Should I use a script? It’s one of the most common questions The Showrunner hosts Jerod Morris and Jonny Nastor get from aspiring first-time Showrunners.

In this week’s episode, they analyze when it’s right to use a script … and when it’s not.

But they start with a fun question that was posed in their Showrunner Course forum … based on a dream someone had: if your house was being flooded, and you could only save what you could carry, what items would you grab?

Jerod and Jonny share what happened in the dream and what their answers are. And they’d love to know yours. Tweet them to: @ShowrunnerFM, @JerodMorris, @JonNastor.

Then they hop into script talk and discuss the following:

• Which formats work with scripts, and which ones do not
• The long-term drawbacks to using scripts
• Why it’s perfectly fine to use scripts when you’re first starting out (Jerod and Jonny did!) … but why your goal should be weaning yourself off needing scripts before too long
• What they mean when they say “use scripts as a tool, not a crutch”
• How Jerod and Jonny still make use of scripts to this day
• Why writing is an important preparation tool before you record, even if you’re not scripting exactly what you’re going to say

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post To Script or Not to Script (That Is the Question) appeared first on Copyblogger.

It’s no secret that Brian Clark is not a fan of Facebook when it comes to so-called “social media marketing.” He’s even less of a fan of those who think of it as a “website substitute.”

That said, Facebook groups are popular for their apparent ease of use. But is it a good idea to build a valuable business community on someone else’s property?

Today on Unemployable with Brian Clark, Brian will tackle that issue based on a listener question.

Plus, Brian answers another question about the credible use of affiliate offers as both a revenue source and valuable market research, and discusses an online/offline hybrid marketing strategy for real estate agents.

Listen to Unemployable with Brian Clark …

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post The Tyranny of Facebook appeared first on Copyblogger.

This is the third part of The Mainframe’s series on membership sites.

Hosts Tony Clark and Chris Garrett define the key parts and decisions involved in getting started with building a membership site that works.

In this episode:

• How memberships are built, starting with the minimum components you need in place in order to get started
• Which membership options could have a far bigger impact than you might think
• What you should automate in order to make your life easier while managing a membership program

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post The Minimum Viable Membership-Based Business appeared first on Copyblogger.

Demian Farnworth and Jerod Morris join The Missing Link for some real-time fun and expertise about content syndication on LinkedIn.

Sean Jackson and Mica Gadhia welcome two of their favorite people from Rainmaker Digital (formerly Copyblogger Media), Demian Farnworth and Jerod Morris. These excellent writers and content marketers share the ins and outs of content syndication and some real-time tricks of the trade to getting it done right on LinkedIn.

Learn from their experiences and definitely check out Gregory Ciotti’s 30-day experience going from 0 – 255,262 article views on LinkedIn; it’s amazing information you can read, understand, and learn from right now.

Join them to learn best practices for content syndication and how you’ll want to up your game right now.

Listen in to understand:

• Why consistency is so important
• What you can learn from Gregory Ciotti (incredible)
• The advantages of short articles
• Why you want to say a big Yes to re-syndication
• More expert writing tips
• One little-known trick for writing catchy headlines

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post So, Jesus and Wolverine Login to LinkedIn appeared first on Copyblogger.

Let’s do a little thought experiment for a minute.

Imagine a life without The Awl, The Huffington Post, the New York Times, Drudge Report, The Onion, The Toast, The Verge, or Vox.

Without Brain Pickings, Slate, FiveThirtyEight, Pitchfork, The Paris Review, Mental Floss, Vice, xoJane, ProPublica, Quartz, Marc and Angel, or Grantland.

You get the idea; I want you to imagine a life without your favorite online publications. A digital content ghost town. Got it?

Now my question for you is this: would your life be better or worse without these publications?

And be honest …

It’s a question you have to answer since a future without these publications is quite possible. Let me explain.

What’s going to kill your favorite publication?

Some are calling it a mere “reckoning,” while others like Nilay Patel at The Verge think, “It is going to be a bloodbath of independent media.”

The issue at hand? The rapid adoption of ad blocking software.

This parochial issue became a national — even international — one when Apple announced this summer that for their iOS 9 update “app developers will be able to create ad blocking software for Safari’s mobile browser.”

And, at the time I wrote this article, the number one downloaded app was for ad blocking.

But could ad blocking software really sink the publishing ship? Let’s look at some numbers.

According to an often-quoted Adobe and PageFair study, ad blocking software is estimated to cost publishers $22 billion in revenue during 2015.

But the startling stats don’t end there:

• 198-million active ad blocking users around the world
• Ad blocking grew by 41 percent in the last 12 months
• In the U.S., that number grew to 48 percent (45-million active users) in the 12 months leading up to June 2015
• In the UK, that number grew to 82 percent (12-million active users) in the 12 months leading up to June 2015

In other words, it’s only going to get worse.

I guess if I was a publisher and my revenue model was dependent upon ads, those numbers might keep me up at night and keep me near a bottle of Wild Turkey and Tums by day.

Particularly since the mobile market trend is on a ferocious upward swing. On MondayNote, Frédéric Filloux wrote:

The second trend is the rise of mobile surfing that accounts for half of pageviews in mature markets. And, in emerging countries, users leapfrog desktops and access the web en masse through mobile.

And I think it’s safe to say this growing group of mobile users will use ad blockers.

The problem with online ads

But why such a backlash against ads? Ads really aren’t that bad, are they? And isn’t there an implicit contract between publishers and readers that says you can view free content if you tolerate these ads?

That seems to be the case. On the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo writes, “Some publishers and advertisers say ad blocking violates the implicit contract that girds the Internet — the idea that in return for free content, we all tolerate a constant barrage of ads.”

But it’s not really that simple because ads disrupt the user experience.

Here’s something you must understand about the current nature of online ads: They are obtrusive, drain your device’s battery when transferring data, and significantly slow down page loads.

Let me show you what I see when using an ad blocking tool called Ghostery.

This is from programmer and writer Marco Arment:

As you can see, there is just one piece of ad software sitting on the site.

This is from The Awl:

There are 29 different types of ad software working behind the scenes on The Awl.

Finally, let’s look at the New York Times:

Forty-three different ones here — and the page continued to load after I snapped that shot.

This shouldn’t surprise us, Jean-Louis Gassée says on MondayNote:

You can’t blame the browser, it’s the way the system has evolved in the Web advertising race to the bottom. Back when physical newspapers were still vital, advertising space was limited and thus prices were well-behaved and constant. No such thing on the Web, where the ‘ad inventory’ tends to infinity. As a result, prices fall, sites need more ads to stay afloat, and they must consent to exploitative practices.

Here’s the funny thing: the current online ad model is based upon interruption. In fact, we’ve come full circle.

Instead of commercials interrupting our favorite television shows and telemarketers calling us during dinner time, videos expand and automatically start playing without warning and products we viewed just minutes ago are stalking us everywhere.

It’s like the advertising industry needs another lesson in permission marketing. Haven’t we learned anything? Clearly not.

If advertising is going to co-exist with readers and publishers, then at least, as John Gruber of Daring Fireball wrote, “Advertising should have minimal effect on page load times and device battery life. Advertising should be respectful of the user’s time, attention, and battery life. The industry has gluttonously gone the other way.”

Now, some publishers have fought back by refusing to allow people who are using ad blockers to see their content. It’s been reported that The Washington Post has been directing users to either disable ad blockers or sign up for a subscription newsletter to access their content.

Others like The Atlantic and NFL display a banner that says some variation of: “We noticed that you’ve got ad blockers enabled. Please be aware that our site is best experienced with ad blockers turned off.”

As if turning on ad blocking software was a mistake. No. It was intentional.

We don’t need better ads — we need a better model

What’s interesting in this discussion is how people are suggesting that this will be good for publishers and advertisers because they’ll have to come up with better ads — ads that don’t interrupt our experiences and bloat our machines.

The sad thing about this is the small, limited thinking behind it.

Here’s Jeff Jarvis taking pro-ad-blocking journalist Charles Arthur to task on Twitter:

You see it when Nilay Patel says, “But taking money and attention away from the web means that the pace of web innovation will slow to a crawl.”

Or, as he says in another article, “That’s a recipe for stagnation, and stagnation is what we have. It’s leading powerful players like Apple and Facebook to create ersatz copies of the web inside their walled gardens, when what we really need is a more powerful, more robust web.”

But we don’t need better ads. We need a better revenue model. And we don’t have to wait long for these models to appear. They already exist.

Let’s explore five possibilities.

1. Subscriptions

Probably the most common revenue model after selling ads is selling subscriptions. Readers pay you a fee to consume your content.

Ben Thompson does it with Stratechery and Matter did it through a Kickstarter campaign/subscription model (before they were bought out by Medium).

But this model has its own problems.

According to this Reuters report, Casey Johnson reported in The Awl, “despite the rise of paywalls over the last few years, only eleven percent of respondents in the US and six percent in the UK say that they have paid for online news in any capacity.”

For instance, you see the influence this type of behavior has had on our favorite bloggers. The ones who are hanging up their cleats because selling ads or the subscription model are not paying the bills.

Figuring out how to monetize a popular blog seems to be the perennial challenge, doesn’t it? How do you make a living from a popular blog?

Dooce, Gigaom, and the food blogger The Amateur Gourmet had to close their doors or focus on more lucrative ventures.

2. Native ads

Native advertising is paid content that matches a publication’s editorial standards while meeting the audience’s expectations.

Furthermore, a native ad can’t be blocked. That’s because it’s viewed as content. It shows up in the publishers stream, typically labeled “sponsored content.”

But a native ad doesn’t eat up your battery life or slow down page load speed.

It’s a normal-sized file. And, if done well, it blends in with the rest of the publication’s content. With native ads, advertisers are back to having to entice readers to consume their content.

In fact, the demand for native advertising has grown so much, a lot of publishers have actually opened up in-house agencies to create these ads and fulfill the demand.

But native advertising also tends to require more resources to create, so it may be out of reach for smaller publications.

To learn more about native advertising opportunities, work your way through this list of resources:

• Copyblogger’s 2014 State of Native Advertising Report
• 5 Ways to Rankle an Old-School Journalist
• 12 Examples of Native Ads (And Why They Work)
• The 14 Keys to Writing Advertorials That Sell
• Is Native Advertising Even Profitable for Brands?
• Is Native Advertising Ethical? (It Depends On Who You Ask)
• Don’t Waste Your Time with Native Advertising

3. Affiliate sales

Next in line is affiliate marketing, one of the most reliable ways to earn an income online.

Maria Popova keeps the beloved Brain Pickings afloat through affiliate marketing. If done right, affiliate marketing is a tough model to beat.

The problem is, there’s a lot of bad (and unethical) advice out there on how to approach it, so here are three resources to help you get started:

• 5 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Beginners
• Affiliate Programs: Why You Should Build a “Second Audience” for Your Business
• Building Your Evergreen Sales Machine

4. Membership sites

Next is the membership site as revenue model. It’s really more than just a private club; it’s an experience.

And the experience that any smart marketer must create is powered by content, first and foremost, because that’s what people are looking for. But what they really crave is something much deeper and meaningful.

That’s exactly why membership truly has its privileges — for both you and your prospects, customers, and clients.

Here are three podcast episodes that will help you understand membership sites and what you need to build one:

• Why You Need a Membership Site
• The Key Types of Membership Sites for Building Your Digital Business
• Why Every Great Website is a Membership Site

5. Build a business around it

Finally, build a business around your publication. That’s what we’ve done here at Rainmaker Digital with the Copyblogger blog.

The content you read here on the blog comes from salaries paid through the sales of our own products — not ads.

And the types of products and services you can create are endless. You could:

• Build software your audience needs.
• Turn your content into books.
• Create training courses to help your audience meet their goals.
• Become a consultant.

The writer still runs the show

Ad blocking isn’t going to end great writing.

Sure, some publications will fail to adapt and sadly die.

But as journalist Charles Arthur noted, “Good journalism, and worthwhile sites, will survive. Or good journalists will.”

In other words, the writer still runs the show. But if you run a publication and want it to thrive, you are going to have to find a way to monetize it without ads.

Explore the different monetization ideas in this article, and then join the discussion on LinkedIn …

About the author

Demian Farnworth

Demian Farnworth is Chief Content Writer for Rainmaker Digital. Subscribe to his podcast Rough Draft. 

The post Why the Ad Blocking Panic Shouldn’t Scare Smart Publishers appeared first on Copyblogger.

Speaker, coach, and author Matthew Kimberley of How to Get a Grip talks with Youpreneur.FM host Chris Ducker about selling, marketing, and the critical importance of speaking your audience’s language.

Why do so many small business owners struggle with sales? Chris invited his good friend and fellow Brit Matthew Kimberley to share his thoughts on the subject in today’s podcast.

Matthew is a masterful salesman, a renowned author of the self-help book How to Get a Grip, and the head of the Book Yourself Solid coaches training program.

On this show, Matthew shares his candid and often hilarious anecdotes on how to be more confident when making a sales pitch (and why it matters), two ways to build your sales muscle, and whether sales people are born or made.

There’s a lot of deep and beneficial insights from Matthew and Chris in this episode of The Youpreneur.FM Podcast, so sit back, grab your favorite beverage, and listen in!

Essential Learning Points From This Episode:

• Why we must understand our audience
• When do people need to be told what to do?
• Where do 90 percent of business problems stem from?
• Why repetition is so important to being great at sales
• What is Kimberley’s kid’s kidney concept, and how does it help sales?
• Much, much more!

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Why (and How) Selling Ourselves Makes a Difference, with Matthew Kimberley appeared first on Copyblogger.

Creating a remarkable experience for an audience starts with authenticity, which should never be confused with transparency.

In this week’s episode of The Lede, Jerod Morris and Demian Farnworth (Hey! They’re back together again!) tackle the topic of authenticity to give you a better understanding of how to create an authentic connection with your audience, no matter what type of content you’re creating.

Jerod has discussed authenticity a lot in relation to podcasts. He wanted to hear Demian’s thoughts on how developing an authentic connection may differ depending on the medium.

Among the topics discussed:

• Why authenticity is one of the essential elements of a remarkable audience experience
• How authenticity differs (or does it?) between audio and written content
• What Erika Napoletano taught Demian about being authentic
• Why Erika’s version of authenticity and your version are surely different

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Revisiting Authenticity: What It Is, What It’s Not, and Why It Matters appeared first on Copyblogger.

Today’s guest on Hack the Entrepreneur is the Founder, Publisher, and CEO of Momtrends.com. She left her role as an executive at Ralph Lauren to launch the Momtrends blog in 2007.

Momtrends has grown massively since then and is now a boutique media brand, which provides moms with the latest news on all things trendy and cool. It has an ever-growing mom community with more than 150,000 visitors to the site and its social media channels each month.

On top of this (and with the help of her team), she has created a successful events business that connects top-tier brands with influential bloggers, and she has hosted nearly 100 events so far.

Now, let’s hack …

Nicole Feliciano.

In this 35-minute episode of Hack the Entrepreneur, host Jon Nastor and Nicole Feliciano discuss:

• The pros of being a connector of people
• Packaging things in a way that’s unique to your brand
• Knowing what you’re not good at and letting better people handle it
• Failing quickly, picking yourself up, and working harder the next time

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post The Extraordinary Value of Sharing and Being a Connector appeared first on Copyblogger.

Back in 2004, the heat was on for me and my little marketing and design studio.

In those days, I was a single mom with a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old, and I desperately needed my business to produce.

And by that, I mean produce profit. I needed money, honey — to support my family, run my household, and build my business.

I knew it was time to ramp up my efforts. My business was successful, but it was time to take it to another level.

Around that time, I started hearing about mastermind groups.

And now, when I look back, I recognize that joining a mastermind group profoundly changed my business for the better, especially because of one specific exercise these groups do.

That’s what I’m going to share today. Because earlier this month, we began doing something similar inside one of our communities at Rainmaker Digital.

Mastermind groups around every corner

You know that thing that happens when you’re interested in something and all of the sudden you start seeing mentions of it everywhere?

It’s called frequency illusion, and that’s what happened to me with mastermind groups. Everywhere I looked, I saw mentions of them.

But every mastermind group I found met in person, either early in the morning or later in the evening. And those were both times of the day when I had to be on Mom Duty. Attending a meeting outside the home wasn’t an option.

And yet, I was convinced that a mastermind group was what I needed. I knew I would benefit from the experience and viewpoints of other business owners, and it would help me position my business where it needed to be.

So, I continued to search and finally found a “virtual” mastermind group that met by phone. I applied, was accepted, and prepared myself for our first meeting.

Group therapy for my business?

I was a little nervous going into the first meeting. Was it going to be like a confessional? More like group therapy? Would I feel comfortable talking to these strangers about my business?

Every scenario I imagined had some level of discomfort baked in.

At the start of the meeting, the group leader explained that we would take turns sitting in the “hot seat” talking about our businesses.

We’d start by reporting successes — what had gone well in the past month. Then we’d move to sharing our biggest challenges — what we needed help with. The group would listen and contribute ideas to help the person in the hot seat.

Here’s where I was wrong

This is embarrassing to admit, but here’s what I thought:

“When it’s someone else’s turn, I’ll listen politely, provide the best feedback I can, and count the minutes until it’s my turn. And when it’s my turn, I’ll get a lot out of sharing my successes and challenges, and hearing the feedback from the group. The real value will come from taking my turn in the hot seat.”

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I learned a lesson that day and relearned it every single time we met as a group.

All the different businesses that exist in the world share many common problems.

When I look back on my mastermind meetings, I got as much or more from listening to other business owners talk about their triumphs and tragedies as I did when I shared my own.

Here’s what happened:

• The mindset tips shared with the chiropractor? I was able to use them to improve my own mindset.
• The negotiation techniques offered to the professional organizer? I used those the next time I needed to negotiate something.
• The website advice that went out to the voice coach? It made me look at my own site in a new light.

The funny thing about calling your time in the spotlight a “hot seat” is that the name is only partly accurate.

Instead of feeling like you’re under interrogation, you feel like you’re being warmly embraced by a community of professionals who support and encourage your efforts.

Maybe they should be called “warm seats.”

New: Authority Business Coaching calls

Last month, we began offering Authority Business Coaching calls inside our private site for advanced content marketing training.

We’ve brought a taste of this “warm seat” style of education to Authority, and the results so far have been pretty amazing.

The main challenge our first guest brought to the session was a need to improve cash flow in his business.

Here’s what we heard from our webinar attendees:

Money is so hard! And talking about it is even harder. This conversation is great.

And this:

I absolutely relate to this conversation. This is a great session.

And from the person sitting in the hot seat? Here’s what he said after it was over:

The session reinforced my ideas about what needs to happen, but it also gave me a sense of direction and more clarity. I feel a bit overwhelmed at times, and the coaching call left me with a sense of ‘I can do this.’

As a member, I think it is a highly appealing format for a show. It helps build a sense of community, while at the same time having a chance to be informative and valuable. All of us are in different stages of growth and success, but the problems we face are very similar.

Exactly. The problems we face are very similar.

And you’ll find that you can learn a tremendous amount by listening and sharing with people who own businesses that are quite different from yours.

About the author

Pamela Wilson

Pamela Wilson is Executive Vice President of Educational Content at Rainmaker Digital. Follow her on Twitter, see her Copyblogger images on Instagram, and find more from her at BigBrandSystem.com.

The post Why a Hot Seat Is Shockingly Good for Business appeared first on Copyblogger.

Author and Fast Company Editor Joe Berkowitz stopped by The Writer Files this week. His latest, a humor book titled You Blew It!: An Awkward Look at the Many Ways in Which You’ve Already Ruined Your Life, lands this October. He took a break from his busy schedule to rap with host Kelton Reid about how he survives the harried life of a big city journalist.

In addition to his work for Fast Company, Joe’s writing has been featured in The Awl, Salon, The Village Voice, Vulture, RollingStone.com, GQ.com, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and many others.

For a writer who works on breakneck deadlines, and almost never gets a break from the writing life, he has some pretty solid advice for keeping the cursor moving.

Join Kelton and Joe for this two-part interview.

In Part One of the file, host Kelton Reid and Joe Berkowitz discuss:

• How a bad breakup can boost your productivity
• When to throw out the rule “All Killer, No Filler”
• How to build your writing endurance
• Don Draper’s advice for beating writer’s block
• How making lists can help your head
• The magical power of 4:00 a.m. dementia

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post How Joe Berkowitz (Journalist and Fast Company Editor) Writes: Part One appeared first on Copyblogger.