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Rank #1: Position Your Content Curation for Success With These 5 Essential Elements.
Last fall, Robert and I did an episode of the podcast where we laid out how content curation could be used to build an audience and even a business. It was one of the most popular episodes of 2014. We did that episode based on a personal project I was already planning to do. I quietly launched that project last month, and it’s called Further. It’s a curated email newsletter dedicated to living your best life, with features and news items related to health, wealth, and wisdom. Here are a few sample issues: Three Real Ways to Protect and Enhance Your Brain Power The Epic Food Fight: Plants Versus Paleo Meditate to Dominate in 2015 Given the initial high interest (and several requests), I’ve decided to do a “behind the scenes” case study on myself, revealing what I’m doing and why, plus what’s working and what’s not. This episode and the next two will be the first leg of that case study. If you’re interested in the possibilities at the intersection of curation and email marketing, I think you’ll get a lot out of these episodes. Even if you’re not sure about that, there are a lot of fundamental content, copywriting, and entrepreneurial insights throughout. At minimum, you can watch a new project develop in real time, with commentary. Enough said … let’s get started. In this 36-minute episode Robert Bruce and I discuss: The two primary keys to building an audience with curation The element that makes curation a financially viable approach How to make your content curation project unique The design philosophy that works like a charm My explosive new image strategy The kind of copy to use and how to test it How I’m positioning Further in a sea of sameness Listen to The Digital Entrepreneur below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Image by Jonas Lavoie-Levesque Authority Rainmaker 2015 Behind the Scenes: 2014 in Review and the Road Ahead 7 Ways to Find a Topical Market that Will Fuel Your Digital Commerce Business How to Use Content Curation to Create a Recurring Revenue Business Brian Gardner’s No Sidebar Dan Pink’s Drive Copywriting is Interface Design Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting. Start getting more from your site today! The Transcript Position Your Content Curation for Success With These 5 Essential Elements Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for building your online marketing and sales platform. Find out more and take a free 14-day test drive at RainmakerPlatform.com. Robert Bruce: Brian, what’s going on? Brian Clark: Busy, busy, man. This year is off with a bang. Robert Bruce: Yeah, what’s the quick list of what we have going on right now? Some of which we can not talk about. Brian Clark: Don’t make me do that. I’ll get stressed out and this whole episode will go down hill. Robert Bruce: No, it will make you feel better to get it all out. Brian Clark: Oh, really. Okay. Robert Bruce: Yeah, isn’t that how psychology works? Brian Clark: Thank you, Dr Freud. Robert Bruce: Any time. We’ve got Authority Rainmaker, our live event coming up in May, and we’ve got our super stealth secret project coming up shortly, that we can’t talk about but we will be talking about, and actually, we are talking about it, without talking about it. Does that make sense? Brian Clark: Yeah, as far as I’m concerned, we gave it away last episode but let’s not say anything now. They’ll have to go listen. Robert Bruce: Good point, good point. What else? Brian Clark: We’ve got some virtual summits that we are working on, and we have got the Rainmaker Reseller Program that’s about to launch. It’s crazy. Robert Bruce: And with all this going on, and all the normal stuff going on, you decide to start a new project on top of it. I don’t know why you do these things, but that’s what we are going to talk about today. Specifically how you are doing this project, which we have been talking about in the last few episodes, the curated email newsletter. So we are going to start today with this series of episodes. We’ll see how many they become, about Further, your curated email newsletter. And this all begins around one of your favorite topics, which is positioning. Brian Clark: Yeah. So as to your point, I do have a pretty full plate and I did add something else to it. I’ve got to tell you, I love doing this. I do it in my spare time. It doesn’t feel like work. Maybe just because it is new but really it’s because the subject matter is stuff that I am really into. I write the feature on Friday nights, I do the link sections on Saturday’s and I proofread it on Sunday and publish on Monday. It’s really not that bad. Now the cool thing will be if you can do this kind of one time per week curation thing and have it actually drive your business model, then that’s a really cool thing. So that’s the idea. The premise that we are operating from. So when you are thinking about, “Okay, how would I start a curation project?” a while back we talked about how to pick a topic, right? You have to pick something that is in demand, a lot of people want and then you have to come at it in a unique way. And that’s another way to say positioning. You know, from a sales perspective the old concept was a USP. We’ve evolved pretty far from that. Seth Godin talks about the purple cow. The thing that just stands out in a sea of saneness. Well, that’s what we are trying to accomplish at the ground level. If we have chosen a topic and it’s got a lot of competition, how do we stand out and have it be unique to us? Basically, that’s what we are going to be talking about today. The five things that you have to cover, that are kind of unique to a curation project and even some of the stuff applies to any kind of marketing. The Two Keys to Building an Audience With Curation Robert Bruce: Okay. So five elements to successfully position a content curation project like you have with Further. What is the first of the five elements? Brian Clark: Well let me talk about the first two because they are closely related, but they are still distinct. The first thing, as you might guess with any content, is value, usefulness. It’s got to be something that your intended audience values and wants to consume but otherwise may not be able to find on their own, or whatever. That brings us to the second element which is closely related, specifically with curation, is convenience. So if you are following original content, you have to subscribe to 50, 100 sources to really understand what’s going on out there. That’s not going to happen. So most content discovery is really just kind of ad hoc. If it’s popular enough, it might bubble up to you, but you know, popular is not always the only criteria here. I think that’s why we really have this growing need for smart, human curators who by their own editorial taste and selection, bring attention to content that needs to be seen by people. Going back to that value thing. So value and convenience are the two Cornerstone elements of any curation project. If you don’t have those two, you are not really going to succeed. Robert Bruce: I get that, a convenience as well. How to Make Your Content Curation Project Unique Robert Bruce: The next item on the list here is uniqueness. Brian Clark: The best way that I can sum this up is the theme of the publication. It’s the editorial positioning if you were starting a magazine. It’s kind of what do you stand for? Who are you? It’s the human element. It’s the voice of the publication. Let me give you an example. So let’s say you’ve got two real estate brokers and they are both going to start content marketing, whether original content or curation. One goes the straight up utility authority route. “Here’s what I know. Here, let me share it with you. I’m the trusted advisor and I am going to prove it to you with my content before you hire me.” Then, a different positioning. Same goal. Same perspective audience theoretically, is the “Here’s what they won’t tell you” guy. So he positions himself as, “Here are all the dirty little secrets in the brokerage industry. I don’t do any of this stuff and I am going to pull the curtain back for you.” Right? Two ostensively same topics, completely different positioning and each will attract a different type of customer. Not either worse than the other, just different. And that’s really what we are talking about when we talk about theme. What do you stand for and how do you express that with what you reveal to the audience. Robert Bruce: This has a lot to do with your own personality. Brian Clark: I think it does because a manufactured thematic approach to your editorial curation is not going to fly. You are not going to feel comfortable with it. It’s not going to become natural. Your writing is going to be stilted. I think the project has to be a passion of yours, as it is in my case, and then you have to bring yourself to the table and the way that you view the world. Then you end up finding an audience or building a tribe that you are already a member of. How many times have we talked about the advantages of that? And I always say, of course it’s possible to fake it, but why would you want to though? Robert Bruce: Yeah, I think this is where a lot of people get screwed up with the idea of how can I become unique, and they really struggle with it. When sometimes the answer really is as simple and as difficult as just begin yourself as much as possible. Injecting yourself, your personality into the topic. Brian Clark: Oh, absolutely. Everyone is already unique. Sally Hogshead who will be keynoting on day 2 of Authority Rainmaker. That’s her whole thing. She has got the data to back it up. It’s really kind of amazing. The Design Philosophy That Works Like a Charm Robert Bruce: Okay, let’s talk about the next item which is design, and you have strong opinions on this when it comes to a project like this. What do you think about when you think about design in a content curation project? Brian Clark: Simplicity. We did talk about it in the introductory curation episode and I made some statement, you know, no sidebar, no distractions, no clutter. Brian Gardner, our partner here at Copyblogger Media, listened to that episode and has just started a project called No Sidebar. Both metaphorically and literally, which I think is pretty cool to see happen. But it also relates to language. You want a very clean, single purpose. Your goal here is singular and we’ll talk about that when we talk about the fifth element, but you are trying to accomplish one thing. You are not trying to have a multitude of options and flashing widgets and all sorts of distractions. You need a very clean, simple site. If you look at some of the other curation projects from around the web you will see they have a singular focus. They are simple, not trying to distract you too much, but also in your language. They have an elevator pitch. What it is, succinctly and directly, then a call to action. Robert Bruce: I saw you link to Dave Pell’s new redesign yesterday over at NextDraft.com. Very simple. Brian Clark: Very simple. It’s a little more than he had before but I think he added all the right things. Robert Bruce: Yep. Brian Clark: Look at all the media sources he has as testimonials. Now that’s the kind of stuff you add to your page once you have them. Further is brand new. It’s nothing like that. We will talk about that in a second but yeah, it’s simplicity, because you have to nail how you communicate that value and convenience, and you do it in your own voice, which is the uniqueness. All these fundamentals are tied together. So even though I am presenting them to you in five different parts, you have to be able to see them as a unified whole, which is kind of our theme. It’s all one thing. We always talk about that, even when it comes to things like SEO and content marketing, they are all part of one thing. Robert Bruce: One of my favorite things about Dave’s new design at NextDraft.com is when you scroll to the bottom of the page. He has got a sub-head there. It’s the greatest thing I have seen in a while. In context to what he does, he says “I am the algorithm.” So there he is speaking to uniqueness. I think he says directly, “I plucked the top ten most fascinating items of the day, which I deliver with fast pithy wit that will make your computer device vibrate with delight. No bots. No computer algorithms.” So he is fighting the man. He’s fighting the computer algorithm that we are used to, generating these interesting lists for ourselves. He says, “I am the algorithm.” I love it. Brian Clark: Yeah, and we’ll take a closer look at language on Further in a bit, but I stole my favorite hipster phrase “handcrafted.” It means the same thing. Robert Bruce: Nice. Yeah. What’s the fifth element? Brian Clark: The fifth element is really simple. What’s our goal here? We are building a business asset, an audience, and it takes the form of an email list. Anyone who has struggled with, “I don’t understand how you can make money with curation, instead of original content” doesn’t understand that the goal in both cases is to build an email list, because whatever business model you end up in, that’s the medium by which people are going to transact with you. So the list is the thing. Robert Bruce: And that ties in perfectly with the idea of simplicity because where is that simplicity leading us to in design? Brian Clark: Yeah, absolutely. They are just basically one thing that we want people to do on this site and it’s as clear as day, and it’s even almost somewhat repetitive in some cases but not in a bad way. So singular focus. Robert Bruce: This episode of Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, and today, instead of me talking about it, I thought I would let our customers do the talking. I’ve just got a few quotes here from Rainmaker customers that I want to read to you. Mike Davenport said, “With Rainmaker I have stopped worrying about my website, now I spend time working on my business.” Another one. “It’s literally plug and play. I just wish I could get all those wasted hours back trying to do this stuff myself.” Ahmad Munawar. Tessa Shepperson says, “I love the idea that I won’t have to do anymore updating or hunting around for plugins and then worrying if they work or not.” And finally we will end this little section with Jane Boyd. “Oh Rainmaker, I love you. That is all.” Find out if you’ll love the Rainmaker Platform with a free 14-day test drive. Start it up right now at RainmakerPlatform.com. The Five Elements of Successful Positioning Robert Bruce: All right Brian, let’s now move into a section where we talk about these five elements of successful positioning. And let’s bring them to your project, Further.net, so that people can see how you are actually implementing this stuff and deciding to play it out in real time. Let’s start with talking about the title itself, Further. Brian Clark: Yeah, so your goal with the brand you are trying to build is to create that instant mental engagement upon first interaction with the person you are trying to reach. You want them to look at the title or the logo, as the case may be. Maybe you have got a tagline in there as well, and they are like, “Hey, this is something for me.” Now whether they sign up or not of course, has a lot to do with a lot of other things as well. But without that kind of instant engagement, you are kind of fighting an uphill battle. So the idea with Further is, it has a lot of significance for me in a lot of ways. It relates to my own journey in a lot of ways, both as an entrepreneur, as a spiritual person, and in the last year, battling back from middle age, just getting healthy. You know, getting back in shape. I lost 30 lbs between my 46th birthday and my 47th, and a lot of this stuff I am writing about in Further is stuff that I actually explored and tried myself, but I am not really coming at it that way, as we will talk about in a second. But is has a few overtones to it, that I think communicated pretty well just through the title and the tagline. It’s about motivation, longevity. Living a long, happy life. And if you want to get technical about it, in the Maslow sense, it’s about self-actualization. Being the highest and best you, you can be and continuing that pursuit throughout life. It’s not necessarily about the young, it’s about ageing well and continuing to accomplish. I really decided to do this project when I was really concerned something was wrong with me because we had a few people talking about trying to acquire the company. We ended up turning them all down. This was a year and half ago. And instead of thinking about the millions of dollars I would get, all I thought about was “What am I going to do next?” And my wife is like, “Are you ever going to be satisfied?” And I’m like, “I guess not. I guess I’m just cursed.” I started looking into the science and motivation. Dan Pink’s book, Drive is really good on this. And I realized, “No, this is just what it is.” If you stop trying to go further, if you don’t keep going, this is why people who retire, die early. This is why people who lose a spouse end up passing away soon after. They lose the will. They are not going further anymore. So that’s what it signifies. From the feedback that I have been getting, people are like “Yeah, I got it.” And that’s good because it would suck if it didn’t. Robert Bruce: That I would rather retire to a bar stool in Long Beach, is beside the point. This is really interesting. Brian Clark: Well you are going further with your sclerosis. Robert Bruce: Yeah. Correct. Brian Clark: In the very first issue I did touch on that drinking is actually good for you and that people who don’t drink die younger than those who do. Weird as hell. Isn’t it? Robert Bruce: That is some science I can get behind. This title thing is interesting because on one hand you have got like the Google, Yahoo, nonsense name thing but I think you’ve found something really interesting here with Further. It’s difficult because domains are gone. As we move further and further into the future, it’s tougher to find a good domain, even if you find a name that you like. And last week you hinted a little bit that you did spend a couple of bucks on Further.net but what’s your opinion on the importance of naming? We know it’s important but can you also come at it if you can’t get to what you are really looking for, or say a name that you want? There are a lot of ways you can infuse your domain name with meaning, right? Brian Clark: Well look at Copyblogger. At the time it was a contrast to ProBlogger and advertising based commercial blogging that meant you apply copywriting techniques to content, and you also sell stuff. And it had meaning. I don’t know if people get that meaning anymore but after 9 years, it’s a brand. It just stands for what it stands for. And that’s what you are trying to get to. There were other variations of Further that I was able to pick up at normal price, but this is me being in this position and wanting to do this project, so I paid someone for Further.net. Honestly I would have paid for Further.com if they would have sold it to me and that would have been expensive. I’m just happy with an old school, original extension, one word domain. And it’s one word that has the most meaning to me seriously in my life. Robert Bruce: And even if you have trouble getting to that one word, like Brian has done, I would suggest too that a lot of great work can be done in the tagline, in the rest of the copy, which we will talk about a little bit later. How Brian is Positioning Further in a Sea of Sameness Robert Bruce: But let’s move on to the next idea here, which is theme. When we think about theme. When we are developing the theme. What do you mean? Brian Clark: Well as we touched in the first section, that’s kind of your unique voice and perspective, that you don’t try to whitewash down. You want to display it in every issue, or curated piece of content that you create. So for me, Further when you think about it, it’s got that tagline of “Health, wealth and wisdom.” It’s essentially personal development. I have always had a love/hate relationship with these guru types. I had this one line in one of the early issues that got tweeted quite a bit, which was “Why do some people call themselves gurus? It’s because charlatan is too hard to spell.” And that was in reference to Dr Oz, who it turns out, 50% of what he says is either wrong, or just baseless. And yet people follow this guy’s every word. He’s got a magazine. He’s got a television show. Oprah is ringing his bell. I hate that. That’s me. Okay. So Further is not about a guru, a cult, or personality. It’s not even about me. I am on this journey with the audience. I am learning as I go. Now I have been reading in these areas for well over a year now, so I have kind of got that head start but that’s how you get enough of a start to get going. But every week in my spare time, the books I am reading, the magazines I read, podcasts I listen to, the videos I watch, are all potential material for Further and I’m discovering as I go along. The theme is very much an emphasis on science and research. Not new age woo woo stuff and certainly not any sort of guru. Because when you think about it, and nothing against Tony Robbins, that man has certainly come a long way from infomercials, to the CEO whisperer. Good for him. I just don’t want to be Tony Robbins. But the topic, health, wealth and wisdom, go look at Tony Robbin’s product catalogue, it’s the same thing, except I’m trying to deliver the newest information, for free, and make sure I am emphasizing that it’s peer reviewed, scientific research. How to Write and Test Your Site’s Copy Robert Bruce: How are you messing around with language and copy over there at Further? Brian Clark: I don’t know how many words there are on the homepage but it’s just a few sentences. And there’s an about page, which is a short article length and then there’s the actual content. That’s it. You know that I dwelled on every word, edited and massaged, and re-edited, and thought, and all of that stuff because when you go back to the themes of useful, and convenient and simple, you’ve got to be succinct. You don’t have a lot of time, and yet you are persuading someone to give up their email address, which is not necessarily an easy task. In future episodes we are going to talk about how you up your odds there, but for now, it’s just the newsletter and the copy. So a lot of that is just based on how I feel about the project, the things I have read, the things I have observed. All the things we talk about watching social media. Picking up on desires and problems and complaints and dreams. And that’s hopefully expressed in the sparse language that I do have. The second thing though that I am doing, which is really cool, and Rainmaker makes so easy is that I have been split testing. And I am really proud of our guys in development for this. I just really kind of got into it because there is enough traffic coming into the site to actually test something and I am just doing a test of the headline on the homepage. It’s a very simple variation but the headline at this point is “Live your best life.” And then I asked you, before we recorded this, “Hey, Robert, if I put “How to” in front of that, what do you think will win?” And your answer was Robert Bruce: Got to be “How to.” Brian Clark: I bet every copywriter on the planet would say, “How to will win” but, do we have to take that on faith? Even though it’s been true for hundreds of years? Robert Bruce: Yeah. Brian Clark: No, we don’t. We can actually test it. I’m still running the experiment because I want to get to a statistically significant result, but “How to” is winning fairly easily. So if you go by the site, a week or so from now, and it’s “How to” you’ll know why. Robert Bruce: The other interesting thing with copy and in particular on the homepage, is the length of copy. This is something that comes up all the time. People ask a lot, “Should we go long copy or should we go short copy?” And like you said, you’ve got the about page, you’ve got the actual articles but they are not prominently available. I think they are in the nav. Brian Clark: It’s a great point, but what do you think I can test next? What I can do, is take the about page copy, put it below the email form on the homepage, make about go to that section of the homepage, and test that against what I have now. And again, I’ll know. Robert Bruce: Yep. Brian Clark: It’s really amazing. I’ve got to just say how happy I am because basically with split testing you have got an existing page, you basically dupe that into a new page and change the parts you want to change. Then you just check a box, hit a button and Rainmaker does it for you. The only thing I would advise is, it’s like a horse race and you’ll waste valuable productivity time checking to see who’s winning, which is a lot of fun. Don’t do that. I’m really forcing myself not to do that but it is fun. I mean if you are a word person and kind of a data nerd at the same time, there is nothing more fun than split testing. But you are not doing it for fun. You are doing it to find out what the audience prefers from language. It’s the same thing with keyword research. The language that they use is always going to be more effective than something you come up with in the alternative. Same thing with “What do they actually take action on, on the page?” Brian’s New Newsletter Image Strategy Robert Bruce: All right. As Jason Fried has written, “Copywriting is interface design” but let’s talk about some other design elements here. You’ve got a few things listed and let’s just go through each one, one by one. Brian Clark: Yeah, so really as you know, a lot of tweaking and evolution in design despite how simple it is, I think almost the more minimal your design, the more important every little thing is. And of course with you working with me over almost 5 years now, you know that I am really into details and I think they make the difference. You never know which detail is going to make the difference but I think in the aggregate the details matter. So even from the last podcast that we did, where we revealed the site, you’re a happy man now that I changed the images that I use in issues of Further. Why don’t you tell them what you told me, and I’ll cop to it? Robert Bruce: I can’t remember the exact words I used but we got on the phone last week and I said, “You know, it looks great, I love the design but I think there is something about these images that are holding it back.” Brian Clark: What kind of images, Robert? Robert Bruce: These were stock images that you were finding. But anyway, through this conversation, you lit upon an idea that you switched up this very week and started rolling with it. I think it’s been a pretty good response. Brian Clark: This has been the biggest revelation I have had so far. Okay, let’s face it, you hated the stock images. You thought they were crap and you always have. Okay, let’s not mince words. I agree with you, but I know I need an image and I don’t really know what else to do but to try and pick something good. But, you were right. So what I have been doing is, I would lead with the Further logo, the template for the page and the newsletter itself are the same. Further logo at the top, headline, image and then a quote. I would lead with a quote that was relevant to the issue. Sometimes it’s kind of funny, sometimes it’s profound but obviously it’s always thematically relevant to what I am writing about. So we were on the phone together and I am trying to figure out what to do, and I just said, “I need to incorporate the quote into the image, instead of having it as text.” And you are like, “Yep, that would be better.” You know, we have all these great tools. I mean you can use simple photo editing software. You can use something like Canva. And I suppose it does take some skill and some taste but people love quotes, and people love visual imagery. I kind of downplayed that because I’m a word guy. And that’s just my bias. But what I learned by doing this was amazing. So the first post that I really went public with to see how people responded was on meditation. A lot of good feedback on that issue. People are into it. It’s a hot topic right now. The original time I tweeted from my personal Twitter account, I got 5 retweets, which I was like, “Hey, at least people don’t hate it. That’s pretty good.” But it had this pretty crappy, blue stock image of a head and some mystical looking stuff around it, which may have not been the best choice. So it was out there for 4 or 5 days, and then I decided to change the approach and I went to black and white. The photo in the background with a black box that contains the quote. This particular quote is kind of humorous because it’s a zen proverb that says, “You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes every day, unless you are too busy, then sit for an hour” which is a very zen thing to say. And I totally get it. So I put the post up with a new image and tweeted it. It was like off hours and it was the second time I had tweeted it, so it wasn’t new but it got 50 retweets. The image. The visual impact. Robert Bruce: Not to mention, you’ve now also created, as you create each issue, another piece of micro content that can stand alone. An advertisement for the entire site. Brian Clark: You are way ahead of me. I’ve all of a sudden got an Instagram account. I rediscovered Pinterest. We will talk about the results of my attempts at visual marketing but it’s interesting because you know, you almost have to do it separately because just on basic social networks, like Facebook, and on Twitter the right image makes all the difference. And I think I’ve hit along on something. I mean it’s not double as good, it was 10 times as good. It really comes down to the topic and the image you choose and the quote you use. Of course, there is all these different variables. But every single issue I went back and changed the image and reintroduced it to an audience. Most and a lot of people had already seen the content and it always does exponentially better. So we will talk more about images later, but that is a big part of your overall visual style and I think one of the main things is that the black and white approach is more congruent with the sparseness of the site as it is. You notice that on the homepage, you’ve got logo, copy, a little bit of nav and the subscription box, and the only splash of color is the “Join Us” button, which has been tested quite a bit in the world of conversion optimization. It definitely helps. The Importance of Congruence Robert Bruce: Okay, so let’s go to the final element in this little list, as it relates to Further, and that is content. Brian Clark: The important thing here is, remember, we may have talked about it on the show in the past, if not, this is something that Brian Eisenberg talked about at the last Authority Intensive show in 2014, the scent test, right? Effectively what that means, and this goes back to research done in Palo Alto many years ago, that people on the web will follow and expect a congruent scent from page to page. So if you have an advertisement that is of a certain style, flavor, or theme, and then they arrive at a landing page that is completely, jarringly different, that will kill your conversion rates. You need congruence. I wrote about that topic in conjunction with native advertising. Basically saying, if you are going to do native advertising in publication you are working with, you not only have to make your content fit in editorially, but it should fit in with you, right? Don’t advertise on BuzzFeed if you are advertising a stuffy law firm. That would make complete lack of sense but people do it all the time. So when you are creating this visual style and you are creating your elevator pitch and you are creating an about page that tells the longer story of what you are trying to do, it’s all got to be matched up fairly well with your content. Same kind of voice, same kind of style, a congruent scent and promise, and then delivery of that promise. That’s all I want to say about content right now. I think we will probably have some questions relating to process and stuff like that. To me that’s individual but I will be happy to talk about it. Remember when I interviewed Seth Godin a couple of years ago, when I asked him what his writing process was and he refused to tell me? Because he’s like, “We are all crazy in our own way. If I tell you what I do, number one you are going to think I am crazy and number two, someone will try to mimic me and that’s completely wrong.” And I get him. So we will talk about collecting links and stuff like that, but of course, Rainmaker’s built in curation features, which are coming very soon, are going to make a lot of this really easy. Robert Bruce: Yeah, let’s leave it at that. We will have further episodes on this topic. The idea of content curation and specifically case studies as it applies to what Brian is doing. Thanks for opening things up over there man. This is interesting. If you like what we are doing here at Rainmaker.FM, please let us know by heading over to iTunes and giving us a comment or a rating. It’s much appreciated. And if you want to get everything, head over to Rainmaker.FM and you’ll see right under the header, the headline and the tagline, a green button. Click that and sign up by email. You’ll get all of our episodes as soon as they are published and you’ll also get access to our free 10-part marketing course that will likely change the way you think about online marketing. Thanks for listening everybody, and Brian, thanks man. I will see you next week. Brian Clark: See ya.
Rank #2: Jay Baer on “Generosity Marketing” and the Power of Business Podcasting.
You’d expect a guy who’s started five multi-million dollar businesses from scratch to know a thing about marketing that works. And then, of course, he’d write the book on it. In this case, the guy is Jay Baer, and the book is Youtility, a guide so useful for effective marketing it’s becoming a franchise unto itself. In his spare time, Jay is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, podcaster, angel investor, new media personality, and restless entrepreneur who can’t help but add just one more project to his portfolio. I asked Jay to be the first in a series of Rainmaker.FM interviews that illuminate the path of content marketing into the future. You’ll notice some common themes that turn up time and again among those who have already successfully built audiences, and Mr. Baer sets the stage perfectly. In this 33-minute episode Jay Baer and I discuss: Jay’s path to a bestselling business book Why podcasting could be the future of content The wonders of “Geographically Agnostic” businesses The strategic basis of my entire career How startups can profit from the concept of Youtility Why Jay doesn’t write as much as he used to How to turn one piece of content into seven The long bet that Jay is making on podcasting Listen to Rainmaker.FM Episode No. 18 below … Download AudioSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Image by Todd Quackenbush Jay Baer’s Youtility MarketingPodcasts.com Jay Today Convince & Convert *Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and Internet entrepreneurs.The TranscriptJay Baer on “Generosity Marketing” and the Power of Business Podcasting Rainmaker.FM is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and online entrepreneurs. Find out more and take a free 14-day test drive at RainmakerPlatform.com. Brian Clark: Hey everyone, Brian Clark here with another episode of Rainmaker FM. Today we’re breaking our normal programming just a bit to bring in a very special guest. We’re going to have more guests periodically, but this is a guy and a friend that I really thought should be the first one. So Jay Baer, you know him most likely as the bestselling author of Youtility, which if you have not read is one of those few bibles of content marketing. And as someone who has been doing this a while, I feel like my opinion on that has some credence. Definitely pick it up and take a look if you haven’t read it. If you have read it, you know and are familiar with Mr. Jay Baer. I’m going to ask Jay to bring us up to speed on his path to best-selling author and content marketing celebrity in his own right. But in general, Jay has managed five marketing service firms, which is amazing. And in the process of that he has worked with over 700 brands, 30 in the Fortune 500. That’s kind of ridiculous. I want to find out and I know his shop is growing, I know they’re doing interesting things but it is better to hear it from him than me. Jay, how are you? Jay Baer: Hello my friend. Thanks very much for having me. Greetings to everybody out there at Rainmaker FM Nation. Brian Clark: Very nice. So as I warned you, I’d love for you to give us more details. So you were born and you’re here today, please fill in the gap. Jay Baer: I feel like what Chris Brogan said a few years ago, “It took me ten years to become an overnight sensation.” I started in online in 1994 so pre-browser, pre-Yahoo, and way pre-Google. I was originally in political consulting. I ran political campaigns. I went from there to corporate marketing and from there I had a brief, and I mean brief, a foray working for the Government as a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections. My job was essentially to give tours of the juvenile prison, which isn’t even as fun as I just made it sound in the previous sentence. I had been there about four months (and this is a true story), they put me in charge of a 13 person business card redesign committee. I thought, “Wow, that seems like a lot of people involved in this process, that doesn’t really fit my thinking on life and in business.” At the same time I had dinner with some friends of mine from college who had started the very first internet company in Arizona and they said, “Hey, this company that we built is starting to get a little bit bigger and we don’t know anything about marketing.” And I said, “Well, that’s okay because when you say the word ‘internet,’ I don’t know what that word means, but I will literally do anything other than giving another tour of this prison.” So I walked in the next morning and quit, and found myself the Vice President of Marketing for an internet company without ever having been on the internet. That is an interesting place to find yourself. So that company ended up getting pretty large and we sold it to MindSpring and I started another company and another company and another company and another company. And here we are at Convince & Convert, which I started in 2008 to provide true strategic consulting services. We’re not an agency, but many of our clients are agencies in fact. We work with medium sized and large global brands to help them with content marketing strategy and social media strategy, governance, metrics, competitive analysis, and things like that. We probably operate more like an analyst firm or like a McKinsey & Co., than we do like an agency. That’s because we don’t get involved in tactical work. Befitting the Rainmaker audience, the company is purely virtual. We have staff members all over the United States. We only have one company meeting per year and we have four phone calls per year, period. Everything else though, is with Teamwork, which is like Basecamp but I prefer it and Skype. And that’s how it rolls. Brian Clark: Interesting. How many people do you have now? Jay Baer: Ten. Brian Clark: Ten, okay. I did not know you were virtual, or as we like to say geographically agnostic. Why Good People Are Good to Find Jay Baer: Absolutely. We’re in all time zones and it works out pretty well. The other thing that many people don’t know about Convince & Convert, is that all of our team members with the exception of myself, also have their own consultancies on the side. So everybody who works with us spends half to two-thirds of their time with Convince & Convert and the balance of their time working on their own clients. Everybody is a 1099 in our company and sort of has that motivation and mentality and skillset to be a sole proprietor. I really look for those kind people when I bring folks on the team because it takes a special kind of person to say, “Hey, go work on a social media strategy for some of the biggest companies in the world. You’re never going to see that company. You’re never going to meet that company, and you’re never going to have a meeting with your team. It’s going to be all on the phone.” Not everybody can do that and so we’re pretty careful about who we bring into the fold. Brian Clark: That’s interesting because that was my exact sworn plan when I started Copyblogger. There would be no partners and there would be no employees after coming out of my last three businesses, which almost killed me. Now we have 42 employees and 4 partners. I think whatever you have to do is, you look at what the goal is and what needs to get done to get you there? I think you’re familiar with the story. I didn’t even have a product or service much less some grand goal of creating X, Y, or Z, you kind of roll with it. Jay Baer: Yeah. Brian Clark: Anyway, thank you for that summary. Jay Baer: I’ll add that there’s no doubt that it gets harder to maintain that thesis as you get bigger. At some point it starts to change the dynamics when you get more people. In fact, just 31 days ago we added a Director of Operations to the team. We did that because we got to the point where we needed somebody in that role because it just gets too loosey-goosey. Brian Clark: I would recommend to anyone starting out, to start that way. Even if you do go with a partnership to some degree, hiring people is capital intensive. I think Joe Pulizzi over at Content Marketing World, with this fantastic conference, has only got one or two actual employees. It’s like he’s a force of his own. Jay Baer: Absolutely. It can be really effective, but the corollary to that is you absolutely have to have the right people. One of the challenges with that kind of business is that even though we’ll be on the Inc. List next year, we’re growing fast. And having that sort of setup does prevent you from growing even faster because you’ve got to be really, really careful about whom you add to the team. You can’t babysit. It’s impossible to babysit them. Brian Clark: Again, we have employees but it takes a special type of employee to be trusted to sit in front of a screen and not look at cat photos all day and to actually do the work. I feel blessed that we have this team. Every day I think about what if I had to get to a hundred employees next year. Everyone has come from the audience. It has been beneficial and I feel lucky and I do think about that. So, your first book was The Now Revolution with our friend Amber Naslund. What year was that? Jay Baer: It was 2011. Brian Clark: Okay. And then Youtility came two years or one year after that? Jay Baer: Two years after that, so it was last summer. Brian Clark: That book has really had some influence. I remember when I saw you do your keynote at Content Marketing World, the first time I heard you talk about Youtility and I was like, “That’s damn good.” And the book didn’t disappoint. Where We’re Headed After the Launch and Popularity of Youtility So Youtility has become in its own way its own “buzzword” I guess, to represent what we’re trying to accomplish with content marketing. Where are we going from here? What’s beyond Youtility? Jay Baer: First, I don’t think we have conquered Youtility. You and me and the people that listen to the show and the people who consume the content that you and your team create are at the very vanguard of this line of thinking. As you know, we do a lot of big corporate consulting and I do a lot of bringing the Youtility message to major corporations. In those organizations, this concept of help rather than hype is by no means something that has been embraced. In some cases they’ve got their toe in the water a little bit. But we’ve got a long way to get Youtility and that thinking sort of embedded in the culture of organizations across the board. It really is a cultural imperative more so than a content marketing imperative. Certainly the manifestation of it and the tactical execution of it could be classified as content marketing, but you have to believe in the power of giving away value. Most companies simply do not because they haven’t had to historically. They could just advertise their way out of it. I think we’ve got a long way to go to reach sort of peak Youtility if you will. The Decline of Online Reading? What I think is really interesting coming down the road is how the Youtility execution layer is changing really, really quickly. A lot of the things we talk about in the book even a year ago were blogging and mobile apps and things like that. Now, you see such a tremendous rise of multimedia content and short form video in particular. So whether it is Vine, Instagram Video, short videos on YouTube, short videos posted natively to Facebook, and podcasting of course. As a four-time author now, it kind of breaks my heart, but Johnny don’t read. Right? Johnny don’t want to read anymore. Brian Clark: I’ve been saying that since 2007 when we launched a training program as our first product called Teaching Sells. The arguments I had to make are, “No, people will buy content,” which no one wanted to believe in 2007. It’s hard to believe that now with the rise of eLearning and online courses and all that. Jay Baer: Of course. Brian Clark: The other thing was people don’t read. You do because you’re my audience and we’re readers. Right? Jay Baer: Right. Brian Clark: That’s why Copyblogger has been so text heavy throughout time, but I think you’re noticing that we’re branching out more into audio and video. Jay Baer: You have to. Brian Clark: There’s only so many people that are readers, but you can’t leave them behind. I do want to talk a couple other Youtility focused books, and you do work with some gigantic organizations. These are for the people that are little closer to my heart. You’ve got one for accountants and you’ve got one for realtors, which these are the professional services’ small business engines of our economy. Jay Baer: Absolutely. Youtility applies as a concept to every business. I really believe that. Brian Clark: I do too. How Your Business Can Move Vertically from One Strong Product Jay Baer: Big, small, B2B, B2C, government, all that. In order to actually do it, I think it is sometimes easier for people to see themselves in the stories even more than they might in the regular book. I essentially stole a play from the chicken soup playbook as well as the e-myth playbook and said, “Geez, we could tell stories in a vertical.” So Youtility for Accountants came out in March and has done really well within that community. That’s certainly a type of professional service provider that typically has not embraced that type of marketing at all. Just two weeks ago we released Youtility for Real Estate, which has been on and off the number one Kindle book for real estate on Amazon for the last couple weeks since we released it. I think it is actually the best thing I’ve ever written. I think it is better than the Youtility hardcover. That’s because I’ve had another year to year and a half to think through the principles and organize my thoughts better. There are so many realtors out there and they all do the exact same thing. There’s very little differentiation between any of them in terms of how they go about building their business. And so Youtility is a recipe for doing it in a different way and it has been really successful. We’ve had great coauthors on both of those projects. Darren Root, a friend of mine who is a very popular famous thought leader in the accounting space and Erica Campbell Byrum is the head of digital marketing for Homes.com and for Rent.com. She coauthored the Youtility for Real Estate book. It’s nice to have those vertical subject matter experts alongside to help me find case studies and to add a little industry gravitas to the proceedings. Those books are virtual only, which has been an interesting dynamic to not have a physical book. They’re just $2.99 in Kindle iPlay, Google Play, iTunes, and all that. It’s less than three bucks, which is remarkable. We look at it more as a marketing exercise for the real book than it is necessarily going to make at $2.99. Brian Clark: Interesting. This is something I’ve seen and I think influenced me early on because being generous, giving things away, and giving value away to make money some other way is the basis of my entire career. I would never argue with the utility of generosity. You see that in your very best real estate agents and you see that in your very best accountants. Jay Baer: Yeah. Brian Clark: I remember my first accountant was that kind of guy. And still, you have people who are trying to squeeze every dollar out or are kind of ruthless. The Power of Generosity Is it easier at the professional services or small business level? I ask because generosity is a personality trait and the enterprise can’t culturally assimilate that. Jay Baer: I think that’s some of it, but I think some it, Brian, is that at that small business level, you’re closer to the customer. You can see the outcomes of Youtility faster and you can see them more clearly. So the feedback loop of, “Hey, I did this and I have both anecdotal and actual evidence of success” generates more enthusiasm for the concept and it creates a snowball effect. The problem with Youtility in corporations (and I say this as somebody who consults with corporations on doing Youtility) is that even if you’re great at it, like Charmin is one of the examples we use in the Youtility book. Columbia Sportswear is another one and Hilton Hotels is a classic Youtility case study that I talk about all the time. Those companies are terrific at Youtility, but the Youtility programs that they’ve adopted is such a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny piece of their overall marketing ecosystem that it is almost impossible to point to that and say, “This is the lift that that created,” other than anecdotes. And anecdotes work great in small business. I think small business decision-making, especially on the marketing side, is almost always powered by anecdotes rightly or wrongly. On the corporate side, on the enterprise side, anecdotes don’t count, so it’s a different circumstance. That’s why I think small businesses are really well established and set up to put Youtility into practice because they can see it work right in front of their face. Brian Clark: Certainly you’re an angel investor and advisor to a lot of startups that have internalized this as a launch strategy effectively. Jay Baer: Buffer for example. I was one of the first investors with those guys, and those guys have really figured it out. The Shifting Landscape of Multimedia Content Brian Clark: Buffer is a great example. Okay so you and I have been chatting about a lot of stuff this Fall working on various things, but I think the exchange that led to this podcast was me marveling at how well done Jay Today is. Jay Today is what, three minutes? I love your tagline and of course you’ve got to tell them what it is, but I think you’re a natural both spoken and in front of the camera as well. I can generally rattle off whatever, but I get a little self-conscious with a camera in my face. If you would, please tell people a little bit about Jay Today and why you’re doing it and how it’s going. Jay Baer: Well, we were just talking a moment ago that people don’t read. We’ve got to find a way to create other forms of content. I’ve had a podcast for a long time called Social Pros that you’ve been kind enough to be on that focuses on interviewing big companies, social media managers and thought leaders like yourself. That’s great, but that show is not about me. It is intentionally about the guest. At the same time, like you, I blog less than ever. Right? I used to write all the blog posts on Convince & Convert once upon a time. Brian Clark: It happens for some reason, why is that? Jay Baer: Yeah, our editorial calendar three years ago was with maybe four blog posts a week, and I wrote all of them. Now we do eight blog posts a week and I write one of them. But the traffic keeps going up. I think the lesson there if you confuse your correlation and causation is that the less I write, the more traffic we get. So what I felt like was A: I need to create more content that’s not written and B: I didn’t really have an outlet for “Hey, here’s what I think right now.” That’s because I’m not like Mitch Joel where I just say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. I’m going to sit down and write a whole blog post about it today.” Our editorial calendar is done pretty far in advance. Brian Clark: Yeah. Ours too. Jay Baer: Yours is as well. Brian Clark: It’s like a magazine. Jay Baer: Exactly. Brian Clark: It’s not really a blog anymore. Jay Baer: Precisely. So I no longer had that outlet. With that, I said, “Geez, what if I just turned on my iPhone and just almost did a reality show confessional. It would be like ‘Here’s what I’m thinking about.'” And I thought, “You know, it can’t be that hard.” I got some people to help me figure it out and got some sponsors so it wasn’t going to be a complete disaster and it has worked out great. So the tagline is “Jay Today where I give you a piece of my mind three minutes at a time.” Brian Clark: I love it. How to Repurpose Three Minutes of Content Seven Different Ways Jay Baer: It is three videos a week. We publish them Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. They are three minute videos, just about whatever. It could be like what’s going on in social media, in business, in life, and just sort of observations. My friends at Candidio were a terrific video editing company up in Indianapolis where you just upload your video and then they take care of it. They put the titles on it, they clean it up, they export it to YouTube, and the whole thing. So they are a sponsor and they are great guys and we’ve generated a ton of business for them because people watch the show and are like, “I want a video like that too.” So that’s worked out great. And Sprout Social is a sponsor as well and they’ve been terrific partners on that project also. One of the things that I think you’ll appreciate and certainly the Rainmaker folks will appreciate is what we’re doing with those videos. The original plan was give me a platform to talk about what’s on my mind and create more video content. Okay, easy enough. What we’ve decided to do is to really make that, because I do it so frequently, kind of the content atomization engine. So every time I record the video, and I just do it on my iPhone with an external microphone. Brian Clark: Which is amazing because it looks really good. It is a testament to how far the iPhone has come. Jay Baer: Right? And the 6 is definitely better than the 5s in that regard in the reverse facing camera. I have a tripod, which is big because it keeps it steady. So we take the videos, they go on YouTube, and they go on our website on a distinct domain name jaytoday.tv, which is powered by Vidyard. Then we have it on a video podcast and we also have the audio version as an audio podcast both on iTunes. Brian Clark: Yep. Jay Baer: Then we take it, we transcribe them, and we make them a written blog post on Convince & Convert. We take the transcription, tweak it, and make it a LinkedIn blog post. We take the transcription, tweak it again, and put it on Medium. Then we take the videos and post them directly to Facebook. So every three-minute video becomes seven distinct content executions. Brian Clark: Nice. That’s a beautiful segue into what I’d like to talk about next, but I think I see a theme emerging here. We’re both writers. I would take it that you probably prefer to read than consume audio or video, or is that not the case? The Secret of Keeping Up with the Modern Day Consumer Jay Baer: I do. In fact, I’ve got a funny story about that. So my son is a big sports fan as I am. Every morning when he gets up and gets ready for school, he is not allowed to watch TV, but he has his iPad Mini and he is always on ESPN or NHL.com. That’s pretty much what he does while he is eating cereal or whatever and I do the same thing. I start my day with a little sports news and this happens with shocking regularity. I’ll look over and he is on his counter stool and I’m on my counter stool and we’re on the same page of ESPN. Right? But if you’re familiar with the way their site works, they almost always have the video at the top and then the text at the bottom. Brian Clark: Right. Jay Baer: Constantly I look over and he is watching the video with his headphones on and I am reading the text of the same. That happens all the time. Brian Clark: That sounds like me. Jay Baer: All the time. It’s crazy. Brian Clark: If that video auto-rolls, it’s off and I’m down to the text. I’m glad they do provide the text for people like me. I’ll watch television and film to a certain degree and enjoy it immensely. But as far as watching YouTube videos or listening to a very long podcast, it is very difficult for me. I’m a reader and yet, I don’t make the mistake of thinking other people are like me. Jay Baer: Yeah. Brian Clark: And the early Copyblogger was essentially a blog about writing and it was delivered in written form. But as you say, you’re going to limit yourself in the universe of content if you only stick with text regardless of Google’s continued predilection for it, which can be solved with transcripts. And you’re essentially talking about doing something once and creating seven unique manifestations of it. Jay Baer: Right. Brian Clark: This year, we have become very bullish on starting with audio, getting that transcript, making SlideShares, making webinars, and making articles. You can crank out more than seven if you really put your mind to it. Jay Baer: Absolutely. Brian Clark: Generally, you want to see what worked and what resonated and focus on that. Don’t repurpose everything because we all strike out from time to time, most often more often than not. You know? Jay Baer: Yep. The Undeniable Benefits of Podcasting Brian Clark: So where are you on podcasting right now? I think I know, but we’ll let you get to that. Jay Baer: Well, I’m hugely bullish on it not only because I see great results from it, I’ve been doing the Social Pros show now for almost three years and of all the things that I do, but I probably get more anecdotal feedback on that. That includes people saying, “Hey I love the show, I listen to the show all the time.” Our downloads of that show are up a hundred and something percent year over year. At the same time, you see lots of other people in the digital marketing community, the content marketing community creating more and more podcasts, which is I think good. I think a rising tide lifts all boats at some level. Then you see research from people like Tom Webster at Edison that shows that podcast consumption has increased 25% in this country year over year to the point that 15% of Americans have listened to a podcast in the last 30 days. And you may think, “Well geez, 15% isn’t that much.” Well yeah, except that 18% of America is on Twitter and nobody is saying that that doesn’t have a future. Brian Clark: Exactly. Jay Baer: So 15% of anything when you’re talking about a country this large is a lot of people. Right? It’s a lot of people. And what the data shows is that people who are into podcasts are really into podcasts. They listen to three, four, five, six, seven, or even eight shows a month. Increasingly, when we get to this “Hey, there’s no more scheduled content” in terms of “Hey, here’s when this television program is on,” etcetera and you already see that now with binge watching on Netflix and Amazon, podcasting is going to be the audio and spoken version of that. Think about a universe five years down the road where blogging fades away because nobody wants to read and everybody accesses the internet through wearables, which is a screen which is not big enough to read on. Brian Clark: Yep. Jay Baer: And consequently, the way you educate yourself, the way you become a better marketer, a better business person is instead of using Feedly to create your customized information newspaper, it is using something like Stitcher to create your customized audio newspaper. Then, you just listen to your education. I think that’s where we’re headed, which is why I wanted to sort of get on top of that and build a search engine to help people find shows like them. Brian Clark: I want to talk to you about that specifically, but you mentioned the time shifted aspect. I was an early adopter of satellite radio because at the time I had a business that had me in the car a lot. Jay Baer: Yep. Brian Clark: The fact that I could listen to 80s alternative on the original XM was just amazing to me. But now certain programming is like, “Tune in at X o’clock.” And I’m like “Are you kidding me?” That’s not going to happen. Jay Baer: They’ve completely gone back on what they originally were intended to be. Brian Clark: Right, okay. So as you mentioned, MarketingPodcasts.com, is that the URL? Jay Baer: That is the site. It is as we record this nine days old or something. Understanding the Long Game of Content Consumption Brian Clark: When you told me about it in September in Cleveland I was like, “Oh that’s cool.” Then I saw it launch and I felt like, “Oh, that’s really cool.” But then I was asking, “Why is Jay doing this? I can’t figure out the angle.” Now you mentioned something about the future of content consumption that tells me you’re playing a long game here. I’ll let you talk about it. Jay Baer: Yeah. It’s a very long game with MarketingPodcasts.com and the site is free. It’s really the first ever search engine for marketing podcasts. Unlike most of the things I do where I have a fairly well thought through plan on how it all fits together and revenue streams and synergies with our other properties and things like that, this is one that was really born out of personal frustration. I was literally looking for marketing podcast because I do listen to shows during my commute to the airport and I’m familiar with a lot of the great podcasts out there. But I’m sure there are more out there that I wasn’t aware of and so I just went to go try and find some. I went to iTunes, and if you’ve ever tried to find a podcast on iTunes Brian Clark: Marketing and management, right? Jay Baer: It is marketing or management and unless you’re in the first page, it’s a hot mess. It’s ridiculous. It is impossible. I thought, “Well surely there is a better solution.” And so I looked around and looked around and looked around, but all I could find was a few blog posts out there like, “Here’s my favorite podcast.” I’m like, “Well that’s not really a search engine.” So I thought, “Seriously, it’s almost 2015 and this doesn’t exist? How can that be true?” And then I thought, “You know what, screw it, I’m just going to do it because it needs to be done.” Then I talked to our developers and their WordPress ninjas at Marketing Press, who are great guys. They built the current version of Convince & Convert and JayBaer.com, which are riding on top of many of your products. Brian Clark: Genesis, right? Jay Baer: The Genesis Framework of course. Brian Clark: Synthesis hosting. Jay Baer: Yes, Synthesis hosting and Genesis. Brian Clark: I always forget you’re a customer. Jay Baer: Of course I am. Brian Clark: You don’t cause me any trouble. Jay Baer: I just pay my bill and keep my head down, buddy. Brian Clark: That’s how we like it. No. Hopefully we’re not causing you trouble to give us trouble. Jay Baer: You’ll be the first person I call. Brian Clark: Of course. Finding Out What’s Possible and How to Make It Happen Jay Baer: So these guys are really talented. And I said, “Hey, is this possible?” And they said, “Well, we’ve never thought about it, but maybe.” So we spent quite a bit of development time and quite a bit of development dollars to figure it out. We essentially do some very sophisticated mining of the iTunes API to create a feed of podcasts to rank order them in a bunch of different ways. You can sort by total episodes, you can sort by what we call audience approval rating, which is our gymnastics algorithmically to rank order shows. We have a staff of reviewers now that are reviewing podcasts every week. You can obviously search by categories so if you want content marketing podcasts versus SEO podcasts versus advertising podcasts, you can do that. It’s fully responsive. The whole thing works great and the feedback has been tremendous, and I’m really excited about it. The reality is now that it’s out and I’m super excited about it and the feedback has been great and people love it, I really have no idea what to do with it. Right? That’s because it’s not part of what I do day-to-day. It doesn’t neatly support other things that we do, although Marketing Podcast is “sponsored by” my podcast so hopefully we’ll get some more listeners to my show. Brian Clark: There is a purpose. You can always find one. Jay Baer: There’s always a purpose. Here’s the thing, it has gone so well and now that we know how to do it, now that we know how to do the technology, there is certainly an opportunity. Maybe we should build ComedyPodcast.com and TVpodcast.com and SciencePodcast.com and build out a whole network of these. Then it becomes a pretty interesting. Brian Clark: I’m currently doing Who Is on those domains. Jay Baer: A domain search, yes. It becomes a pretty interesting sponsorship opportunity for a bigger company at a bigger level at that point. The other thing is I was talking to John Wall at Marketing Over Coffee, which is a great show. He’s a great podcaster and the other day he said, “One of the problems with podcasting is that there is no way other than through your own efforts to get more attention on your show.” You can’t buy an ad on iTunes and you can’t buy an ad on Stitcher. There’s no marketplace for attention within the podcasting community, which is puzzling. Brian Clark: Right. Jay Baer: There’s no Outbrain for podcasts, for example. We’ve thought about building an ad network to sell sponsorships, to aggregate everybody’s podcast audience and to sell sponsorships to big companies and be the middle guy on that. We’re really good at sponsorship packaging and sales at Convince & Convert, so that’s an option. We’ve also thought about the next version of MarketingPodcasts.com sort of being like a Google search engine results page. That would be where it’s like here’s the shows that organically rank and then these guys have paid us to be at the top of the search results. That’s an option as well. There are several things we’re kicking around. Now that we have it, it’s like “I better figure out what to do with it.” Brian Clark: That’s interesting. I’m going to be watching that because I think you actually do. This is something I face all the time and often keeps me from doing projects like that at all. That’s because I know that to truly make the best of the opportunity or I wouldn’t be thinking about it in the first place will take some serious work. Unless you have the team to handle that, you tend to launch it. If it does well you’re like, “Wow, I could really make some money from that if I did this, this, or this, but I’ve got this business over here.” It’s challenging. Alright, in summary, if you have not read Youtility, you need to read it. If you are a realtor, broker, or an accountant, I would check the vertical Youtility that Jay has released because specificity, right Jay? We’ve been trying to teach the fundamentals of content marketing for nine years and people always get lost on “Okay, how do I do that for me?” Jay Baer: Yep. Brian Clark: I think that’s a smart thing, moving in to the verticals. Jay Today, check that out. And MarketingPodcasts.com, I will certainly be keeping an eye on it and hoping Rainmaker shows up somewhere. Jay Baer: It is on the list. Brian Clark: Of course I looked. Jay Baer: Of course you should. Brian Clark: We’re just now getting a consistent schedule of broadcasting and actually upping our frequency because it’s fun and it works and there is a huge ravenous audience out there for it. Jay Baer: Here’s a tip, if you’re listening to the show and you like what Brian is doing with Rainmaker.FM, as soon as this episode is over, go to iTunes and leave a review. Please don’t just leave a rating, but leave a review. Make sure you put a five star score on that. That will certainly help the show not only get into the MarketingPodcast.com database, but rank quite well in the database. We have over 450 podcasts right now in the site. Brian Clark: Excellent. As always, the check is in the mail. Thanks for the review plug. Jay, thanks a lot for joining us. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. Jay Baer: You too. Brian Clark: Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
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