search engine optimization

The Transcript

6 Business Insights That Could Radically Increase Your Online Engagement in 2017

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM.

You’re listening to The Digital Entrepreneur, the show for folks who want to discover smarter ways to create and sell profitable digital goods and services. This podcast is a production of Digital Commerce Institute, the place to be for digital entrepreneurs. DCI features an in-depth, ongoing instructional academy, plus a live education and networking summit where entrepreneurs from across the globe meet in person. For more information, go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce.

Sean Jackson: Welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur. I’m Sean Jackson.

Jessica Frick: I’m Jessica Frick. I am really excited to ask you, Sean, this week’s question.

Sean Jackson: What is it, Jess? Now, for those who don’t know, we always end our show with a question for the week. Now, Jessica and I are going to debate it. Jess, what was the question that we left everyone hanging with last week?

How to Turn Daily Distractions Like Email into Something That Improves Your Productivity

Jessica Frick: Well, last week we talked about social media accounts and got to hear how wrong you are, but this week we get to hear how wrong you are where it relates to email. Is email a time saver or a time suck?

Sean Jackson: It is a time suck, okay.

Jessica Frick: You’re insane.

Sean Jackson: I’m telling you now, it is a giant time suck. Maybe it’s our generation, too. One thing about email, when it comes to people of a certain age, email is our default communication system. For my daughter, literally her email app on her phone is in a folder called ‘Old People Stuff.’

Jessica Frick: Whoa.

Sean Jackson: I would definitely say email, whether it’s a time saver or time suck, greatly depends upon your age. If you’re too young, you don’t really care about email. It’s for password-retrieval purpose.

Jessica Frick: Oh my gosh.

Sean Jackson: Let me tell you why I think email is a time suck.

Jessica Frick: All right.

Sean Jackson: I don’t think people use email properly. That’s why it’s a time suck. I think that too many times people are so addicted to their mobile device, to their desktop device that they’ll have multiple tabs open, but there will always be that tab to their email program. It’ll have a little alert on there telling you how many unread messages you have. Or it’ll be you get on your phone, and there’s that little icon with that little red circle that says, “You have 55,000 unread messages.”

I think what it does is that it is a time suck because of the way we use it. It is constantly drawing our attention to it. For example, if you go on vacation, which I know you never do, but if you ever went on a vacation, what you would find is that what is a real vacation? If you’re checking email, is that really a vacation? No.

Jessica Frick: It can be if you enjoy it.

Sean Jackson: No. So it is a complete time suck because people don’t use email correctly. What do you say?

Jessica Frick: Well, I say that I would agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.

Sean Jackson: Okay, well, give me another point. That’s not the point of this. Give me the counterpoint.

Jessica Frick: Counterpoint is, well, yes, I will acquiesce that some people do use email wrong. For example, us, we’re in a virtual workspace. Can you imagine if every time we needed to talk about something we had to actually talk about it over the phone or in person?

Sean Jackson: Well, that we use Slack for all of it.

Jessica Frick: Exactly. Well, Slack or email because email is for long-form stuff if we have to get somebody to sign off on something or strategize something where it’s not in a chat room. I feel that email is better for addressing specific things without the nuances and distraction of that immediate feedback loop.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, but here’s the thing. You spend so much time on email going back and forth when picking up the phone could solve about 20 hours of back-and-forth dialog on the email message. To me, that’s where I get so adamant about email. Not only do we not use it right, but then we go back and forth and things can be misconstrued. Your tone in there, god forbid you put all caps in something, right?

So to me, email can be just an incredible waste of an entire day, especially if you let it pile up and then you’re having to go through and go through and the anxiousness that comes from that. I would disagree with you. I don’t think if there’s any time savings per say. I think there are certain times when it is appropriate, but picking up the phone and talking to someone is, in many ways, a faster form of communication than going back and forth on email. What say you?

Jessica Frick: Well, speaking of old people stuff, how many people do we work with who forget what you guys just talked about yesterday?

Sean Jackson: Yeah, good point.

Jessica Frick: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go back to the email and say, “Actually, we talked about this on February 22nd, 2015.”

Sean Jackson: Yeah, I know. Next to the send feature on email, it’s the search feature I use the most.

Jessica Frick: Exactly. How much time do you save with that? Email is more than just that one to one. It’s also a group situation. How many times have you been on a conference call that could have been solved with an email?

Sean Jackson: Yeah, you know, if we talked more on the phone, then I would agree with you, but I think we’ve become overly reliant upon it. I think there is a value in picking up the phone and talking to people. I think there’s a value in putting together a webinar, let’s say, where people can have a voice and talk. I think it has more value to look at other alternatives — only because I, again, will push back on this, saying I think people use email incorrectly.

Jessica Frick: I think I would agree with you on that part.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, and here’s why. I think we leave it always on, so I literally, literally just before the show was using the restroom.

Jessica Frick: TMI, Sean!

Sean Jackson: Yeah, I know, I know. Getting really personal, folks. Cover your ears, folks. I was sitting there, and the guy in the urinal next to me was checking his phone. He was coming in, and he was checking his phone. He was going on and et cetera, and he was reading through all these emails, et cetera. Because I know the guy, I wasn’t just talking to a stranger, I said, “Look, email so permeates our business life.”

So what I have done — and I would highly recommend everyone think about this — on my mobile devices, I turned automatic email off.

Jessica Frick: Like when it refreshes?

Sean Jackson: Yeah, I have to go get the email. I don’t let it just sit there and come to my phone automatically so that, every time I pick up my phone, I see this little red circle with 20,000 things that I haven’t done.

The reason I do that is because it goes to the greater point about email and most communication in general — given the tremendous amounts of ways that we do communicate, blocking off time is the best way to manage all forms of communication. Having it always on can be and is a huge distraction to productivity.

Turning your email auto fetch to manual means that, when you’re ready to check your email, then you are in the right mindset. Otherwise, you just ignore it.

I will tell you, doing that, Jess, has saved my weekends with my family. I’m dead serious because, when I pick up my phone, I’m not like, “Oh my gosh, there’s an email I have to respond to.” No. I have certain times when I work, and I have certain times I spend with my family. Turning off email auto fetch and making it a manual process allows me to control the way that I spend my time in communication.

What say you?

Jessica Frick: Well, I like the idea of block scheduling. I’ve never been able to make it stick because so much of what I do is fluid. Somebody might need to get in touch with me right now, and it can’t wait eight hours until my next email block. Like our colleague Matt, he handles a lot of our server operations, and he has a tremendous workload on any given day. If he always makes himself available, he gets distracted and isn’t able to accomplish the huge feats that he does on a regular basis.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, that’s true.

Jessica Frick: He needs to have that focus, but at the same time I can’t imagine how he’d survive if he had too many group phone calls. The best way to get him is email.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, and I will say this, that there is a time and place for it. I think it’s up to you who’s listening to this to really think about your communication plan. How you interact with the communication streams that you have coming at you and really think about it for a second. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it is not a time suck.

Jessica Frick: There is no maybe.

Sean Jackson: No, there is. There is. But again, by controlling your communication stream, you may find yourself to be more productive. Certainly, there are times when you’re sitting around waiting for that one email communication to come in, but I think that if it’s that damn urgent pick up the damn phone and talk to somebody. Jess, I’ll let you end our argument with your point.

Jessica Frick: If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can contact us at Digits@Rainmaker.FM. That’s our email address.

Sean Jackson: Wow, that was a heck of a plug, and way to go to, Jess. We’ll be right back after this short break.

Voiceover: The Digital Entrepreneur is brought to you by the all-new StudioPress Sites, a turnkey solution that combines the ease of an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. It’s perfect for bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as well as those selling physical goods, digital downloads, and membership programs. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why over 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress right now.

Trends in Mobile, Native Advertising, Online Video, and Direct Mail You Should Be Paying Attention To

Sean Jackson: Welcome back from the break, everyone. I’m Sean Jackson and joined by Jessica Frick. Jessica, for this particular segment, I want to talk about focus points for 2017. Some ideas for you to focus on for your online business.

Jess, I’m going to go ahead and let you give your top three focus areas that you think our audience should be looking at 2017.

Jessica Frick: Well, my first one is going to be live video.

Sean Jackson: Now, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by live video?

Jessica Frick: I feel like more and more brands are getting into the live video business. Even those that you’d be like, “Well, what could you possibly do a video about?” But they’re all in there, and they’re using Facebook Live or YouTube. I feel that that medium has become a very strong way to reach your audience, and people love it.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, so let me push back on that for a second. Let’s say I sell a digital good, an ebook, a software, a membership system, et cetera. Let’s say I’m not selling a physical product, which tends to lend itself to a video format. What type of live video ideas should someone in the digital goods space be thinking about?

Jessica Frick: I think it depends on the product or service, but people can talk to you. You might be discussing one of the areas of your expertise. Or you know what, maybe you’re just walking around a downtown area that looks really cool, and you just wanted to hang out with your friends and talk about this new book you’re selling.

Sean Jackson: Yeah. Here’s a couple of ideas. Whiteboards, obviously, certainly over at Moz, they do Whiteboard Friday. I think certainly webinars fall into that space, but whiteboards, a constant stream of just very simplistic style of video composition where great audio using your phone. Certainly, talking to customers.

At the end of the day, there may be customers of yours in your local town — just getting together and talking through their issues. When it comes to the digital goods space, you have to be a little bit more creative with video, but at the same time, you don’t have to feel like you’re limited either because you can talk about bigger ideas using video.

Jessica Frick: That dovetails with my next thing — 360 video and imagery. Are you seeing so many people are using that? It goes virtual reality, augmented reality, that kind of immersive experience is becoming more and more popular. I feel like a lot of brands can leverage that to help them.

For a digital entrepreneur, giving them an immersive experience inside it could even be your office. I know that sounds so stupid, but I would totally look at that. Not only would I look at that, but I’d be zooming in on your desk.

Sean Jackson: Right, giving a little bit more appealing to the lifestyle aspect of what you sell, right?

Jessica Frick: Yeah.

Sean Jackson: Certainly, there’s some people who really promote the freedom lifestyle. Your freedom to be anywhere, right? Well, reinforce that.

Jessica Frick: Yeah, you’re hanging out on the beach doing your work.

Sean Jackson: Right, exactly, because you’re hanging out on the beach doing your work. So again, sharing information around there. Certainly, with augmented reality, virtual reality, and some of the other things that are in the pipe and coming down further, I think it really comes down to content creativity. What is a piece of content that is visual that can be associated with both your brand and your product to reinforce it, right?

Then, through that, give them something that is a little bit different. Again, a lot of people are doing gaming right now. The YouTube channels that are coming up where people are touring houses. Certainly, if you’re in the real estate segment, man, you’ve got to be thinking, “What are some of the ways that I can really get above the noise?” And augmented and video virtually reality are methods for doing that, especially where there’s a physical aspect to what you provide online.

Jessica Frick: Completely agree.

Sean Jackson: What’s your third one?

Jessica Frick: The third one and you and I talked a little bit about all of these earlier, but I’m going to make a last-second decision and change my third one. I think physical mail is going to come back.

Sean Jackson: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Tell me why you think that.

Jessica Frick: Even if you run a digital business, nobody is using actual mail anymore except for the phone companies and the utility companies. How much do you love getting stuff in the mail? I give Amazon all kinds of money just to send me cool stuff.

Sean Jackson: I know.

Jessica Frick: Post cards. I can remember being young, and my mom started getting these weird random post cards from some dude that she didn’t know. But they were all like these rural places with these photos of cool farms. She couldn’t figure it out. Anyway, cut to the chase, the last post card in the series turns out this guy actually worked for a new popcorn company, and they were selling popcorn.

So she’s getting all these random post cards. I want to say there were four or five before he revealed himself, but you can bet your bottom dollar that she bought that popcorn all the time.

Sean Jackson: Yeah. You are absolutely 100 percent spot on. I was thinking about including that actually, so you jumped me on that one. That’s fine. No, I did. You took my idea. I’m looking at it. I’m tapping the desk right now. You took my idea. Let me explain why, folks.

Here’s why. When you start to look at all that data that you’re getting in on both your visitors and your customers — and we talked in the last episode about Clearbit API, which I particularly like — you are starting to get a lot of data about these people. Reaching out to them with something like, I don’t know, a sticker.

Jessica Frick: Oh yes, people love stickers!

Sean Jackson: A sticker for their laptop. One of the things I have on my laptop is a laptop cover that’s really cool. Every time I pull out my laptop, people look at my computer and go, “Oh my gosh, where did you get that cover, that wrap that you put on the front?”

It doesn’t have to very expensive, but what about that social acknowledgement that you could generate with a sticker of some sort — just sending it out to people whom you’ve been able to identify on your site either by them filling out a form or you’re just coming up and being smart about it and saying, “Oh I realize who this is person is,” looking at data sources, and sending them something inexpensive that builds social currency for your online brand.

I will tell you, you send a sticker or a wrap or something like that, people will be Tweeting about it. They’ll be showing you. It really is something so easy, but it requires you to think outside of the Twitter-verse.

Jessica Frick: Yes, and you’re engaging another sense all together, that tactile sensory experience. I’m touching the same sticker you touched. There’s a human connection going on here.

Sean Jackson: That’s right, and it doesn’t have to be expensive folks. All right. So, Jess, you stole my idea, so I’m down to two. I had three, wow. Man, I’m never going to do a pre-call with you. Man, forget that.

Jessica Frick: Sorry.

Sean Jackson: Here’s my big focus I think people should be thinking about for 2017, and it’s going to go into the mobile space. I know, mobile, mobile, mobile — but here’s why. We have really transcended past the mobile-responsive age to the mobile-first age. Let me explain that.

As content creators, we spend all of our time in a desktop-style environment. It’s conducive to the way that we operate, so we have a natural bias to the desktop experience. Knowing that, in certain categories, especially the consumer side, and even in the B2B side, people are consuming information more and more on a mobile device.

In the consumer side, it’s over 50 percent. It’s looking at 60, 70. Heck, even on LinkedIn, a business social media network, most of the content consumption is on a mobile device because executives are reading, learning, and listening to these things as they are in transit. Where I would say that a mobile-first design means that you look at your site purely from the mobile experience first. That if you go into some tool like Chrome, for instance, the Chrome web browser, they have developer tools in there that will allow you to see your site in a mobile environment.

Start thinking about what are the features that are on my site that are not applicable to the mobile experience? I’m talking about forms on your site. I’m talking about content on your site, video. I just went to a site that was on Shark Tank. I was watching Shark Tank, and I went to their site on my mobile device, which is probably how a majority of people watching Shark Tank are going to look at these companies.

I looked at their home page, and I was disappointed. You could tell that it was trying to be responsive, but it just didn’t work. All of that traffic flooding to them, and your first experience is, “Eh, the text looks weird. It doesn’t respond properly.” I’m not saying it wasn’t responsive. It didn’t respond properly because they didn’t look at it from the mobile-first viewpoint because the people who built the website were sitting at the desktop.

I would say that looking at a site, number one, is the current focus. The second big focus area for 2017 goes in line with that, which is really about text messaging. Now, this is something that, again, I have been on a rant for the past two years as I’ve been really thinking about a mobile-first world.

Certainly, video is a big part of content consumption in the mobile world. No question about it. If you have children, you know exactly what I mean. But on top of that, text messaging. You know we went through the app phase where in-app notifications and popping things to your phone, and everybody got annoyed with that because every app wanted to send you a push notification.

The text messaging still out-performs push notification. It has more people using text, more people who are seeing it because, really, unless you unsubscribe, you’re going to see the text. Then, I would also say that, when people are viewing your site and there’s a call to action where you want them to fill in something about themselves, the default of your name and email is laborious and tedious on a mobile device versus just putting in your 10-digit phone number from the United States.

Think about those forms, those calls to action you have on your site, and find a way to intelligently, say, if you’re on the desktop, putting in your name and email is not a big deal. But if it’s a mobile, it better transfer over to a text input and a real input so that the keyboard even goes to numbers, not letters, right? So they can easily put in their telephone number and, again, access, consume, or get a part of your subscription.

Does it cost a little more? Yes — but I want to tell you, folks, email costs. Everybody thinks email is free. It’s not. You pay something for email management over time. Text messaging is no different.

Jessica Frick: You know, Sean, I remember when you first started talking to me about this a couple years ago, and I rolled my eyes. One of the things that’s so annoying about working with you is how often this happens. I roll my eyes, and I’m like, “Oh, Sean, bless your heart.

Sean Jackson: Yeah, you don’t get it.

Jessica Frick: “You think of just the cutest ideas that are never going to work.” Here we are two years later, and I’m getting text messages from certain organizations — and I’m responding. They’re like, “Do you want to find out if there’s a meetup in your area? A for yes, B for no.” And I’m choosing my own adventure with these people via text. They’re like, “Send a 2 if you want to send $2 for this,” and I’m doing it.

Sean Jackson: Yeah. Look at the last campaign. Candidates would have their text messaging number on the podium because they know that they don’t need people to download an app just so they can send their communication. Text is still the fastest way.

I went shopping the other day, and I went to Bed Bath & Beyond. Because I’m on Bed Bath & Beyond text-messaging system, the coupons are sent to me now right to my phone. I don’t have an app or anything like that. Here’s the thing — even when they expire, they give a little note that says ‘resend.’ If you’re a part of the Bed Bath & Beyond and you just hit resend, they’ll give you the current coupon.

Jessica Frick: What? I didn’t know that.

Sean Jackson: Yes, I know. I was trying to use the coupon and it expired. So I went to the text messaging. It just said ‘resend,’ and it came back.

Jessica Frick: Oh my gosh.

Sean Jackson: I know. That’s where I think, again, smart online entrepreneurs are thinking about, “What are we doing today? How are people working today, and what will carry me through to the next several years?” Then I’m going to end, and I’ll put my third one in since you copped one of mine, I’m going to come in. I’m going to take your original idea, which is online ads.

Jessica Frick: Yes.

Sean Jackson: Now, here’s where I think we were kind of moving to. I think if you really look at native advertising, which is essentially paid content, I really think focusing in 2017 on native advertising — using the content networks out there, Google, et cetera — where you can really be intelligent about tagging people as they come to your site, using remarketing to use rich media ads to drive them to content.

Primarily, in my opinion should be video content, but regardless, it can be long form text content, doesn’t matter. Remarketing and focusing on putting your own native advertising together. So if they visit a page about blue socks, then they’re seeing the blue socks ad, not just ads for socks. If they’re reading about hosting, they are coming in, and you’re tagging them and putting something out for them. So being a lot more intelligent about people who come to your site, remarketing to them based on the words that are on that page so that they’re given different ads based on the content they consume.

Let’s recap this, so we can finish off this segment. Jess had number one, live video to focus on — 100 percent agree with that one. Secondly, virtual reality. Certainly, figuring out how to engage people with this new and emerging media. Then third one, of course, offline. Figuring out ways to use traditional mail to get to people and give them, as I pointed out, social currency, something that they can have a brand affiliation that doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg to do.

Jessica Frick: Love it.

Sean Jackson: And my three points were mobile-first design, focusing on that site, looking at it from a mobile experience first and making sure it works perfectly for that, then the desktop. Text messaging, just being smarter about using text messaging, capturing text messaging. There’s a lot of services out there. I happen to use EZ Texting.

I find it to be fairly affordable, very intuitive, and easy. Then, of course, the third aspect that I was talking about which is really about using native advertising, but be very strategic about it. Looking at the per page or the categories of content that you have and using remarketing to drive people back to those calls to action that are related to the content they just read. Those are the six focus areas for 2017. I’m sure there’s many more, but that’s what we could come up with.

Jessica Frick: You can do it, guys.

Sean Jackson: Folks, we’ll be right back after this short break.

Sean Jackson: Hey, everyone. This is Sean Jackson, the host of The Digital Entrepreneur. I want to ask you a simple question. What is your business framework for selling digital goods online? Now, if the question perplexes you, don’t worry — you’re not alone. Most people don’t realize that the most successful digital entrepreneurs have a framework or a general process for creating and selling their digital goods in the online space.

One of the best free resources is Digital Commerce Academy. Digital Commerce Academy combines online learning with case studies and webinars created by people who make a living selling digital goods online. The best part is that this material is free when you register. Are you interested in joining? Well, I’ll make it easy for you. If you’re listening to the show on your phone and are in the continental United States, I want you to send a text message to 313131 with the key word ‘DIGITS.’ When you send that text message, we will send you a link to the registration form right to your phone.

Are you outside the United States? Don’t worry. Just send us an email to Digits@Rainmaker.FM. Either way, we’ll send you a link to the registration form so that you can sign up for free for Digital Commerce Academy. As a special bonus, we will also subscribe you to our newsletter when you text or email us so that you can stay informed with the latest insights from the show.

And don’t worry — we respect your privacy. We will not share your email or phone number, and you can easily unsubscribe at any time. If you want to start building or improving your framework for selling digital goods online, then please send a text to 313131 with the keyword ‘DIGITS,’ or send us an email at Digits@Rainmaker.FM. You won’t be disappointed.

The Latest Book You Should Be Reading and a Killer Tool That Will Help You Manage Your Online Ads

Sean Jackson: Welcome back, everyone. For this segment, we always like to talk about sites, tools, information, and things that we think are very valuable to your online experience. Jess, I’m going to go ahead and start off on this one. Is that all right?

Jessica Frick: Have at it, Sean.

Sean Jackson: I have now found an author that I am absolutely just enamored with. His name is Adam Grant. Now Adam Grant is the new Malcolm Gladwell.

Jessica Frick: That’s a pretty big statement.

Sean Jackson: In fact, Malcolm Gladwell says he’s the new Malcolm Gladwell.

Jessica Frick: Really?

Sean Jackson: Adam Grant is a professor, I believe out of Warden or Chicago I can’t remember. He’s a big thinker. He has written a series of books, one Givers and Takers, which just had true impact in my life, but there was another one — which is how I first ran into him — which is called Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World, basically.

He goes through and debunks a lot of the preconceptions that we have about success in general. One of the things that he really pointed out in there and he uses a ton of illustrative examples, from Dean Kamen and et cetera, but what he really pointed out was where original thinkers come from and how they actually can do things differently.

He gave a great story, and I use this all the time. He gave a great story in this book to illustrate his point about this study that people were doing about support centers. Specifically, what were the attributes that made someone very good at customer support? They looked at everything. They looked at education, background, demographic data. It didn’t matter.

They looked at all sorts of personality traits, and they could not find any direct correlation between what made someone really, really good at customer support, and succeeded over the long run in customer support, versus those that didn’t. Until they looked into how people filled out their job application online.

Jessica Frick: What?

Sean Jackson: I know. When they researched that, here’s what they found. People that used Internet Explorer and Safari generally were not very good at customer support.

Jessica Frick: Huh.

Sean Jackson: People who used Firefox and Chrome did exceptionally well.

Jessica Frick: Firefox!

Sean Jackson: I know. Now, think about that. Here is what he was pointing out.

Jessica Frick: Who still uses Internet Explorer?

Sean Jackson: Exactly. Internet Explorer and Safari are the default browsers that come with your OS, right?

Jessica Frick: Oh, I can see that.

Sean Jackson: They’re the default ones. Now, think about what you have to do to put Firefox and Chrome. First, you have to go out there and find them. Then you have install them. You have to want the advantages of speed, performance, and security that you feel that they bring to it versus just using what you see in front of you.

When they started dividing people up based on the type of browser they use, what they found were people that went and used Firefox and Chrome were more inclined to find solutions to people’s problems outside of the little box of solutions they were given in customer supports. They were willing to go above and beyond to find solutions versus people that just would deal with the status quo — which, again, goes back to Internet Explorer and Safari. Isn’t that crazy?

Jessica Frick: That is fascinating. I would’ve never made that connection, but you’re right. You’re absolutely right.

Sean Jackson: I told you — he’s the new Gladwell, right? He totally takes something really arcane and really espouses through them. He talks about the Warby Parker guys, who were actually students of his, one of the founders of Warby Parker. He actually had a chance to invest in that company, and he didn’t because his preconceived mindset was, “Entrepreneurs are risk takers. They put everything to the wind, and they’ll risk it all on a roll of the dice.”

When he met with the Warby Parker founders when they were starting out, they were highly risk averse — highly risk averse — and they would take small, incremental steps to get towards a goal. What he found in looking at other entrepreneurs, the people that we really think are the big entrepreneurs, what he found was they were highly risk averse. They would take small, incremental steps and remove risk from the equation as they continued to build their business up.

It’s this type of different type of thinking that make people, what he basically prefaces, original thinkers, people who are willing to go and do different things than the status quo, who are willing to take risks in measured increments — not just throw it out and hope that it lands on black. That was the type of thinking that he really highlighted in his book.

So the name of the books is Originals by Adam Grant. I highly recommend it, especially if you’re in the online space because you’re probably just strange to begin with. You’re not the status quo. You’ve taken a risk to go out there and leave the 9 to 5 job to get into the online space, and I think you will find this book to really appeal to you. I’d also say, his other book, Give and Take — I already called it Givers and Takers, but it’s Give and Take — that was one of his first books and, again, really a powerful author. Easy to read, very insightful.

That’s my tip for the week. Jess, what do you have?

Jessica Frick: Well, I kind of dovetail on that to say, if you’re not super risk taker-y there we go, that was really well said, Jess. I am admittedly a little risk averse. I like to know what I’m getting into. I like certainties over uncertainties. It’s probably why I would have unfortunately passed on Warby Parker, too, but one of the ways that I help us make sure that we know what we’re getting into before we get into it with actual money is using a cool tool called SEM Rush.

I handle our ads, and I don’t like treating the money like so many other people in the world seem to. You know just throw some money at it, see what sticks, and then do more of that. I like to really research these keywords, and I like to research the competitors. I like to know what’s happening in the market.

I like to know if one of the main keywords I want to go after just had a huge drop in people buying it. Those sorts of things save us money. I’d rather learn from your mistakes.

Sean Jackson: Right, and you think SEM Rush is a tool that helps you do that?

Jessica Frick: I do. And I feel that by learning what our competitors do, I can compete better. I feel that we have a definite leg up on the competition because we know not only what they’re doing, but what they’ve done.

Sean Jackson: Well, it goes back, too, because then they know what we’re doing.

Jessica Frick: Well, they do. They do, but at the same time, we also are always looking forward not backward. Beyond just that, I think it’s important to still pay attention to rank even though there’s always these algorithm changes and stuff like that. Whether you’re entering a new market or just increasing your presence in one that you’ve been in, I feel it’s important to see who’s moving up in the scales there. Am I?

Sean Jackson: I think you’re right because, again, keying off what I was just talking about, risk mitigation, the more that you can research, the more that you experiment in small, incremental ways, and find things that work, knowing what may not be working for someone else. These are important insights, and I definitely agree. There’s a lot of great tools out there, folks. And just so you know, we don’t get compensated for this.

Jessica Frick: No. This is something that we buy. We pay for this. We’re not including an affiliate link here. I do use other tools, but I have found the SEM Rush interface to be so user-friendly that I am completely comfortable recommending it to any digital entrepreneur who is considering entering the paid placement space.

Sean Jackson: There we go. All right.

Question for the Week: If You Are Just Starting Out Online, Should You Use WordPress Or Medium?

Sean Jackson: So, Jess, we’re coming to the end of the show, and we’re going to leave our audience with a question of the week. I want everyone to really think about this because I’ve been asked this question by people from the outside looking to come into the digital entrepreneur space, who are looking to maybe give up their traditional office-esque job or want to experiment with the online marketing, online selling of digital goods.

So here’s the question to leave you with. Should you start your online business using WordPress or start with something like Medium’s publisher, Squarespace, Wix, et cetera? Should you go out of the box with WordPress, just make the investment of time there, or should you start with something a little simpler like Medium and Squarespace to start building an online presence.

So, Jess, we’re going to talk about that and, like we do at the top of every show, debate it profusely.

Jessica Frick: Now, Sean, do you promise if I give my actual opinion I’m not going to get fired since we’re a WordPress host?

Sean Jackson: No. We can’t agree, though, Jess. That’s the key to an argument. We both have two sides.

Jessica Frick: I know, we can’t agree. But see, here’s the thing — and this is going to surprise you. I’m going to tell you that I don’t think you need to be on self-hosted WordPress.

Sean Jackson: Ooh, well, I will leave you hanging with my response to her proposition on the next episode of Digital Entrepreneur. You folks have a great week now, okay?

The Transcript

Politics, Content Marketing, and the 2017 Super Bowl Ads

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by the all-new StudioPress sites. A turnkey solution that combines the ease of an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. It’s perfect for bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as well as those of you who are selling physical products, digital downloads, or membership programs. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress. You can check it out by going to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital, and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always get extra links, extra resources, and the complete show archive by going to Copyblogger.FM.

Today I’m going to be talking about Super Bowl commercials, Super Bowl ads. I know you’re probably thinking, “We already talked about that to death last week, so why are you talking about it today?” The answer is that this podcast has about a one-week lead time. In another year, I might skip it and say, “Yeah, it’s good. We’re set.”

But this year, the kind of overwhelming theme of the Super Bowl commercials, which are of course, for those of you who don’t fixate on such things, the television ads run during our big American football Super Bowl, which is the big game of the year. These ads and the context of these ads are so relevant to what we’ve been talking about on Copyblogger for the last eight years that I thought it was worth talking about. Hopefully, maybe I’ll have something fresh to bring to the conversation or a different way that you might want to think about it.

To give super brief context, the Super Bowl advertising, it’s very expensive. The starting cost is about $5 million for a spot, but then you’re talking about maybe another $2 million to produce and another million dollars, in some cases, of PR to promote the ad outside of the time that it airs during the actual game. This is serious money being thrown around for a chance to talk to a very large number of people for a couple of seconds.

The way that advertisers — smart advertisers, smart agencies, smart PR firms — have gotten around this is, you guessed it, to treat them like content. To make them so interesting that people will go find them on YouTube if they didn’t catch the game. They will talk about them. They will record podcasts and all that good stuff.

So we do talk about them every year. I’m not personally a football fan. I don’t watch the game, but I always look at the ads. Many people share that, and of course, many, many people do watch the game. The big news about this year’s ads is the same as the big news about everything else in 2017, which is that this year, for the first time, they are political. This crop of ads is political, even going toward being controversial.

So today I thought we would talk about, is this a good idea? Is this something you should try out? Is this something that somebody who doesn’t have $8 million to spend for a 30-second advertisement, is this something that the rest of us can benefit from? And just try and pick out what’s going on with these ads. Then, is there something here that would be relevant to normal people creating normal advertising and marketing to get attention for normal businesses?

The New ‘Brand Activism,’ and How It Plays Out in Huge Businesses — or Normal Small Businesses Like Ours

Traditionally, historically, Super Bowl ads were just emphatically not political. It’s never really been particularly popular for this kind of ad form. Traditional wisdom is to keep out of politics with your advertising because there’s not enough perceived benefit. You lose half the audience, and then the other half may or may not really be that excited with you.

Now, to be clear, that is the thinking of the mass market advertiser. That’s the thinking for Ford, Coca-Cola, and the giant, giant companies that can afford this kind of advertising. Their targeted customer is everyone, so that kind of advertising has always tended to play it safe, especially with things that really matter to people.

And in recent years, the trend has been to become remarkable by just being bizarre. To create evermore strange and bizarre little animated characters to represent the brand and tell odd stories that stick in the mind. There’s still some of that, the Skittles ad told a weird little story. That’s the traditional Super Bowl ad in the last few years.

This year was a little different. Now, that kind of Super Bowl ad strategy — creating a very bizarre and memorable story, possibly with a bizarre and memorable character — it can work for a normal small business. It might work. It’s something that one could experiment with. It’s going to be tricky to pull off, but it’s a way that you can go.

However, this more political, more politicized position has actually always been something that a small business could have more room to play with than a larger business. We’ve never been able to reach everyone with a small business. We’ve never been able to be Coca-Cola. We’ve never been able to be the Levis jeans, the brand that was almost the generic brand.

We’ve always had to reach specific somebodies with a specific message, and a memorable message. Going a little more toward the political has always been more open to the smaller business than to these massive, mass brands.

But let’s talk about what that’s been looking like this year. The history of Super Bowl ads has been they tend to be quite patriotic. People who like to watch football games often also identify as patriotic people. Scribbled in my notes when I was pulling together some thoughts on this podcast is the statement, “Patriotic or political in 2017, is there a difference?” Now, I think there is still a difference.

But something I’ve found striking is that, this year, advertisements are political, that if you had run them in 2015 or even 2016, would not have been taken that way at all. I think probably the most striking example of that is an ad for Budweiser, which is a pretty straightforward, hardworking immigrant story.

For those of you in the audience who are American, you recognized these stories. They’re part of our national story, our national mythology. The hardworking immigrant who comes to the country faces a lot of difficulties, overcomes a lot of obstacles, works very, very hard, and builds the American dream. When I say ‘mythology,’ I’m not saying in the sense of not being true. I’m saying it in the sense of it’s one of the most culturally resonate stories that Americans tell about America.

So an advertisement for a beer company that showcases a hardworking person who goes through some trials and tribulations to go from his country of origin to a new country, then meets with another immigrant, and they have an idea to sell beer — this is not a controversial story.

The fact that it’s being taken as a controversial or political one really shows that the landscape changed much more, I would argue, than that core story did. In fact, Budweiser’s VP of marketing did go on record saying that they had no intention of creating a political statement with the ad, adding, “We recognize that you can’t reference the American dream today without being part of the conversation.”

I remember seeing the actress Eva Longoria interviewed once, and she talks about when people ask her, “When did your family cross the border?” She says, “We didn’t. The border crossed us.” Their family came from a place that has been in the United States and in Mexico, depending on where the political line has been drawn.

That line really struck me about the political environment right now. It’s not so much that brands are crossing a line, although some have moved. Some have shifted position. The line kind of crossed them.

I would really argue that Budweiser ad, if you had run it two years ago, the primary criticism of it might have been it was a bit boring. It didn’t have any dancing chimpanzees or strange little characters with funny voices singing a catchy theme song. It would have been entirely unremarkable.

The Ads Sonia Thought Worked, the Ads Sonia Thought Didn’t

I figure I might as well give you my take on a couple of the ads, trying to take a strategic look at them and what they were doing. I thought the Audi ad was a well-told story. I thought it was pretty straightforward.

Anytime you’re telling stories about kids and parents, that’s a theme that’s going to resonate with a lot of people because a lot of people have kids. Even more people have parents. Then they’re expressing an opinion that’s not exactly ultra-controversial — “We’re committed to equal pay for equal work.” That’s pretty mainstream at this point.

I thought it did a good job of speaking to their people. Who buys Audis? People who have money, because they’re expensive, professional people on the younger side. It’s kind of an affluent, professional brand.

If I were going to criticize, and I don’t really need to criticize it, but I would say it has the appearance of taking a brave stance when, in fact, they’re not exactly taking a risk here. I think Audi knows its customer very well. It knows that its customer thinks this is a pretty non-controversial statement. Professional men and professional women should make the same money, and professionals are very much who Audi is speaking to.

Another ad that might have felt controversial in a way, not because it crossed a line, but because the line crossed it, was the Coca-Cola ad. There is an absolutely straight line from the classic Coca-Cola ad, “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” to this year’s Coca-Cola ad, which was singing America the Beautiful with different voices in different languages. Coca-Cola’s PR person on their YouTube video of the ad puts in quotes, “We believe that America is beautiful, and Coca-Cola is for everyone.”

I’m just going to go out on a limb and say I don’t feel like this is a super radical statement. They do go on to add, to actually call out certain values by name. People are talking about values right now. The values they mention are, “Optimism, inclusion, and humanity. Values that bring us closer together.” Again, that’s a quote.

Again, I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m seeing a bold controversial statement here. Then, again, it’s Coca-Cola, so we’re not looking for Occupy Wall Street from Coca-Cola. It’s just very in line with their brand. Their brand has always had that feel-good inclusiveness. It’s just part of the Coca-Cola message.

I thought an altogether a more interesting presentation, the presentation of the ad, which was a very dramatic story, and then the backstory behind it, was a company called 84 Lumber, which is a company that a lot of us have never heard of. I’ve never heard of them.

They’re a small huge company. According to The New York Times, they bill about $2.9 billion annually. They do business in 30 states, so by any normal measure, they’re a huge company. However, they’re not Ford motors, and they’re not Coca-Cola.

They told a very dramatic story, again an immigration story. They had a longer version of the ad that they ran on their website. There’s various stories around that. The thing that I find interesting about 84 Lumber is it’s a little hard to figure out what they stand for, even though the ad was really dramatic and was a really intense, dramatic story.

It is the story of a mother and daughter trying to immigrate from Mexico to the United States. They have a very difficult journey, and they come to the border. They encounter a wall. If for some reason you have not heard this, there is a highly controversial proposal to build a border wall with Mexico. Then they see a big door in the wall, they go through the door, and they come to the United States.

The CEO and owner of 84 Lumber has given quite a few interviews about the ad. Her position seems to be interpreted as all kinds of different things, all over the map. Many people believed this was an overly political ad, a daring ad, that was criticizing this controversial proposal to build a border wall with Mexico.

The Biggest Danger from Going Political with Your Marketing (and No, It’s Not Making People Mad)

Now, here’s where it gets weird. The CEO and owner supports the wall, thinks it’s a good idea, voted for the president who’s proposition it is. The message of the ad, the story of the ad seems completely, directly counter to her actual values. That’s where I think it might get tricky for this company.

I’ll give you a couple quotes from that CEO. “This came from the heart, and I didn’t do it for personal gain.” That’s cool — $8 million is a lot of money to spend just to do something for giggles, but that’s fine. They make 2.9 billion dollars annually, so they’ve got money in the budget.

Now, The New York Times and other venues report that this ad is not necessarily aimed at consumers. It’s aimed at potential employees. The company owner has stated that they’re trying to employ young Millennials who really believe in the American dream because they’re going to be doing massive expansion.

The issue here is, this owner is trying to attract an audience by expressing values, but nobody who sees the ad really understands what the values of the company are. She’s for some kind of immigration, and she’s not for other kinds of immigration. It is an industry, the construction industry, that’s strongly associated with immigrant works, including a lot of immigrant workers who don’t have documentation.

Many people thought she was supporting that. She says, “No, this is actually the opposite of what she supports.” It’s really confusing. She’s coming out with a message, and it’s a well-told story — but it’s not telling the story that she actually believes. I have absolutely no personal insight into this person. I can’t tell you what she meant or didn’t mean. All I can tell you is what she’s gone on record telling reporters.

Here, I think is maybe the instrumental story in terms of what we can take away, a lesson if you will, that we can take away from this set of ads. If you’re going to create a piece of content and that’s what this story absolutely is, is a piece of content. It’s very memorable. She spent a lot of money on it. The story was so strongly told. The piece of content is intended to express your values. You have to make sure it expresses your actual values. Otherwise, I just don’t see how this is going to work at all. She’s not intending to fool people. I think that the message just got maybe a little lost in translation.

I’ll give you a quote from David Armano. David Armano is the global strategy directory for Edelman. Edelman is a massive PR firm, or as they now market themselves, a ‘communications marketing firm.’ Very interesting choice of language, about the term ‘brand activism’ — “when a brand decides to take a definitive stance on a societal issue and bring it front and center into the message or value proposition.” David Armano says that he thinks it’s a good idea. He thinks it’s a really good idea for brands to go ahead and participate in this brand activism and say what you mean, say where you stand.

But notice some of the language, ‘definitive stance’ and ‘bringing it front and center.’ When your stance is something nobody can figure out after reading four or five articles about it that are laced with your quotes, that would not be the gold standard.

The Compass That Always Points the Right Direction for Your Business (Spoiler: It’s Your Audience)

So final analysis as I see it — should we or should we not advocate certain specific political positions in our content marketing? Should we go there or not? I think it depends. Everything depends in content marketing. In my opinion, yes, if it’s relevant. I feel like that’s kind of a no-brainer.

I’ll give you an example. Copyblogger posts essentially zero political content. We have gone on record twice supporting net neutrality. And we will go on record again supporting net neutrality, probably later this year. It’s extremely relevant to our audience. It’s political in the sense that it’s a law, right? You have lawmakers who support it or lawmakers who oppose it.

We think one of those positions makes much more sense for our audience and for our business. That one is pretty simple. If it’s relevant, if it’s highly relevant to your audience and they care about it a lot, then you should talk about it because it makes sense.

I would also say, if it really feels, if you feel culled, this is very personal — if you just feel as the voice of your business, you’re the business owner, the CEO, or what have you, if it just feels like there’s a giant error of omission there if you don’t speak up, then I think you should speak up because it’s going to show.

I don’t think it’s mandatory, necessarily, for every business to take a brand activist position on political matters. It just depends a lot. But remember that point — the border might cross you. It might not be that you cross a line politically, but it might be that a statement that you make, that you think is fairly mainstream, will take some heat.

What’s mainstream today might be taken by some people as being really radical tomorrow. In my experience, and in my view of dozens, hundreds of businesses, that just tends to work out just totally fine. If you are speaking from a position of integrity and if you know that you and your audience share that point of view, then if you take some heat, if you get some people who are angry with you, the odds are very great they were never your customer in the first place.

I would encourage you to be as brave as you can. You don’t have to seek it out, but if it comes for you, I would just advise courage, steadfastness, and integrity.

It’s always about your who. It’s always about who you serve. Values in business — talking about values, sharing your values, and all of that stuff — if it’s not a shared expression between you and your customers and prospects, then it’s kind of pointless. It’s just kind of grandstanding.

If your audience is with you, then don’t back down off of it. You don’t need to wimp out on it. Frankly, I just don’t think there’s any avoiding some blowback in this climate. Things are running very emotionally right now. The climate is very intense right now. I will tell you that the sites, the businesses, the content websites, podcasts, and blogs that I see that are trying to play it totally safe, and they’ve just turned themselves into these bland piles of leftover cream of wheat. That’s not a solution.

That’s a solution to be forgotten. That’s a solution to be overlooked. And it’s not going to keep you safe. It’s going to do the exact opposite because there is no safety in your business unless you can rally your audience and get them to support you. So that’s how I see it. Very interested to hear what you think about it. Drop a comment to Copyblogger.FM, and you can always Tweet me @SoniaSimone.

Thanks, guys, and take care.

The Transcript

Copyblogger Book Club: Winning the Story Wars

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hello there, it s great to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the Chief Content Officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You could always find more resources, extra links, and just general good stuff by going to the show notes at Copyblogger.FM. You’ll also get the complete archive for the show.

Today we’re going to do something slightly different. We’re going to do a segment I call Book Club. We’ll try these out, see how they go. I am going to talk to you guys about a book I found really significant or meaningful or important or useful, crack open some of the ideas in the book, and explain why I think they’re relevant, how I think they might be useful, and then encourage you to pick the book up and let us know your thoughts on it, let us know how it’s striking you.

The Beginnings of the Book Club

I’m going to start with one that Brian Clark recommended to me a month or two back. We were on the phone and he was saying, “You gotta read this book. If you read it, it’s going to give you post ideas for the next five years.” I pick it up on Amazon, and I click to pick it up on Kindle, and Kindle says, “You bought this three years ago.” I look and lo and behold, not only did I read it, I took extensive highlight notes in it.

So I re-read it and realized, yeah, actually I thought this was a great book. I really do think that Brian’s right. I think these ideas are actually very core to the way that we work at Copyblogger, to the way that we write, to the way that we try and structure how we communicate, how we structure content. I thought it would be a great introduction to this book club idea of thinking kind of deeply about a book and then getting together. I would love to know if you’ve read it, what you think, or pick it up and let me know how it’s striking you.

The title, again, of this one is Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (and Live) the Best Stories Will Rule the Future. It’s by Jonah Sachs. I have five quotes that I pulled out of the book from, again, my extensive notes. I’ll also share with you how those ideas struck me and how I think they’re applicable. One of the reasons I like this one, in addition to the kind of ridiculous story of how I came to re-read it, is it’s very much the kind of thing that speaks to me because it’s very idealistic on one hand.

He has a very strong sense of the innate goodness of human beings and how that can be turned away from our best natures, and then how it can be turned back again toward our better natures. But he’s also just super practical. It’s not a manifesto full of high ideas. It’s really about practical, concrete things that we can do to make better messages that are more effective, and also messages that just make humanity better, to call on the better angels of our nature, which was a phrase used by Abraham Lincoln that I’ve always found really powerful.

I’m going to read you the first quote: “Stepping into the world of meaning-making means stepping onto a high-stakes battlefield where important stories compete. To thrive in the digitoral era, we must be prepared to understand and then join the story wars. After all, great stories and great conflict have always been inseparable.” End quote. I’ll start by just referencing that word he uses, digitoral era, which is a word he made up to talk about the way the digital era is kind of reinventing the oral tradition. It’s kind of an ugly word, but maybe it’s useful.

This quote, I thought, was valuable because you may have noticed, if you are a denizen of the internet, that the level of discourse right now is intense. The level of emotion, the level of passion spilling over into absolutely, you could say great conflict, is all around us. In my observation, a lot of us think that when there’s a strong negative reaction to something that we publish, that we’re doing it wrong, that we’ve made a misstep. We’ve said something wrong. You’ve said something incorrect or insensitive, and there’s a counter to that that I think can be useful.

The Difference Between Taking a Strong Position with Your Content and Just Being a Troll

We have talked a lot on Copyblogger, and we will continue to talk a lot about speaking to the right people. If you’re not speaking to people who share your values and they have a real issue with what you said, that’s sort of going to happen because you don’t share the same values. You may get a very negative reaction from somebody who just really is coming from a very different place of values than you are. This is what I do to just keep myself sane, just so I feel like, I want to make sure that I’m doing the right thing by publishing, that I’m trying to publish something that is fair and true and beneficial.

My first recommendation is just check your position. In other words, make sure you have real facts, like the kind of facts other people can see and hear and verify, not internet facts. Make sure that your evidence is strong and that it’s coming from something that someone without skin in the game would be able to look at and say, “No, that seems like good evidence.” Every one of us has to really think about checking our egos. If we care more about winning than we do about what the evidence actually shows, then that’s kind of a red flag. You can get into a lot of trouble with it, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes.

Real stories serve your audience, and the ones that are based on things that are simply not true, they’re just not true, they do a lot of damage. I’m old-fashioned, but I really believe that the truth is actually a thing, not some kind of capital T truth that necessarily beats up everybody else’s little t truth, but just more that we can look at the evidence and we can say, “You know, this seems a lot more likely than that.” I think that’s a thing, and I think that’s kind of a common sense thing that we can all agree on. Gravity is real. We breathe oxygen. These kind of things, verifiable facts.

That first idea from Winning the Story Wars is really about him calling it Story Wars, using that kind of intense language. I think when the book came out, that seemed pretty strong. I think now in 2017 I think everybody gets it. It’s like “Yep, nope, that’s probably right.” I would just add those sanity-preserving measures to make sure that you don’t embroil yourself staying up until three in the morning arguing with somebody who is wrong on the internet. You may your facts may be a little wobbly too.

The Formula for Inadequacy Marketing, and Why it s so Corrosive

His second point, I think it’s so powerful and so, really beautifully-put in the book, is about empowering your audience and not turning them into permanent children. He talks about a great divide in the history of advertising. If you ever watch the show Mad Men, or if you ever watched advertising, now but especially 20th century advertising, it was really marked by what is called the inadequacy approach. Here’s another quote: “Inadequacy stories encourage immature emotions like greed, vanity, and insecurity, by telling us that we are somehow incomplete. These stories then offer to remove the discomfort of those emotions with the simple purchase or association with a brand.”

The great proponent and practitioner of this in the early days was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, interestingly, a gentleman named Edward Bernays. He wrote a book called Propaganda. He was a war propagandist. He was actually a popularizer of Freud’s ideas in the United States, so he marketed those ideas in the U.S. He’s credited with inventing PR. He’s credited with inventing product placement. He was profoundly influential, and he created some really influential campaigns, advertising campaigns. Jonah Sachs’ book points out that this inadequacy approach to advertising always has two steps.

Step one is you create anxiety. Again, another quote: “In inadequacy stories, the moral always begins with the words, ‘You are not.’” End quote. It starts with, “You are not,” and then there’s some statement that stirs up a negative emotion. So, You are not loved, you are not safe, you are not good enough, you are not successful, this kind of thing. Then step two is to introduce a magic solution, so a solution that bypasses the real lessons of myths, the real lessons of maturity, which is that we can work meaningfully with negative emotions and get over them and not be like permanent, sullen children. Now, it’s important that the magic solution does not indicate any kind of real work or hard work. It has to be something that’s effortless, Just go out, by this product, get a little more in debt, and this bad feeling will go away by magic.

This kind of approach, this kind of structure, really comes out of Edward Bernays’ belief, which comes in turn from Freud’s belief that people are basically driven by anger and hate, that that’s what drives humanity, so humanity has to be controlled. They have to be calmed down, placated, and kept kind of pleasantly drunk with consumerism so that they don’t do anything dangerous, because basically human beings are fundamentally messed up. This is the worldview that informs that kind of advertising, that kind of marketing.

While we are talking about legendary, old ad guys, and if you like stories of the early days of advertising, this is a wonderful book, because not only does he present interesting ad campaigns, but he really looks at why they work and what they’re really saying. It’s so fascinating. Along with Edward Bernays, he introduces another gentleman by the name of John Powers.

Three Commandments from a Powerful Voice for Ethical (and Effective) Marketing

John Powers is sometimes credited with being the first copywriter as distinct from an advertising man. John Powers wrote ad copy that looked a lot like ad copy you might recognize today. It was content. It was interesting. It was truthful. It educated the customer about the product. It didn’t really do all this trickery or stimulating fear, things like this. I’ll read you John Powers, what he called his three commandments, because they’re very instructive. I think you’ll find they’re very resonant with good advice today about content marketing.

Quote: “The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever is wrong in the merchant’s business. If the truth isn’t tellable, fix it so it is. That’s about all there is to it.” So, that could be paraphrased as, Be interesting, tell the truth, and if the truth sucks, then fix reality so that you can tell the truth. This leads to what Sachs is calling empowerment marketing, as the other side of inadequacy marketing. Empowerment stories are really, first of all, they’re behind some of the most effective marketing and advertising in content that we see, businesses like Nike and Apple.

Here’s another quote from Sachs. Empowerment stories, quote, “…inspire action by painting a picture of an imperfect world that can be repaired through heroic action.” End quote. This idea of empowering stories resonates so closely and tightly with what we’ve been doing on Copyblogger, especially the series that we’re doing from the first of the year, where we’re really trying to get very structural about the kinds of stories that work for content about who you’re speaking to, about speaking from values, all of these things really, really resonate with that John Powers, those three commandments.

A lot of it is about getting to a deeper truth. The analogy that Sachs uses is it’s that core of cork in the middle of a baseball. That’s what makes a baseball springy and lively, is that it’s got cork in the middle. That same idea that there’s a core of real, sincere human values at the core of the message, and it really is about helping people be better versions of themselves and helping people help one another, that that’s the kind of message that creates this empowerment kind of context. It can be very, very powerful.

How the Empowerment Model is the answer to the Inadequacy Model

So Sigmund Freud is kind of the precursor to the Edward Bernays inadequacy model. Abraham Maslow with his hierarchy of needs is really kind of the grandfather of the empowerment model. It’s not necessarily really a new model. I mean, we’ve had empowering myths for as long as people have been people. So it’s not a new model. It’s really more of a return to an ancient model, and Jonah Sachs is making the case that it’s an inherently healthier model, which I found convincing.

Those are some of the biggest ideas in the book. I’ll touch on a couple more, just because I found them so interesting, but I really would strongly recommend, don’t leave it with this podcast. Do pick the book up if this kind of work is at all interesting to you, or if you think it might be able to inform what you’re doing, because any kind of persuasion, marketing, content, journalism at this point, certainly editorial, political work, anything like that, this kind of empowering story is an amazingly powerful tool for helping people see things, helping people see things differently, and making the case for what you think is going to make the world better. I think it’s just a really, it’s a lovely piece of writing.

How to Use Sachs Freaks, Cheats, and Familiars to Make Your Content More Interesting

A couple of quick strategies you can go at and use right away, because I like to be very pragmatic, and what we’ve been talking about is a little abstract. One of his identifications in terms of that how to be interesting part … you might remember that John Powers, the first thing that he recommends is you have to be interesting. That was true when he was doing newspaper ads back in the day, and of course it’s much more true now because we’ve so many more distractions. Jonas Sachs has kind of three tips. He calls them freaks, cheats, and familiars. These are what he calls primal brain structures. They’re storytelling devices or hooks, if you will, that help stories become more interesting and help capture that attention of your reader, your listener, what have you.

The first one is freaks, and Sachs identifies this as a character who’s recognizable but really, really different. It’s a recognizable person. We know it’s a person, it’s not like a talking trash can or the space station or something like that. It’s a human character, but it’s a human character that’s really, markedly different and unusual. That kind of gets us to stop in our tracks and pay attention to who this is, who’s speaking.

The person could be unusual in appearance. The person could be unusual in … they could even be unusually great-looking. He has an example from the Old Spice ads of how that works. But somebody who’s so distinct-looking that it’s striking, and it captures our attention. I would make the point that in content, sometimes you do this not necessarily with something visual, but with a particular writing voice or a speaking voice, or a video style. It’s not always visual in my experience. It sometimes has to do with word choice, with really, really interesting language, or it can be a combination of those things.

The next word he uses for ways to make your content more interesting, kind of a trick to make your content more interesting, is cheats. A cheat challenges social norms. A person who cheats is a rule breaker. It’s somebody who’s not accepting the traditional ways that we’ve always done things. This is always interesting. It creates tension. Now, cheats can be used in stories two ways. One, you can have the lone wolf, the one who’s breaking the rules to make the world better and is willing to defy the powers that be in order to do the right thing. That’s a cheat.

The other way that this could be used is to identify someone who is cheating in a negative way, who’s being dishonest, who’s being hypocritical. There are cheats who break the rules we think should get broken, and there are the cheats who break the rules we don’t think should get broken. Both of those are inherently really interesting. Those are stories that, they will pull people in. If you can identify that element, that cheat element somewhere for a piece of content, it can really pull the story in.

Then his final element was familiars. If you rely too much on freaks and cheats, you’re going to create content that becomes off putting at a certain point. It’s going to become distancing. It becomes grotesque. We don’t want grotesque, right? We want a sense of belonging. Familiar is about balancing that out, balancing that tension, speaking a common language. This is closely tied, if not identical, to the Robert Cialdini principle of unity where we are the same. You and I are the same because we share a core, deep value or belief.

Arming the Choir, and a Few Requests

Jonah Sachs has a great, a great turn of phrase, which is arming the choir. We all say, “Well, you know, you’re preaching to the choir,” like that’s a negative thing. He talks about arming the choir, giving the choir evidence to go out and do your work because the choir is, by its nature, the people who believe most intensely in what you do. Again, that goes back to empowerment. You’re taking your choir of people who believe as you believe, and you are helping them craft the stories and the arguments and everything that they might need to go out and spread the gospel, right? Spread the word about what it is that you believe is going to make things better.

If you look for ways to use that freaks, cheats, and familiars, if you’ve ever used something like that in your content, or if you have some thoughts on anything in this podcast, please do leave a comment. I love your comments. You can leave one by going to Copyblogger.FM and just finding the post. A couple of asks from you. One, if you do pick the book up, please let me know how it struck you. Did you find it boring? Did you find it compelling? Did you get something useful out of it? I would really like to know how it struck you.

Two, I would love to hear your thoughts on books we might cover in a book club segment in the future. Is there something you think is just groundbreaking, you think everybody, kind of Copyblogger kind of person should read this book and benefit from it? I would really, really love to hear about it because I have some thoughts for the next edition, but I’d also like to hear what you have to say.

The third ask, and you’re never supposed to ask more than one thing, but I’m going to ask you three things, and you can pick whichever one, or two, or three you want. I’m thinking about writing about this freaks, cheats, and familiars idea. If you’d like to know more about it, if you feel like it wasn’t completely covered in what I talked about today, will you let me know? Just drop me a note. You can drop me a note on Twitter also
@SoniaSimone. Just let me know if this is something you’d like to hear more about or you feel like, “Nah, I really feel like this was covered.” Thank you so much. I appreciate you so much. I’ll catch you next time. Take care.

The Transcript

13 Ways of Looking at a Headline

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the Chief Content Officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always get extra links, extra resources, as well as the complete show archive by pointing to Copyblogger.FM in your browser.

If you are joining us this month for our content challenge, or even if you aren’t, the group, the audience over at Copyblogger.com is doing a challenge to come up with better headlines. We start by coming up with more headlines. The challenge for the month is to come up with, let’s say, 20 or 30 headlines, brainstorm a whole big stack of them, and then keep adding to that every day by brainstorming a couple of additions.

One of the things we’ve heard back, and this is not surprising really, is that coming up with that many headlines is just hard, it’s just kind of a brain teaser. Today I thought I would revisit an exercise that I did way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I went to college. I had a poetry class, and we did a riff on Wallace Stevens’ poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I don’t remember what the exercise was, but it was a poem to use that same idea, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Banana, I think it was.

So today, I am giving you Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Headline. This is intended as a way for you to kind of shake up your creative mind, shake out some additional ideas for headlines that you can try. Now, you might not use all of these ideas, you might only use one or two, but it’s a way for you to generate more ideas, so you can pick the ones that really jump out at you, the ones that you say, “Okay, that’s actually … seems like something I might want to read.”

If you’re doing the content challenge, and that’s awesome, I would love it if you were. This will help you get that done. If you’re not officially doing it, you can certainly sit down and brainstorm a big stack of headlines. It is so useful, no matter what you do to create content, to just have a bunch of headlines that you can start from and start writing something, or recording a podcast, or whatever it is that you do. Let’s get it started.

1. Start With a Number Or Tweak an Existing Headline by Adding a Number

The number one tweak you can make to an existing headline or jumping off point for a new headline is to work with numbers. You might have seen there are lots of numbers-oriented posts and content all over the web. The reason is that just numbers and headlines just seem to work really well together. Now, my favorite way to handle a numbered list post, or, 13 different ways to do X, Y, or Z, is to write the piece first and then pull the number out of that.

I’ll write a comprehensive how-to post about something and then I’ll just go back and count, “Okay, I’ve got 17 ways here, so this is going to be 17 ways to do a better job of X.” Starting from the content and then working back to the numbers, for me personally, is a best practice, but it doesn’t always work this way. For example, this podcast, I knew that I wanted to just have a little play on the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of a Looking at a Blackbird, so I knew that I wanted to come up with 13 ways to tweak a headline and come up with a new idea.

You can go either direction. Just realize that most of the time you should be willing to tweak the number to fit the content, rather than the content to fit the number. If you can only come up with 87 really good ideas and you had originally thought about a 101 list post, I would go ahead and go with the 87. Keep it strong, really make sure that the content is keeping the promise that the headline is writing the check for.

2. The Cosmo Technique, Taking the Structure of a Magazine Headline and Adapting it for Your Topic

Second tweak, this one is one of my favorites. I mention it nearly any time I talk about headlines, because I find it just handy and it’s something you can do right away, you can do it immediately. That is to head over either to a physical magazine stand or you can head to a virtual magazine stand, like Magazines.com, and look at very popular magazines. Look at their headlines and then just tweak those for your topic.

This is sometimes called the Cosmo headline technique, partly because Cosmopolitan magazine is really, really good at giving you headlines you can tweak for any topic at all: fitness, parenting, relationships, finance, business-to-business marketing. Their headlines structures are so tight and so solid, and so it’s a great place to go and you just take the shell, the skeleton, the structure, and then you just change the words around until it makes sense in your topic. It’s a really good way to knock out a bunch of ideas very quickly.

3. Play With the Promise. Amp the Promise Up with Strong Words Then Try a Quieter Version that Sets a More Realistic-Seeming Expectation

Technique number three is to play around with the promises you make in the headline. Sometimes some words imply a big promise, like breakthrough, or sure fire, or instant. Those are just words that imply a big promise, they imply that the content is going to deliver on something big. Play around with using some big promise words and then generate a couple of more alternatives, dialing down the promise, making it less hype-y, for lack of a better word.

To take a big promise and, what would that big promise look like if you managed expectations on it a tiny bit and dialed down that promise? Play with the promises, go big, go a little softer, and see which one feels more compelling to you. It’s not always the big promise headline. Sometimes a more realistic headline is the one that will actually get more attention, but you have to play around with it and experiment and just try different possibilities.

4. Try a Warning the What Not to Wear Headline

Technique number four is the What Not to Wear headline. In other words, the negative headline. This is a headline that implies some kind of a warning that strongly suggests that people avoid some terrible fate, a headline that tells people what not to do, or what to avoid. These are always compelling, they are always interesting.

5. Answer the Protest March Questions: What do They Want? When do They Want It?

Technique number five is to answer what I call, the protest march questions, and those are, What do they want? and, When do they want it? So, How to teach your first grader to tie his shoes in less than an hour, okay. What do you want to do? I’d like my first grader to be able to tie his shoes. When do I want to be able to get that done? I’d like to be able to get it done in under an hour. What do they want, and when do they want it? Answer those questions. Those are just always very solid headlines.

6. The Monster Post 101 Ways to , The Ultimate Guide to

The sixth technique is the monster post headline. So, 101 ways to do X, Y, Z, keeping in mind what I said earlier that if you actually only come up with 87 or even 64, just go with the smaller number, it’s still impressive. The ultimate guide to, is another very time tested post formula. It can work very well, it’s used a lot, but it still has good promise. Think about what monster, massive, gigantic piece of content could you create and write a headline for that. Kind of an additional pro-tip on those, sometimes those can be turned into really interesting larger pieces of content also, like eBooks, tutorial series, autoresponder series, something like that.

7. The Brief Guide Identifying the Small Set of Key Steps to Getting Started

Countering that, the seventh possibility for a headline is the brief guide headline. This is a headline that promises the most important steps to getting started with a particular topic or a particular thing that the audience wants to do. Really think about selecting, winnowing down from all the possible advice they could get, what’s the most important, most salient how-to you can provide, and then create your own brief guide to getting more whatever it is that they might want.

8. The X Questions to Ask Before You (This is Often Nicely Paired with a Checklist, Cheat Sheet, or Worksheet)

Closely related to that is number eight, and this is the X simple questions to ask before you … The eight simple questions to ask before you publish your blog posts, the six simple questions to ask before you do your workout today, whatever it might be. This is very related to the earlier one, which is it’s very step-by-step, it’s very concrete. You’re telling your audience what they should do and in what order. This is a great kind of content type to pair with a checklist or possibly a worksheet, so that you can actually give them a cheat sheet to remember the eight simple questions to ask before they move forward with their project.

9. The Question Without an Obvious Answer. Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? Remember: The Audience Needs to Understand the Relevance!

All right, technique number nine is more difficult to pull off, but they work really well when they work. That is the question that doesn’t have an obvious answer. I’ll give you an example from Copyblogger, Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? That one was written for us by Sean D’Souza and I like that because your first thought is normally, “Well yeah, law of supply and demand tends to suggest that when you lower price, you increase demand.” Then there’s a question mark and I think, “Well, maybe not. Maybe that’s not true.” There’s not an obvious answer there and I’m going to want to click through and find out why.

In one of his books, Bob Bly found this great one from Psychology Today, Do You Close the Bathroom Door Even When You’re the Only One Home? Now, I have no idea what that piece of content is about, that article in Psychology Today, but I think I would probably read it, because I’m just really intrigued. Now, these are tricky headlines, because curiosity is an important factor, but the pure curiosity headline, where the person really has no idea what they’re going to get on the other side of that, that, it tends not to get good results.

If I’m reading Psychology Today and I get that headline, I’m going to read it because I read Psychology Today to find out what makes people tick, right? I read to find out more about human psychology. That’s going to share an interesting fact about human psychology with me. That headline is very relevant for Psychology Today. It is not relevant for Copyblogger, and I think if we got clicks on that, it would be to ask us if we had been hacked.

However, Sean D’Souza’s headline, Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? is very relevant to Copyblogger and any reader of ours is going to know, “Oh, well that’s interesting, that’s going to be an article about the relationship between pricing and sales. That’s a topic that I think about and I’m going to click through and I’m going to see what Sean has to say about it.” If you have the question without an obvious answer headline, it has to be clear to the audience how it relates to what they come to you for. Otherwise, it just gets confusing and confusing is not helpful.

All right, so I’m going to wrap up the last four suggestions for you with the four U’s of copywriting, or the four U’s of headlines, which are useful, urgency, unique, and ultra specific, and I’ll walk you through how each of these might be something that you could use as a prompt to come up with some headline ideas.

10. Useful: What Will the Audience Get Out of Reading, Listening to, or Watching this Piece of Content?

The first U, letter U, stands for useful. This is a really major tried and true thing to keep coming back to for your headlines. Which is, to ask that question, What does the audience get out of reading this piece, or listening to this podcast, or watching this YouTube video? These are the how-to’s, the tutorials, the guides. These are also the warnings and the pitfalls.

If your headline makes it really clear what the person’s going to gain from checking out your content, you’re going to have a good headline. Even if, maybe your other skills are not incredibly fantastic, that’s probably the most important one to master. Some people apply the so what test, so you keep asking yourself, “Well, so what? Well, so what?” You should have a good answer for that. It should be an answer that makes sense to your audience.

11. Urgent: Increase the Sense of Urgency with Time Pressure or Warnings

The second letter U stands for the word, urgency. This is about getting people to check out your content today, rather than never. Urgency language can include things like, introducing, or announcing, that suggests, “Okay, there’s something new here, I want to look at it.” It appeals to that sense of novelty. Another good urgency phrase is why you must, and this is often paired with the word, immediately. So, you know, Why you must secure your WordPress based website immediately. That’s an important post, because there are actually super bad things that could happen to you if you don’t do it.

12. Unique: Can You Use an Unusual Word? Can You Challenge Conventional Wisdom? Remember: Don t Let Unique Turn into Confusing

The third letter U stands for unique. This is about catching attention and catching attention with things like, something unique, something that people haven’t seen before. You can get this done with possibly an unusual language choice, including one of my favorites which is, use words like weird. Now, we’ve all seen that terrible stupid ad on social media, this one weird trick to doing whatever.

Don’t use this one weird trick, because it’s horribly overused and associated with something that looks not very high quality. There are lots of other ways you could use the word weird, that would cause people to just pause for a second and say, “Huh. Weird. Well, I wonder what that’s about?” Think about playing with that. Any unusual language choice is going to make people just take that moment and stop and look at it.

Another very tried and true way to work the unique angle is to challenge conventional wisdom. To take something that everybody believes is true, and turn it on its head. You have to be able to do this legitimately. Don’t just be a contrarian to be contrary. This actually has to support a real and useful position. Otherwise, you’re getting attention, but you won’t keep attention, because you’re not perceived as being reliable.

Again, I just want to caution you that when we want you to try and put a unique element in your headline, that’s not the same thing as confusing people with your headline. A lot of people go for unique, and what they end up with is unique and confusing. Again, it just won’t help. If people are confused, they tend to get a little bit nervous and when people are a little bit nervous, they don’t act. Anybody who’s a little bit nervous about what they’re going to find on the web will just tend to not click. It just feels safer to not click, rather than going to that weird thing that I’m not sure what that is. Be unusual, be different, be unique, but don’t be so different that you’re confusing and scary.

13. Ultra-Specific: Precision is Interesting. Replace Vague, Waffly Words and Round Numbers with Specifics

Our thirteenth tip is to be ultra specific, that’s the fourth U, ultra specific. This kind of brings us full circle, because one of the best ways to get ultra specific is to use a specific number. Let’s talk about numbers for a moment. We have a tendency to want to round numbers, so we want to write posts with, Ten things you should know about this, or, 100 things you should know about this.

It is often more compelling and more interesting if you go with kind of a knobbly number. If you go with a non-obvious number. 17 is a much more interesting number than 20, and 17.2 is more interesting than 17. Getting incredibly specific with numbers, with the facts, getting really, really pointed about what you have to say … very, very useful, very compelling. It just makes it feel like this is somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about.

Of course, you always want to back that up by, in fact, knowing what you’re talking about. If you see vague words in your headline, then take advantage of that and create a second iteration of your headline that makes that word much more specific, that really speaks to a specific individual. Use specific, crisp, clear, especially verbs and nouns, rather than vague, waffly, fluffy ones.

Those are 13 prompts or tweaks that you can use to look at your stack of headlines and grow it by quite a bit, double it, triple it, perhaps. I will go ahead and post all of these in text. If you go over to Copyblogger.FM, you can get the complete list in text just for your general reference. I would love to hear from you. If you guys have some headlines that you have tried one of these out on, let me know, drop them in the comments, always interested to see what you’re working on. And keep an eye on the Copyblogger.com blog for the next content challenge, which will be coming up in early February. Thanks so much guys, take care, and talk with you soon.