy, put it below the email form on the homepage, make about go to that section of the homepage, and test that against what I have now. And again, I’ll know.

Robert Bruce: Yep.

Brian Clark: It’s really amazing. I’ve got to just say how happy I am because basically with split testing you have got an existing page, you basically dupe that into a new page and change the parts you want to change. Then you just check a box, hit a button and Rainmaker does it for you.

The only thing I would advise is, it’s like a horse race and you’ll waste valuable productivity time checking to see who’s winning, which is a lot of fun. Don’t do that. I’m really forcing myself not to do that but it is fun. I mean if you are a word person and kind of a data nerd at the same time, there is nothing more fun than split testing. But you are not doing it for fun. You are doing it to find out what the audience prefers from language. It’s the same thing with keyword research. The language that they use is always going to be more effective than something you come up with in the alternative.

Same thing with “What do they actually take action on, on the page?”

Brian’s New Newsletter Image Strategy

Robert Bruce: All right. As Jason Fried has written, “Copywriting is interface design” but let’s talk about some other design elements here. You’ve got a few things listed and let’s just go through each one, one by one.

Brian Clark: Yeah, so really as you know, a lot of tweaking and evolution in design despite how simple it is, I think almost the more minimal your design, the more important every little thing is. And of course with you working with me over almost 5 years now, you know that I am really into details and I think they make the difference. You never know which detail is going to make the difference but I think in the aggregate the details matter.

So even from the last podcast that we did, where we revealed the site, you’re a happy man now that I changed the images that I use in issues of Further. Why don’t you tell them what you told me, and I’ll cop to it?

Robert Bruce: I can’t remember the exact words I used but we got on the phone last week and I said, “You know, it looks great, I love the design but I think there is something about these images that are holding it back.”

Brian Clark: What kind of images, Robert?

Robert Bruce: These were stock images that you were finding. But anyway, through this conversation, you lit upon an idea that you switched up this very week and started rolling with it. I think it’s been a pretty good response.

Brian Clark: This has been the biggest revelation I have had so far.

Okay, let’s face it, you hated the stock images. You thought they were crap and you always have. Okay, let’s not mince words.

I agree with you, but I know I need an image and I don’t really know what else to do but to try and pick something good. But, you were right. So what I have been doing is, I would lead with the Further logo, the template for the page and the newsletter itself are the same. Further logo at the top, headline, image and then a quote. I would lead with a quote that was relevant to the issue. Sometimes it’s kind of funny, sometimes it’s profound but obviously it’s always thematically relevant to what I am writing about.

So we were on the phone together and I am trying to figure out what to do, and I just said, “I need to incorporate the quote into the image, instead of having it as text.” And you are like, “Yep, that would be better.”

You know, we have all these great tools. I mean you can use simple photo editing software. You can use something like Canva. And I suppose it does take some skill and some taste but people love quotes, and people love visual imagery. I kind of downplayed that because I’m a word guy. And that’s just my bias. But what I learned by doing this was amazing.

So the first post that I really went public with to see how people responded was on meditation. A lot of good feedback on that issue. People are into it. It’s a hot topic right now.

The original time I tweeted from my personal Twitter account, I got 5 retweets, which I was like, “Hey, at least people don’t hate it. That’s pretty good.” But it had this pretty crappy, blue stock image of a head and some mystical looking stuff around it, which may have not been the best choice.

So it was out there for 4 or 5 days, and then I decided to change the approach and I went to black and white. The photo in the background with a black box that contains the quote. This particular quote is kind of humorous because it’s a zen proverb that says, “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes every day, unless you are too busy, then sit for an hour” which is a very zen thing to say. And I totally get it.

So I put the post up with a new image and tweeted it. It was like off hours and it was the second time I had tweeted it, so it wasn’t new but it got 50 retweets. The image. The visual impact.

Robert Bruce: Not to mention, you’ve now also created, as you create each issue, another piece of micro content that can stand alone. An advertisement for the entire site.

Brian Clark: You are way ahead of me. I’ve all of a sudden got an Instagram account. I rediscovered Pinterest. We will talk about the results of my attempts at visual marketing but it’s interesting because you know, you almost have to do it separately because just on basic social networks, like Facebook, and on Twitter the right image makes all the difference. And I think I’ve hit along on something. I mean it’s not double as good, it was 10 times as good.

It really comes down to the topic and the image you choose and the quote you use. Of course, there is all these different variables. But every single issue I went back and changed the image and reintroduced it to an audience. Most and a lot of people had already seen the content and it always does exponentially better. So we will talk more about images later, but that is a big part of your overall visual style and I think one of the main things is that the black and white approach is more congruent with the sparseness of the site as it is.

You notice that on the homepage, you’ve got logo, copy, a little bit of nav and the subscription box, and the only splash of color is the “Join Us” button, which has been tested quite a bit in the world of conversion optimization. It definitely helps.

The Importance of Congruence

Robert Bruce: Okay, so let’s go to the final element in this little list, as it relates to Further, and that is content.

Brian Clark: The important thing here is, remember, we may have talked about it on the show in the past, if not, this is something that Brian Eisenberg talked about at the last Authority Intensive show in 2014, the scent test, right?

Effectively what that means, and this goes back to research done in Palo Alto many years ago, that people on the web will follow and expect a congruent scent from page to page. So if you have an advertisement that is of a certain style, flavor, or theme, and then they arrive at a landing page that is completely, jarringly different, that will kill your conversion rates. You need congruence.

I wrote about that topic in conjunction with native advertising. Basically saying, if you are going to do native advertising in publication you are working with, you not only have to make your content fit in editorially, but it should fit in with you, right? Don’t advertise on BuzzFeed if you are advertising a stuffy law firm. That would make complete lack of sense but people do it all the time.

So when you are creating this visual style and you are creating your elevator pitch and you are creating an about page that tells the longer story of what you are trying to do, it’s all got to be matched up fairly well with your content. Same kind of voice, same kind of style, a congruent scent and promise, and then delivery of that promise.

That’s all I want to say about content right now. I think we will probably have some questions relating to process and stuff like that. To me that’s individual but I will be happy to talk about it.

Remember when I interviewed Seth Godin a couple of years ago, when I asked him what his writing process was and he refused to tell me? Because he’s like, “We are all crazy in our own way. If I tell you what I do, number one you are going to think I am crazy and number two, someone will try to mimic me and that’s completely wrong.” And I get him. So we will talk about collecting links and stuff like that, but of course, Rainmaker’s built in curation features, which are coming very soon, are going to make a lot of this really easy.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, let’s leave it at that. We will have further episodes on this topic. The idea of content curation and specifically case studies as it applies to what Brian is doing.

Thanks for opening things up over there man. This is interesting.

If you like what we are doing here at Rainmaker.FM, please let us know by heading over to iTunes and giving us a comment or a rating. It’s much appreciated. And if you want to get everything, head over to Rainmaker.FM and you’ll see right under the header, the headline and the tagline, a green button. Click that and sign up by email. You’ll get all of our episodes as soon as they are published and you’ll also get access to our free 10-part marketing course that will likely change the way you think about online marketing.

Thanks for listening everybody, and Brian, thanks man. I will see you next week.

Brian Clark: See ya.

The Transcript

Behind the Scenes: 2014 in Review and the Road Ahead

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

Robert Bruce: Happy New Year Brian.

Brian Clark: Happy New Year to you too.

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

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

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

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

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

Why 2014 Was Such a Strange Year Around Here

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

The Biggest Rainmaker.FM Episode of 2014

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

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

Robert Bruce: It won’t?

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yep.

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: No, Copyblogger is what it is.

Robert Bruce: Right.

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

Robert Bruce: Yep.

The Next Big Project We’re Working On

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Right.

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yep.

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: Right.

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

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

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

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

Brian (Finally) Reveals His New Curation Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future of the Rainmaker Platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact have I said too much?

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

Brian Clark: You love a good circus.

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

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

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

The Content Trend You Need to Focus on in 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Bruce: I think so.

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Thanks man.

The Transcript

Seth Godin on Stepping Up and Making it Happen

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

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

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

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

Who Is Seth Godin?

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

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

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

How Seth Got His Start

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Godin: Oh no.

The Impresario Concept

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: And on a bad day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Godin: Right. Exactly.

The Biggest Challenge with Seth’s New Book

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Wow.

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

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

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

Seth Godin: Yep.

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

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

Seth Godin: Yay!

Who Seth Wrote This Book For

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

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

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

Brian Clark: That’s right.

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

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

Will College Serve Any Purpose in the Future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yeah.

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

Brian Clark: Yes.

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

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

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

What’s Next for Seth Godin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seth Godin: Alright. We will see you soon.

The Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Is Michael Hyatt?

Michael Hyatt: I graduated in ’78.

Brian Clark: Okay.

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

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

Michael Hyatt: I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt: Putting in the work.

How to Become the Writer You Want to Be

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

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

Brian Clark: I feel the same way.

Michael Hyatt: Do you?

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

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

Michael Hyatt: Yep.

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

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

Brian Clark: Go ahead.

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Excellent.

Michael Hyatt: And I did.

Brian Clark: Right.

You Have Full Permission to Start

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Yes, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt: Absolutely.

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

Michael Hyatt: Right.

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

Michael Hyatt: Right.

How to Build Your Own Online Platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Podcasting Is So Important

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt: Thirty minutes.

Brian Clark: Thirteen in a day and a half?

Michael Hyatt: Yeah, can you believe it?

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

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

Brian Clark: Exactly.

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Clark: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt: Me too.

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt: That’s crazy.

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

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

Michael Hyatt: I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt: No.

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt: Are you an introvert?

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

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

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

Michael Hyatt: That’s it, right there.

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

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

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