What is marketing?

Is it a process of gathering as much money as you can, throwing it to the “creative” winds, and hoping something will come back?

Is it a practice of interrupting as many people as possible with a message they don’t care about, and never asked to receive?

Is it a performance you frantically stage around your product, service, or idea, in the final moments before launching it into the world?

Or is it something else entirely? And if it is, how and when do we employ it?

Seth Godin has been asking, answering, and living out these questions for decades. In the process, he’s written thirteen best-selling books, built dozens of companies, and crafted one of the most influential blogs on the planet.

He’s on the show today, delivering a fast and elemental definition of marketing, and what it means to engage an audience in the post-industrial era. Don’t miss this …

In this episode we discuss:

• Seth’s definition of marketing
• When you should start marketing your product, service, or idea
• Why running a ton of ads just doesn’t work anymore
• The most important element of good marketing
• The most dangerous element of bad marketing
• How the Internet builds trust, and why you must get it
• A stunning example of breaking out of the old marketing system

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

[transcript]

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert: This is Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio . I am Robert Bruce and today Seth Godin is on the line. If you don’t know Mr. Godin, he is the author of more than a dozen worldwide best-selling books. He is an accomplished entrepreneur and a legendary independent online publisher. You can grab all the details of his storied career by Googling just one word, “Seth.”

And, Seth, since I blame you for the idea of giving my stuff away online back in 2005 and, therefore, indirectly creating my current professional situation, it’s a very real pleasure to be talking to you today.

Seth: Well I am pleased that it ended that way. I thought you were about to blame me for something that was out of my control, so thank you.

Robert: If you’ll give me just one moment for a short word from our sponsor and then we will get right into your definition of marketing, when we should start marketing our product, services and ideas, and quite a bit more.

This radio show is brought to you by Internet Marketing for Smart People course, which is Copyblogger’s online marketing course that is delivered straight to your email inbox. Here is what it is. A systematic overview of the very best of Copyblogger in 20 emails, that’s it. It covers six years of experience teaching on content marketing, email marketing, the basics of good copywriting, social media marketing, and a lot more and it’s totally free.

78,000 people have signed up for this course and if you want to join them, just head over to Copyblogger.com, scroll down to the middle of our homepage and you’ll see the headline, “Grab our free 20-part internet marketing course.” Drop your email address into the little box there, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Seth, you wrote a deceptively simple blog post back in March of this year that stopped me cold. It’s titled “When Should we Add Marketing”and I think it addresses and challenges some commonly held beliefs about marketing that most folks who are trying to spread a product, service, or idea hold.

It might seem an elementary question to some, but in order to meaningfully frame the next few minutes, let me ask you, what is marketing?

Seth Godin’s definition of marketing

Seth: Well the easy answer is that it’s not advertising. A lot of people have trouble right there because for fifty years it was advertising.

Mad Men was all about this notion that if you ran enough ads, they didn’t have to be good, just had to run enough, they would pay for themselves. It was a perpetual motion machine of money.

That ended a few years ago, and I would like to describe marketing as the art of telling a story that resonates with your audience and then spreads. That story better be true, which means that implicit in marketing is making something for which, or about which, you could tell a story that resonates.

This is almost diametrically opposed to what every big company marketer in the world does and lots of little company marketers who think they are supposed to copy big company marketers. They think their job is to “get the word out” and that they have a moral right, and a professional obligation, to interrupt everyone they can to talk about their average stuff for average people.

How the Internet builds trust, and why you must get it

Robert: I’ve heard you tell it before but I love your description of why this has changed. Some of it’s obvious, you know the change in media, the change in the world with everything or most of media coming online, but why has this changed so radically from the old Mad Men era that our culture is leaving behind to this new culture that you describe?

Seth: We all grew up learning about the industrial revolution; every revolution then brings an age behind it. The industrial revolution created the industrial age and what was hard about the industrial age was making stuff. Henry Ford didn’t get rich because he ran good commercials, he got rich because he made a better car for the money than everyone ever had before and so for half a century, making stuff was key.

Then, once you got factories up and running making stuff, there is a demand for mass media.

We invented television to make advertisers happy not the other way around.

In the second era, the mass media era, we’ve got lots and lots of attention, because television manufactured attention and we needed to grab that attention and turn it into money.

The thing that is going on now is that attention is now scarce, it’s not abundant anymore. There are a million or billion channels to choose from, not three. There is a store one click away that sells every item ever made as opposed to the local store where shelf space was scarce.

All of those things undermined the importance of making average stuff because it’s easier than ever before. You can design something on your computer, send an email to China, and a month later it comes back and you didn’t have to do anything. The hard part isn’t getting shelf space because everyone gets the same amount of shelf space on Amazon as everybody else. The hard part is earning attention and trust and nothing that Henry Ford did was about attention or trust.

Why running a ton of ads just doesn’t work anymore

Robert: One thing seems to be carried over from that older era, it’s very popular to do, and that is the practice of interruption. Why doesn’t interruption work?

Seth: Well interruption does work unless your interruptions are being interrupted. Interruption works when … if you stand up in church and start screaming and yelling, everyone will notice you. They may not trust you, but they will notice you.

What has happened is that the amount of interruption, the amount of noise, has gone from getting two emails a day to 450. So you can interrupt my email box all you want, it’s not going to work.

So we replaced this idea that you could steal my attention with an idea that you could earn it and I have to pay it to you. I can’t get it back cause once attention is gone it’s gone forever, but the person who owns attention has built a worthwhile asset.

I would say to your listeners, name one company that has gone on the internet and built a brand, a jingle, a slogan, or a logo and the answer is, “none.” The internet doesn’t build those things the way TV does.

What the internet builds is connection. Every successful internet company and every successful internet marketer is successful for that and only that reason. They have earned attention, built trust, and turned it into profit.

The most important element of true marketing

Robert: Alright, I am going to ask you a little bit later for an example or two of folks, individuals, or companies that are doing that well, but even good marketing, real marketing as you’ve described earlier, gets a bad rap from people in certain corners of the internet. It’s a word that’s called all kinds of inaccurate things and associated with all kinds of people and practices, but I think you are arguing something very valuable here, and that’s that we’re all already marketing, for better or worse, and that true marketing, almost by definition, lies at the very core of dreaming up and making astonishing product services or ideas. Is that about right?

Seth: Oh yes, it’s totally right. The problem, given how good we are at making up words, is that we don’t have a word for the other kind of marketing to distinguish it from this kind of marketing.

I’ll accept partial responsibility because I haven’t thought of a good one yet, but the guy who is selling, get rich quick, $99 a month PDF’s that are exclusive to you, blah, blah, blah, and then slams some extra charges on your charge card tells his mother-in-law that he is a marketer.

I don’t see how he could be any more different than the marketer that brought us the iPad, but both guys are marketers, and you are correct, that there are a lot of people who look askance at it but if you ever went on a first date, or if you every tried to raise money for your charity, you are a marketer too.

When you should start marketing your product, service, or idea

Robert: To be very clear then, according to your post and the major point that you bring up in it, when should we start marketing our products, services, or ideas?

Seth: Well before you have your product, service, or idea, how do you decide that running a service that’s going to help homeowners lower their property taxes is worth your time and effort? The decision to do it is a marketing decision, right? The implementation of it isn’t difficult anymore. The implementation of importing rugs from Turkey or the implementation of deciding to build a new kind of social network, the coding isn’t hard, the hard part is marketing it and telling a story about it that people choose to listen to.

I did a post shortly after the “When should we add marketing” post about sea monkeys. Anyone who grew up reading comics knows about the sea monkeys. If you ever ordered them, you didn’t get the king and the queen and the little happy kid monkey thing, you got microscopic brine shrimp. If you turned off the lights, and used a flashlight, millions of them would swim around, that’s how you train them.

Well clearly the marketer had nothing to do with the guy who put the brine shrimp in the packet. They said to the marketer, “we got a bunch of brine shrimp in a packet, come up with a way to sell them.” If your job is to sell somebody else’s sea monkeys, it’s an interesting intellectual problem, but it’s not the marketing I am talking about.

Robert: That can’t exist today.

Seth: Well I am not sure that I am ready to buy that. I think there are lots of people who are successfully selling average stuff to average people because we love a story, we like to be entertained, and we’re going to buy stuff.

My argument is, given the choice, the purest form of marketing starts from scratch and that if you are an ad agency, your big win is to let your clients have you sit in on the product development meetings. Then you can help them design products that don’t need advertising, but if all you are going to do is sit there and wait for them to bring their average stuff, you’ve made your job much harder.

What good storytelling marketing looks like

Robert: What does this look like Seth? What does this storytelling look like digitally online today? Give us an example of one good way to tell a story over time about your company, about your idea, about your product.

Seth: A lot of times what is going on is that you are not telling a story about what the industrialist would have thought.

If I think about TOMS Shoes, Blake tells a story that if you buy this pair of shoes, you will be part of a hip group in your community, plus you will have a story that you can tell everyone, which is an identical pair, went to someone who doesn’t have shoes. Right? So he doesn’t tell a story about the fabric or the workmanship, he tells a story about what your act of buying did.

You do that year after year after year and you end up selling literally millions of shoes that way. That’s really different than saying, I can prove my shoe is better than your shoe and if you don’t buy it, you’re an idiot.

An example that shatters the old marketing system

Robert: Alright and to finally give a vivid picture of what this can look like, and you give a great example with TOMS shoes, but I would like to close by asking you for one more, or maybe two, examples of people or companies who are embracing marketing for what it truly is as you described it here. Adding marketing from the very beginning, and all the way through, rather than plopping it on at the very end of the sales process and bringing it to market.

Seth: Okay well I always loathe to do this because inevitably the person I pick then does something that I didn’t know about and people say, “see you shouldn’t have picked that.” I mean, poor Tom Peters after In Search of Excellence, which was loaded with great stories, 80% of the companies, had a hiccup, not his fault of course, it’s for analogy purposes.

Let me tell you about Shepard Fairey, who most people have heard of. He’s the most famous fine artist of the century. So Shepard Fairey is a talented graphic artist, but there are millions of graphic artists and they look at the fine art market where someone might get paid $50,000 or $100,000 for one painting and they say, “that’s good work if you can get it,” and they go to the old system of, “how do I get a gallery owner to recognize me?” and, “how do I get a show and then how do I get a bigger show?” They are struggling. We invented the term starving artist for a reason.

Well Shepherd did none of that. Shepard said, “I am going to make art with story and I am going to organize it to spread.” So he put it for free on the wall and he was arrested more than 30 times for putting his art on the walls of buildings in Los Angeles and in Boston and in New York. That is a real commitment to what I am talking about and that he didn’t charge a thing, in fact, he was willing to go to jail to spread the art.

Well over time Shepard builds a blog and that blog built a mailing list and then he starts doing something where once or twice a week, he will post that he has a new limited edition piece coming out and you can buy it for between $40 and $100. He has to change what time he posted because so many people want to buy it that he needs to make it sort of random.
Many of the people who buy it turn around and resell it for $500 or $1,000 to a collector because everything is limited and, over time, he built this tribe of people who identified with his art and identified with the way he spread it and started moving his way up the food chain to the point where one of his works has sold for over $100,000 for an original and he’s had a major New York City show.

It was inevitable that he would get there because, step by step, bit by bit, he spread a story. He built a tribe. He earned permission. He made connections. He did art that people recognized. It’s iconic, it’s all of these steps, built in to what he was trying to build.

Is traditional advertising dead?

Robert: You said it just now, but I can hear a small business owner out there saying, “Okay, I understand what’s going on, I see all of this, but I don’t have the time, how do I make this happen now, online? I’ve got to get my stuff out there. I’ve got to make sales. Yeah, yeah, it takes hard work and all of this but can’t I just get a bunch of money together and make something happen? Come on, what about the old days?” What would you say to that?

Seth: I am so glad you brought that up. That, in fact, is not what they are saying. What they are saying is, “I like the industrial era, I like the industrial age, I’ve got this pile of mediocre stuff, help me sell it.” Then they say, “By the way, I hate marketing.”

Well the reason you hate marketing is that you are doing it the old way. You are trying to push, and trick, and cajole, and interrupt your way into someone buying your slightly better than average stuff for slightly better than average pricing. I am like, “Great! Have fun! But don’t tell me that’s the future, because it’s not. And please don’t ask me to give you countless examples or folks who used funnels and sales pitches to get that busy average person to notice them and instead of their competitor and buy it. Not the way it works now!”

If you want the wind at your back, take a deep breath, prepare to get rich slow and you will get rich slow by emulating this connection economy process that is relentlessly successful as opposed to herking and jerking from come on to scheme to come on to scheme and in the long run you are going to get nowhere.

Robert: Would it be fair to say that you are stating that that old world is gone? Maybe not completely, of course, we still see some vestiges of it and some pretty powerful vestiges of it. But it’s gone. We don’t have a choice, right? This is not a choice between one or two. The choice is to proceed as you described.

Seth: I think that if you want to hang in there, you will be able to hang in there for a while. I think that if you want to grow, I don’t know how you can do it that way. The model is really simple. Dell Computer can’t do it anymore. Dell Computer’s model is probably more similar to yours than my model is. If you look at Dell Computer and say, “Why can’t Dell Computer grow, why can’t Dell Computer sell more of its PCs using its brand and logo, blah, blah, blah?” It’s because consumers are too smart for that and when everything is a click away, we’re just not going to give you our attention because it’s important to you.

Robert: This has been Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio . Thanks for listening everybody. If you like what is going on here, a great way to support the show is to head over to SethGodin.com and you can see some of the work that I’ve done.

Robert: Mr. Godin, you have taught and shown a generation how to do this marketing thing ethically, artistically and remarkably. Thank you.

Seth: It’s a pleasure. Keep spreading the word, and thanks for the good work you and the rest of the guys there do.

[/transcript]

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The Show Notes:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
• When Should We Add Marketing?
• SethGodin.com
• We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is VP of Marketing for Copyblogger Media. In the off hours, he files unusually short stories to the Internet.

Google’s been pissing people off lately. Panda, Penguin, Parakeet (okay, I made that last one up), who knows what’s next …

Then there are the social networking evangelists whose entire fortunes are deep in Zuckerberg’s asset.

And finally, the faithful content producers, who labor slowly and quietly to build their businesses one thousand words at a time.

It can all seem a bit much to keep up with. SEO isn’t bad. Social networking sites aren’t evil. Content marketing isn’t impossible. But it can feel like it sometimes.

To clear up some of this confusion and frustration for us, I’ve asked Lee Odden to jump on the show and tell us how the smart, systematic integration of search, social, and content can attract an audience … and keep businesses — both large and small — sanely profitable.

In this episode we discuss:

• The 3 phases of a holistic customer attraction plan
• What the changes in search algorithms really mean for online publishers
• How to intelligently plan a content strategy that works
• Why it’s now essential that you become a “holistic” content producer
• 5 content optimization audits you need to perform
• 3 steps to implementing your systematic content plan
• How to scale your content efforts on a limited budget

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

[transcript]

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert: This is Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio . I’m Robert Bruce and I am here with Lee Odden, CEO of Top Rank Online Marketing and author of the book, Optimize: How to Attract and engage more customers by integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing.

Now Brian Clark has said he’s very glad that Lee wrote this book so that he wouldn’t have to. Copyblogger is behind Lee’s ideas here and I am hoping to get to the bottom of this very cool and very effective holistic view of attracting customers online. Lee, thanks for coming by the show. Are you ready to answer some of these questions that I’ve got about SEO, social media and content marketing?

Lee: I am happy to be here, ready to be interrogated, Robert.

Robert: Excellent. Well just kick back for just a moment, I need to do a word about our sponsor, and then we will get right back into it. This radio show is brought to you by Internet Marketing for Smart People, which if you haven’t heard is our online marketing course that we deliver straight to your email inbox.

Now this course consists of 20 highly useful emails and more if you decide to stay on. It covers everything from content marketing, to email marketing, to the basics of good copywriting, to social media strategy and much, much, more and by the way, it’s totally free.

If you want to join over 75,000 people who have signed up, just jump-start your online marketing efforts, if you want to skip a large part of your learning curve with all this stuff, if you want to learn how to use the online marketing strategies and tactics that actually work, get on the bus, sign up, it’s easy and it’s free. Just head over to Copyblogger.com, scroll down to about the middle of our homepage where you will see the headline, “Grab our free 20-part internet marketing course.” Drop your email address into the little box there, and we’ll take care of the rest.

How SEO has changed for online publishers

Robert: So let me make sure that I understand what you are getting at with your new book here, Optimize. And that is as far as I see it, the big picture with SEO is really now, a holistic picture with content, social and search being one thing. I am just wondering if you can explain this holistic concept in more detail.

Lee: There’s a lot of history to SEO. I mean even though it’s been around for 10 or 15 years at best, there has been a lot of changes. They say that the one constant with internet marketing, especially with search, is that things are going to change. You can look back. I started in the business in 1997 and I never, ever would have imagined back then that things would be in the state that they are now. There was no Google. We were in a world of Lycos, Alta Vista, Hotbot, right? It was really all about keywords and that was it.

Then Google came along and we had to bow down to the almighty link, and as things have progressed, and things got personalized, and things began involving different media types, in terms of universal search, and personalized social search and social signals, really, really growing and in many cases displacing the importance or at least augmenting the importance of standard links between pages as signals.

What it really all boils down to is the ability for a company that’s publishing information online to connect with an audience and to keep them around.

Optimize takes this sort of holistic approach and doesn’t just connect the dots of how those target customers, those customers that you are after, discover and consume and act on content, but also digs into what it is that they care about in the first place.

SEO as a tactic or discipline has been very focused on keywords. It’s been very focused on the notion of optimizing for search engines, the notion is, the better visibility, the more traffic, and what should follow are more leads and conversion and more sales. Optimize takes the approach that …look, that’s important. It is, but let’s find out what customers care about.

Let’s really identify common characteristics amongst groups of customers, let’s understand the sales cycle, and let’s actually map the information needs in terms of content, across that buying cycle and then identify search keywords, social topics, and places where those customers can be influenced to move through that journey of the sales cycle to buy, so that by the time we come to conversion, we’ve got a self-educated customer or prospect that has pulled themselves through that journey to buy and that shortens sales cycles, increases order frequency and volume, repeat orders and referrals, all kinds of good stuff.

Why it’s now essential that you become a “holistic” content producer

Robert: Would I be right in breathing kind of a sigh of relief about all of this stuff? Not that we’re talking about anything that is unscientific, not that we are talking about throwing away testing or keywords or anything that has gone before, but breathing a sigh of relief at this holistic approach, because in some sense it seems like, though not well, generally, it seems what a lot of people are already doing.

Lee: I think there is something to be said for the building blocks of marketing as having been often overlooked. People like to chase shiny objects like this whole notion of social media, social business, social this or that, without having any clear goals identified and not having a clear idea about what’s even possible if they approach things a little more holistically.
Here is an example, most people are investing in SEO from a marketing perspective because it’s all about customer acquisition, and that’s great. But companies produce lots of other types of content that doesn’t have to do with products or services being sold and they have particular audiences in mind.

At the same time, people search for many different reasons than just to buy stuff. So while the revenue opportunity is very significant and most formidable, what a lot of people are leaving in terms of money, on the table, is efficiency.

For example, you’ve got people who are already customers and they have a problem, they go to Google and they search for an answer to a problem, why wouldn’t a company optimize it’s knowledge base in FAQ content so that the customer can answer the question online, right within a click through from Google instead of having to pick up the phone and annoyingly navigating an auto attendance system to finally talk to a human being or fill out a form and who knows when they will get replied to.

Same thing with optimizing news content, so that journalists who are doing research on topics, companies and subject matter experts can actually write about a company because they were easy to find versus only relying on outbound media relations. There are lots of efficiencies and cost deflections and other business benefits that come with optimizing holistically and maybe it is blocking and tackling, but a lot of folks aren’t doing it and Optimize covers all that.

How to plan a holistic content strategy that works

Robert: Now you break your overall optimization strategy down into three major phases, which are planning, implementation and scale and we’re going to talk about those three here but let’s start with phase one. What are some of the best practices surrounding good optimization planning?

Lee: I think one of the first things to do is just to get a sense of what is possible. I just want to touch on a couple of different things so optimizing holistically is about taking a look at the totality of content and objectives for that content.

Who is the content for? We’ve got public relations content, marketing content, customer service content, we’re trying to recruit people, investor relations, right? Think about all that content and who the audience it’s intended for and make that part of your overall content plan.

The second thing that I think is important to take a look at is doing some research that’s competitive research, that’s doing audits, and SEO audits, a social audit, a link audit, and it’s doing some social media monitoring and capturing some idea about where conversation are actually happening on the social web relevant to what it is that your target audience cares about.
The other thing with planning has to do with translating some preliminary ideas about keywords and understanding market demand and rolling that all up into a firm set of hypotheses in terms of objectives.

We believe, for example, that if we optimize our marketing content and we increase traffic by “x” with these relevant keywords, our revenue could increase by “y.” Right?

At the same time we’re forecasting that if we’re able to optimize our customer service FAQ content, and we’re able to increase traffic by “x” percent then we will actually be able to improve customer service or, if you will, customer perception of us substantially or by a certain percent.

We can forecast what’s possible and that’s all part of the planning phase. Understanding the landscape you are dealing with, identifying benchmark measurements and setting up goals and metrics to put that plan in place and be able to understand how well you are doing and progressing towards your goals and having an adaptable approach to refining it as you go.

5 content optimization audits you need to perform

Robert: How does your company, Top Rank, and this is a big question, we can’t cover everything here, but can you give us an example of how Top Rank does optimizing planning?

Lee: The way we do optimization planning is that we initially identify or we execute a series of audits. We want to have a sense of what our starting point is. We want to establish some benchmarks.

A lot of companies coming into a situation where they believe they can advance their marketing effectiveness through optimization may have employed other optimization tactics in the past, either on their own or with another agency, and we need to uncover, we need to know the truth about really what our starting point is. So we are going to conduct a series of different audits, there are five actually.

We are going to do a keyword audit, so that we have some documentation on what demand there really is, what language there is, what language, or voice of the customer so to speak, from both a search keyword and a social topic standpoint.

We are also going to do a technical audit so we want to make sure that the website or websites can be crawled properly by Google Bot and MSN Bot.

We are also going to do on-page or content audit, so we want to make sure that not only does the existing content deserve search visibility, or social sharability according to the target keywords that we have established, but we also want to make sure that the storytelling that’s happening with the existing content supports the key messaging and what it is that our target audience cares about. We are also going to do an audit related to links, good old fashioned, Google-centric SEO and document where links are coming from, what the distribution of anchor text is and all that sort of thing.

The fifth type of audit has to do with a social audit. What is the social presence of the brand? What are people saying about the brand? What are competitors doing? What are people saying about the brand terms, keyword terms? What sentiment, and that sort of thing.

These audits all paint a very qualitative picture for planning and we bring that together into a strategy that goes forward and says, “Look, here is the content we need to create. Here is an editorial plan.”

This is really getting into implementation but that’s how we do optimization planning. We do that kind of research to inform us and arm us with the qualitative information that we need to most efficiently and effectively reach the customers that we are after, but at the same time, produce content that is going to keep them around.

3 steps to implementing your systematic content plan

Robert: Yes and you have perfectly, effortlessly led us into phase two, which is, of course, implementation. So specifically, you write about building an effective content plan through what you call attracting, and engaging, and inspiring. Can you explain this process for us? How can we start to build an actual content plan that works through implementation?

Lee: Sure. There is this sort of content marketing trilogy that I talk about and that is having empathy towards how your target audience discovers content, right? What are they searching on, what are they talking about on the social web.

The second thing has to do with consumption, what are their preferences for consumption whether it’s devices, smart phones, tablets or computers, as well as media format, videos, images, if it’s text, is it how-tos versus tips?

There are lots of different types of content formats and understanding what it is that will move and inspire your customers is essential.

The third thing is action, or engaging. What kind of content will actually motivate them to take the actions we want them to, like buy stuff?

Not everyone is going to be a customer, but if they are inspired by the content that you’ve created, the engagement opportunity you’ve given them, then they may refer you to others. So the oldest form of marketing is that sort of word of mouth referral and the sale that everyone can make is a social share.

The implementation phase of the book is centered around acting on the opportunity to optimize for discovery, consumption, and engagement. And we do that by first going through a customer segmentation exercise and identifying common characteristics amongst groups of customers.

To simplify this, I am going to boil it down to just two things in terms of customers segments and personas. Who is your best customer? Who is your worst customer? Because we sure as hell don’t want to optimize for our worst customers. We want to identify behavioral demographic information that we can collect from surveys, from site data, from web analytics, and conversion data that will help us paint a picture of those coming actionable characteristics about a group of customers that we can leverage for developing a content plan.

So once we understand our best and worst customers, and what their pain points are, what their goals are, what they care about, we can literally translate that into a content plan that transcends or moves across the buying cycle so, in other words, for a particular customer segment, what kinds of topics and content types and keywords are relevant for generating awareness, for generating interest, for consideration, for purchase?

To be honest, we go beyond that, we look at the entire life cycle experience and look at retention, and advocacy.

How to scale your content efforts on any budget

Robert: Phase three is scale, and this is really where the rubber meets the road for many businesses. What are the challenges of social optimization that small, medium, and large businesses face in scaling and how can they overcome those challenges? You’ve got five minutes to solve the scaling issues of businesses large and small right here, Lee.

Lee: On the planet earth? Buy Optimize! Go to OptimizeBook.com, there you go. It’s a great starting point and there is a lot of storytelling in that third phase, it gives some specific examples about different types of companies and the challenges that they face and really, there is no predictable way to say, “Well small businesses will deal with this and large businesses will deal with that.”
But what I can touch on is that with a small business I think one of the opportunities for scale is self-education. Imagine a small business owner wearing multiple hats, they don’t have a budget either and I think they would do well if they would just get some self-education about what’s possible and how these different puzzle pieces can work together.

It’s kind of like a recipe. People will use that same recipe in different ways to achieve an objective that is satisfying to them and to anyone else involved. I think it’s important that they do get some understanding about how some of these fundamentals will work in terms of search, social and content.

I didn’t talk about SEO mechanics, or social media mechanics, or link-building mechanics. All that stuff is in the implementation phase. But to scale you have to have some idea of what the hell it is that you are doing and have some processes in place.

I recommend, if nothing else, that if someone doesn’t have a lot of time for that, that they do engage in some kind of audit with a third party resource.

That’s true whether it’s a small or large business. I know with large companies, we work with small and large companies; we have one large company that is a one hundred billion dollar business. It’s a Fortune 14 company. We’ve been working with them about five years now, and believe me, working with them is very different than working with start-ups.

I think the political aspect, working with a large organization and having some identification of, “Okay if I can get PR and marketing and customer service and even HR working together, and I can help them each understand what they are going to get out of this, from this idea of optimizing their content because it’s about more than just marketing.”

If I can show them how they can reach their goals and how it will advance their reputation in the organization and that political ecosystem that exists in large companies and if I can leverage that and make it part of our process, part of our brand style guide, if you will, then I will be more successful implementing a holistic approach.

In a small business, it’s that business owner saying, “You know what? I just have to make a commitment and now let’s act on it.”

An example of how to capitalize on an opportunity

Robert: Yes, and these three phases, I want to make clear to everyone that we are just doing a broad overview of the three big sections of Lee’s book, but these three phases, they are cyclical as well. In order to scale properly, it begins with the planning and the implementation of course as we go through that it also comes back around over and over again as you make moves to serve your audience better.

Lee: That’s it exactly. It is a cyclical process of having an idea, doing homework, having an informed idea about what’s possible, making a plan, implementing it, monitoring your progress towards that plan, measuring success, and then refining based on insight from your analytics and your measurement efforts, and then coming back to planning again and adjusting.

As you go, you are going to see opportunities and I talk about, for example, that editorial plan, content marketing plan, that specifically identifies topics and types of content and media and where we are going to promote in advance, but at the same time it allows for wild cards .

Here is a practical example; I saw a notice yesterday that we are getting a ton of search traffic for a search phrase having to do with “what are the best social networks for business?” I thought, “What the heck is happening, that’s crazy?”

I look at web analytics and I am like, “Wow, this is trending up.” There is a bunch of demand for this and I haven’t written a post about it in two years. So what did I do? I made sure that I put up a survey today asking people what the best social networks are for business.

So I’ve capitalized on an opportunity that’s kind of “real time”, if you will. That’s a big part of this.

It’s about quality over quantity

Robert: That’s very different from capitalizing on an opportunity like that and what you did there is very different, we are not talking about blowing around with the wind even though you see that search term coming through in your analytics, you write about it specifically.
What you are writing is still … you push that through the lens of everything else, the bigger plan of what your company is about and the integration of everything we’re talking about here, right?

It’s through that specific lens, not just grabbing whatever is popular, you mentioned earlier we are so addicted to these shiny things. That is not what you are saying at all.

Lee: No, no. If I was talking about that, then I would be talking about national disaster and celebrity crotch shots and things like that. Bad choice of words.

Robert: Page views, man. Page views.

Lee: Wasn’t it Stalin that said that “quantity has a quality all its own”. I don’t know.

I think I’d rather go for quality, just a qualitative approach is, yes indeed, the lens through which these opportunities and situations are acted on. No doubt about it. There’s sort of a narrative or storyline that comes along with that editorial plan and being able to proactively news-jack situations is smart marketing.

Robert: Okay, man, is there anything else here that I’ve missed that you really want to communicate to businesses both large and small that are maybe struggling with this integration of SEO, social media, and content marketing?

Create a content plan to meet the needs of your customers

Lee: The thing that holds it together is customers and content. Folks are sitting there going, “You know, marketing is handling SEO, public relations is handling social media, and then we have copywriters and stuff.”

Really what ties it together is having a clear picture of who your customers are and understanding that it’s a work in progress and at the same time, creating a content plan to meet the needs of those customers.

If you give customers what they want in terms of information, then they will give you want you want in terms of buying and referring you to other people.

So I think that’s really the core and central message of the book and what so many people like Brian, and Chris Brogan, and Scott Monty, and John Jantsch, and Ann Handley, and Joe Pulizzi, and people like that have all endorsed the book because of having that common understanding that the customer is key and it’s a missing piece in a lot of SEO discussions that are out there today. Folks are still hanging themselves up on Panda, Penguin, and keywords and aren’t really thinking about what’s best for the customer.

Robert: Alright this has been Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio. Thanks for listening, everybody. If this show has done something to you or for you, please head over to iTunes when you can and drop a rating or a comment there. We really appreciate it when you guys do that for us and it helps the show out a lot.

Lee, where can people find you and your book out there on the internet?

Lee: Well you can go to OptimizeBook.com and there we are publishing chapter previews. We’ll be uploading videos in each chapter, there is a downloadable spreadsheet both for a keyword glossary and editorial plan that you can get there so there is a lot of stuff that we are publishing there that is of use.

I have also been publishing a blog for eight years and you can find that by going to Google and typing in “online marketing” and after that darn Wikipedia you should find TopRankBlog.com and there you will find over a million words that I’ve written over the last eight years on specifically search. And I didn’t call it content marketing three or four years ago, I called it editorial marketing but about these sorts of things with lots of tips, and interviews, and live blogs, and polls, and all kinds of good stuff.

Robert: Great, I will link both of those in the show notes. Mr. Odden, you are a pro and in writing this comprehensive book you have saved my boss much aggravation and, in turn, saved me from much of the same, thank you!

Lee: I appreciate that, thanks!

[/transcript]

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The Show Notes:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
• Optimize by Lee Odden
• Top Rank Marketing
• Content Marketing 101
• SEO Copywriting Made Simple
• Keyword Research for Content Producers
• We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is VP of Marketing for Copyblogger Media. In the off hours, he files unusually short stories to the Internet.

Where do great business ideas come from?

What about products — how can you know (or at least make a highly educated guess about) whether your idea will actually fly in the market?

In his must-read book Breakthrough Advertising, master copywriter Eugene Schwartz wrote:

“This is the copywriter’s task: not to create mass desire — but to channel and direct it.”

Though Schwartz aimed that truth at copywriters, it’s also a good starting point in explaining Brian Clark’s Minimum Viable Audience model for building businesses and products that people want.

Build an audience through content marketing. Let them tell you what they want. Build products and offer services based on their desires and needs. Prosper.

In this episode we discuss:

• What is an Entreproducer?
• Why you should build a Minimum Viable Audience before anything else
• How to build a profitable business around content marketing
• How to succeed in business without outside funding
• Why focus groups and surveys don’t work
• How to find and build a product that people actually want
• How Brian built Copyblogger with a Minimum Viable Audience

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

[transcript]

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert: Welcome to Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio . I’m Robert Bruce. Brian Clark is with me today to spill the beans on his new multi-media email newsletter over at entreproducer.com.

What is it? What is a minimum viable audience and why is it crucial to your startup, ideas and products? These questions and more will be answered in the next few minutes, but let me start by asking Brian, did you finally get out of South by Southwest?

Brian: I did! I did, and immediately flew to Boulder, Colorado where it was 70 degrees and sunny, while it was 43 degrees and raining in Austin. Exactly the opposite experience that you want from South by Southwest but we made do. We did find a way to enjoy ourselves, I think.

Robert: We did enjoy ourselves. I was looking for a little break from the rain but that did not happen. All this talk about Texas being so hot and sunny didn’t really come around for me.

Brian: I think your break was called, “scotch.”

Robert: Okay this show is brought to you by Internet Marketing for Smart PeopleInternet. It’s the free 20 part online marketing course that your in-box cannot resist. Over 71,000 people have signed up for the course and one of the reasons you should jump in is because it’s so damn comprehensive.

Sonia Simone, our Chief Marketing Officer, and one of the top content marketers working today, developed the course. She has been at this discipline, and the discipline of dealing with Brian Clark, for years. She knows what works, what doesn’t work, and how to produce content that attracts an audience in order to sell products and ideas. She’s distilled the very best that Copyblogger has published over the years into 20 easy emails. All you have to do to take this free course is … well Brian let’s do this, head over to Copyblogger.com with me. Scroll down a little bit, about half way down the homepage, what do you see there? Read that headline for me if you will, Brian.

Brian: This all looks familiar, I think I designed this page.

Robert: I think you had something to do with it at least.

Brian: So it says, “Grab our free 20-part internet marketing course.” It’s got some handy compelling bullet points, a little social proof in the amount of subscribers there. There is even a link to more information if you need it, or you can just go ahead and sign up.

Robert:You can go there, read all you want about it by clicking that link or, yes, the easiest way to do it is to drop your email address into that little box that says, “enter your email address” and click the red “sign me up” button. If you do that, you will be on your way and we’ll take care of the rest.

So, Brian, let’s talk about this new venture and in starting to do so, I want to know what an Entreproducer is?

What is an Entreproducer?

Brian: Basically that’s a term I came up with about five or six years ago to try to describe the way we worked at Copyblogger. It really came up during 2007, when Tony Clark and I were building the first Copyblogger product which was Teaching Sells, I should say conceptualizing, because we didn’t build it before we launched it, and that’s one of the key tenets of what Entreproducer covers going forward.

A lot of things have happened, we moved into software development and all that, so essentially the way I think of it is that an “Entreproducer” is someone who sees the opportunities in online content, and since it’s a core aspect of the business model, I’ve adopted the producer/writer concepts from Hollywood such as the show runners that have become famous now.

The writer/producers like the guys from Lost and JJ Abrahams and all that kind of thing. Or it could be more like a peer producer who doesn’t create an ounce of content, never writes a thing, but makes it happen with whatever resources and people are necessary to get it done.

So the kind of things that we are talking about here are … we talked about content marketing at Copyblogger . Entreproducer is really how do you base a business around content marketing, whether it be a completely new startup idea or really taking an entrepreneurial approach to reinventing an existing business, which I think is really what the smart people will do to gain an unfair advantage in whatever market we’re talking about here.

There are also all sorts of cool things coming down the pipe in transmedia, all these forms of media that really wouldn’t work without the internet as that thing that ties everything together.

A lot of the traditional content industry is not going to go after these things because they are risky, or they don’t understand it, or whatever, so there are opportunities for entrepreneurs there. As you mentioned, Entreproducer is also the name of my new newsletter, which I am publishing as a way to finally write a book.

Robert: This is what it took then?

Brian: It had to be the right thing. I just never felt the need to write a basic content marketing book or anything like that, we give that stuff away for free on Copyblogger, that’s always been our model. We’ll teach you as much as we can of the basics in order to get you going, then of course we’ll help you out if you need a deeper course, you’ve got Teaching Sells, if you need software, you need a design, you need help with conversion, all of that stuff.

So that’s always been our model, and I think by not running off and writing a book and instead giving that content away for free has really been the key factor in our success so far. So you really don’t want to mess with that.

Why you should build a Minimum Viable Audience before anything else

Robert: Alright, speaking of the newsletter, the free content that you are giving out on Entreproducer, you’ve just released the latest newsletter article and it’s about something that you call the “minimum viable audience” and linked it in the show notes below but talk about that for a bit. The minimum viable audience, if you will.

Brian: It’s kind of a play on the term minimum viable product, which is kind of a core tenant of the lean startup movement. A guy named Steve Blank cashed out during the dot-com craze and became more of an academic and advocate of these kind of “lean” principles applied to startups.

Of course, Eric Ries, put out the book, The Lean Startup , last year which was a huge hit and started this entire movement beginning with Eric’s blog and carrying on with the book. It’s really cool to see, and of course the tie in between the two is that Steve Blank was a mentor of Eric’s at his company that he uses as an example in the book, The Lean Startup.

So I am totally down with the whole lean startup thing. We have run Copyblogger for the last six years according to those principles. The interesting thing was that I started leaner than they do in that I started with a blog and was looking for the audience to tell me what the business model was.

That is one of Steve Blank’s big things. Startups are not companies in the normal sense. They’re really a search for a scalable and repeatable business model. So once you find that model then you’ve got a real company.

At Copyblogger I’d say we became a real company in the fall of 2007 when we started getting paid. Before then the blog, the audience, was the mechanism by which the first product came to light.

In the typical lean startup model you begin with a minimum viable product, something that people will actually buy. That’s important, you know, people will only really tell you what they are willing to buy by buying it. Focus groups asking people what they would buy are horrible waste of time and will always give you bad data because people don’t know what they want.

I think the late Mr. Jobs said, “That’s the job of the entrepreneur or the business person, given all the available information and data possible, to figure out what it is that the consumer wants. You can’t ask them, it’s not their job to know.” I think that’s dead on and, in fact, I think if you ask you will get the wrong answer and you will end up failing worse if you didn’t bother anyone at all.

The minimum viable product is something that you build. It could be quite shaky. It could be a software product that’s held together with duct tape and is not stable but conceptually, if people buy it, then you take feedback from them and you immediately make it better.

This is how all Copyblogger products have been developed, with one key difference, we make better minimum viable products because we have this audience who we are interacting with, serving with content at such a level of intimacy in that it’s not like marketing research that is very arms length or anything like that.

With social media you’re right there. You put something out. People comment. Everyone’s got something to say about it and I’ve always said that social media is the greatest free market research environment ever because people are responding in authentic ways as opposed to telling you what you want to hear or things like that.

Robert: This is very different than the test subjects in a lab, right?

Brian: Absolutely. It is the world. It may be the online world, but it’s still the best thing that we’ve got for people’s reactions and unfiltered responses to something that is topically relevant to them, which is your content.

So basically all I am taking here with the minimum viable audience is exactly what we did with Copyblogger, which is before you try to come up with that first product, build an audience. They’re your test group, they’re the ones who become fans of what you are doing so far, they want you to sell something to them, and because of that relationship, you’ll have a much better and more concrete vision of what they actually want.

So your minimum viable product has a much better chance of being truly viable and it’s actually a little bit further along than you would be if you just started with an idea and tried to test it.

Why focus groups and surveys don’t work

Robert: Let me ask you just to be really clear here. I think I remember you saying, these are not direct questions that you are asking the audience, most of what you developed and came up with in the early days, and still do today, we as a company, comes from observation, right? Observation and various places. Like you said you want observations through social media as opposed to direct questions.

Brian: Yes, exactly. We have never done a survey. You ask for feedback, sure, but you keep it very open-ended. If you are going to do any kind of surveying, and people have made that work when they have a responsive audience, always ask open-ended questions. Don’t use multiple choice, you’ll pollute your sample by suggesting certain things. There’s a real art to that and even research scientists screw it up a lot of times, which I think you alluded to earlier.

With the totality of it all, by developing content you are intimately involved with in an area of relevant knowledge that you are trying to teach, transmit, share, whatever, and then you also get to see how people react to that content. That’s how we develop our content, but through that process you also get just invaluable information that you wouldn’t get otherwise.

The whole title of The Lean Startup comes from lean manufacturing, or lean production, which is actually a big company thing that was developed by Toyota decades ago for efficient manufacturing processes and it was totally focused on value to the customer, efficiency, and avoidance of waste. That’s why the lean principles are so perfect for a startup because the definition of an entrepreneur is someone who tries to make something happen with only the resources at hand, which are usually pretty thin and should be thin, which we’ll talk about in a little bit.

How Brian built Copyblogger with a Minimum Viable Audience

Robert: In the context of the minimum viable audience model then, what about promotion? What about getting the word out? How does that work? Is it more of a natural process or are you actively going out seeking promotional opportunities?

Brian: In the context of a minimum viable audience, product development is only one aspect of what that audience can do for you. What we’re talking about here is not a passive audience sitting in a theater or on the couch. What they are is a networked audience that can become a community of advocates for you.

So there are really three prongs to a minimum viable audience, one is the point when you have enough of a regular audience, people who have given permission for you to contact them, or they’ve subscribed to your feed, or they are following you in the parlance of social networking.

You want to be at the point, when you have enough audience feedback so that you know how to adapt the content itself. So the lean principle of “you start off with your best guess of what the audience will go for”, which is essentially a product of research and positioning. So when I first started Copyblogger, it was my recognition that people needed help with their blog content and it was at the intersection of copywriting and content.

That was my best guess for Copyblogger, and there was also enough room in that position to keep going, but I knew I wasn’t going to just nail it right from the beginning. You have to just start somewhere that’s good enough. It’s just like the minimum viable product thing. It’s your best guess, and then you have to put it out there and see what people actually do.

So in the content and development standpoint it’s about what are people commenting on and saying they found helpful. Sharing is the social media equivalent of buying, right? They start advocating your blog, or your video, or your podcast, or whatever format you are taking to develop content, and you are getting enough feedback to realize what they like and what they don’t like.

A lot of that can be down to what is popular and what’s not, but not exclusively. People tend to just say, “well popular is good and unpopular is bad.” To a certain degree, that’s kind of right. The audience rules, right? You also will glean insights into what do they need connecting each of these kind of blockbuster pieces of content in order to truly get the value that they are looking for. Whatever it is, the problem that they have or the desires that they have. So that’s the first thing.

The second one is kind of related, in that the minimum viable audience will start promoting your content by a social media themselves. That’s the part that people struggle with. I remember my first three months of Copyblogger, I was plugging along creating the core content for the site, which is now Copywriting 101 and a couple of others, but I kept trying these various content events like something beyond just a blog post, and I tried a couple of things and they didn’t really work, and then three months in I released a PDF report that went viral and, of course, it was about viral marketing.

That was the day I knew that I was doomed to be meta-fabulous! Copyblogger was going to have to teach and demonstrate at the same time with a very transparent wink at the audience saying, “You can listen to what I say or you can watch what I do but they are both congruent.”

Robert: They’re the same.

Brian: That is really where our “practice what we preach” mantra came from, because that’s what worked for us.

You can’t talk about marketing and pretend like you’re not doing it at the same time. In fact I think that was a determinant, so that was something that we learned from the audience by what actually happened very early on.

Then the third aspect is what we kind of already touched on which is that when you are developing content week in and week out for an audience, a type of person related to a topic (some people put the topic first, it’s really people), it’s a certain type of person you are trying to reach.

When you tune in at that level to that type of person in the aggregate as an audience, then you really start to see what’s missing. What are they lacking, other than the knowledge that you are sharing? Sometimes you make content mistakes where people don’t understand what you are saying, that’s an aspect of number one, which is that audience feedback helps you make better content.

The second aspect is beyond my content. What else is it that they need? That’s how every Copyblogger product has been born.

How to build a profitable business around content marketing

Robert: Very quickly, what is a good example out in the real world of a company or individual who’s used this minimum viable audience well, whether they knew it or not?

Brian: There are tons of people. Every person with a successful blog that’s now a business has done this and it’s not limited to blogging. I think a lot of this came out of the middle of last decade that the people who jumped on the blogging thing and experimented with advertising to various degrees of success, some people still do have advertising models, but all of them have added selling things to it.

Darren Rowse is a better example for Digital Photography School, which was his passion and his big, big business.

Problogger is not how Darren makes most of his money. He basically created a community around sharing content about digital photography and that’s a great business for him. It started out with building the audience, not with making money or knowing exactly what it was he was going to sell.

Leo of Zen Habits. Basically this guy had a life philosophy, he built an audience around it, and now he is living the dream. He moved from Guam to San Francisco, supporting his rather large family, bless him. I don’t know how he manages that many kids (laughs).

37 Signals, which I always loved to use as an example because back in 2005, before I started Copyblogger, I looked at 37 Signals. They had just moved into software and I was like, “Wow, too bad I can never do that.”

It did happen, because I built an audience, and over the course of the years following, these opportunities presented themselves thanks to having the audience in the first place and we can talk about that in a little more detail, but 37 Signals was a design shop that built a big following based, in part on their unique philosophies and utter lack of shyness about sharing them. When they went into software, they were like, “Well, Base Camp is what we needed for ourselves.” Of course at some point they recognized “if we need it then this audience we have needs it” and that’s really when 37 Signals, as we know it today, began.

That is what I like to call an example of being a “member of your own market”, which I think has benefited me as well. I am an online publisher serving other online publishers, which is helped along with the feedback from the audience which tells me what it is we all collectively need to do a better job.

Never lose touch with the people and their existing desires

Robert: This people over topic thing is really wild. We need to revisit this again at some point, but like Darren Rowse is a great example of that. I obviously follow him, I know him, I watch what he does, I learn from him, but honestly I could care less about Digital Photography School. It’s an amazing resource and an amazing site, so on one hand I am watching all the moves he makes, but this other world that he has created for those other people, around this topic, it is endlessly fascinating to me.

So let’s circle back around in the coming weeks or something.

Brian: Well just on that it is the intersection of, in this case, a passion, a hobby, but again it’s not about… If you create content that is just about a topic and ignore the fact that you are primarily there to serve people, it’s really Marketing 101, but it’s applied to the world of content development in that it’s always about the people. You don’t know how to frame the content, the topic, unless you understand something about the type of person and what drives them to do this certain behavior. In this case, taking pictures.

Robert: What’d our man Schwartz say? “Never, ever, ever lose touch with the people.” Which is why he spent so much time in “trashy magazines” and the like.

Brian: He also said, “You can’t create desire, you can only channel it.” That’s what Darren did. These people were out there, he shared an affinity with them. He decided to serve that market of existing desire. I am sure Darren has no idea that he is such the epitome of what Eugene Schwartz said, because only Copywriting geeks like us think about that, but it’s a great example.

How to find and build a product that people actually want

Robert: It’s almost over two years now that I’ve seen firsthand the power of an audience within Copyblogger, but for those who aren’t convinced of this concept, of minimum viable audience, what are the benefits with an audience over the typical “lean” startup approach?

Brian: Well the first thing is something that we already touched on but I want to refer back to. I know you read that Seth Godin post from I think maybe last week. I think it was something like “When does marketing start?” Right?

That’s the thing, I think a lot of people who go into entrepreneurship wanting to start up a company tend to compartmentalize it. Well then there is product, then if your focused on content, well there’s content, and then there is something over here called marketing.

No, it’s all marketing, and Seth has been saying that for years and I wholeheartedly agree and that nothing offends people more because they have preconceptions about what marketing is. But an entrepreneur is a marketer first and foremost. That’s what they do. They create something and take it to market, that’s the definition and to create something that people want to buy is the very first step.

So we hear about the exception cases where someone just dreams something up, puts it out there and it’s a homerun, which of course we celebrate and glamorize these stories but it’s less than … I don’t even know how minuscule this could be, half of one percent might be too much, compared to all the companies that fail, all the ideas that go into aware, all the products that are developed and are just left alone.

That is just not a function of reach. That’s another misconception, the idea that I have a great product and if I could just get on CNN, it would take off. You are probably not getting on CNN because really nobody wants what you made. You thought it was a great idea but you didn’t have any kind of viable reason why other people might like it beyond that.

Again, that’s what the lean startup movement is all about, finding out as quickly as possible, “Is this a viable idea? Is this a viable product?” According to the way we’ve done it and a way a lot of other people have done it, the way to begin that process is to serve a market before you’ve even got something to sell. The way to do that is with content, because at the same time you are accomplishing so many other things.

Let’s just start with that premise that serving an audience will give you a better shot at creating something they actually want. Not to mention that when you have fans, a lot of them will buy anything you put out as long as it’s reasonably competent, right?

I mean we’ve never advocated putting out junk. You’re not going to get away with it. That’s rule number one. There are many quality things that have been created that aren’t junk, but nobody wants them. That’s a distinction. Okay? Keep that in mind. It doesn’t mean that it’s bad, it just means that it’s undesirable. Channel existing desire.

Connecting with an audience is the epitome of what Schwartz had to read those trashy magazines for, not to say you are building a trashy audience. You get the point. He had to stay in touch with whatever market he was serving with his copy. The best way to do this is to basically take something you’re interested in or good at, making you part of that market, and connecting on a deeper level.

It’s like the best form of market research there is, not saying that you can’t start with the minimum viable product approach but there are other benefits to having an audience that goes beyond that.

Another point, which we touched on, is having that additional insight, connection that comes from constantly having to try to make a certain type of person’s life better with content.

In other words, solving problems or satisfying desires will help you build a better first product or a better minimum viable product.

Even with us, it has always been version 1.0. We only put in what we know is necessary or desirable. We know it’s not going to be perfect, there is no way. You have to get it out there, this is the whole idea behind “you got to ship.” Until you actually sell something to people you have no idea, you really don’t. You’ve got a better educated guess because you have the audience, but once it’s out there, there are going to be things that people tell you that you did right, and there are going to be things that people wished they had, and there are going to be things that people point out that you did wrong. That’s just the way it is.

That’s one of the principles of lean, which is start off with your best guess, understand that it can always be better and, number three, never stop making it better.

So you’ve seen that over time with the evolution of Teaching Sells, every software product keeps evolving, getting better, but I think the reason why we’ve been able to succeed one part is that we start off at a better 1.0 than someone who didn’t have the audience insight that we have.

Another benefit, of course, is essentially the true story of Copyblogger, which is that all I ever truly built was the audience. Tony Clark and I collaborated in 2007 to create Teaching Sells, later Sonia joined. She was one of the first members of Teaching Sells and then ended up on the team and took it to the next level.

All the software products started the same way. Someone outside came to me and said, “Hey, I’ve got this and you’ve got the audience, so let’s team up and do it.” Of course, that happened over and over until 2010 when we merged all the companies together to form Copyblogger Media.

What people don’t see from the outside is everything I said, “no” to. People look and say, “Wow.” I’ve heard that people say that Copyblogger Media has a Midas touch, everything we touch turns to gold. It’s true. We’ve never had a product fail. All of them are doing quite well, but the truth is that so many more things were brought my way that I said, “no” to. Way more than I ever said, “yes” to.

Again, that’s the same thing as building a better minimum viable product. Being able to choose what is right over what might be a fast buck. Now I like money as much as the next guy, but there is no way that I am going to destroy my primary asset of the audience on a crappy product or just something that is a short-term gain but a long-term pain.

People came to me with stuff constantly and I ignored I’d say 70% of it. So again, to quote the master, Master Jobs, “What you say no to is just as important as what you say yes to.” If I didn’t know the audience so well from serving that audience through content, I might not have been as good a judge in that context or I might have just sold out because I needed the money because I wasn’t doing very well.

How to succeed in business without outside funding

Robert: Seems like this minimum viable audience, the content that you are talking about, it seems like it’s also a great remedy for this incredibly popular word that we keep hearing over and over lately, pivot. These companies doing these massive, expensive, pivots from one product to another trying to turn this what might be a monster in some cases, but in content and in building an audience, you are doing a thousand little pivots that are less painful. It’s easier, it’s less expensive, it’s better.

Brian: Yes that’s an excellent point. There is nothing wrong, that’s another key concept of The Lean Startup, the pivot. I think you are pointing out some of the larger mistakes that perhaps I think could have been remedied by having a tighter relationship, having fans instead of just market segments and all the impersonal approaches.

A huge pivot is kind of a form of waste, on one hand, or it could be seen as saving the day on the other, but if such a huge pivot could have been avoided because you had a better starting point with audience, then you are serving one of the key tenets again of lean ideology which is “don’t waste.”

Another thing here on the waste front is that … so the lean startup thing has gained all this traction and Eric and Steve have got to be pleased about that, but at South by Southwest they had the “The Lean Startup Track”, I mean it was a whole day dedicated to it and one of our colleagues, who will remain unnamed, said she was disappointed that the main question over and over was, “How do I raise money?”

I think everyone on the other side of the table must have been slapping their forehead because that’s the wrong way to think about it. Getting investment money based on an idea loan without understanding anything about it or having any sort of asset that lets you know how much money you truly need, to me, is the epitome of waste.

For one, you’re wasting equity, right off the bat. You’re giving away part of your company, you haven’t even tried, I mean there is a lot to be said for bootstrapping beyond necessity. It seems to me that anyone can get money these days because everyone wants to be an angel investor. I’ve seen it happen before, it’s that irrational exuberance.

A lot of bad ideas are getting funded, and a lot of money is being wasted, but from the other side of the coin, why would you give up “x” percentage of your company before you know for sure what it’s going to take? You are also wasting control, right? You are wasting flexibility, because as soon as investors get involved, you may stay maybe majority owner, but they have a say and they have a very ingrained traditional way of the way things should be done.

If you are truly being a revolutionary, maybe they don’t like that. That’s always what scared me and why we’ve never taken money. We get more offers to take money now that we’re ultra profitable than at the beginning and we’re still very wary of it.

If our goals can only be accomplished, six years later, with as informed a decision as we can now make, and we decided to take money, well then I don’t think anyone could say, “we weren’t thinking it through” because that would be wrong. I am still not sure I want to do that kind of thing.

The real point here is you build an audience and they give you a better idea of what it is they actually want to buy, and someone comes along with you to partner or joint venture, whatever, on that product alone. You’re not wasting anything and you are not risking anything because if it doesn’t work out, you’ve really not done anything. You just keep moving on.

There are a lot of reasons why your first step raising money is, I think, a huge mistake that you may end up regretting later. Every funded company founder that I’ve talked to these days who understands that we never took money, they don’t even try to hide their jealousy, they are just like, “You don’t know how good you’ve got it, don’t take money.” I am like, “I know, I know,” especially at the very beginning.

I know Jason of 37 Signals is a big advocate of bootstrapping, that taking money makes you lazy, taking money makes you focused on spending money, instead of actually being creative about what needs to get done.

All I am saying is that you can bootstrap an audience. That’s been done a million times. Not only by us, but every example I’ve given so far and countless others out there, and that was why they didn’t have to get funding.

The audience gives you all sorts of opportunities, all sorts of data about what’s an actual thing that they want.

And the final point I’ll finally say it, even without all this other stuff, in the process of building an audience you’re building a valuable media asset. I know, Robert, on this show I’ve told you the story, before we merged all the companies together, I got a seven-figure offer from a publicly traded company for Copyblogger.com. That’s it.

Robert: Just the site?

Brian: Yes. Not all the other companies I held an interest in that actually make money. They wanted the platform and they had an advertising model, amongst some other stuff that they thought. So that’s how they valued their offer, which was still substantial but as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t even in the ballpark. It’s way more valuable to me with the products than it is without.

If we were ever to sell off the company piece by piece, product line by product line, which I doubt would ever happen, but if it did, Copyblogger.com would be the last thing to go. But my point is, it still itself has value. People make a living flipping sites all the time. They usually don’t take it as far as I did to get up to that level.

In 2006, people forget that the first way that Copyblogger actually made money was by launching Tutorial off of it in 2006 before YouTube sold, we kind of saw the writing on the wall about online video and then eight months later we sold it for six figures.

So in part, Copyblogger was profitable before then but I don’t count that because it was kind of a spinoff thing. You’re building media assets, people will pay money for them, people who are not good at what you do, which is create content. So I’ll close on that one because that should be the icing on the cake.

How to start building your audience now

Robert: Yes, I can hear people out there asking, “Okay this is all fantastic, but how do we actually build the audience? How do we build this platform? How do we produce the content to do these things as an Entreproducer?”

Brian: Well first of all, I always point people to six years of Copyblogger archives there. Starting with that very newsletter that you so eloquently pitched at the beginning. It really is a great resource, it really ties the topic together, to get Lebowski on you.

But from a strategic standpoint, from a business Entreproducer mindset, that is what the very next article on Entreproducer will be about, where I kind of lay out how these lean startup principles actually also apply to content development, content marketing and that’s how I started Copyblogger before Tony ever came along and explained to me what I was doing.

At that point, we were like, “Oh well we’ll just keep more of this, but now we know what it is called.” That was back in 2007, so again, I am really glad to see the whole lean movement really going wide. I think there is still a lot of confusion out there and I think there is a lot to be said for building an audience instead of chasing down investors. In the show notes as you mentioned the article about the minimum viable audience, will be already there, but if you want next week’s article, sign up for free.

I am using the very technique that I talk about in that article with the newsletter to write the book. So at a minimum you get the book in pieces for free upfront and you get a ringside seat to watch me as I do it. The same as it ever was meta-fabulous!

Robert: Alright. So the way to get the goods from Entreproducer is through email, we’ll have a link on this post and in the show notes of course. But that is Entreproducer.com. Thank you everyone out there for listening we really appreciate it. Mr. Clark, you are without equal among CEO DJ’s. Thank you.

Brian: I’ll agree with that!

[/transcript]

Other listening options:

• Click here to download the mp3 | 51.8 MB | 43:08
• Click here to subscribe via iTunes
• Click here for the RSS feed (non iTunes)
• Click here for the show archive

The Show Notes:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
• Entreproducer.com
• 5 Ways a Minimum Viable Audience Helps You Create a Successful Startup
• The Lean Startup
• When Should We Add Marketing?
• We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s Chief Copywriter and Resident Recluse.

Chris Brogan is everywhere.

From the outside, it seems that in just a few short years, he’s created an independent publishing and speaking empire with nothing more than his personality and a laptop.

The truth of his story is a lot more compelling.

He spent 10 years writing into the void. He flew to conferences around the country broke, eating leftover granola bars. He struggled to pay the mortgage, to pay the electric bill. After eight years of work, he had an audience of just 100 subscribers.

He eventually created an invaluable content platform that now gets up every hour of every day and goes to work for him.

It didn’t come easy for Chris, and it didn’t come fast, so he’s on the show today laying down some wisdom and advice that can make your own road to creating a content platform that works for you a lot less brutal …

In this episode we discuss:

• How to write 2,000-4,000 words a day
• The critical importance of brevity in the digital age
• Why every online writer should read (and study) The Shipping News
• 2 ways to find endless content ideas
• Why it took Chris 8 years to gain his first 100 subscribers
• Brogan’s best advice on how to create a valuable content platform

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

[transcript]

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert: You have walked through the front door and right into the living room of Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio . I’m Robert Bruce and I am talking to the ubiquitous and the irrepressible Chris Brogan today.

If you don’t know Chris, I am going to go ahead and immediately direct you to ChrisBrogan.com because he’s on a merciless schedule today, and we’re going to do a lightening round stream of consciousness thing with him based on an impressive list he wrote a few weeks back entitled ”97 Ideas for Building a Valuable Platform”.

More than a collection of facts, more than a mere resume, your content platform is the place from which you publish to the world exactly what you want, with no worries of fickle terms of service changes, unwarranted shut-downs or crazy privacy rules you’d rather not live with.

You own your own platform and, like it or not, it’s how the world now sees you, or doesn’t see you, professionally.

Chris thanks for coming in, man, you ready to burn through some of these ideas of yours on creating a valuable content platform?

Chris: I just can’t get over what you’ve done with this living room. If smart people were going to hang out, they’d be in this living room.

Robert: There is a chair over in the corner there, take a seat for just a moment if you would. I am going to do our sponsor and then I’ll call you back in. Is that cool?

Chris: Let’s go!

Robert: I need to remind everybody out there that this show is brought to you by Internet Marketing for Smart People, , it’s a fast, irresistible marketing course consisting of about 20 lessons delivered by email, and it’s free. Over 70,000 people have signed up for the course and one of the reasons they’ve done it is convenience.

The internet is a big place, Copyblogger alone has over 2,000 articles on every aspect of marketing online. You could patch all that together, post by post, page by page, but do you have the time? And how would you know if you were finding the best stuff out there? It’s just too much.

So we’ve bundled the very best that Copyblogger has written over the years into one simple systematic course. You sign up by email, we send you about 20 of them, and more after that if you decide to stay on, you read and study those emails at your own pace, whether it’s Monday morning or Saturday night, whatever works for you, and by the end of it, you’ve gone through the very best of Copyblogger’s practical marketing wisdom and strategy and you’ll come out the other side knowing more about this stuff then most ever will and it won’t cost you a dime.

If you want in, head over to Copyblogger.com, scroll down to the middle of the home page were you will see the headline, “Grab Our Free 20-part Internet Marketing Course,” drop your email address in the little box you’ll see there and we’ll take care of the rest. Chris do you need coffee or anything? You look comfortable in that chair.

Chris: Oh yeah, it’s great. You know I brought my own gin.

Robert: Perfect. You knew what kind of show this was.

Chris: No question.

How to write 2000-4000 words a day

Robert: Alright, so folks can find your post “97 Ideas for Building a Valuable Platform” over at ChrisBrogan.com/97 but let’s start with number 4, man. You say, “get in the habit of writing daily.” You’re a prolific writer. What does your daily writing practice look like?

Chris: So I type maybe between 2,000 and 4,000 words a day. Some of that goes into a blog post, some of that might go into my newsletter, some of it goes to articles that I write for different magazine gigs that I suddenly, accidentally have, and quite often I am working on a book.

Although I am just grateful to say that I am not writing a book right now, I am in between, I am getting ready to do the second edition of a book, which is almost like coasting down a hill.

So I do 2,000 to 4,000 words a day. The way I do that, and I know we’ll go into that in a great deal of depth, is that I type. So I just put my fingers on the keys and I know that is immediately a turn-off to people, but yes, you must type to actually get the words typed.

Robert: Right, I can hear people out there listening to this thinking, “yeah, yeah, that’s fine for Brogan, but I’m just not that type of person.” Do you think that you are a certain type, Chris, and that has allowed you to produce so much? Or is it something else?

Chris: There are a lot of people who are not my type of person. There are a lot of people who instead of trying to make money and do business really know what’s going on in American Idol and I wish them well.

I haven’t figured out a way to get paid for that though, and as I have a home and a mortgage and a family and an ex-wife and everything to pay for, I’ve got stuff. Because of this, in between vacuuming up pet dander, I need to earn a living, and so I try to figure out how I can build a platform that lets people come to me so that I don’t always have to look like a leg humping sales person. In between that, I create words and the words are in service of business a great deal of the time.

A lot of people say “Well I don’t write because that’s not my main business, my main business is selling things.” And I go, “Great! How do you sell those things? Do you shake people and say, ‘Here hold this thing. Oh, now give me a dollar?’”

There is a transaction that comes right before the sale, and what I write is in support of that and also in community in between sales, which I think is probably where they forget. I think where we tend to lose some of the words that we’re writing is that we forget that we should actually have community in service of the people who occasionally pay our way. That’s I think, Robert, where we go astray.

Robert: Okay so would it be fair to say then that your 2,000 to 4,000 words a day, typed, are a conscious decision as opposed to something you were born with, some magical ability you possess.

Chris: Right, right. I’m not like a monk with a keyboard. I have a full life, I am doing all kinds of stuff, I have a girlfriend who is a yoga instructor so I am learning yoga and stuff and we just started a band together and I have all kinds of other stuff.

I keynote a lot so I am flying everywhere and doing speeches all over the place, which is another kind of writing. You don’t have to be monastic to put out a lot of words, I mean it’s just a matter of how you are going to spend your calories and your time trying to sell and/or build business, or do whatever you think that you need to do.

Don’t forget, when we talk about marketing and sales and all that sort of thing, I am always telling people not to think of sales only as an expense where dollars pass hands. I am also often thinking about the sale of ideas, so to me churches are selling. To me colleges that are trying to get you convinced of being educated are selling. We sell every single day, and so every time I say words like “sell” or “market” I am always trying to double back and remind people that that’s just in service of moving your ideas forward.

The critical importance of brevity in the digital age

Robert: Alright, second section of your list here is titled “Embrace Brevity”. As a fellow laconic writer, this is my personal favorite out of all of them in your list but why does brevity work so well today?

Chris: Well there is this really kind of weird crap where people are thinking that more words are better. I led by saying how many words I write a day, I didn’t say how many I put in one space in a day.

The other thing is that we are all reading off of a three inch device. It’s baffling to me how many people think that we’re writing for the laptop/desktop set but then when they get up from a conversation or when they get up to go pee or when they are hanging out at a tweet-up or whatever they are doing, that’s when they are flicking through their emails.

It’s on a little tiny three inch device, and so I am forever asking them, “Well then are you sending out 5 to 900 to 1,700 to 3,000 word posts or emails to people?” and if so, if you are reading all kinds of your emails on your phone, then that’s what everyone is doing.

You are not any different than anybody else so brevity matters. The other thing is we’re all sort of turning our social media consumption, and our consumption in general, into a chore. I am finding that people are reading less and less, they are consuming more and more.

Robert: So we both know that there is a place for short copy and there is a place for long copy that is still around, but are you finding yourself writing with more brevity in general?

Why every online writer should read (and study) The Shipping News

Chris: All the time. I think one of the ways to do it is you read the book The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx, and then you read it again.

Then by the time you’re finished the second run through of reading The Shipping News you can’t not write three word sentences all the time.

The other thing is that people often confuse long sentence structure with intelligence. If I don’t write a long sentence with a bunch of commas and stuff like that, then I probably am not a smart person.

But you know I had a great teacher, Ken Hadge who told me “Tell it to me like I am six years old.” The one thing I know for sure is that small easy to consume sentences really make that truth happen. I am just forever in the business of trying to make sure that people get the idea I want. I break all the rules, I make little one sentence paragraphs every now and again for emphasis.

How to find endless content ideas

Robert: You’re section called “What to Write” covers one of the biggest questions we get around Copyblogger. How do I find ideas to write about, how am I supposed to create all this content? Give us a couple quick tips about this for folks struggling to find ways to create content, to build their platform.

Chris: You know I read an e-book when I was doing some research on Kindle. I was reading some e-books and I was trying to find all the really crappy 99¢ and $2.99 type e-books out there from names that I maybe knew a little bit, or didn’t know, or people who maybe under-valued their product.

I was looking for something very specific but what I found instead, totally different – it’s almost like the way science goes sometimes – I found some really neat nuggets written into really poorly formatted e-books that I don’t think people will buy just for the look and feel of the product, you know? The cover art and all that was just heinous and whatever.

Out of all that, one of the story lines that I saw there that really worked on what to write about was write around any community’s frequently asked questions. So that’s one. That’s one really simple easy answer.

Look for the frequently asked questions of any community and you will see the meat and the guts of what people want more writing about. The number one searched thing on my website, all the time, besides my name, is how to use Twitter for business. That’s the thing that draws more people to my site, and Twitter has been around since 2006 and the last thing I ever want to do is write yet another article about using Twitter for business, but I can tell you that my search results if I wrote one of those everyday people would come and read it.

The other thing that I do is that the way I like to teach people how to write for their community is write stories that will make their buyer the hero. So if you sell, well I don’t know, the Copyblogger community is a wee-bit different, but let’s pretend that we sell vacuum cleaners, well then I would write “Ways to get twice the life out of your air filter” or “A 10-minute vacuum cleaning hack that makes you feel like you didn’t vacuum” and I would write all kinds of things that just made the product better.

Then I would stop writing about the vacuum cleaner in general, but write about housekeeping hacks and things like that. Things that sort of tie to the ecosystem of the product.

What we’re always doing a little bit wrong is that we’re writing only about our product or only about our service at the expense of forgetting what the buyer is like in all three dimensions.

If you sell jet skis then there are only so many articles that you can write about a jet ski, or there are only so many videos that you can shoot about how cool a jet ski is. But the kind of person who is a jet ski owner is also the person that has a lake front property, that has a little bit of extra money, that has a certain lifestyle that goes around it. So you write around the lifestyle or you write around the ecosystem and you have topics until you are dead.

Tap into your audience’s FAQs for answers

Robert: Okay, let’s double back real quickly for a quick tip. What’s a good way to find the frequently asked questions around a topic, subject, or community?

Chris: There are a few ways to do it, one of the ways that this e-book that I am talking about, I wish I could remember the name, I would love to give the person credit, but they said look at forums. Look at Google groups, and Yahoo groups, and all these old school technologies that exist out there for free, they all come with an FAQ page.

There are tons of bulletin boards services out there with a FAQ page. It just takes a little bit of Google work to start thinking about the frequent asked questions. You can type in a topic name and then space and then FAQ, which stands for “frequently asked questions” and then the minute you do that you’ll see a bunch of serving suggestions of people’s frequently responded to answers.

Look at every single one of those answers as fodder for a big post or a big article or a newsletter, whatever you want to do. Don’t recycle, don’t take the answer as it was provided on that site.

One, I mean don’t plagiarize, but two, you can come up with a much fresher answer than whatever is out there. No question about it, it’s baffling how many people come up with the idea of “Wow that’s not bad” and then they start with the Chef Boyardee quality, as opposed to cooking something fresh in the kitchen.

The myth of Chris Brogan’s “overnight success”

Robert: Alright. Next is “overnight success”. Anybody who knows you, knows your story, that you started this whole online publishing thing like two or three years ago and it’s come really easy for you, right? In a nutshell, that’s your story right?

Chris: That’s pretty much it. I just turn on the system one day and I just started cashing checks.

Robert: That is awesome! I think there is a book in there somewhere. No, really, this is actually one of my favorite stories of yours; it was a while ago that I heard you tell it and I don’t remember where it was exactly but what was it? It was a number of years to your first 100 subscribers? Can you tell that story?

Chris: Sure. I probably have a little bucket of these stories for you. It took eight years to get my first 100 subscribers, so first I have to give myself a little credit because there wasn’t RSS when I started. I started blogging back in 1998 and it was called journaling and people just basically had to go site to site to see everything.

There wasn’t a subscription mechanism per se, if I was really a pioneer I would have done an email list back then, but I wasn’t that smart. So, it took eight years to get my first 100 readers. Even today, people are like, “Man, Chris Brogan can write about a piece of poopy sitting on the sidewalk and he gets 50 comments, that’s amazing.”

Robert: I said that just the other day!

Chris: It’s true, by the way. If I write about a piece of poop there would be 50 comments. The thing is, people look at that 50 like that’s a huge number, but I get 200,000 unique visitors a month and I get about 70,000 RSS readers a day. Fifty comments out of any of those two numbers means way less than .001%, so you probably do get that many comments a day relative to your community size.

The other thing, the other overnight success story that I like to tell a lot, the first time I told this was in an interview with this guy Barry Moltz who has a new book coming out with Becky McCray, Small Town Rules: How Big Brands and Small Businesses Can Prosper in a Connected Economy .

We were talking about the fact that I couldn’t afford to be at half of the conferences that I was at. I was paying out of my mortgage and I was paying out of my bank account, such that when I’d land in Manhattan, I would have like a negative $120 balance in the bank or something. I didn’t even have the money to get the cab from JFK to the hotel and then if there wasn’t decent conference food at the event I would be stuck eating whatever might have still been in my bag, like a granola bar or toothpaste.

I went from really seriously not having the rent and being two months behind on a mortgage or something like that, from ramen noodles and all that, to five star hotels and as much steak as I could put in my belly and still have a liver. I did that the hard way, I did that with well over a decade of hard work, and to your point about the overnight success, it’s baffling how many people really honestly think that we all just started, that Brian Clark just started one day and started Copyblogger and was wealthy, and I just turned on my thing and was wealthy, and Gary Vaynerchuk was just handed all his money.

It’s a lot of hard work and I guess the one difference between our stories and people who are in the beginning is that people at the beginning seem to have this unrealistic belief that it’s going to happen a lot faster than it does.

It’s just like everything in life that’s worth anything, you start by planting seeds and nurturing them and you have to wait until the harvest.

Brogan’s philosophy on building a valuable content platform

Robert: Alright, last question. Let’s embrace brevity here. If you could boil down your philosophy of building a valuable content platform into one or two sentences, what would it be?

Chris: Be helpful, do it often. That’s easy. I give that advice to people as often as I can. When I say be helpful, by the way, it’s fascinating how many people think “be helpful” equals standing around asking, “how can I help?” That is the least helpful sentence in the whole universe.

Helpful is, “I was thinking about you the other day and I realized that it would probably benefit you to meet this person who can probably find you some business. Would you like an introduction?” That’s helpful! Not, “How can I help?” So be helpful to the people who you want to serve and that will change the universe.

Robert: Alright Chris, let’s get out of here. If people want you, as they should, they can get more of you over at ChrisBrogan.com. Anywhere else, you want to hook up with people?

Chris: Not at all. But if you go there I use the Genesis Generate theme, sign up to my email. My email is actually the coolest thing going on right now. I write back to people all the time, it’s a very personal email newsletter and every week I am giving away the secrets behind the wall. Go there. Hey, let’s get out of this living room, I think it’s time to go out and enjoy the rest of the day.

Robert: Yes. Thanks for listening everybody. Wherever and whenever you are, if you want to keep this operation going, the best way to do it is to leave us a rating or a comment on iTunes. Thanks for that if you do it. Mr. Brogan, you are a wild man and a player. Thank you.

Chris: Thank you, I’ve had the best time ever, and I ate popcorn the whole time.

[/transcript]

Other listening options:

• Click here to download the mp3 | 22.8 MB | 18:55
• Click here to subscribe via iTunes
• Click here for the RSS feed (non iTunes)
• Click here for the show archive

The Show Notes:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
• Chris Brogan’s blog
• 97 Ideas for Building a Valuable Platform
• The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
• We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s Chief Copywriter and Resident Recluse.

Think having a huge Twitter following is enough to drive your marketing?

Is big media attention (social or otherwise) enough to drive the sales you need and want?

Those certainly help, but the future of a successful marketing campaign lies — in part — in becoming a “Youtility,” finding creative ways to to be unforgettably useful to your interested propects.

So says thought leader, author, and one of America’s top three social media consultants Jay Baer. He jumped on the show today to clearly explain the “Youtility” concept, and how you can put it to use in your own marketing mix.

In this episode we discuss:

• Why you’d better be playing for the long-term
• Why the future of marketing lies in becoming a “Youtility”
• How “Friend of Mine Awareness” can revolutionize your marketing
• The fatal flaw of merely creating a lot of content
• 3 case studies in developing “Friend of Mine” awareness

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

[transcript]

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert: You are listening to Internet Marketing for Smart People radio . I’m Robert Bruce and in this episode, I have brought to your ears thought leader, author, and one of America’s top three social media consultants, Mr. Jay Baer, to talk conversion. Specifically, conversion of your website and social network prospects into potential customers. Jay, how are you feeling today? You ready to give us the goods.

Jay: I am absolutely ready, Robert, and apparently the first and second best social media consultants were unable, so I will do the show today.

Robert: Yeah, try not to drop the ball here. You are my first choice, let’s make that very clear. Where can people find you online?

Jay: Thank you. My primary online home is convinceandconvert.com. That is my blog and consulting company and, of course, I am on Twitter @JayBaer. Like the animal but backwards.

Robert: Excellent, we’ll repeat those later for folks, but before we get into these questions for you, Jay, this show is brought to everybody out there by the Internet Marketing for Smart People course.

Over 69,000 people have signed up for our course to learn the basics of marketing their businesses and ideas on line.

There are many reasons why but one of the big ones is: it’s so easy. You sign up by email, we send you about 20 emails, you read and reread those emails at your own pace, whether it’s 2:00 pm or 2:00 am, whatever works for you. By the end of it, you’ve gone through the very best Copyblogger has to offer. Over six years of practical marketing, wisdom and strategy, and you come out the other side of it knowing more about this stuff than most ever will.

More importantly, you are going to have a very strong foundation to move your business and ideas forward online, and it’s all free.

If you want to get on the bus, like I said it’s very easy, just head over to Copyblogger.com, scroll down to the middle of the home page were you will see the headline, “Grab out free 20-part internet marketing course,” drop your email address in the little box you’ll see there, and we’ll take care of the rest.

Why the future of marketing lies in becoming a “Youtility”

Robert: All right Jay, in a recent speaking engagement you pointed to three ways that we can tie our prospect’s interest to action. That was a great talk you gave. I want to ask you to first give us the big picture here, an intro to these ideas, and then I am going to grill you on those three specific ways while looking at how we can put your best strategy to use online. Can you give us an overall 10,000 foot view here of your talk?

Jay: I can. We are in an era of an invitation avalanche where every company of every size and description is competing, not only amongst themselves, but with your parents, your spouse, your best friend, and your kids, for your attention.

Every company wants you to follow them, and find them, and watch their video, and read their blog post, and get their emails and everything else and we are in a place now where the way to break through that clutter is not necessarily to do more or to do it more loudly, but to do it with relevance, to do it with context.

And that’s why we believe the future is in becoming a Youtility, being actually useful. The premise is that helpfulness trumps selling. The difference between helping and selling is only two letters, but those two letters are extraordinarily important.

Robert: So in the context of major competition and information overload, this is kind of what we are talking about, right? Not only conversion from folks that have found us, but that pre-conversion, if you will, of the potential customers out there everywhere.

Jay: Absolutely. I think it’s very much of a mid-funnel circumstance. Certainly, you have to create awareness by being present, by being useful, but this idea of being helpful, of really making question answering, and being a Youtility, a major plank of overall marketing intuitive, turns the tables on the historical customer/company imperative, right?

Since the very first caveman sold a rock to another caveman, the whole relationship between companies and customers has essentially been master and servant. Company is master, customer is servant, and companies say, “We’ve got great stuff, buy it from us. We’ve got great stuff, buy it. We’ve got great stuff, but it from us.”

How they choose to express themselves, and what medium they express themselves in, are really just details. The fundamental relationship has always been master and servant.

Now it can be much closer to peer-to-peer and the companies that are going to succeed now and in the future are the companies that really assist their customers and prospective customers in the same way that a friend would assist you.

The fatal flaw of just creating a lot of content

Robert: Let’s drill down into some specifics here that you give us. What is, first of all, “top of mind” awareness in relation to conversion and, as you say, being helpful and how is it potentially flawed?

Jay: Well top of mind awareness, of course, is the historical imperative for marketers. It’s the way we’ve done business in marketing for generations or centuries and the notion is that you have a sustained program so that when your prospective customer happens to need your service, you have been around enough. They think “Oh I need X. I remember those guys who are purveyors of X” and that you’re sustained participation triggers them to think of you first.

Now, that is a difficult proposition today because of the fractured media environment, it’s difficult to maintain that kind of broad-based awareness. You also have this tidal wave of marketing messages, so it’s harder to standout anyway, and we also have a rising suspicion of marketing messages and much more technology for consumers to tune those message out, whether it’s DVR’s or turning ads off on your browser or any number of other advances.

Robert: So traditionally this has been “spend a lot of money over a long period of time”, we look at the traditional advertising model and we know that things are changing, we know that people’s response to general advertising campaigns are changing radically, but this also applies to our sustained overall content strategy, right? I mean we’re not looking at 2005 anymore, correct?

Jay: Absolutely. I think it’s very, very difficult to say our content strategy is just to make a lot of content because everybody is making a lot of content, right. It’s not a volume game anymore. You can’t succeed just based on throwing more coal into the furnace. You have to win based on relevance and I think helpfulness.

Why is “frame of mind” awareness important?

Robert: Okay, so that’s top of mind awareness. We can see some issues with trying to gain that in this current landscape, but the second way to turn our prospective buyers into action is what you call “frame of mind” awareness. What is the difference between the two, and can you define that strategy for us?

Jay: So frame of mind awareness is really what we have come to call inbound marketing or to some degree, content marketing or the notion is that you create content, you tell stories, you provide resources, the kind of things that you do so very well at Copyblogger, and as a result when people need you, they will find you, primarily through search or now more social oriented referrers that when they need you they will seek you out.

Because you have created this great content, they will discover you at their point of need or as Google calls it The Zero Moment of Truth and that really is the inbound marketing philosophy and trust me, I’ve made part of a career out of inbound marketing as you have as well, and I’ve got no problems with inbound marketing phenomenon or philosophy, other than the fact that I think we don’t talk enough about the notion that if you only are doing inbound marketing and you only are doing frame of mind awareness you are by definition capping your upside, because you don’t create demand with inbound marketing, you fulfill demand.

You are reaching out to people who are ready, who will take the step to find you and that’s not the same as “you know what, you didn’t know you need this.” The famous quote, and I’ll paraphrase, that Steve Jobs once said,

It’s not the consumer’s job to understand what it is that they need.

Robert: Can you give us a good example of a company or individuals that are doing really great frame of mind awareness.

Jay: Oh sure, I think in our particular world, Robert, you see it all the time. Certainly, I think you guys at Copyblogger are amongst the best in the world at that particular type of program.

Hubspot is very, very good at frame of mind awareness and inbound marketing, organizations, you see a lot of B2B companies that are very good at telling their story. Eloqua, for example, is really good at the type of approach where they just put it out there when people are ready to take the next step. They have resources available to do so.

The most powerful way to convert prospects

Robert: And this leads us, finally, to discuss what you call “front of mind” awareness which, in your opinion, is the most powerful and accessible of these three ways. Can you explain this third way for us and how we can put it to good use for converting interested prospects into potential customers of our products and ideas?

Jay: Absolutely. You’ve probably seen the movie Meet the Parents where one of the recurring gags in that movie, and all of its sequels which got progressively more terrible, is the “circle of trust”. You are now in the circle of trust.

“Front of mind” awareness really operates on the same principal as a business does when it says, “What is the best possible way that we can assist our potential customers or current customers? How can we make their lives better, even if we don’t make any money at that today?”

In so doing, you build this relationship where you don’t have to market to them. You are giving them resources or information or opportunity or access that generally, unlike the Trojan horse, makes their life better as a result. The customer will keep you close to their bosom.

The customer will keep you inside their circle and when, in fact, they are ready to take the next step and buy from you or advocate on your behalf, they will do so. It is basically building friend-based relationships with your customers based on being useful. Based on being a Youtility.

“Front of mind” awareness and playing for the long-term

Robert: So how do you do this Jay? What does this actually look like and how do we accomplish this front of mind awareness?

Jay: Here is an example of a company that does this really well, and I think it’s a good example because it’s something that people understand and they’ve experienced. Geek Squad.

So some people have had great experiences with Geek Squad, others less so. That’s not really the point. Geek Squad services, of course, part of Best Buy and they make their money by fixing things. They fix things for a living, but yet they have a very robust YouTube presence where they have literally hundreds of instructional videos on how to set your DVR and swap out a hard drive, and all the things that they actually would do for a fee.

I was at a conference a few years ago, and this is where I first sort of started thinking about this concept, and their founder, Robert Johnson, was speaking and there was a question from the audience, they said, “Robert let me get this straight, you guys are in the fixing business?” and he said, “yes.” “But yet you’ve got all these videos that show people how to fix stuff without you. How does that make business sense?”

And he said something; it was dead on and very funny. He said, “Well our best customers are the people that think they can fix it themselves.” Which is probably me, right? I would say, “Yeah sure I can do that.” Then I make it three times worse, but the idea is that yes, maybe they will show you how to do it, maybe they will be helpful enough to show you how to DIY this.

But eventually you are going to get out of your depth either on that project on a project down the road, at which point who are you going to call? Are you going to call somebody randomly that you discovered on Google or are you going to call the guys who you just watched their logo in the corner of a 14-minute instructional video?

It’s “the long game”. Being useful and being a Youtility in social media and content marketing is all about the long game. It’s all about the lag-putt not the tap-in, and the smart companies are those that understand it’s about getting customers eventually, not getting customers today .

Too many people in social media and content marketing are all about the quick close and you have to understand that you have to go to dinner first and then a movie.

The “bikini concept”; how much should you give away?

Robert: I heard Brian and Sonia talking recently about what’s been called the bikini concept. You can give 90-95% of your product, service, or information away and people will then gladly pay for that final 5-10%.

Brian was talking specifically about how he has seen folks with great success, essentially giving their clients the road map to complete whatever it is they need to complete, like you say, the instructional videos from Geek Squad, same idea, but the issue is that they are still going to hire you or enough folks will hire you because what they are paying for and what they really want is the execution of whatever it is even if you give them all the answers.

They are paying for the execution, they either don’t want to do it, can’t do it, or just don’t have the time. They will pay for the execution.

Jay: Having a shopping list doesn’t make you a chef. It’s not the same thing. In fact, that exact topic is what myself and Joe Pulizzi from the Content Marketing Institute are presenting at South by Southwest this weekend, it’s a session called “How far do you open the kimono?”

Does giving away thought leadership, cannibalize your ability to generate customers? And that idea of, especially as a professional services firm, “we shouldn’t tell people what we know because then they won’t need to you to hire us”? I think that’s just flat crap.

If you know so little that you can encapsulate your entire expertise in a free content give-a-way then you probably need to know more first. Think about what you just talked about in the open, you guys are giving away 20 plus action packed information rich emails, no strings attached. That doesn’t mean that people won’t necessarily need your services down the road, it just means that you are showing them how useful you really can be.

Robert: So front of mind awareness in a nutshell, and correct me if I am wrong, is being insanely generous with your expertise and what you know, related specifically to this product or service that you provide.

“Front of mind” awareness case studies

Jay: Not necessarily, not necessarily, and I think actually some of the best Youtility programs are those that are only tangentially related to what it is that you are actually trying to offer. For example, Hilton Hotels has an amazing program called Hilton Suggests on Twitter, it’s @HiltonSuggests.

The way that they do it is that they have their concierge staff and a number of their different hotels across America, and possibly Canada as well, monitor Twitter in real time. When people have questions that they can answer, they will leap into those conversations just because they can be useful.

The legend goes, and this was just two or three months ago I believe, somebody was in one of their markets, Buffalo or something like that, and they had a sick dog and just put on Twitter, “Oh my dog is really sick and I need to find a vet.” And the concierge staff in the hotel is like, “I know a great vet at 13th and Jay, take him over there he is fantastic.” He takes the dog over there, dog’s life is saved, and the guy goes back on Twitter and goes, “I cannot believe that Hilton Hotels just helped me save my dog’s life.”

That’s the notion of Youtility, it’s giving a gift of knowledge without an expected return, and that return will come back eventually four-fold.

Robert: Okay, this is outside the scope of what we are talking about here, a little bit, but humor me if you will. Do these concepts circle back around and also bring people into the “top of the funnel”?

Jay: I think they certainly can, especially, as we just talked about in the Hilton circumstance, if some of the ways you are helpful are not necessarily strictly aligned with your core service. It does help widen the top of your funnel.

Robert: That guy is going to talk to all of his friends, he’s going to spread it around on his little or big website, whatever he has but certainly spread the word about what Hilton did for his dog.

Jay: Absolutely. He is not necessarily a travel writer, and his friends aren’t necessarily looking to book a hotel today, but they will eventually. That’s why it’s all about the long game.

The definition of Youtility: usefulness and relationships

Robert: And stories like that will stick in the mind forever. Let’s talk finally Jay about Youtility. You mentioned it earlier and peppered it throughout our conversation here, but you have a different definition for this word and even a spelling that you came up with, can you define Youtility as you mean it and spell it for us.

Jay: Yes. Youtility. The notion is making yourself and/or your company radically useful, radically helpful, and realizing that this is much more about forming relationships than it is about harvesting opportunities.

One of my favorite examples of Youtility is a guy, his name is Taxi Mike, and he lives Banff, Alberta up in Canada, and it’s a very, very heavy tourist area up in Banff, lots of skiing and things like that. There are tons and tons of cab drivers in Banff and so what Mike does to stand out is that he produces this thing called Taxi Mike’s Dining Guide and all it is, is an 8 x 11, tri-fold from FedEx Kinkos on bright yellow paper and it’s just a map.

On the back is different recommendations about the best BBQ restaurants, best places to eat with kids, best outdoor patios, best fireplaces, that kind of thing. It’s really down and dirty and it’s clearly a one-man operation, but it’s all over town. It’s small enough that you can just throw it in your pocket, and at the end of the night when you are like “wow, I probably shouldn’t be driving home, I need a cab” you reach into your pocket and it says “Taxi Mike” and a big phone number on there. He is literally leading with the usefulness. His entire business is about the usefulness, the fact that he drives a cab is almost immaterial, it takes a backseat to being a Youtility.

Building long-term business with a marketing mix

Robert: I think my favorite part of this whole conversation is the idea of the long game and you’ve mentioned it several times. But we get so frustrated, especially if we’re just starting out. I can imagine folks out there either just starting in a business or struggling in a business they’ve had for some time and they are looking at this and they are thinking “Youtility”. They are thinking of all of this great content that they need to create, but also that they need to make something happen now.

Certainly, some things can happen more rapidly than others when we employ some of these strategies, but this is a long game, this is not in any way related to get rich quick. Can you say anything to the idea of patience?

Jay: Yes. I think that how I would address that is, while I think these programs are powerful and all of the ones that I mentioned are successful, it’s by no means, with the possible exception of Taxi Mike, the only marketing that these organizations are doing.

Geek Squad does a lot of marketing in addition to useful YouTube videos. Hilton Hotels does a lot of marketing in addition to Hilton Suggests. So this is a piece of the puzzle, this is not the puzzle.

If you think “we’re just going to be massively helpful and that’s going to be everything that we do”, that’s going to be tough. You have to realize that this is a funnel play, right? You’ve got to have top of the funnel things which might be top of mind awareness, you’ve got to have mid-funnel things which primarily is the frame of mind awareness, inbound marketing that we talked about and then I think you need to have a front of mind awareness, this type of Youtility oriented program which is going to pay dividends in the long-term.

The other things can pay dividends shorter term, and you need to interlace these things together to have a really affective program.

That’s why it’s called a “marketing mix”, not a marketing idea.

Robert: Any final words on this Jay?

How can you benefit people in their day-to-day lives?

Jay: I think companies need to sit down with a real clear head and it’s better if you get customers in the room and say “What are all the challenges that you have? Just tell us the challenges.” Then figure out where you can be helpful.

I think that there is a real opportunity for companies to perform a Youtility audit in their organization and say “Look, even if it’s not our core business,” like the Hilton example, “even if it’s not our core business, what do we have and what do we know that can benefit our customers and prospective customers, ideally in real time?”

Not enough customers are consulted about that and too many companies say “Well let’s start with the action, we want people to download this white paper and walk it back.” Yes, of course you do, but more than that, what do you know that people actually can use in their day to day life? Sitting down and kind of thinking through that can help lead you to a path of Youtility.

Robert: Alright Jay, let’s wrap this thing. We mentioned it at the beginning of the show, but where can people find more of you online?

Jay: My blog is convinceandconvert.com, the number one content marketing blog in the world according to Junta42, and I’m on Twitter at @JayBaer. Feel free to grab my book, The Now Revolution, one of the leading books on social business design.

Robert: Great, I will link all of that up in the show notes, for those of you listening, and thank you all for listening to our show. If you like what’s happening around here and you want to keep it moving along, one of the best ways to support us is to jump over to Click here to download the mp3 | 28.9 MB | 24:01

The Show Notes:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
• Jay Baer’s Blog
• Content Marketing 101
• Does Free Content Cannibalize Your Paid Consulting?
• We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s Chief Copywriter and Resident Recluse.

John Carlton is a professional copywriter who charges $2,500.00 for his one-on-one consulting calls.

In this 30+ minute interview, he decided to lay out some of his best advice for carving out a career in the writing trade. And he decided to give it up at no charge.

Part 1 of this interview went over well last week. Make sure you don’t miss it.

If you write persuasive copy (and content) as a freelancer, or for your own business, do not miss Part 2 below for some of the most valuable tips and trade philosophies you’ll find online …

In this episode we discuss:

• The 5 “Carlton Copywriting 101″ philosophies
• How John wrote his most famous (and best-selling) headline
• The Professional Copywriter’s Code
• The old-school tactic that can jump-start your copywriting career
• How to find the hooks that people respond to
• Why copywriting is not a “mystic” art
• How to use dead guys as mentors
• John Carlton’s best advice for copywriters trying to make it

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

[transcript]

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert: You are listening to Internet Marketing for Smart People radio . I’m Robert Bruce, and today we’re getting back to part two of a conversation I had with one of the best working copywriters in the world, John Carlton.

Before we get into these final questions for John I want to remind those of you listening that this show is brought to you as always by Internet Marketing for Smart People course, this is a our completely free, 20-part online marketing course, delivered straight to your inbox. It’s the very best of Copyblogger; we’ve wrapped this up, over 6-years of Copyblogger content into 20 emails that we’re dripping out to you about once a week.

If you want in, it’s very easy, just head over right now Copyblogger.com, scroll down to about the middle of the home page there where you are going to see a headline, “Grab our free 20-part internet marketing course,” drop your email address in the little box there and we’ll take care of the rest for you.

All right let’s get on with part two of my interview with John Carlton. Give us some of the basic elements of good copywriting as you see it, as you’ve learned it, give us a quick handful of Carlton Copywriting 101 principals.

The 5 “Carlton Copywriting 101” philosophies

John: Robert, you were gracious enough to warn me about this question so I actually wrote a few things down. I made a couple of notes.

So number one I actually address, is “be the adult”. As a copywriter, whether you are the staff copywriter or you are the hired gun freelancer that comes in, or it’s your own business, and by the way, that’s the hardest writing you’ll ever do in your life, is for your own stuff. I have a saying that I tell freelancers “all clients suck” and the caveat to that is when you are your own client, you suck the worst of all. So I am the worst client I have ever had for myself. So that’s just something to keep in mind.

But the idea of being the adult in the room, when you walk in and you are a freelancer and you know what needs to be done to create the ads that will actually get results for your client, again whether your client is a guy that you are working for permanently or whether it’s a freelance position, or whether it’s yourself, in most cases, freelancers tend to be a little timid.

They tend to be introverts, and then tend to take the job because they like writing and working alone mostly, and they are uncomfortable in asserting themselves too much and that is nonsense.

As a freelancer, it’s your job to get out there and make sure that the client understands that you do know what’s going on. It would be like the plumber coming in and suggesting, “Well I can stop the leak, but I recommend that you use this, but you may want to use a different type of plumbing material.” No if you know what needs to be done, you just go do it. That is the way it should be in writing.

Can you be the adult in the room?

So being the adult in the room means that you take control of the situation because probably other people aren’t. Even if there are other alpha males in there, if the CEO of the company, if the guy you are working for is a blustery, alpha, silver-back male who tries to bully everybody and wants to have his way, that’s fine, but you’re getting paid, so you want to make it clear to him, through the fact that he’s paying you money, through the fact that you are the expert, you need to be the adult in the room.

That’s a process that a lot of writers have to go through to get to the point where they can confidently just say “that’s fine that you want to do it this way but that’s the wrong way to do it. Here is how I am going to do it, or here is how I strongly urge you to do it, and then you write the ad.

That’s why I say a lot of the ads, my mostly famous ads have all been met with disbelief, shock and hair pulling panic by clients who refuse to run it, who didn’t want to run the ad, who were afraid to run it, and it was only when the result came in that they realized that they can handle the little bit of blow-back that they got from the stuff. So being the adult in the room is huge.

Gun to the head: a writing method

The gun to the head thing I brought up before. With a gun to your head writing, imagine a gun, that will go off if the ad doesn’t work, you do not stray from the fundamental principles of great advertising, which go back to Claude Hopkins and the 1920s, actually even before that.

From the time a caveman traded up to a better cave with a view in exchange for a slab of mastodon meat, that was basic street level salesmanship going on. You want to stay with that classic salesmanship.

With the gun to the head, you don’t get cute, you may test stuff, but for getting a control, for right out of the blocks, you want to do fundamental, straight ahead, salesmanship that worked before, it is probably going to work in the future.

It’s an ad, it’s not a work of art

Also, operation: money suck. That’s the concept of going after the money. In the direct response advertising world of agencies, they have an award called the John Caples Award, or the Caples Award. That is presented to the best direct response ad of the year. About 15 years ago, they stopped having results as part of the judging. I just lost it, I have not dealt with an agency since then. It’s so ridiculous.

They used to say, it had to be a great ad that everybody loved, and it had to work, and then you could win this John Caples Award. I mean John Caples was a guy that who was all about results. Then they decided, ah geez this is limiting us, we can’t give the award to these really fun, funny, entertaining ads, most of these ads were TV ads, if results matter ‘cause a lot of these funny, entertaining ads don’t work.

That was the disconnect, and that’s a disconnect that still happens in most agencies. Most agencies don’t have a clue how to do direct response advertising. They think it’s all about entertainment, they are really clueless.

So operation money suck means stay focused on this, it’s an ad, it’s not a work-of-art, it’s a communication device to let prospects know that you have what they need and to close the deal.

Knock them off the fence with simple story salesmanship

The fourth thing is story, story salesmanship and psychology, that’s the basic nature of great direct response advertising. You tell a story, it can be as simple as, here is what I got, here is why it matches your needs perfectly, and here is what you need to do to get it, you are still telling a story.

It’s the same language, the same words that you would use face-to-face with a prospect that you just met in an elevator, at a party, on the street somewhere, and you overhear somebody saying something that they express a problem that you happen to have the product that solves.

What would you say to them and how that conversation goes is how your ad should go. It’s story, it’s basic salesmanship, it’s your job if you have a product a service or information that will help a prospects life, if he has a problem that is most problems are at some level of trauma from very low trauma like he needs to get nails to finish the playhouse for his daughter out back, but he can’t finish it until he gets those nails, so now he’s shopping for nails, if you had that information, it’s your job to get it to them.

If he has a health problem and you have information that will help him solve that health problem, it could be a very high level of trauma, but it’s your job and presenting it in a story form, closing the deal and using whatever psychology you need to use to get them to do it.

Most people, it’s kind of perverse, and this is kind of getting deep, but people will not act in their best interest. They will say, you know what, I have this problem, I understand that you have a product that solves it, and it sounds good and I really should get it, but I am going to think about it and I am not ready to go.

So it’s your job as a copywriter to close the deal. To get past those objections and that’s where guarantees come in and things like that. Take away all the objections that he has to actually getting it so he can actually get this thing in his hands and then make his decision.

If he doesn’t like it, he can send it back and you want to be ethical about it, but you do need to do some things to get it in their hands because people are slow to act. I call them the large somnambulant blobs, welded to the couch, so invested in laziness that they will get up and leave the house if it’s on fire, and you have to get them to move and take out a credit card and actually order and wait for the thing to come and that is not an easy thing.

Most rookie writers can get a prospect to say “Yea that sounds pretty good, maybe someday down the road, maybe I’ll think seriously about buying that.” That’s what I call “getting them up on the fence.”

The pros know how to knock them off the fence. Getting someone to admit that what you’ve got is pretty good, that’s easy, getting them to actually shell out cash and buy it, is that next step and that’s the next level and that separates the pros from the rookies. That involves understanding the psychology of the sale. So that’s very important to do.

Every client wants your best for less

I talked about all clients sucking, the reason I say all clients suck is just go into these relationships knowing it’s an adult relationship, they don’t have to like you, and you don’t have to become best friends although I have become friends with a number of my clients but only long-term ones, over a long period of time. But this is not a social situation, this is helping a business, this is taking care of capitalism at its most basic fundamental elements.

So knowing that clients suck just removes all that stuff, yeah they are going to want to pay you as little as possible, they are going to want to push the deadlines to crushing levels, and they want the best you can do for less money then you want and they want all these things and that’s fine, just work through that.

That doesn’t mean you have to take less, that doesn’t mean that you have to agree to their deadlines, just know that it is an inherently hostile relationship. They want things that you don’t want, and you need things to happen, that they would prefer don’t happen such as paying you a lot of money. So once you understand that, then you are off to the races.

Because you can have great civil, wonderful relationships with clients once they knows who’s boss; and you know who’s boss? You’re boss. You know how to write, you know what needs to be done, you are the expert coming in, you are the hired gun, you walk in, you know what should be done and you got the skills to do it and then you do it.

So you have to put yourself in a position that the boss understands that you are the guy to do this.

Keep your BS detector on high alert

Lastly, I would recommend that everybody keep their BS detectors on high alert all the time. Writers should be more aware of what’s going on in the world, what’s going on in the psychology of their markets than everyone else. They should know more than the CEO or the client that they’re working with, more than the guys who are actually selling the stuff, because a lot of times the actual salesmen are doing that unconsciously.

So you want to keep your BS detectors really high and not take things for granted. Double-check stuff and makes sure that it works in your world. Your world is your toolbox of skills, knowledge, and psychological insights.

It doesn’t matter what people think, its’ how they act

Finally, reality checks. Writing is the best gig on earth because you have to have an examined life. I think it was Aristotle that said,

The only life worth living is the closely examined life.

That means you have to look in places other people may be uncomfortable looking.

You have to be aware, not of how you wish the world was, or how you think the world ought to be, but rather you look at the world as it really is. You look at not what humans say they will do, but what they actually do. When asked, a number of humans would say “Yeah, I would buy that product” in a focus group. That’s why most direct-response guys don’t like focus groups. They’re not lying. They really believe they would buy it, but you don’t care.

You want to see what the behavior is, that’s why results matter. You can write a great ad, everybody you know, all your buddies, your golfing buddies, your wife, your neighbors, the client, everybody will say “This is the best ad we’ve ever seen. It’s going to be great.” If it doesn’t actually pull, then it’s not a great ad. It doesn’t matter what people think, it’s how people act. So that would be the big thing. The BS detectors and the reality checks.

The old-school tactic than can jump-start your copywriting

Robert: You sound a little bit like Hemingway there, Mr. Carlton. All right, John, let’s get even more specific. It’s largely accepted that either the headline on an email, or the headline of a landing page, a blog post, or even a Tweet, is the most crucial element in writing copy that sells. How do you write your headlines? What is your process? And if you would, could you please tell us the story of the one-legged golfer?

John: Sure. First of all, I usually spend the same amount of time on the headline as I do on the copy. Now after 30 years of writing, I will occasionally sit down and write linearly. I’ll write a headline, I’ll write a subhead, and I’ll get into the copy and write it down.

Usually though, or the more normal way that I wrote throughout my career was in pieces. I might have a headline idea and put it aside. That was a chunk of the final ad that was separate from the opening paragraphs, that was separate from the sales part, that was separate from the mass of bullets in the middle, which is like the proof.

I guess the old thing, AIDA, you get attention if you have interest, then desire and then action. You can kind of break an ad down into that, and if you treat them separately, almost none of the top writers I know wrote linearly. You know, you don’t start with “Hi, my name is Bob” and go on. I mean, you may write that, but you stop at the end of that and jump down and actually do the actual sales pitch, the last page of the copy, and then come back and do the middle.

I wrote bullets first. After I’d get all steeped up, I’d do bullets. And I’d write pages and pages of bullets that maybe a third or half would make it into the final piece, maybe even less than that. That helped me cement everything in my head.

From there, I might go and write headlines. I would write headlines throughout the process of writing the piece because they would change. I would start with a how-to headline, which is the most fundamental and often the one you wind up with.

Often the first headlines I come up with are the ones I wind up with. But I would then write 50 to 100 more headlines, some of them takeoffs on the original headlines, some of them wildly different. I would try to get past what I knew would work. I’d get funny, I’d get filthy, I’d get outrageous, I’d make stuff up and just go way over the line because no one was going to see this but me and it was effective brainstorming.

And sometimes in those wild, outrageous headlines I would find the one that would really work and I would walk it back slowly and still come up with a headline that was way more outrageous than a simple how-to-do-something-better headline. It would be much more outrageous than that, but not quite as outrageous as the one where I would have gone to jail if I had run it.

So you spend a lot of time. You write a lot of that stuff. You’re absolutely right about Tweets and Facebook posts and subject lines of emails being headlines. It’s the compact delivery of either the curiosity, which means you’re kind of blind, you’re saying “Here, do you realize you are making a mistake that’s going to murder your business by this time tomorrow?” If you had that kind of curiosity value.

Or you can be very specific by saying “Here’s three ways you can double the amount of traffic that looks at your website by this time tomorrow afternoon.” Then you deliver the three ways, and various things or whatever.

There’s a lot of things you do, but you have to understand how that is done, and it’s not just sitting down and ripping them out. I will write emails. I still think … I was one of the first guys to write sales emails and still think I do some of the best ones around, but they’re different than what a lot of other people do.

If you get on my email list, you will see how I do it differently. It’s based on excellent writing.

But, Robert, as you alluded to, the importance is in the subject line. It’s how I bring people in and I do it kind of intuitively now, but it’s a process. It’s bringing people in. It’s understanding the competition. That they have maybe 400 other emails in their inbox competing for their attention.

So your competition isn’t just other people in your market, it’s every other email they get. It’s all of this stuff going on. And, if they are on marketing lists, they are going to be getting some of the cleverest, savviest, most cutthroat and shark-infested marketing possible, which means you are up against some of the best headline and subject line writers in the business.

So by not understanding that, you are essentially walking downtown into a dark alley with dollar bills pasted onto the outside of your suit and whistling happily, as you are going off to your death. So don’t do that.

How John wrote his most famous (and best-selling) headline

Get hip to how things are written and how they are done. Real quick, the headline you are talking about, the one-legged golfer. I had a client, he was doing his first instructional golf video. It was the first one he was doing. I looked at it and it was basically a boring “Here’s how to improve your golf game.” And I thought “Well, this is kind of boring.”

So I wanted to interview the guy. So I interviewed the actual talent, the guy who was the “expert” who was on this video. That’s how old this was, it was an actual video, and it wasn’t a DVD. And he was saying “Here’s how to do this stuff” and about 45 minutes into the interview where he’s talking about this triple coil power swing he’s doing, I said “How did you figure this out? How did you get the inspiration for this thing?”

And he said “Nobody wants to hear that story. I tell that and people roll their eyes.” And I said “I want to hear the story. How did you come across the epiphany, the inspiration for this?”

And he says “Well, I was golfing one day behind this foursome and one of the guys only had one leg. As he hopped up to the first tee to tee off, I thought ‘He’s going to fall over when he swings.’ And he didn’t. He had perfect balance, and he hit this great 300-yard drive right down the center of the fairway, and I had this epiphany that how he was balancing would work even better for 2-legged golfers. But nobody wants to hear that story. That’s nonsense.”

How to find the hooks that people respond to

That is the hook, I recognized that as the hook that I would need to lead people in. The headline became “The Amazing Secrets of the One-Legged Golfer That Can Instantly Eliminate Hooks and Slices and Increase Your Drives by 40 Yards” or something. I forget the exact headline.

After that, I taught my client how to look for hooks. They were so fascinated at how well this ad worked, it ran, it’s still running. It ran in the golf magazines for 15 years, and it’s still running online without much change to it. I taught the client how to look for hooks because I had to work pretty hard to find these hooks. You have to be able to recognize them when they come.

Now I call myself the most respected and ripped-off copywriter online because as I taught people how to write, and in that book Kick-Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel, I talk about that headline, the one-legged golfer, and suddenly a lot of ads starting cropping up about the one-legged accountant who can teach you how to cheat on your taxes, the one-legged everything.

The one-legged accountant, that’s not a hook. It doesn’t matter if he has one leg or not. It doesn’t matter if he’s a head in a jar somewhere. But it matters for golf, because you think it’s a disconnect.

It’s what I call the incongruous juxtaposition of compelling sales elements. So the incongruity is very, very important. So it might be an accountant who was declared brain-dead last week. That would count because his brain is what works.

So you have to understand how this stuff works. But once you do, then you’re off to the races. I taught my client, who knew nothing about writing, how to look for hooks, and he started coming back to me with these great new talents that he had found for golf, and all of them had a hook.

One guy crawled off of his deathbed, he was literally thinking he was going to die on one day, then he rallied and crawled off of his deathbed and went in and qualified for the U.S. Open in Los Angeles and actually competed and made money at the U.S. Open after thinking he was going to be dead by that time.

And he didn’t want to tell that story to my client. My client said to me “John, I think I’ve got the hook.” And sure enough, it went into the headline. Does that make sense?

John Carlton’s best advice for hungry copywriters

Robert: That makes perfect sense. That goes back to what you were talking about, research defeating, well, we don’t believe in writer’s block, but defeating the idea of writer’s block. In that research, all that research, everything you are going to pick up, those hooks are going to be coming out more and more. OK, last question for you.

If you could only give a handful of advice to say a starving copywriter out there who’s staring at the next 30 years and wondering how he or she is going to proceed in their craft and in their business, what would it be?

John: Wow. I am dedicated to this. There’s a lot of information out there. When I came up out there, there were no mentors, and there were no books. The word freelance copywriter wasn’t even known in the general public. I was in Los Angeles. There were very few, just a handful. I got to meet every successful freelance copywriter there.

There were five of us and we didn’t even know each other existed. We met by accident at an advertising guild meeting. Now, it’s the opposite. There’s tons of stuff out there and my blog goes back seven years of solid free archives. So there’s a lot of free information out there. I know that Brian has a lot of great stuff. There’s a lot of good free information.

New writers now have the opposite problem. They’ve got too much information. How do you tell? Do you hop onto the forums out there, do you start hanging out with other writers, and how do you tell the nonsense from that? Well that’s where the BS detector comes in.

Network, network, network

I would suggest that the most important thing for a young writer would be networking. Now I didn’t even know what networking was when I started out, but I was doing it. When I made a connection with a graphic designer, for example, or with another writer or the head of an ad agency that liked me, I would start to work them. I would let them know that I’m available for other jobs, and I would call them and ingratiate myself and learn how to bond and do things.

So networking is hugely important and it’s the #1 overlooked thing. I recently redid my freelance course. It’s a course I wrote just for freelance writers and I took a half a dozen or so of my best-performing students who were all wildly successful freelance copyrighters now. Many who have moved onto their own businesses, and asked them to write short pieces that went into the new edition of the freelance course, about what their main success thing is besides getting the information about how to write and honing their skill.

It all came down to networking. It all came down to taking the risk, attending seminars, meeting other writers, getting your networks together, actually working. You know, if you have a client and the client likes you and you never talk to them again, you’re a freaking idiot.

You should be not just asking him for more work or making sure that you’re available to him as a consultant or doing other stuff, but have him introduce you to other people. Businessmen are happy to do that. Businesses are starved for good copy. Starving. And businesses are going belly up every second of every day because they don’t know how to create an ad to bring in good copy to turn prospects into new customers or even to find the prospects in the first place.

So by networking you start to expand yourself. Now for a lot of writers, there was a golden age of seminars that has kind of fizzled and may be coming back, but during the last five or six years there was a seminar every month somewhere. From Dan Kennedy to a lot of the online guys that are having seminars, and you could go there as a writer and pay the money and just go and hang out in the hallways, talk to people, hand your card out and let people know that you know how to write.

You know, that was a way a lot of my students found work right off the bat. They became very successful. Through that, they networked with other people. So they would find one client in one niche, they would become an expert in that niche. Then they would go to other marketers in that niche and say “I’ve already written a successful ad for this. If you need writing you should hire me” and start to build on that.

That’s part of the salesmanship process. You don’t need to get stuck in one niche, but you can become very good in one niche, and then another niche. I was great in multiple niches throughout my career. It wasn’t that big of a deal, once I broke down the basic problem of being able to sell to a specific niche market, then it was easy to do for another thing.

So learning how to sell to golfers, I could sell to bodybuilders, I could sell to gun fanatics, and I could sell to guys who rode motocross motorcycles. Once you start breaking it down you figure it out. So networking is one thing.

How to find and use mentors to up your game

As far as the amazing amount of mentoring going on out there, my advice is to pick a guy you like and get kind of steeped in what he’s doing. That doesn’t mean you can’t look at what other writers are doing, but there are so many different styles out there, and there is conflicting information about how to address something.

So find a writer that you are simpatico with, who either has a blog or who has teaching stuff, or is available for mentoring or whatever the process is. Even if you just, I mentored under several writers early in my career who didn’t know they were mentors to me because I would find their writing and study it and break it down.

Gary Bencivenga probably the greatest living direct-response copyrighter in the game, he’s since retired, but he’s just a monster. I used to take his pieces and break them down. I would break down the way he did bullets, the way he did teaser copy, the way he did headlines, and he became … and he didn’t even realize this, and he thought it was funny later because he respected me as a writer later on, but I said “Dude, I wouldn’t have gotten this far with my reputation if I hadn’t taken your stuff and broken it down and figured out how you wrote a damn good bullet.”

He’s the guy who kind of taught me how, and I realize there was this one-two punch, and I could go on for an hour about how to write a good bullet. But I focused on him, and I didn’t write like him, I didn’t try to copy him, but I kept him in mind when I wrote, so through that gun-to-the-head, through that preparation, and through that that idea and was kind of like “Would Gary agree with this? Would Bencivenga agree with me that I’m doing this?”

I never wrote like him, but I used him as a mentor, and that helped me because there were a dozen other guys I could have done that with. But I felt simpatico with him, I understood him, so when I wrote for Jim Rutz as a ghostwriter later, he was a totally different writer, wildly different writer, told longer stories, went off on tangents, both of them were very, very successful but completely different copywriters. I understood that now I need to shift from that other kind of writing, to this kind of writing and I understood how to get in there and figure it out and study it, and I began to write in ways that Jim Rutz would agree with.

When I started writing with Gary Halbert, a third writer who was radically different than the other two, I was able to understand “ok”, now there’s this new way of approaching it and it was much easier. It’s a very short learning curve to be able to figure out what they’re doing because I understood what they were doing. It was all broken down.

Why copywriting is not a “mystic” art

So networking and breaking down the process as much as you can so none of it is a mystery. You shouldn’t be mystified by why a writer uses a how-to headline, or why he writes bullets in a certain way, or how he has constructed a pitch, whether it’s a video sales letter, or just a written letter, or if it’s a launch. A launch is a sales letter turned sideways. So rather than one long linear sales pitch, you get it dosed out in chunks as you go along. So if you took it, mashed it all together what has leaked out over a period of two weeks, is actually just a straight-ahead sales piece.

Once you realize that, then all the mystery fades away and you realize that’s why he did this, that’s why he did that. It’s like listening to music, a lot of people listen to music, and it’s this pleasant thing that makes them feel a certain way, and that’s all they know about it.

Other people, and a lot of the copywriters I know, by the way, are musicians too. You want to break it down. What instrument is that? How is he playing that? What chord is that? What mode is he soloing in? How is the production done? How many instruments are there? How is this done? You start breaking it down. And that increases your enjoyment of music and also allows you to be able to create it yourself. Does that make sense, Robert?

Robert: It does, and I want to bring up one more thing on the mentorship. Don’t forget as you mentioned earlier, those old dead guys make good mentors too, right?

John: That’s a really good point, Robert. When I started out all the mentors I had, like John Caples (Tested Advertising Methods), and David Olgilvy (Confessions of an Ad Man) was still alive but he died soon after I got into the game, and Claude Hopkins (My Life in Advertising & Scientific Advertising) had been dead for decades, and Robert Collier (The Robert Collier Letter Book) had been dead for 10 years.

Robert: Eugene Schwartz (Breakthrough Advertising) was still around when you were starting, right?

John: Yes, yes he was. A number of the guys … what was interesting, I have a videotape somewhere of David Ogilvy from the Creative Guild in Los Angeles that doesn’t exist anymore. It was kind of an intervention group for advertising people, they would meet the first Tuesday of every month, complain about stuff, and share insights and they had David Ogilvy come and talk.

I made two realizations, one these guys are approachable. David Ogilvy in the last part of his career was on a David Letterman show, when Letterman had a very late midnight show. Letterman didn’t know who he was, was kind of disrespectful and interrupted him and wouldn’t let him tell his story. I thought “Wow, what an ignoble way to go out.”

But also, when he was in Los Angeles he said “hey you want to stop by speak at this guild, and there would be like 40 people” and he said “Yeah!” and he went and he spoke. They made a videotape and I got the only videotape. I asked the President of the Creative Guild “God, can I get a copy of the tape?” and she said “You can have the tape, it’s just Ogilvy.” But it wasn’t a very good tape, just an interview with him and it was pretty much what he had done in his writing, and it was a bad videotape, I don’t know where it is, I probably should have kept it, but I don’t have any copyrights to it.

My point is, even the most famous guys are approachable, but you have to be respectable. I get people asking me all the time. This is my last piece of advice. They come to me and say “I’ll do anything to work with you or to get mentored by you.” That’s not what I want to hear. That just dumps it in my lap. I don’t need another puppy dog, and I don’t need somebody coming to me and telling me how wonderful it would be to have a career like mine. I don’t need to hear this stuff and I don’t need the trouble of having to make up stuff for you to do.

I did mentor somebody as recently as last year and I mentored him for about six months. He was a British guy in London and he came to me and said “Tell you what. I will trade you 10 hours a week that I will work for you for free for one 1-hour phone call a week where I can ask you anything I want.” I said “Yeah.” Because my phone calls right now are $2,500 for a consultation, so it was equivalent of that, and I was getting a lot more than that in extra writing stuff, and the guy became like my virtual assistant for awhile.

He came to me not with a problem, but with a solution. That’s very rare. I’ve never been approached like that before. It’s the way I approached Jay Abraham, the way I went to Halbert when I went with him. You can’t just announce yourself and say “I’m the next greatest writer and you should mentor me because then you’ll get credit for it.”

No, I don’t need any more ego-ridden writers and I don’t need any more people with problems with self-esteem and I don’t need any of that stuff.

So get your act together, go as far as you can, and if you find a writer that you are simpatico with, that you like his style and that you can follow him, then immerse yourself in it. There’s a lot of writing out there. You never need to talk to them. You never need to get private mentoring from them. You may never need to buy their actual stuff, although you probably should.

The first money you make you should be reinvesting in your education. Your education goes on for the rest of your life. But there’s a lot of opportunities out there to do it, it’s just be aware that there’s conflicting information out there.

Not all writers write the same, and just keep breaking things down and keep working towards developing who you are. Don’t decide what kind of writer you are if you’re a rookie. You talk about staring at the next 30 years and wondering how to proceed in your craft and your business. You know, you take it one step at a time; you do the smart stuff and start paying attention to what the successful guys have done.

They did it through networking, and they did it through getting better all the time, those things I talked about like being the adult in the room, writing with a gun to the head, and devoting yourself to this. It’s not hard.

I’m a lazy guy. I was working, in the height of my freelance career I was taking three to six months off a year to go and play in bad biker bar bands. I’d play in these seedy bars. I’d do it for six months at a time and not even think about business, and I’d come back and my clients would be glad to see me come back, and I’d find new clients.

That all changed when I became a “guru” and I started having to do monthly newsletters, but I’m back to it again. After 10 years of being a guru I’m back to taking off a lot of time. I’m working a few hours a week. But those are intense hours. I get more done in two hours in a day writing when I’m prepped sitting down than most writers get done in a month.

So once you have all these realizations coming down and you start getting really good at what you’re doing, you recognize you are the linchpin to the success that businesses crave. They need it. They are starved for good writing.

The Professional Copywriter’s Code

So make yourself a good writer first. Network. Never lie. Never do anything unethical. Be that professional that people need. And by the way, I will leave you with the professional’s code that I kind of invented, although it’s not new, but this is the way I’ve been saying it.

You are where you said you’d be when you said you’d be there having done what you said you’d do.

Very, very simple. That encompasses deadlines, that encompasses meetings, that encompasses everything. If you’ve got a 10 o’clock meeting, you are there at a quarter ‘til. If you have a deadline, you meet it even if you have to stay up all night. Even if you have to forgo everything else. Business before pleasure. That’s one of the early things I did.

So I would suggest people go over and check out my blog, john-carlton.com. There’s a dash in there because I didn’t grab the John Carlton straight URL in time, and some woodworker in Boston got it, who has high search engine rankings, by the way.

Robert: I’ll bet he does!

John: But it’s john-carlton.com. Sign up, it’s easy, and you’ll get notifications when new blogs are up and notifications about things I’m doing, where I’m speaking. I’m speaking much less. I’m speaking at Kennedy’s thing in the fall. Scaled way back, but I’m very visible. I’m out there a lot. I’m doing a lot of things. I love doing interviews with guys like you. So that would be my only recommendation.

And I do have things that will be available soon so it’s always good to stay in the jet stream of what guys like me are doing. There aren’t many like me left. Most of us are retiring, leaving the field and I’ve got many years left in me, but I’m taking it slower and I’m not being quite as involved.

So take advantage of this rare opportunity. There are still some guys who have feet in both worlds. The old classic world of advertising, which is pre-web, and highly steeped in the online world. I was one of the pioneers online. The early websites I created because just from intuition are still being used with testimonials running down both sides of the wall of testimonials. It’s not like I’m any kind of genius it was just gun-to-the-head. It was just straight-ahead, let me get the message out in the most awesome, effective, solid salesmanship way that I can, and that’s really all I’ve got to say. I’m kind of talked out.

Robert: Well, there’s not many of you left, I agree, and I for one am glad you are still around and I hope you’re going to be around. You could probably just disappear if you wanted to. But I hope you’re going to be around for a long, long time because it’s good having you here and I appreciate you very much coming on today.

Let’s get out of here. Thanks for listening, everybody. Like John said, if you want to get more of him online, you can find him at john-carlton.com. I’ll have that link in the show notes as well. If this show does anything to you or for you, please jump over to iTunes and give us a rating or a comment. If you get a chance, it’s always very much appreciated. My. Carlton, thank you for coming by today. I really appreciate it.

John: Robert, it was a pleasure speaking with you and I hope to speak with you soon.

Robert: You bet. Let’s do it . OK, bye bye.

[/transcript]

Other listening options:

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The Show Notes:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
• John Carlton’s Blog
• Listen to Part 1 of this interview with John Carlton
• How to Write Magnetic Headlines
• Copywriting 101
• We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s Chief Copywriter and Resident Recluse.

John Carlton is a force of nature.

He’s that rare breed who can write fascinating copy, and is just as fascinating to listen to. Every story ends up a great story.

Through the lens of his remarkable journey to and through the copywriting trade, John delivers practical business tips and killer copywriting advice in this first half of a two-part interview I did with him.

Whether you’re a veteran writer, or just starting to learn your craft, the next 30 minutes with this outspoken ad man is a worthwhile spend …

In this episode we discuss:

• How to go from slacker to pro
• Why writer’s block is a myth, and how to get your work done
• 4 books that will change your career (and you should read every year)
• The dirty little secret most copywriters don’t want you to know
• The mental attitude that made John’s career
• 2 secrets of John’s success
• A vital lesson on the nature of opportunity

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

[transcript]

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert: You have found Internet Marketing for Smart People radio . I’m Robert Bruce. Today we’re getting back to basics with one of the most respected, dangerous and “been around the block” copywriters in the world. John Carlton is on the horn with me and I am going to grill him on your behalf and try to get every bit of copywriting wisdom that I can from the man. Mr. Carlton thanks for coming on the show today. It’s a pleasure to have you here.

John: It’s a pleasure to be here, I am looking forward to this.

Robert: Well before we get into these questions for you John, I want to remind those of you listening that this show is brought to you by the Internet Marketing for Smart People course which is our totally free, 20-part online marketing course, delivered straight to your inbox.

This course is the very best of Copyblogger wrapped up into a 20 systematic, perfectly readable emails, dripped out to you about once a week. When you sign up, you’ll get years of Copyblogger tutorials totally free and with the benefit of not having to go back and pick through thousands of articles in the achieve.

If you want to get on the bus it’s easy, head over to Copyblogger.com , scroll down to about the middle of our home page, you’ll see the headline, “Grab out free 20-part internet marketing course,” drop your email address in the little box there and we’ll take care of the rest.

All right John. We could probably spend the entire show on just the story of how you came up as a copywriter, how you started, and then how you finally found your way, but give us the ten-minute version here if you can. This is a great story and I think it’s also very instructive to those out there listening who either want to learn this craft or want to get better at it.

How to go from slacker to pro

John: The reason it’s a good story is totally by accident of course, but I was the uber-slacker even before they invented the term slacker. I finished college, drifted away, and just really never figured out what I was going to do.

I was in my early 30’s, I think I was 32 maybe 33, and I had gone through a period of time where I was working in Silicon Valley in an art department and I lost my girlfriend, my place to live and my job all within a two-month period. I wound up living out of my car, going up and down the west coast looking up every friend I knew who had a couch to sleep on and sleeping on that couch.

I went down to San Diego and wound up in Los Angeles and got a really bad job and just had an epiphany that if my life was going to change, I was going to have to be the one who took responsibility and changed it. I learned for the first time in my life about goals, and goal setting and all this stuff happened and that’s stuff I could talk about a long time and I try to help people out with that, but as far as my story, literally I was working from nothing.

When I decided to become a freelance copywriter and go off into what I call, a career, which became a career, but I had no idea what was going to happen, I had no mentors, I had never meant a freelance copywriter before, I had no idea how I was going to pull all this off.

All I had was one month’s rent left in my bank account, I had a rattle trap car, that I had to put water in every time I wanted to drive it anywhere and I was working on a manual typewriter at the time, this was the early 80’s, before PCs came out. I had big cojones. I was living down in Los Angeles, happened to be a right period of time for freelancers, so it didn’t matter that I was figuring this out as I went along. Because there weren’t many freelancers out there.

The main thing that I did, the accidental thing that made my rags to riches story compelling was, I made what seems like an obvious decision. Back then, it wasn’t obvious at all, I figured out before I walked into a direct response advertising agency and said “I am here to be hired to write the stuff that your staff can’t handle right now” I better get really hip on everything about business, marketing, advertising, and stuff like that.

I took a speed-reading course, paid $100 for it, really couldn’t afford it, but did it. I went to the Torrance Municipal Library and read everything in the Dewey decimal system from I think 600 to 750, something like that. It was marketing, advertising, sales, salesmanship, all the stuff and I sped read through it and found the good books and took these good books and read them again very slowly.

What was interesting about that, there were two things that happened that gave me a leg up on everything? I then walked in to agencies thinking that that two or three weeks of having spent reading the entire library so of speak, was going to get me up to speed with the guys I would be begging for jobs from. In fact, it put me light years ahead of them.

I discovered right off the bat that most agencies, most writers and agencies, and most people who ran agencies knew very little about advertising marketing or business in general. They usually have jobs, they really wanted to be screenwriters or novel writers and they look down on copywriting and they thought being cute and clever was the way to go and they really had very little idea of what to do.

I walked in, the day I walked in as a rookie, I knew more than most of the people there just from an intellectual standpoint and as I gained experience, I kept running it through a couple of things that I invented, mostly the “gun to the head” attitude.

I just decided, every time I sat down to write a piece that I was going to write as if I had a gun to my head that would go off if it didn’t work. So that kept me from doing cute stuff, that kept me from going off on tangents, that kept me from experimenting, I used classy “how to” headlines. I kept it simple, straight forward and really stuck to classic salesmanship and all that worked.

The second thing that happened was when I met Jay Abraham, through Jay Abraham when I met Gary Halbert, who your listeners should know are now legendary copywriters, the books that I had found during my jaunt through the library and decided were the best ones, happened to be the ones that these guys had also chosen.

4 books that will change your copywriting career

This included Claude Hopkins, who was then out of print. The best book would be My Life in Advertising & Scientific Advertising two books that he wrote that were sold as one book is now back in print.

David Ogilvy’s books, Confessions of an Ad Man and a guy that worked with Ogilvy, John Caples, who wrote Tested Advertising Methods and also a guy name Victor Schwab, who wrote How to Write a Good Advertisement.

A lot of this stuff was written back in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s and in fact Claude Hopkins was writing back in the 1920’s, so this was the kind of stuff that was over looked, ignored and dismissed by most advertising, so called experts, back in the 80’s and we kept it alive. Like I said, a lot of the stuff, like the Robert Collier Letter Book had been out of print for 15 years.

When I was with Halbert, we paid a $1,000 for a copy of a mimeograph copy of that book. It’s now back in print and I think you can get it, I am not sure who is publishing it but you can get it for $12 now, but it was worth a $1,000 at the time to get a badly copied …. I don’t know if the listeners here know what a mimeograph is; it’s a very low-level form of copying.

The point is the information was most important. So all this stuff kind of coalesced. Now I spent my career working for agencies, for small corporations and then I got involved in the largest mailers in the world like Phillips and Boardroom and Rodale and things like that. When Halbert came along he kind of made me an offer, he represented the entrepreneurial side of the marketing world, and I didn’t even hesitate.

I turned my back on a million dollar career, I was “the” up and coming writer with these corporations and had a very, very lucrative career ahead of me and I was working with guys like Jim Rutz, I was ghostwriting for Jim Rutz, he’s the inventor of the magalog one of the top and highest paid writers.

I was working with Gary Bencivenga and guys like that, but I didn’t even hesitate to go off with Halbert and work with the entrepreneurs because that’s where it was exciting and that’s where we could try stuff, and we could market fearlessly and go where no marketer had gone before so I went off on that way. What happened was, while I was having fun and jumping on this stuff, two things are relevant and I will wrap up this story with this, one is, during my career and I would say it took me ten years to figure out how to be a good freelance copywriter before I took off with Halbert.

2 secrets of John’s success

I made almost every mistake possible, I stumbled into every pitfall, I went down to every blind alley, I did it, but I recovered quickly and I took notes.

Those notes, then became my first book, Kick Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel , and became the foundation from my own teaching and my own abilities to take almost any writer and show them the ropes very quickly of what to do, because I knew what to do because I had done what “not” to do, figured it out, fixed it and then went back and did it right.

So I multiplied the successes, recognized, and minimized the bad stuff. It was kind of perfect. If I hadn’t taken notes, I would be a much less better teacher but I kept journals along the way, which I recommend all writers do. Keep a semi-secret journal. Actually, I would not want anybody to read my journals so I had an uncensored way of letting out all my frustrations and talking about things and I hope nobody finds these journals, but it helped me clear my head and stay focused on what was going on and fix a lot of problems that were happening. So I recommend journals for everybody. Well that’s great, I offered two things, I talked about one and the other one will remain a secret.

Robert: We’ll come back around to it if it comes back up. Why copywriting? In the very beginning where did the idea come from and what kind of captivated you or captured your imagination about it in the very beginning, when you were looking around, when you were living in your car, this rental trap car and you had a month, I think you said you had a month of income left or even that. Why was it copywriting?

John: There was a period of time, I sometimes compress the story because there is a lot of irrelevant stuff, but I did have a job. There was about a year and a half between that period of me living out of my car and me going out as a freelancer. During that time, I actually had a job where I was a one-man advertising department for a very small company and I was just trying things out. I stayed there because it was a forgettable job but when I went out on my own, yes, I had no money saved up, I had a car and I was working off of a typewriter that I had bartered for and I had a phone that I had actually taken out of the garbage at this other job that I had and set it up in my bedroom. I was in a little tiny apartment in Redondo Beach down in the LA area.

I had a bed and next to the bed was a desk and everything was there. There are photos of me back there, it’s pretty interesting, but it proved the point that that’s all you need is your brain and your skills and the ability to translate that into advertising.

Early I got a personal computer, I was an early adopter and I didn’t get a bigger office for five years or so, I continued working out of the bedroom because I just had my little cubby-hole. I did remember by the way Robert, not to scatter brain this too much, the other thing that I was going to say,

the main decision that I made when I became a freelancer, I just kind of announced to the world by just saying to myself — I am now a freelancer, that’s what I am going to do…

…and I had no plan B, and I was going to starve if I didn’t make this work, so it was kind of like Cortez burning his ships off the coast of Central America when he conquered the Aztecs.

Take your opportunities when they come

I realize that opportunities were not something that cascaded upon a person’s head. Opportunities are like whispers in the wind. If you are not primed to hear them, you will not hear them. I discovered Jay Abraham through someone else mentioning an ad that he had written somewhere and if I hadn’t had my antenna up and hyper attune to listening to that stuff … I didn’t know who Jay was, I didn’t know who Gary was, nobody did, Gary was actually still unknown when I was introduced to him.

These whispers in the wind, I think most people in their lives get at most two or three opportunities, big opportunities in life. Most people get none, even if some go by them or are available. What happens is that we not attuned to it, we get jaded about it, we think “oh if I don’t do it now, I’ll do it later” and what happened to me was not going to a Jimmy Hendrix concert back in 1968, I was still in high school, had an opportunity to go, didn’t go because something important popped up and Jimmy was gone not too long after that. I never did see him live and to this day, I can’t tell you what was so important that I didn’t go to that concert, but I do remember missing the concert.

That is that thing that opportunities come and go and there aren’t a lot of them and the big opportunities, the life changing and career changing opportunities often will not announce themselves, they will not tap you on the shoulder, they will drift by almost imperceptivity, you’ve got to be hyper attune to that. That alone can change a person’s life once they realize that opportunities are hard to catch and you need to jump on them right away.

Robert: Alright, one more thing from your story. You said that you went through the entire marketing and advertising section of the Torrance Public Library. This is fantastic, probably my favorite part of the story. You talked about coming out of that experience, reading those books that you thought would catch you up, but you found when you got out in the world that you were way ahead of working professional writers and copywriters.

One thing in particular from that is that you said that you read the stuff and tried to find the good stuff of course, but you reread the really good stuff. This is a drop dead simple, elementary piece of advice, deceptively to simple, but this is really important. Reading, re-reading, even a hand-full of books maybe on an annual basis.

John: Oh I would say, what’s interesting is that when I met Jay Abraham I actually physically met him, I had arrived at his office ready to punch him out because he had put an ad in the LA Times looking for direct response writers and I responded and he sent me back a curt letter which made it obvious to me that he had not read my stuff, because he had said “You are not really ready for this kind of stuff, why don’t you read Claude Hopkins and I suggest that you read it six times before you get back to me.”

Well I had actually read Claude Hopkins, My Life in Advertising & Scientific Advertising , eight times at that point. That was during the first year and a half of my so-called career. So I was very angry because it was obvious that he had not even looked at the package, that he had just taken my response and sent me this form letter back. So I found out that he lived very nearby and I went and met him and his office manager intercepted me, I was going to go in to confront him, but I was really mad because this was my life and he was being capricious about it and I wound up becoming fast friends and made a deal with Jay, this is very important too, and ties in with that reading the books.

When he found out that we had the same books in common, that I had read a lot of them, we were reading these and I continued to read that book yearly for another 15 years, I haven’t read it in the last couple years, but I am due to read it again. I kept reading these books but I also made a deal with Jay that I would work for free in exchange for free run of his office, so I got to hang out while he was doing consultations, I got to look in the back drawers of forgotten cabinets where stacks of unpublished advertising was hidden away and I got to see how a successful consultant ran his operation, so it was huge.

The mental attitude that made John’s career

I wasn’t getting paid for it. I would write for free, but it was a million dollar education. Finding those old books that other people dismissed and ignored, setting myself up for not becoming rich right away but actually doing my due diligence. I grew up in a working class household. My father was a construction worker and they don’t do it anymore but they use to have a guild, you had to be a novice, you had to be mentored by someone else who knew how to do the job and it took a couple of years to get from novice state to journeyman and then after journeyman you became a foreman and such but you had to climb the ladder very slowly.

So that was beaten into me and I didn’t expect, even when I knew I could write better and knew more than a lot of these ad guys, I knew that until I got the experience, and until I had done my duties as a rookie, that I wouldn’t be deserving of calling myself an expert writer yet, so I was willing to do this. I didn’t have expectations of fast wealth, I had expectations of entering a career that I could do for the rest of my life.

I have to tell you too Robert, that career, I teach other people how to be writers and how to be freelancers, because the career saved my life and I made a vow early on that I would help others if I made it. I mean I seriously had no plan B, I was working without a net, it was pretty scary so I understand how scary it can be for others and I started confronting things. That attitude, that “gun to the head” attitude, I started confronting things like writer’s block and things like that and realizing that they were myths.

Really, being a good writer meant that you didn’t have a novel … I do write novels on the side, but I didn’t consider myself a novel writer, moonlighting or trying to pay the bills by being a copywriter. I was a copywriter and on the side I might sample in fiction and do other things, but I took this business of creating ads very seriously and I never forgot that when I wrote an ad for somebody, his business was on the line, his lifestyle, his family, everything that he needed to make his business a success, copy was king from the very beginning, so without a good ad, they are nothing. Businesses are toast!

I realized that even if I wasn’t getting paid or even respected as much as I should, I held the keys to the kingdom for every single job that I took. If the ad didn’t work, bad things were going to happen to the client’s business. Also it formed my attitude later as my fees went up and as I started gaining notoriety and “reputation,” I started realizing that I had to take control, that I had to be and actually I think, we’ll get into this later on, but it’s about doing freelancing in the right way and having the right attitude and I think a lot of people get into it thinking mostly this is about you making money as a writer and that’s fun for people who realize “wow I am a professional writer this is great!”

That’s a huge revelation to have that you are actually paying the bills by being a writer, but sitting down and crafting language so that it effectively communicates a business sales message to prospects. That’s all very fun but really you are the savior of businesses, you are the guy that is going to come in and take an untenable position of a business. They’re almost always struggling when they have freelancers. They don’t know how to write, they don’t understand advertising and they don’t understand salesmanship and print, they don’t understand any of this stuff and you are that guy that comes in.

You are the white knight. So that attitude means that you have to be serious about this, it’s your job, and your job is very important.

Robert: Alright, you talked about goals, you talked about writer’s block, worth ethics, let’s extend this idea of what your job is and take a look, maybe a day in the life kind of thing. What are your working habits John, and how do you approach the blank page and how are you getting your work done day after day and year after year?

Why writer’s block is a myth and how to get you work done

John: That’s a great question and I will say that as a tie-in to me being a slacker who didn’t get my act together until my early 30’s and I had a true rags to riches story. Actually living in my car and then breaking out from that, so too am I one of the laziest writers that you will ever meet. I am by nature a slumbering ape in the jungle who is waiting for the banana to fall on my lap because I am too lazy to get up and go grab it.

But when I write, I do something that I call “stocking the desk” and what happens is that I know that I am going to spend a period of time and it could be an hour or two hours or whatever but I am going to go deep into this writerly state and so I stock the desk. And when I have to write an ad, I will do what I need to do, maybe I have to take a walk before hand, maybe I’ll take a nap, maybe I’ll take a long hot shower, I will do what I need to do and I’ll start to get prepped and if I don’t need to get prepped at the desk, if I can get on the phone, say an interview with somebody, and just get some information, I won’t sit at the desk and do it, I’ll walk around the house or I’ll walk out back.

What I am doing is prepping myself, and when I get in close to my desk, my desk by the way looks like a bomb went off, I use pile theory here. People would be appalled by the mess on my desk right now but I know where everything is and there is a method to my madness but I work very sloppily, I am very lazy but when I sit down and I am ready to write, I become the most intensely focused, hard-working writer that I’ve ever met in my life. What I do is I get prepped, I get zeroed in, I stock the desk and when I am ready to go, it’s like “bang” let’s go!

I am a fighter stepping into the ring. I’ve mentioned before that writer’s block was a myth, when I speak in front of audiences and there are usually a number of writers in the audience, or even there’s people who are sampling writers or need to write and say “how many people are bothered by writers block?” and a good third to a half of the room will raise their hands and I disabuse them of the notion, my response is “grow up it’s a myth, it’s nonsense.”

All writer’s block is, is not being prepared on what you need to do.

So if you sit down and haven’t got a headline burning in your head and you don’t know how you are going to start this conversation using language to write down whether it’s going to eventually be a sales video or a presentation from the stage or whether it’s going to be an infomercial, whether it’s going to be a written ad in a magazine or it’s going to be a website, it doesn’t matter. It starts with a written page, writing down “Hi my name is Joe Blow and for the last twenty years I’ve been an expert in blah, blah, and here is what I have for you.”

If you are not ready to just blast that first draft out when you are sitting down, then you have no business sitting down and even starting because you should be prepared. You should be boiling with the information that you need and all the stuff. Freelancers become experts in the markets that they inhabit for the period of time that they are paid to inhabit that market, so that’s what makes us different from other writers.

Some writers only work in one market, like they get a job … say a guy in the weight loss or diet field and they wind up becoming an expert in that, but they couldn’t write for the financial industry to save their lives, they would have to reinvent it. The kind of freelancer that I was, was that I took every job that came along and I don’t think there was a market out there that I haven’t written for. I knew a little bit about a lot of different things, but for the period of time that I am writing a piece I become an expert. I do what I have to do. I do a shorter version the equivalent of reading everything in the Torrance Municipal Library of that, I know how to interview people now and get the short cuts on what’s going on.

The dirty little secret most copywriters don’t want you to know

When I interview to write for a client, in a perfect world I interview the client yes, but I don’t take what he says, the boss of the company or the guy behind the product as seriously as I do when I want to talk to his secretary, I want to talk to the guy who actually has to sell the thing, I want to talk to the feet in the street, I want to talk to the chemist if they are involved, I there is anybody else involved, I want to hear the rumors, I want to hear what his staff is saying behind his back about him. I want to hear from the people who actually have to deal with the people on the phone who are maybe doing the refunding, I want to hear all these stories.

Hidden within that are the hooks and the real reasons why people buy and why the product can be successful, which often the owner of the company is clueless about because he has his own myth going on. He is in this echo chamber where he believes his product is really great and it’s his baby and people buy it because they want “X”. Usually that’s not true. Usually people are buying it for a totally different reason.

That is why when I present … and I don’t take on very many clients anymore, in fact I turn down 99% of people who want me to write for them and I recommend other writers to them, I make sure that they are taken care of but I am not taking the jobs, but when a client does hire me and I present a piece to them, if he says “wow this is a great ad John, I can’t wait to run it” then I know I did something wrong.

The only way I know that I did something right is when I present him an ad that makes him nervous. I want him to come back and say, “We can’t run this! We can’t say this! This is going to blow everything up! This is horrific!” because then I knows I’ve gotten him out of his comfort zone, into that space where the ad is going to wake people up and actually get the results that he has been looking for.

Most people want pabulum out there, they are afraid of their “reputation” and they want to run ads that are mild and don’t offend anybody, they are more worried about offending people then they are about selling stuff. If you are going to sell stuff, if you are going to be aggressive about having a great ad running, you are going to get some blow back; you are going to get a certain amount of refunds.

I tell people if you are marketing and you don’t have that sweet spot of refunds; between 7% and 15% of all sales should come back as refunds. If they are not, you are not pushing hard enough because to wake people up to get them to understand your message, to get them involved in the capitalistic dance of buying and consuming and getting whatever it is, whether it’s services or products or information, whatever you’ve got to sell.

It’s a dance and 15% of the population, I have a psychology degree Robert, we’ve talked about that, 15% of the population is crazy. So if you are not bringing in enough of any given audience of the 7% refund rate that you have, you can’t take that personally, that’s going to be people who bought by accident, who were drunk and bought, who bought and where in sycophantic episode and have no memory of it and things.

You just have to keep that in mind so that you don’t take that personally, but you have to be … I hear people bragging about zero refund rates, you are just marketing inside a small pocket and if you are happy with that then great, but if you want to break out of that and really start making some waves in your niche or your industry then you’ve got to get out of your comfort zone.

Robert: Hey everybody, Robert Bruce here closing out of part one of this interview with John Carlton, we’ll be back next week with part two. If you want to get more of John in the meantime, you can find him at John-Carlton.com and if you like what’s going on with this show, the best way to support it as always is to head over to iTunes and drop a comment there or a rating if you do so, we really appreciate it. All right, we’ll see you next week for part two of this interview with John Carlton.

[/transcript]

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The Show Notes:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
• John Carlton’s Blog
• Copywriting 101
• We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s Chief Copywriter and Resident Recluse.

What’s one of the most reliable ways to earn an income online?

If done right, affiliate marketing is a hard model to beat.

Problem is, there’s a lot of bad (and unethical) advice out there on how to approach it. So, I’ve invited Sonia Simone and Jessica Commins to jump on the line today to counter that bad advice, and offer their best strategies for effective, ethical, and profitable Affiliate Marketing.

Where do you begin? How do you attract customers? What are the pros and cons of various Affiliate Marketing business plans? How do you make money by building a loyal audience?

Let’s find out …

In this episode we discuss:

• What is Affiliate Marketing?
• The best way to make a living as an Affiliate Marketer
• The vital element your Affiliate website and/or content must include
• How to choose an Affiliate Program
• Why content creation is key to profitable Affiliate Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing legal issues you need to understand

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

[transcript]

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert: You’re listening to Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio. I’m Robert Bruce. Today we are talking about one of the most effective ways to earn a living online, which is affiliate marketing. I’m joined by Copyblogger Media’s Chief Marketing Officer, Sonia Simone, and Copyblogger Media’s Affiliate Manager, Jessica Commins. Sonia, I know you were in Vegas last week. Did you change your title again down there?

Sonia: Yeah. I’m now Chief Flamingo Feathers and Glitter Officer.

Robert: Oh man. Jess, congratulations on your relatively new gig here at Copyblogger. How are you doing these days?

Jessica: Loving it.

Robert: Before we give these fine listeners the skinny on affiliate marketing 101, let me ask you a question. If it were possible to pick up a world-class education in email marketing, content marketing, key word research, copywriting, and yes, affiliate marketing all in one place and at no charge, would you do it?

Sonia: Absolutely, Bob.

Robert: (Laughs) Yeah.

Sonia: (Laughs)

Robert: You’re ruining the professionalism of my ad, Sonia. You would be a little crazy not to jump on this right? Well, thanks to the hard work and the expertise of Ms. Simone there, who you just heard, this is possible. If you’re looking for an unfair advantage in applying all the topics I just mentioned to your business, we offer a completely free course called Internet Marketing for Smart People.

What is it? In a nutshell, it’s a systematic overview of the very best of copyblogger.com, dripped out to you about once a week right into your email inbox. If you want to learn how to use the online marketing strategies and tactics that actually work, that Copyblogger has spent over 6 years using to build this business, get on the bus with over 63,000 other folks; just pop open a new page on your browser, head over to copyblogger.com, no really, I’m going to wait. Go ahead.

Sonia: He’s waiting.

Robert: I’m waiting, you there? Okay, everybody’s there. Now, scroll down to about the middle of the page until you hit the headline, ‘Grab our free twenty part internet marketing course.’ You’ll see a few bullet points there and a form to pop your email address into. Just drop your email in there, click the red button and we’re going to take care of the rest.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Alright guys. Let’s have a nuts and bolts discussion about affiliate marketing 101 and the best place to start is to ask Jessica. Briefly, what is affiliate marketing?

Jessica: It’s basically an online version of business referrals. You know, any time a business is ready to reward you for customer or visitors, chances are good that’s an affiliate sort of relationship.

Kind of like, you know real estate agents where you have a real estate agent and they give the lead to another real estate agent. The second agent doesn’t pay the first agent unless the house actually sells, right? Well, that’s pretty much what affiliate marketing is all about.

You refer sales and if it turns into say, an email address opt-in or a sale, that’s a successful transaction made by affiliate marketing.

Robert: So, an old school term people may be more familiar with if you aren’t familiar with “affiliate marketing” might be a commission situation correct? I’m sending people to your company, and we’re talking online here through a link of course, and if something is purchased through that link from my site to the other company’s site, they’re paid a commission.

Jessica: Exactly, but you know, that’s how all of our programs work because we pay cash money but (laughs)…

Sonia: By cash, we mean PayPal.

Jessica: Yeah. It all spends the same. But sometimes, you know there are companies that will reward you just for bringing somebody to their website and perhaps giving their email address, and they’ll give you a standard amount of money for every email address you refer. So there are different ways that affiliate marketing can work out as far as what the reward is and what triggers it. But yeah, it’s pretty much all the same.

How to Choose an Affiliate Program

Robert: Okay. I want to do a very basic intro on how somebody might get into this. What are some of the most important things an online publisher needs to consider when they’re approaching an affiliate program thinking about signing up to an affiliate program, just the very beginning steps of what to look for. What type of affiliate program? How to determine what type of affiliate program they might join up with?

Jessica: Well the first thing I think a potential affiliate needs to consider is how much time they want to devote to this. You know, what kind of affiliate business are you trying to run? Are you trying to build a whole bunch of separate assets where you have product-specific websites built for the different programs that interest you or whether you’re going to find only products that are relevant to your current niche and audience, and then basically work that into your content strategy? I think it really depends on you.

Robert: Yeah, it depends on you and also depends really heavily on what you’re doing, right? What you’re publishing or maybe in the case of if you haven’t got anything going already in terms of content production and a specific website, what you’re interested in and want to do.

Put your audience first

Sonia: Something people may want to keep in mind, especially with the post Panda update on Google’s part which really did a lot of damage to a lot of people whose primary business is affiliate marketing. I would advise people if you want to do this for the long haul, if you want to really run it as a business and not just as a little project, to start thinking about your audience, really think about who you serve, who you talk to.

Have your loyalty be to your audience first, your readers or if you do videos, you know your viewers or your listeners, and consider creating something like Brian created at Copyblogger, so an authoritative site, a comprehensive site, that talks about different elements of a well-defined topic and that, first of all, gives you a ton of flexibility so you can talk about different kinds of products on an affiliate basis. You can, you know, kind of come and go.

You can really base what you promote based on what you think is best right now, which I personally think is the way to go. You know, don’t promote anything that you don’t think is awesome, but that gives you a little bit more of a robust site that you’re going to find is not going to be quite so subject to the ups and downs of the search engines because you know the folks, very, very smart, smart folks, SEO’s out there who are trying to keep these super, super narrow sites running.

Why content creation is key to profitable Affiliate Marketing

It’s very challenging unless you can create a lot of content. You might be able to create a lot of content about one piece of software, if the piece of software is complex and you know, and has a lot of nuances to it, but think about being able to create lots of content and really think about your audience.

Who are you serving? The affiliate marketers who serve their affiliate product first or their commission first, I find are not as successful as the affiliate marketers who serve their audience first; first and foremost.

Robert: So you are basically shattering, kind of destroying the make money fast, make online money fast right now in three weeks kind of paradigm. You’re saying, talking about a much more holistic…

Sonia: Yeah, I mean…

…the truth is if you don’t have a customer, you don’t have a business.

So if you burn the customer because you’re promoting something that’s not very good but has a great commission, your business has a very short shelf life. That’s just my observation.

And yeah, I mean affiliate marketing is the traditional way to make money fast, but there’s a lot of other people out there swimming in that same tank who would also like to make money quickly. I would rather have you build something really reliable plus my new favorite thing that I wrote in on an SEO post the other week is, ‘don’t take short cuts; it takes too long.’

The vital element your Affiliate site and content must include

Robert: (Laughs). You know, we’ve got a lot of tutorials that people can through, our Copywriting 101 discussing the ins and outs of copywriting, but I want to ask you specifically, how does copywriting fit into a really good affiliate marketing campaign?

Sonia: Yeah, I mean copywriting is really—and understand that copywriting also refers to things like scripting your videos, doing outlines for your audio content so it’s not just text. Copywriting also is about your multimedia content.

Solid copywriting and solid content marketing, which are related but are not totally identical, and maybe we can put that post in the show notes, solid writing is really how you build that relationship with that customer. It’s how you educate them. It’s how you help them understand what they need to know in order to make the purchase. It’s how you address the objections. All the basics of copywriting come into play with affiliate marketing because affiliate marketing is not different from a “real business.”

Affiliate marketing is a real business, and just the same way copywriting supports a business if you were a graphic designer or you know, you had a catalog for your clothing line, it’s the same when you’re an affiliate marketer. You need to use your writing to build a relationship with the customer and educate the customer about the product.

Why content creation is key to profitable Affiliate Marketing

Robert: This goes back to the bigger picture, holistic, long-term approach when we get into talking about content creation and content marketing. How can this help drive affiliate sales? And second part of that question would be for both of you, we’re not going to talk about specific examples but maybe let’s give some general examples of how content might work and what types of content work.

Sonia: Yeah, I’m going to give you an example of how we did on Copyblogger in text, and then I’m going to throw it to Jess and she can talk about some of the things that she’s seen with video if that works for everybody.

You know, we do a fair amount of this on Copyblogger. We don’t do as much affiliate promotion anymore because we have so many products of our own that we don’t have a lot of promotional band width in our calendar but we actually did two different posts on how to write an ebook. They both did incredibly well and they were posts that, first and foremost, were educational to the reader. So they talked to the reader about why do you even want to do an ebook in the first place? What’s the point? What do you get out of it?

And then, you know, what are some of the key things you have to make sure you include in there? Then they had links to more full-fledged products about how to write and sell ebooks.

You can sort of tell they were good content marketing because they delivered value to the reader even if the reader didn’t buy the product. They were inherently valuable and that’s how you keep that audience coming back next time. Maybe they don’t pick up this product, maybe they do, but they come back next time.

You know we pointed people to the most valuable resources we found on the topic so we didn’t point them to junk. It’s just not worth our reputation to do that.

They had clear calls to action so it was very clear, like when it came time to go click over to the affiliate offer it was very clear like, “Click here to find out more about it and pick it up today.” They also gave a little bit of the features and benefits of the product so they had described a little bit of you know, “What’s your end result? What do you get out of writing and selling an ebook? What’s better in your life because of that?” And we talked a little bit about that as a way to presell the end product to some degree.

Robert: So classic attraction, valuable content, you keep repeating these. There’s like a theme here, Sonia, that I’m picking up on which is valuable content marketing.

Sonia: Yeah, the thing is, you absolutely must get out of denial about this. There are a billion other things people can be looking at other than your affiliate marketing site. It has to be worth reading.

Robert: In and of itself.

Sonia: In and of itself. It has to be worth sharing. It has to be worth tweeting and Face-booking and Google Plus-ing. If it’s not, you ain’t going to make it. There’s just no way, there’s no way around that. So yeah, you’ve got to make it valuable in and of itself. That’s the #1 most important thing you can do to get results on the ‘click here and add to cart’ side.

How to make Affiliate Marketing work for you

Robert: Jess, you see a lot of stuff out there and we’re not going to talk again, specifics about anything that we’re looking at from our affiliate program anyway but can you give us some general examples of how a beginning affiliate can begin to think about what kind of content works for people and really works for an audience?

Jessica: I think for new affiliates, there is a big lure to go “pay per click”. I hear a lot of people talking about it. You know, why would I want to spend all this time creating content for a website when I can just bid on some words? To that I would say it’s a really great way to make money, sure, through affiliate marketing, but long term you will always be paying money to make money.

With content marketing, if you’re doing it right, you’re creating a good mix of evergreen, tried and true lessons and information, but you’re also creating relevant and timely things as well that speak to, perhaps, an update. People will do this through articles or tutorials or reviews of perhaps a new feature, but when you’re looking at pay per click versus content creation, I would say content creation’s always going to win because you can increase your traffic and you also increase trust because Sonia’s talking about that.

You know, you buy from people you know, like, and trust. The most effective affiliates that we have definitely have authority and trust with their audience. That’s what makes people click on their affiliate link and they’ll tell you right out, “Hey this is an affiliate link.” It makes people want to do it because they know, like and trust them. They’d rather give them the commission.
But as far as other good content creation, there’s a really good article that Brian Clark wrote: Five Effective Copywriting Tactics. I think you’re going to include that in the notes, but he talks about endorsements and bonuses as well. Those are also really good strategies but speaking as both an affiliate manager and somebody who buys things online, I buy because of words, personally.

Good words and understanding how you use it, telling me why I care about, telling me and doing the homework for me, helping me understand why this is better than that one, that’s what’ll get me to buy, and it seems to work for our affiliates as well.

Robert: So that’s a really, really good point. Two things that I want to just follow up on briefly; you are a person who loves words. People are different and people respond to different media in different ways, so find out who your audience is goes back to that right?

It might be text, it might be audio, it might be video but there are all kinds of ways that people interact with content and you want to be in tune with, one, what you want to be doing, but also who your audience is and what they want, even more importantly.

Is pay per click worth it?

But quickly back to the PPC thing; pay per click ads and buying ads to drive affiliate programs.

Very good point Jess, and Sonia, you and Brian have talked about this before. I wonder if you could just expand on it for just a moment. We know that pay per click works, I won’t put words in your mouth but let me just do that right now, I think I’ve heard you say, “We know it works but it’s a tough game. You’ve got to know what you’re doing.” Right?

Sonia: Yeah, absolutely. Pay per click really rewards people who are willing to stay on it, you know? And keep running tests and keep split testing your headlines and keep split testing your landing pages.

One thing that has definitely emerged out of pay per click marketing is if you can send people into a rich content experience, and especially if you can do that with an email list, so you’re sending them into like an email auto responder, you get much better return on the investment of that click.

So instead of buying a click, you’re really buying a lead. You know, you’re really buying somebody who’s interested in your topic and you can make more than one offer. The thing about pay per click is its quite expensive and again, the better you are at the game, the better your clicks, the better your pricing is.

The other part of the pay per click game that’s starting to be more of a factor than it ever is how much you pay for that click is partially determined by the quality of your website.

So if you have a rich, high quality, good content website, I’m not saying you have to have 2,000 posts; you don’t. But have enough content there to really cover the subject and keep adding content regularly. Google looks at that. If you’re using Google pay per click, they look at that and that’s one of the very important factors they use when they decide how much they’re going to charge you. They would give you a deal if you have a better quality website so there are great reasons to focus on content even if you are doing pay per click. I think pay per click is a good way to get traffic; it’s pricey.

We don’t do it because we have this amazing content asset of copyblogger.com so it makes more sense for us to focus on that but I don’t have anything against pay per click, just realize that you can use it better if you pair it with content and you’ll get a lot more out of it.

Robert: If you’re just showing up to Copyblogger, if you’ve only been here for a little while, if you just picked this radio show off the wild, wild web and you’re wondering what all this means, drop down on the post where this podcast appears. I’m going to have a lot of links to all the things: content marketing, copywriting 101, all these things that we’re talking about that we just don’t have time to get into right now. So never fear it’s all there for your taking, but be aware this is just kind of the 10,000 foot overview. We’ll get into this more in detail later.

Jess, as far as I know, you are not in an attorney, correct?

Jessica: (Laughs) Only in Vegas.

Sonia: No secret law degree in your background?

Affiliate Marketing legal issues you need to understand

Robert: Yeah. Well with that knowledge, I wanted to ask you, just real simply and quickly, there are some very clear legal issues that folks need to be aware of when it comes to affiliate marketing. What are one or two of those? This is not exhaustive. Again, we are not attorneys. You need to research this on your own and hire an attorney if you’re concerned about these things but can you give us a quick hit on what people need to be aware of, first and foremost?

Jessica: Well, first, we do have a recovering attorney as our CEO and he already wrote about this, so definitely go check out his post on the subject. But the Federal Trade Commission wants bloggers and affiliate marketers to tell people that they are taking money or goods in exchange for reviews and endorsements.

It makes perfect sense from both a business perspective and just a good old-fashioned relationship perspective. I’ve seen affiliate marketers do very well by just outright saying, “Yes, this is an affiliate link. Please click it so I can make a commission.”

You know, if you are the kind of affiliate who is providing some great information or a valuable resource for free, people will value that, and they will be more likely to click a link if you just outright say, “Hey I will make a commission if you do this.”

Bottom line is, disclosure is usually a good thing. It helps create that trusting relationship that you want with your customers and in the long run, it will help both of you.

Robert: And if you want more on this, yes, Brian did write a great post on this and I’ll link to some other resources in the show notes. Any last words from you ladies on affiliate marketing 101?

Sonia: I would recommend if your topic does have anything to do with doing business online, and some of our listeners do and some of our listeners don’t, if you are interested in checking our affiliate programs and seeing the products we have, we strive to make them the best on the market, but you can make that choice for yourself, get in touch with our dear friend Jess, who is our Affiliate Manager. She is awesome. She takes great care of our affiliates and she really helps people more one on one figure out how to do this stuff and how to make good use of your time. So I’m going to give a little pitch for Jess here.

Jessica: Well yeah, all of our programs are open and free to join. I think Robert’s going to put a link at the bottom too. If you’re new and you like to read, I would recommend Traffic and Trust is a really good book if you’re just getting started out. It was written by Nick Reese with experienced commentary from Chris Brogan.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to learn in person, Affiliate Summit is a really great conference with incredible sessions. So you know, don’t be afraid to dive in. It’s really a cool way to make money both actively and passively depending on your chosen approach.

Robert: Great and yeah, I will drop this link in the show notes as well, but this is copyblogger.com/affiliate-programs and on that page, two things, you can take a look at just a basic overview of our programs, but at the bottom of that page, you can contact Jess directly through a form there, ask her any questions you want. As Sonia said, make your own decisions about these things.

Alright guys, let’s get out of here. Thanks for listening everybody. If you like what’s going on here, the best way to say thank you is to head over to iTunes, give us a rating and a comment over there and we really, really appreciate it if you do that. Thank you very much Ms. Simone, Ms. Commins, Mr. Ogilvy would be proud. Thank you.

Sonia: (Laughs) Thanks Robert. Take care.

Jessica: (Laughs) Thanks.

[/transcript]

Other listening options:

• Click here to download the mp3 | 29.1 MB | 24:11
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The Show Notes:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
• The Copyblogger Affiliate Programs
• How to Survive the Affiliate Evolution by Rae Hoffman-Dolan
• Copywriting 101
• Content Marketing 101
• Five Effective Copywriting Tactics for Affiliate Marketing
• How to Turn Affiliate Marketing Disclosure Into a Selling Point
• What’s the Difference Between Content Marketing and Copywriting?
• How to Write Ebooks That Sell
• Email Marketing 101
• We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s Chief Copywriter and Resident Recluse.

We know that online marketing works when selling digital products.

When’s the last time you thought about selling physical products online?

Of course, the business of physical widgets is booming, even though Internet types tend to shy away from it. Online marketing doesn’t necessarily mean an exclusively online business.

Ben Settle jumped on the line with me this week to talk about his old school physical information product business.

Give it a listen to find how he gets it done, and how he gets his stuff into the hands of buyers …

In this episode, Ben Settle and I discuss:

• Why physical information products work in the digital age
• How to market and sell physical products online
• The 3 myths of selling physical products online
• The easy way to get information products printed and mailed
• Why you should consider adding physical products to your lineup

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

[transcript]

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert: You are listening to Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio. I am Robert Bruce and today we’re going old school with our pal Ben Settle from bensettle.com. Ben how are you doing today man?

Ben: I am doing great and as usual, I appreciate you having me on.

Robert: Now before I grill you on this old school physical products business model that you’ve got going that’s powered by online marketing, by the way, I want to ask you a favor if you will. Could you please jump on your browser and head over to Copyblogger.com real quick.

Ben: Okay.

Robert: Tell me when you are there. I should have some music playing in the background.

Ben: I am there.

Robert: Okay, so now scroll down to about the middle of that page, until you hit the headline “grab our free 20-part internet marking course” and I just want to let people know briefly that this radio show is brought to you by the href="http://www.copyblogger.com/imfsp/">Internet Marketing for Smart People course. If you are looking at it on your browsers right now, that’s where you are you. What is this? In a nutshell, it’s 20 highly readable and useful emails covering everything from content marketing to email marketing, the basics of good copywriting to social media strategy, and much, much more.

It’s a systematic overview of the very best of Copyblogger.com and it’s dripped out to you about once a week, right to your inbox. So if you want to learn how to use the online marketing strategies and tactics that actually work, that Copyblogger has spent over six years using to build this multi-million dollar business, get on the bus with over 63,000 other folks. Just drop your email address into that little box there and click the red button and we’ll take care of the rest.

Why sell physical products in a digital age?

All right Ben, I asked you on the show today to talk about how you sell physical products online, because we know that online marketing can be much more than just digital products. This is one of those models that a lot of folks online either ignore or they just never think about doing.

We think it won’t work, we think it’s to difficult, or we think people today just won’t want a physical information product when they can easily download a PDF or an eBook, so I want to take a few minutes and ask you what you are doing and how you do it. Let me start by asking you generally, why sell physical products in this digital age?

Ben: Before I answer that, there are actually a lot of reasons for this, but I do want to say real quickly, that I am not an absolutist on this, I don’t think it’s never a good idea to sell digital, and we can talk about this later if you want. I sell digital products in other business formats, but physical products are something that people should at least consider if you are selling something somewhat high quality, high ticket, and something that you just want to have this air of quality about and there are some other reasons too.

To me, it’s something that people should at least consider in the business-to-business arena and one obvious reason for me to do it, and not everyone is going to get excited about this reason, but I find that doing this works for everything. It’s kind of like the old Earl Nightingale quote “just look around at what everyone else is doing and then do the opposite and you’ll succeed.” Everybody is digital right? By being the physical product person, you are going to stick out right off the bat in ways that other people aren’t.

It’s kind of like Christmas, when people get something in the mail; it’s a completely different experience then if they just download air. In fact, I am going to take this to a level that I don’t think most people realize, I didn’t even realize it until somewhat recently. When you get an email, and this is one reason people are so addicted to the internet, I think, is that you get this little drip of dopamine or something from your brain, it’s like a feel good chemical. So when you get that tweet or that email or that instant message, it’s kind of like a little jolt of excitement.

When it’s direct mail, physical, something that you get in your mailbox or delivered to your door step by the UPS guy, that effect is amplified I don’t know how many times, I don’t know if it’s 100 times or ten times, but it’s a lot. You are having a huge impact on that person, you are making the buying experience so much more interesting and so different, and it’s like an event. It’s not just “oh I am going to download some air right now and I’m going to see this eBook” it’s a completely different experience.

The example that I like to use and this is when this really dawned on me. A few years ago, a man named Gary Bencivenga who is considered the world’s top copywriter, I don’t know too many people who would argue with that, greatest living copywriter today. He put out a seminar where he revealed all of his tricks and all of his methodologies. He charged $5,000 for that seminar and now he is charging $5,000 for the DVD’s to that seminar.

Well a few years ago back in 2008, I bought that, and it’s high price tag thing, and I mean you would not have the same effect downloading that and paying $5,000. You’d almost feel kind of gypped. But it wasn’t just that, it was the whole experience. You are waiting for this really valuable thing to come and when it shows up, you place so much more value on it, you are far more likely to use it and consume it. You are far more likely to probably go through it and it’s not like something that just sits on your hard drive with a 1,000 other files that will probably get lost somewhere along the way. It’s like a big deal.

Now there are a lot more reasons than that, but those are some big ones. I think just the impact alone, where it’s like Christmas, it’s like receiving something really cool in the mail, and it just sets you apart from everybody else.

How Ben Settle incorporates physical products into his business

Robert: Thanks for making clear, we’re not making an argument that people should sell physical products alone, far from it. This is just an eye-opener for some folks who may not have constrained it at all or have some objections that I think Ben is going to address very specifically later on in the show to considering doing it. Thanks for clearing that up.

Before we get into how you are selling your stuff online, let’s just do a quick rundown of what you are actually selling so that folks can get an idea of what we are talking about here. All of us have seen kind of the rise of Etsy, that’s a great example recently for arts and crafts people being able to physically sell their arts and their crafts on the Esty website or through the Esty website, but you are still in, and talking about, the information business, right?

Ben: Yes. On my main site, my bensettle.com site, all I sell are physical products. Now I used to have a much bigger product line up then I do now, and I changed it for several reasons that are somewhat irrelevant to this conversation but my main product is a physical newsletter, that’s a very expensive newsletter, it’s almost a $100 a month. It’s physical, I mean I don’t have any online component to it, there is nothing to log in to, there are no passwords or anything like that. You just get this physical newsletter every month and I can tell you, if I were going to deliver that thing digitally, it would not have as nearly the impact that it does physically. It would probably not get read as readily, it would be easier to just put aside.

It’s a high-ticket thing and this is the thing, like I said, I don’t think physical products are always the best way to go. I am a partner in another business, a weight-loss business where all we sell is digital eBooks, low priced, inexpensive eBook, which is fine for what we’re doing. We don’t need physical products; everything is inexpensive and no big deal. Some people like to sell things on Kindle, so that’s obviously digital and there is a lot of wisdom to that actually for front-end products.

I think that when people are selling business-to-business especially or if you are a specialist in something and you really want to have that impact, I just think you should at least consider physical products and this is why I sell my newsletter that way. I have a copywriting product that’s a physical book with a CD; actually, it’s two books and a CD. Again, if I delivered that digitally, I don’t think it would have the impact, I don’t think that people would get as much value out of it. I don’t think they would place as much value on it.

Believe me, I am not the only one who is discovering this, I have friends who have been watching what I have been doing and they are starting to experiment with this and they are kind of catching on to this and seeing the same thing. People are sticking around longer if it’s continuity. We can talk about this later about this myth that physical get more refunds, I have not found that to be the case. Personally, I don’t offer refunds on things, but for people who do I think that they would find that they would get fewer refunds and that’s something to think about too.

The old-school secret to selling products online

Robert: Yes and we’re going to talk also very specifically about how you get this stuff done, getting your products produced and shipped. Before we go there, what is your basic marketing setup? This is going to be 101 for folks, you can look at CopyBlogger.com, dig into the archives there, go through our Internet Marketing for Smart People course to get the bigger overview of how we do things with online marketing.

What is your basic marketing setup: email, you do content marketing, and you do direct response through both of those mediums. How do you get these physical products, how do you raise awareness for your physical products online?

Ben: Well, this might disappoint people looking for the ninja tricks and all that, I am the first to admit that there is nothing complicated.

Robert: We are definitely talking general here.

Ben: Well good. My whole model is very 1990’s. It’s very retro, its like an oldies radio station compared to what most people are doing today. It’s really just opt-in sales letter, email follow up, sending them emails everyday. That’s my whole funnel, my whole front-end funnel; backend stuff is a little bit different.

For my newsletter, I have other products that I sell to newsletter subscribers and I use the physical newsletter to deliver my sales pitches for that. I use email for that. Now that’s not the only way to do it but my point is that it’s very simple. I am not the only one doing this, a few years ago I wrote the bullets for a Ken McCarthy System Seminars, his 2008 seminar. He had recorded and he hired me to write the bullet points for the sales letter, so I had to go through the course which is really cool and all the system seminar lectures and all that.

I remember that they did a beginners class, “here’s how to get started” and it was really great. It was Ken McCarthy and this guy, Lloyd Irving, I think his name is, who does like ten million dollars in the martial arts niche, and they are like “you know we really don’t do a whole lot of all this web 2.0 stuff.” I mean they do it, they still use all that stuff but at the end of the day it is opt-in, sales letter and follow-up. That’s it. Email and follow-up, that’s all I do and it’s been working out pretty good.

The 3 myths of selling physical products online

Robert: We’ve got to get you going with Premise for creating some of those landing pages that you are creating all over the place. I see them everywhere and they are fantastic but I think Premise would definitely help you out. Let’s get into a great post you wrote a while ago about the myths that people believe about selling physical products online. What are some of these myths?

Ben: There are a lot myths actually; I remember that post and the three that I talked about were that there was this myth that it’s a big hassle mailing and printing stuff. Another one was delayed gratification, people want things right away, and then other people thought you’d get more refunds with physical products and I’ll walk us through all three of these and why they are myths. At least I have not found these to be the case at all.

First is the hassle of mailing and printing thing. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t physically lick a stamp or anything. It’s all done by my print by fulfillment house. I don’t even think about it in fact I don’t have any tech support issues, I don’t get any emails from people saying “Oh I couldn’t download this PDF” which happens a lot, especially people using Chrome and that sort of thing, I noticed they have problems. I don’t get any of that, I don’t even think about it.

It’s actually for me, less hassle than digital. I don’t have to think about it.

It’s all done via auto-notification through my shopping cart where you can put another email address in there for order notification, that gets sent to the people who do my mailing and printing and there is a lady there by the name of Michele who’s like superwoman. She’s just awesome; she’s on everything like white on rice, no matter what comes up. So if there is a problem I simply email her and she just takes care of it.

By the way, I want to plug this place because I think they do such a great job, I don’t get any kickback, I don’t get any affiliates stuff for recommending them I just know that they will take care of you. It’s SelbyMarketing.com and just ask for Rich Selby and he’ll take care of you. So I don’t even think about it. It is completely hands-off. The only difference is that if there is a pain in the butt it’s that you have to have inventory printed up so you have to pay for that up front, but if you are making sales, it pays for itself anyways.

Again, this is why I don’t really recommend it for cheap, inexpensive front-end necessary, physical products, but if you are selling something that’s quality, something that’s kind of specialty information, I really think that you should consider it.

The other myth was the delayed gratification thing. People want everything now. There is some truth to that, I am not arguing with that. There are some people who want everything now, they want it fast, they want it free, and they want it yesterday. But I have found those to be like the biggest pain-in-ass customers that I have ever dealt with. If I am losing sales because of that, good, I am finding and this may not be the case for everybody, this is just what I experience, and the experience of some other people that I know of.

People who buy physical products are just a higher quality customer. I am not saying that digital customers aren’t high quality, I am just saying that as far as overall, and I am generalizing here. The customer base that you will get selling physical products, these are people who are more thinkers, they don’t need as much hand holding, they are excited to get the product that … they are sitting there waiting in eager anticipation for the mailman to show up and they are ready to rip into that product and use it.

What is the point of being in business if people don’t actually use your product? I don’t want people just downloading things and never using it. So I think that it’s kind of a myth, this whole delayed gratification that people have to have everything right away. There are times though when that is good and I am generalizing here, I am not saying never to do digital, I am just saying in cases like mine, I far more prefer the physical side of things.

Finally, this idea that you will get more refunds, I don’t know who started this thing. I don’t know who is spreading this around but if you think about it, they have a point when they say well people will download your digital product and then it’ll sit on their hard drive and they’ll forget about it until after the guarantee period. It’s almost like they are trying to get away with something. I just don’t look at business that way. I want them to use the product, and consume it.

One of your guys at Copyblogger, one of your writers that I see, Sean D’Souza I know he would agree with me on this at least, that you want people to consume your product. He teaches this and it’s just awesome information. You don’t want people letting it sit on your hard drive and never using it and oh, I got away with that one, they waited too long to ask for a guarantee. I just don’t see it that way.

Let’s take it beyond that, what’s easier to refund, a digital product, or a physical one? A physical one you gotta go pack it up, run it down to the post office, pay for the postage, it’s just a pain. Most people don’t even like going there to send their own stuff for other things much less a refund. I am not saying that there aren’t people out there who don’t make entire businesses out of refunding products, they do.

The biggest hurdle to selling physical products online

Robert: Okay, you are making a great case, in my opinion, for people to look into this and add physical products to their product list and what they are selling online. My final question for you is how do you get this done? How do you get your products printed, distributed, and mailed? What are some of the hurdles to selling physical products on line?

Ben: The biggest hurdle and really, the only hurdle that I can think of is finding a good printer. This can be a problem. I went through three; the third was the charm, luckily. The first one that I went through was back in early 2009 and it was a company that all the gurus out there were recommending, “now you gotta go with these people, they’ll take care of you.” So I went along with the game and I regretted it because they didn’t even print the products on site, they outsourced it to a local company. That’s not that big of a deal but it just opens up a door to more problems, the more people that are involved.

I would have orders that would just not get shipped and the customer service person would be like “Oh I am sorry about that.” Well sorry kind of doesn’t cut it when someone just spent $130 on my product, it’s a month later, and they are emailing me asking where it is. I think that is unacceptable. It happens once in a while, that’s okay, and that’s going to happen. It hasn’t happened with my current printer in two years, but it could happen.

It was happening way too often; so I went to a friend I had out there in the internet marketing world and I asked “who do you guys use?” because he was the CFO of a really, really big info publishing company. He told me who they were using, which happened to be the same company who did the printing that was outsourced from the original company that I was using. I talked to that guy, he was a great salesman, and he sold me on why they were the best and I should go with them. They were even worse!

They would get my shopping cart notifications and then they would email me back saying, “You know for some reason our email reader can’t read these notifications.” These are plain text emails, I don’t know. That was a whole other thing and I would ask them to please send me the tracking numbers and sometimes they would remember to and sometimes they wouldn’t.

Finally I went to Selby, who I should have gone to in the first place and I remember it like is was yesterday, it was late 2009 and I am like “look man I just want a printer where I don’t have to think about this stuff. Can you print things up, can you mail it out? Can you just send me or the customer preferably both a tracking number?” And I remember him saying “Ben you are not challenging me here!” Finally, the most basic thing … and they will do a lot more than that but it was refreshing and I have not had a problem with them ever.

The easy way to get information products printed and mailed

Robert: Let’s take a look at your email player’s monthly newsletter. Tell me how you get that done.

Ben: Okay well this is pretty simple. When somebody buys, they get into a recurring order, it’s in the shopping cart, and it’s all automatic. You set up a recurring ordering product and every month you can go on and download all the people who are on that recurring order list into an excel sheet. I just send that list along with the PDF to the printer. Actually, I send the PDF a month in advance, I have my newsletters usually written a couple months in advance, I don’t like being under the gun too much.

Robert: And it helps because it is evergreen content right? This is not new/used, time-based stuff.

Ben: And if it is, I’ll add it in at the last minute or something but 90% of these things are written in advance. I’ll send it in a month early, in fact just yesterday I sent in the PDF for the March newsletter because I want them to send me a proof of it first. They send me a proof, I’ll get that next week, and I can make sure that it looks okay and that’s it.

On the first of March, I’ll send that list in and I’ll say please send the “email players newsletter” to this list and they just do it. You can make special requests, you can say: well I want foreign orders, non US orders, I want those to have tracking numbers, which by the way, here is a big tip, if you are in the United States, and it doesn’t matter what printer you are using, and you are sending physical products overseas, it’s very important to have tracking numbers because the United States Postal Service has dropped the ball way too many times for my taste.

It used to be that I would get three or four people a month that say “the newsletter never showed up, or this product never showed up.” But when I have tracking attached to it, it shows up all of a sudden. That’s kind of a side tip. But that’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s all done via the shopping cart, notifies them of new sales. When somebody subscribes to my newsletter they get a book, that’s the premium I give away is a free book, so that is automatically printed and sent to them, I don’t even think about it and then they just kind of bill me for that every week or so, I’ll get a bill from the printer.

If you are doing inexpensive products with razor thin margins, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend physical products, unless you have your numbers really figured out but if you are selling something high ticket, it’s more than worth it. I’ve been saying that it’s good to do physical, in my opinion, if you sell specialty high ticket type products, but I am going to show you the other side of the thing, I am not saying it’s impossible to sell high ticket things digitally either.

There is a marketer named Jim Straw and he’s been in business forever. He owned banks and export companies and those kinds of things when most of us weren’t even born and now he focuses online and he sells, I don’t think it’s more than 150 page eBook that’s like $1,000. There is no refund guarantee on it or anything. So I am not saying it’s impossible. I would love to have a business like that where I can sell a few thousand-dollar eBooks every month and not have to think about anything. He is kind of the exception to the rule, I don’t know anyone else doing that, but it is possible.

Robert: Alright Ben, where can people find more of you? Do you have a home phone number that everybody can call or I hear you take calls up until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning?

Ben: Well the best number to call would be my URL which isBenSettle.com and when people go there, if you opt-in, I’ll send you free issues of my newsletter via PDF, not physical, but PDF, and there are a lot tips in there that people have used to just make money with whether you buy anything or not.

Robert: Well thanks for listening everybody. I hope this show got you thinking about the possibilities that selling physical products online might hold for you. If you like what we’re doing here, the best way to say thank you is to head over to iTunes and give us a rating and a comment, Mr. Settle, thank you for coming by and reminding us about the “physical” world.

Ben: Absolutely. I hope more people at least think about and experiment with it.

[/transcript]

Other listening options:

• Click here to download the mp3 | 30.9 MB | 25:45
• Click here to subscribe via iTunes
• Click here for the RSS feed (non iTunes)
• Click here for the show archive

The Show Notes:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
• How to Push “Send” and Grow Your Business
• Content Marketing 101
• The “No Headache” Guide to Selling Physical Products Online
• We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s Chief Copywriter and Resident Recluse.

What if most of the business world stopped blogging tomorrow?

Would you stop as well?

No, if that happened, you’d find yourself sitting on the opportunity of a lifetime. Social networking sites would explode with likes and retweets and pins and +1s of your original content all day long.

This is why the annual “blogging is dead” claim is so dumb. Even if it were true, your continued content production would dominate the web in every way.

So, instead of worrying about the latest claimed trend or alarming decline of the moment, stay the course.

Original content creation is the present — and the future — of online marketing.

In this episode, Brian Clark and I discuss:

• Has blogging peaked?
• The clear future of online marketing
• What Twitter wants, and how to give it
• Is the online playing field really even?
• Why it doesn’t matter (at all) if “blogging” dies
• What even the major brands are focusing on right now

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

[transcript]

Please note that this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and grammar.

________________

Robert:This is Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio. I am Robert Bruce here with Brian Clark.

This radio show is brought to you by Internet Marketing for Smart People, which if you haven’t heard yet, is our online marketing course that we deliver straight to your email inbox. The course contains 20 highly useful emails covering everything from content marketing, to email marketing, to the basics of good phone etiquette on podcasts (laughs, home phone is ringing).

If you want to jump-start your online marketing efforts, if you want to skip a large part of the learning curve with all this stuff, if you want to learn how to use online marketing strategies and tactics that actually work, get on the bus. Sign up. It’s totally free! If you want in, it’s easy. Head over to Copyblogger.com scroll down to about the middle of the home page where you will you’ll see the headline “Grab our free 20 part internet marketing course” drop your email address into the little box there and we will take care of the rest for you.

Is blogging dead… again?

Robert: Brian let me read you a little something as we get into the show today. And I quote, “The use of blogging may have peaked as a primary social media tool in the US business world. The new data shows adoption of blogging is declining for the first time since 2007, among the Inc. 500 companies.”

That is from Nora Barnes, a University of Massachusetts, a Dartmouth researcher, from a new study looking at the online activities of Inc. 500 Companies. In a nutshell, the study basically states that more and more of these larger companies are abandoning their own online real estate, their own websites and/or blogs, in favor of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. What do you think about this?

Brian: I think that’s a leap. It’s interesting, I read about this study yesterday, which would be Tuesday, and I didn’t think much of it because I’d learned about the study from a very well-balanced and analytical article that really dug into what was being said and the reality of it and then I was like “Okay, no big deal.”

The next day everyone is up in arms about it. ReadWriteWeb basically just published those assertions, no one else’s, with no questioning. And I like ReadWriteWeb, so I was a little dismayed especially since they happen to also be a blog.

Then the other people are blogging and the advocates are firing back saying this and that, some of it kind of good and humorous, but here is the thing, and I’ll see if I can find that article because I don’t even remember where I read it at this point, the Inc. 500 changes every year.

It’s not just the same 500 companies year to year, it changes actually much more then you might think. That was the first thing that was pointed out, that you are not comparing apples to apples because it’s not the same companies, so you can only say, “Of these companies, less are doing corporate blogging” not that others have abandoned it. That’s important.

The second thing is that the study even points out that certain companies just aren’t going to blog, like government service companies and construction companies. That would be ridiculous, right? Government service companies get a government contracts that’s their business model and again, the article pointed out that, due to Obama’s economic stimulus plan, the inclusion of more government service companies in the Inc. 500 was a natural result.

So companies that don’t need to blog are more prominent in the 500 this year. If you look at it that way, I am not sure that the study really says anything at all about corporate blogging.

Robert: You are saying 1) this is not a static, the Inc. 500 is not a static list. New companies are coming in all the time for various reasons and 2) this shouldn’t be a worry, because, as you say, with a lot of these companies there is not necessarily a need for … well there is a need for content marketing, but they are not concerned about it.

The clear future of online marketing

Brian: Certain companies just don’t have the need. I’ve got a buddy from high school who manufactures these giant springs for heavy machinery, it’s the most horribly boring business ever, but they get these huge government contracts and he’s doing very well. He’s not going to blog. He doesn’t even understand what I do. That’s not the issue because there are lots of companies that can benefit from it.

But you really bring up the important thing, which is that it’s not about corporate blogging. Most corporate blogs are horrible because on one hand, they are corporate, and on the other hand, the idea of what the C-level people thought the blog was suppose to be ended up, in most cases, being really bad. The blog became press releases and dry dribble about the company instead of being focused on prospective customers or whatever the business model is.

You are hearing a completely different story about content itself and I am talking about web content. Last time we addressed the “blogging is dead” thing I just said

“Look, okay, we’ll just call it content marketing, is that better? Okay good. Now keep using WordPress and keep doing what you are doing, you just don’t have to call it blogging”.

I don’t think a lot of people call it blogging anymore and WordPress is a more functional full CMS. We build all our sites out of it whether there is a blog involved or not.

Let’s look at another report that was issued yesterday about the concerns of CMO’s, Chief Marketing Officers, when it comes to digital growth. Among many interesting points, the number one thing that they need in order to grow in the online world is sharable content.

Bingo!

So far this year, I have been spending a ton of time talking to the agency and consulting folks, the people that are on the front lines with all the big brands and content marketing is all the rage. They get it now.

Again, it’s a whole mix of things, but it’s primarily about content that is spread through social media, and then of course you get the longer-term benefits of search engine rankings.
Google has made that quite clear that the social signals are more important than ever. So the story that you hear from this “corporate blogging is dying” report, might actually be accurate because they are not talking about blogging but they are talking about building content focused websites. So it’s just nomenclature really.

Why major brands are acting like media companies

Copyblogger doesn’t look like a blog to some people, right?

Really, what’s happening here are that the big brands are building stand alone content sites, many times on WordPress because that’s what the agency people will tell them to adopt. They are finally thinking and acting like media companies.

Talking about companies that you would never expect, like Procter & Gamble, of course we know they’ve always been into content. What about Clorox and Tide and Coca-Cola who we profiled during their big move into content marketing? But that’s because it’s what works and they don’t think about slapping a blog onto their corporate site, although Clorox for example does have an entire section of blogs, not one blog, not a corporate blog, but consumer focused content, and they are done as blogs.

It doesn’t have to be, Procter & Gamble doesn’t even have anything really about them other than as a sponsor on their “Man of the House” site. It’s a standalone content site that happens to be produced by Procter & Gamble.

So that’s what you are seeing. Some companies are building individual media assets often many of them 10, 20 some companies, you’d be surprised like in the travel space, have hundreds of niche sites that they own.

Is the online playing field really even?

Robert: We talked briefly about this a while ago and it’s one of my favorite stories, but just to give people some context, let’s talk for just a second about Procter & Gamble. In the past, you could call it their content marketing of the past and what they are doing a little bit in the future or doing now and into the future. This is a company that has millions and millions of dollars that they could pour into traditional advertising with all kinds of media and they still do.

But they are also, and I am torn here because I really want to talk about Coca-Cola going all in as we were discussing a few weeks back, great article, but Procter & Gamble just the short version if you will. What was the old decision they made decades ago and then what does it look like now that they are doing today? Just to give people an idea of what this looks like in the real world.

Brian: I mean we’ve talked about it on the show before, but they invented the soap opera on radio as a way to reach depression era housewives and they did it through serial drama, you know, show up every week, find out what happens, cliff hangers, family drama, all that kind of stuff.

Then obviously with the advent of television they made that move, by the 70’s soap operas were the most lucrative form of television on the planet, and two of the most popular shows were actually produced by Procter & Gamble by a separate division called Procter & Gamble Productions.

Most of what happened from those early days, that changed and you didn’t have companies producing their own content, they just went with advertising. During the golden age of advertising, people who spent the most money just literally crushed it and Procter & Gamble did that too.

But they were really taking from both sides; they were going direct to their target audience with soap operas using new mediums like radio and television. Of course, then they were brand advertising out the wazoo, as well, because they were masters at that game.

But we’re living in a different world now, so now Procter & Gamble’s out of soap operas, which were declining in popularity, now they build niche content sites in this case, for men not housewives, housemen. House husbands, whatever you want to call it. It’s an interesting adaptation with the times, right?

Robert: Those content sites, those niche sites they look a lot like what we’re doing, not in content obviously, but in terms of the structure and in terms of how they are producing it and putting it out there.

Brian: Oh sure, I mean, mainstream media sites are all social now and a lot of blogs have transformed themselves into something bigger, if the business dictates it.

I mean everything from Mashable which is an amazing story, a blog started by a 23-year old, now a major media company. So things are evolving to where there is not really old media and new media, there is just a big mess of media.
The cool thing is that I can build a site that builds a business just as much as Proctor & Gamble can, just as much as Time Warner can. We are all media now.

Why it doesn’t matter (at all) if “blogging” dies

Robert: If some of these companies don’t want to go to the effort to create great content, what do you say to them?

Brian: I don’t care. From what I am hearing, there is enough exceptional momentum out there with content marketing that there’s an entire industry that’s being built around it and it’s not going away. It’s just not.

Social media itself is just the internet and sooner or later, we’ll stop talking about it as a distinction, right? Content is what works so Lisa Barone wrote a responsive post to the ReadWriteWeb article and basically that was her angle, she like “you don’t want to blog, who cares, here’s what you are missing out on if you don’t” and she just ran through ten of the biggest benefits. People share content.

Another report that just came out found the best way to use to Twitter is sharing content. Basically, what that means is that the content creators get the most benefit even though others are curators and the sharers. Basically her argument was “fine, don’t blog, I don’t care” and I agree with her in that there are enough people who get the content thing whether you call it blogging or not, that it just doesn’t matter.

There are companies who are Facebook only; good for you. When Zuckerberg cashes out and they change the rules on you again, have fun, I’ve got my site and if anyone is going to screw that up it’ll be me, not Zuckerberg.

The opportunity for small businesses

Robert: Yes and this creates quite a hole for maybe smaller business to run through right? To create great content, to reach those customers and reach those people through content marketing.

Brian: I mean the people who do, will have outsized results, they will own the search results, they will have much bigger social networks because every time someone shares your content, it’s being exposed to that entire person’s network and they may or may not already know you.

If all you’ve got is a Facebook strategy, all you are doing is attracting the people you already do business with or already know you.

So for some huge brands maybe they think that’s fine, what’s amazing about content marketing with social media, one of the points Sonia made in her 10 Content Marketing Goals post, is that it’s consistently creating awareness among people who might not know who you are. Obviously with the small business that can have an amazing impact, and literally build the company like it did with Copyblogger. The big companies are clearly getting in on it.

What Twitter wants

Robert: You brought up this, we’re running short on time here, but you brought up this new Carnegie Mellon Study which highlights what we’ve been saying for years about exclusive use of these social networking sites and the quote that you pulled out on Twitter was that the Twitter ecosystem values learning about new content, and this goes directly to the heart of one of the core principals of Copyblogger which is, don’t be a digital sharecropper.

Brian: Sure, like I mentioned just a second ago, Twitter is the greatest content distribution network out there for people who create content. Everyone gets that. Twitter didn’t start out with that idea, but that’s what it became because they kind of stepped back and let us use it the way we wanted to, what choice did they really have?

It’s interesting that Dick Costolo, the CEO of Twitter came out and said that Twitter was not a media company because they don’t create content. Which is interesting because a lot of these user generated content companies do present themselves as media companies.

So I don’t know, if you’re a content distribution platform, aren’t you still a media company? But he just kind of rephrased it as “we’re in the media business because, of course, we sell advertising”. Interesting distinction, but yes. It’s the content that people value on Twitter, it’s the information, it’s about finding out news, it’s about finding out useful things about their interest, their industry, whatever.

So that’s why you produce content, because those people want to share it, they want to read it and then you can establish that direct relationship with it.

Robert: A distribution system is nothing without something to distribute.

Brian: Exactly.

How building an audience can build your business

Robert: You’ve talked before about using content, but also the reason to build an audience and using content in the context of building an audience. How does that apply to this stuff that we are talking about today?

Brian: Going back to Sonia’s post of this week that talked about the goals, everything from lead generation, establishing trust and rapport and stuff that used to be traditional advertising or copywriting like overcoming objections and expressing benefits, all of that can be done in a much more friendly and useful way over time with content.

But the one she focused on at point nine, “developing new business ideas”, I am going to be talking about this in detail, because again that’s how we built the company. We had an audience first, and then we listened to the audience, we watched, we didn’t necessarily survey or ask, but we watched and then time after time after time, we figured out what people wanted and would actually pay for because it solved a problem.

That is my project for this year, you’ll be hearing about it more, is that cryptic enough?

Robert: I am interested.

Brian: Well you kind of have an unfair position.

Robert: I’ll get a little inside look before you make it public, right?

Brian: Sure!

What this means for you

Robert: So what’s a good take away for all of this? For somebody who is looking at these articles and these studies, they are doing content marketing, they’re blogging, they’re putting content on their websites, what does it mean for them?

Brian: Basically it means that content is the thing, it’s what people want. They don’t want advertising, they want content that solves a problem. This has gotten a lot of very smart people to finally see the light that they, indeed, do need to be digital marketing companies and, in fact, a lot of the big brands are really into that. I mean it’s cool, right? Everyone wants to be their own version of uncle Rupert Murdoch, I guess.

For the little guys, of course, we all enjoy building our businesses, but there are certain side benefits of having an audience, fans, people who look forward to hearing from you instead of turning up their nose when they see another one of your ads.

That’s the deal; this is what works now in online marketing and marketing in general, so get in on it. It’s actually kind of fun. If you are not a writer or a content creator, figure out a way to partner, hire, bribe, whatever, you have got to get a team together and act like a producer.

Robert: I gotta get out of here to get some writing and editing of new content done which will, of course, appear on Copyblogger.com shortly. Thanks for listening everybody and Mr. Clark, as always, save Ferris!

Brian: Please do!!

[/transcript]

Other listening options:

• Click here to download the mp3 | 25.1 MB | 20:49
• Click here to subscribe via iTunes
• Click here for the RSS feed (non iTunes)
• Click here for the show archive

The Show Notes:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People Course (free)
• Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500
• Are company blogs really declining? Maybe not…
• Content Marketing 101
• Why You Want To Be the Last Blog Standing
• Be Better at Twitter: The Definitive, Data-Driven Guide
• 10 Content Marketing Goals Worth Pursuing
• Do not click this link
• We left the building with Girl Talk …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s Chief Copywriter and Resident Recluse.