359: A Deep Dive Into Content Marketing Today With Corbett Barr

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You’re listening to the My Web Clutter Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. And today I have my buddy Corporate Bar back on the show. And in this episode, we’re going to discuss all things content creation. Now the world has changed drastically in just the past decade and we are now living in the creator’s economy. But before we begin, I want to thank Klaviyo for sponsoring this episode. Now I’m super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they are the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store.

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and it depend on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who has shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy. Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customer depending on what they purchased. Piece of cake and there is full revenue tracking on every single email sent.

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Now Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your own customer contact list. And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source from my e-commerce store.

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and I couldn’t have done it without Postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose Postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce, and e-commerce is their primary focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button. Not only that, but it’s price well too, and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So, head on over to Postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free.

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That’s P-O-S-T-S-U-I-P-T.I-O slash Steve. And then finally, I want to mention a brand new podcast that I recently released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:25
Today I’m thrilled to have Corbett Barr back on the show. I think the last time we spoke was back in 2014 when I, I think I first launched my podcast that year and Corbett had recently launched Fizzle, which is his online community. And I think seven years has passed now and it’s going to be great to catch up. So for all of you who aren’t familiar with Corbett, I’ve known this guy for almost a decade now. He actually started out in Silicon Valley, which is my backyard running a VC funded startup.

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got totally burned out and then he decided he wanted to do something that suited his lifestyle. So we have actually very similar philosophies on life. He started many successful blogs and incredible online business program called fizzle.co, which I want to say he’s been running for almost a decade now. I see Corbett as somewhat of a visionary in the content space. And today we’re going to talk about the creator economy and his digital reboot. And with that, welcome to show Corbett. How are doing today? Hey, I

03:20
It’s ridiculous that it’s been this long. can’t believe it. And you look exactly the same, Steve, I gotta say. So do you, actually. Good shape, my dad. Thank you. Corbett. Okay, so the reason why I invited you back on is I’m still on your email list. And I got this email that said, I think the subject line was, I’m deleting everything. I’m like, okay, well, what the heck is going on here? That’s very good clickbait.

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By the way, I clicked on it and you were deleting everything. what’s the reason for that? Yeah, this is a few months ago. I decided to delete all of my social media posts. I’ve deleted many of my social media accounts. I went through and cleaned up a lot of old podcasts and videos and blog posts. I’ve been a content creator for, I don’t know, 12 years or so now. And I felt like I had a lot of

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I would call it digital baggage out there. These are things that have been created along the way for one purpose or another, either for business purposes or just sometimes because you have some random thing that you want to talk about and you end up writing a post about it. And looking back on it, it just felt like there was a lot of things that were either not relevant, maybe not useful to me or to the business anymore. And just like a lot of clutter, almost like I felt like I needed to clean house.

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just from a mental standpoint almost to give myself some room to breathe and to wipe the slate clean so that I could have clarity on what I want to do next. So I mean, is this baggage bad though? I mean, the way I see it, all the content that you put out there has a chance to being discovered, right? I don’t know that it’s necessarily bad.

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to leave that stuff out there. mean, obviously if you’ve said a bunch of stuff in the past that you no longer agree with, or if you’ve said some things that people might find offensive, that might be bad, but that wasn’t the case for me. Because we have analytics, you can kind of look and see if any particular piece of content is getting traction, and you can look at a piece of content or blog post, something like that, and ask yourself if you think that it might if you updated it in some way. For me, I guess it’s…

05:40
part of maybe a little bit of physical OCD that carried over to the digital world. And I just ended up feeling like I wanted to think about who I want to be in the future and be less constrained by who I was in the past. We all have these, whether we like it or not, these digital selves that are out there on the internet kind of representing who we are. And I don’t think that we’ve…

06:08
necessarily come to grips with how strange that is because it’s only been, you know, the past 15, 20 years that we’ve been on the internet every day and social media is even younger than that. And for every little thing that we’ve thought or commented about to exist online publicly for the entire world to be able to access for all time, it’s just not a very natural thing. And I don’t know that

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we’ve come to grips with that as a society. And for me, it just felt like it was mentally holding me back in some ways. I can actually see that. I had a buddy, his name is Scott Volker. He recently just completely rebranded because he didn’t want to be known as the Amazon guy. That’s what his podcast was probably about. So he went through this entire rebranding process. I don’t even think he talks about Amazon anymore. So it’s kind of like a clean slate there. He like literally ditched his older domain, which had a lot of strength on it.

07:07
Yeah, it’s, you know, I’m trying not to throw out things that are super valuable. I have blog posts and other pieces of content that drive, you know, thousands of visitors every month. And so I’m being mindful about that. If something has value in terms of lead generation and it’s something that I still agree with, then I’m happy to leave that alone. And, you know, in terms of the main podcasts that I’ve run for the past like seven years or so, The Fizzle Show,

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We’re up to episode number, I think, 380 or so. I’m not touching any of that. I consider that to be a complete body of work, and I want to leave that intact and continue to care and feed that. I’m just talking a lot about the peripheral things, the random YouTubes and stuff like that.

07:56
Well, it got me clicking, that’s for sure. So what is the new you that you would like to create? what are you looking at in the future now? Well, one thing is, as you run a business, and you and I, mentioned we share similar philosophies, it turns out that I really like running a very small team. In fact, I kind of prefer operating just on my own without a team at all. But over the years, I…

08:23
I built a bit of a team at Fizzle. We’ve had up to maybe six people on the team at once over the years. And through that process, I found myself becoming more and more of just an operator and less and less connected to the business. And it turns out that when I got into this line of work, if you want to call it that, after running a VC-backed startup, when I started being more of an independent creator, really what drew me to it and what

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what I loved about it was creating content and really it was writing specifically. And I got away from that over the years. And when I sent that email that you opened that said I’m starting over, I had literally just deleted all the archives of my personal blog, know, hundreds of posts, wiped the slate clean. And from that point forward have been writing a little bit more consistently, at least once or twice a month. And

09:21
have just remembered how much I love the craft of writing and also how much I love emailing people on a more personal level. So it’s not like it’s something coming from my business. This is like my personal email list that I had really let go fallow for quite a while. I dusted it off and of course a lot of people were kind of surprised to hear from me. But just that act of thinking about something, sitting down in front of a blank page and forcing you to

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examine your thoughts on something and to find out what the world thinks about something and try to contribute to it and then just be of value to other people and then to email an article out. That is just such a rewarding experience for me and I know that that’s something that I want to continue to do and not lose sight of again. You know, it’s funny, I went through something very similar in my day job. Like I really enjoyed my job, which I quit back in 2016.

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the coding aspect of it. It’s a lot like content creation. But then when I became a manager, I started contracting out to my employees all of the fun stuff. And then before you know it, I was just stuck in meetings all day and I really wanted to get back into that. it’s something similar in that. And I think we’re both very similar people. I just enjoy the personal connections and whenever you outsource something that you really enjoy doing,

10:47
then that just kind of takes away from your love for doing what you do. Yeah, and I, know, this year, instead of, you know, reviewing my last year and what I accomplished and so on, I took some advice from Tim Ferriss had posted about an alternative way to do an annual review that involved looking at your calendar over the past year, all of the different meetings and, you know, time that you had blocked on there.

11:16
And asking yourself for each of those things, whether it was a positive use of your time, something that you enjoyed, something that you looked forward to, and something that contributed to a positive outcome, or if it was negative, if it was draining, if you didn’t wanna do it and it didn’t necessarily contribute. And to put things in those two buckets. And in thinking about it, just from a selfish perspective, I enjoy writing.

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I really enjoy coding as well, Steve. I absolutely love opening up under the hood of my website and spending time on there. And so I want to craft a world in which I get to do those things. And then that makes my day-to-day amazing. I also really love being on podcasts as well. And so that’s something that I’ve committed to doing more of this year. essentially just do more of the things that light you up.

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that you enjoy and less of the things that you don’t. And if you think about it, you might worry about, well, the productivity of it and is this thing contributing to my business and so on. what I found about myself is when I go against the grain in terms of what I enjoy doing, I end up dragging things out forever and sometimes even kind of get stuck for a while and in a mood or just in avoidance.

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even if it’s something that should be important, if it takes me weeks to do it because I don’t want to and I’m avoiding it and maybe not doing anything else, that’s such a drain on productivity that I’d rather focus on things that are easy for me, that I just enjoy doing and can whip out day to day, week to week. I’m actually really glad that you’re writing more often now because I miss it. I mean, you’re such a great writer. Oh, thanks. I’m really glad that you’re going to be focusing on that going forward.

13:08
So let’s segue into talking about the present day creator’s economy. remember, I don’t remember when you wrote this, but it was probably 10 years ago. And I think you, in that post, you wrote something like, every individual is going to become a creator someday. And that the big print media, the newspapers and the television stations, they’re not going to rule the roost anymore. I think that in the past decade, I would say more recently in the past couple of years,

13:37
That’s true now, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’ve been reflecting on that a bit. There’s like a new generation of people on Twitter, especially, who are probably Gen Z at this point. I don’t know. I’m Gen X. I’m 44 now. We’re the same age, yeah. Oh, cool. And it’s interesting watching these people sort of discover things and taking things and running with it.

14:06
this concept of the creator economy has become a really big thing and some people are calling it a passion economy now as well. Just this idea that there are these new forms of work that weren’t possible maybe a decade ago. And you know, in some cases it seems like they’re just discovering this like it’s brand new. But when I started blogging in 2009, there were people doing it already and writing about their success or their lack thereof in turning

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a blog or some sort of online audience into a way, a means to earn a living. Copyblogger was one of those that I followed back then, Brian Clark, and as well, Leo Babauta, who writes at Zen Habits. He was being successful with it, but it was just being discovered. And now you fast forward those past 12 or 13 years, and there are so many tools now that make it much easier today to

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build an audience around something that you’re interested in and to monetize that in some way. We’re even now seeing new forms of content. Clubhouse has become this big thing over the past year, which strangely just kind of sounds like conference calls to me, but because it’s got this online component, people are really into it and finding new ways to reach audiences there. So are you on Clubhouse by the way?

15:33
I joined and looked around and I haven’t done much else. Oh, okay. Okay. But anyway, yeah, I think it’s, you know, now more than ever, it is possible to join the creator economy and to make a full-time living or at least to make a side income, reaching people, you know, around something that you’re interested in, something that you can provide some value on. Yeah, so for the people listening who kind of haven’t…

15:59
follow along with this whole creator economy. Like Joe Rogan got a hundred million dollar contract. think Mr. Beast makes tens of millions of dollars a year putting out YouTube videos where he gives away stuff. When I publish a YouTube video, I’m shocked that I can reach, you know, like 40,000 people on a video. It’s crazy, right? That’s like a stadium full of people watching something that you’ve created. And so more than ever,

16:25
I think Joe Rogan reaches more than a lot of major publications and TV networks, Yeah, I’ve heard that he has the largest audience anywhere. Yeah, and all he has is a mic and a studio, and he just talks to people, which continues to astound me. And so independent publishers are now in control, right? Wouldn’t you say? Yeah, they’re being courted. mean, these independent publishers now, think about it used to be that

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that the publishing houses, that the TV networks and so on were the gatekeepers. you had to climb the ladder and rely on them to give you opportunities to reach an audience. And now it’s been turned around on its head. Anyone can go out and create an audience. And if you have something that’s unique and interesting and that a lot of people tune into, then those former gatekeepers now come

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you, looking to bring you into their stable of, you know, in Joe Rogan’s case, Spotify was looking for a way to get into podcasting. So they paid him $100 million. I mean, that is an obscene amount of money. I can’t think of anyone on television who got a contract like that ever in the past. That’s like, you know, that’s big time like sports money. And like you said, Rogan just has a microphone and

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talks about absurd things and whatever he wants with friends a lot of times. it’s just astounding that he’s been able to build an audience much bigger than any of those gatekeepers or networks could themselves. So, Gobert, I know you’ve done it all, YouTube podcasting as well as a lot of writing and blogging. For someone just starting out and wanting to build an audience, what would you say is the best medium to start with? Well,

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I think there’s a couple of answers to that. The first is the best medium is usually the one that you connect with and feel a sense of ease in contributing to and creating on. If there’s friction in terms of you showing up and producing the content, then it’s rarely going to work out for you. So make sure that you choose a format, first of all, whether it’s audio or video or writing, that you

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feel comfortable with or that you believe you can become good at over time. So first of all, check the format. And then second of all, look for a platform that you just feel drawn to for some reason because of the kinds of people that are there, the kinds of interactions that are happening, and so on. Beyond that, though, you should also think about which platforms have the most leverage and are most likely to give you a return on your investment of time.

19:18
I prefer to own my audience and building an email list is one way that you can own your connection with an audience because it’s direct. It’s just you and the person. There’s no platform in between. But growing in that way, a lot of times, and you know this because of e-commerce, obviously, sometimes you need to rely on a platform that already has an audience that you can tap into. And that’s fine, but…

19:45
For me, the goal should be eventually to, if you reach your audience on a platform, then to start pulling them away from that platform somewhere else that you can have a direct connection to. Because as we all know, those platforms often change the rules overnight and you can suddenly see your revenue cut in half or your reach cut in half. And that’s always a horrible thing when it happens to someone. So let’s break down these platforms.

20:14
in terms of different categories, I guess. Yeah. Discoverability. Let’s cover that first. So YouTube, podcasting, social media and blogging. Which of those like how would you rank those in terms of just getting your content out there? Proliferation and discoverability? Yeah, well, I would say the two that have the best discoverability of those four would be blogging and YouTube. And that’s because of search.

20:40
You have to realize that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. People go to YouTube to find answers about things. And YouTube’s job, Google’s job, is to provide those people with good answers. And a lot of times, there are new subjects that there aren’t a lot of other pieces of content on, whether it’s a blog or YouTube video. And so you can reach an audience just by trying to answer those questions. This is technically called

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search engine optimization or keyword research, but you don’t have to go necessarily down that rabbit hole. You can just ask yourself, what are people looking for? What are people searching for? And do some searching yourself and see what you find and see if there are opportunities for you to fill in some of the gaps. And if you do that, people will find your stuff on either of those platforms. Now, social media and podcasting are a bit more tricky. Podcasting is tricky because

21:39
it has a discoverability issue, I would say. It’s not as if people are searching and finding an episode based on something that we said in the episode. They might find it based on the title, but podcasts are just less accessible to people because they can’t dive in and find an answer quickly, necessarily. You know what’s funny about that is that I would argue that from a technical perspective, it should be easier to

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create some sort of search algorithm for a podcast and for a video, right? YouTube does such a great job though of suggestions, recommendations. I’m just wondering why no one has replicated that yet. Yeah. Or Google hasn’t tackled it even. Yeah, it’s a great question. And I’m not sure exactly. There are a lot of smart people working in podcasting and so I hope that they, someone will at some point, but I’ll tell you that podcasting for us, for me at Fizzle,

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has been incredibly valuable, but we brought our own audience initially. Starting a brand new podcast from scratch is a very difficult thing because there are a lot of podcasts out there and I don’t know that people necessarily find podcasts by, like I said, through search. They find it through recommendations and generally the podcasts that get recommended are the ones that are really popular. So if you don’t have an audience to begin with, it’s pretty hard to get a podcast off the ground.

23:06
when you have a podcast and it’s somewhat popular, it’s an incredible way to reach people because if someone listens to 20 or 30 or 60 minutes of audio, they really get to know you well. So there’s a deep connection that you can forge there, but not necessarily a very broad one. I mean, you mentioned earlier reaching 40,000 people through a YouTube video, and that is a lot of people, but in the scheme of YouTube, it’s not really that many people.

23:35
you know, millions of videos out there that have 40,000 views or more. And, but I’ll tell you that in podcasting, it’s rare to build a show to 40,000 or more. Not that people don’t, but you know, a lot of people that have quote unquote successful podcasts are doing more like in the, in the low thousands or low tens of thousands of downloads. So there’s just a difference in, in reach there. Totally. think the top

24:02
2.5 percent of podcasts get 40,000 downloads a month. Yeah, that sounds about right. I think that was crazy stat So does that imply then that you don’t recommend starting out with a podcast? Probably not right now unless of course it’s in a new growing Unique kind of space that has a lot of demand but if you’re trying to break into an existing space that has a lot of competitors in the podcast arena, I

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probably wouldn’t recommend it as a place to start.

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If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

25:05
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

25:35
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s EMERGECONSCL.com. Now back to the show. Would you say that of blogging as well? Like I know like there’s all these companies that I personally compete with with my content and they just have hired people just churning out article after article after article. So is it harder to rank in search these days and how do you combat like the content farms, so to speak? Yeah, yeah. Content farms are tough. You know,

26:04
I would say that blogging takes a while. Whenever somebody comes to me and they say, you know, I’ve got this product or I have this idea for a product and I need to build an audience right now, I always caution them that blogging is a longer term strategy. It’s likely going to take you six months or a year for your site to start really ranking and drawing people in. And that’s because, you know, Google, its job again to find great content involves

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getting to know a new domain for a while and judging how important it is based on links that are coming in from other sites and so on. And that just takes a while to kind of season a domain and to start ranking for something. YouTube on the other hand, seems, of course, you you probably need to produce videos for a couple of months, two or three months before YouTube starts getting comfortable with your channel. But I’ve seen people in three,

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certainly under six months, start receiving thousands of views to their videos, even in somewhat competitive spaces. So, you know, it’s funny because I’m not very active on YouTube, but I am very bullish on it for people, just because I’ve seen it work so many times. Yeah, actually, I have friends who’ve gotten like 100,000 subscribers in less than six months. Wow. I mean, just discoverability is a huge deal with YouTube.

27:30
What’s also nice about YouTube, and most people might not feel this way, is that the barriers to entry are higher. Right? Because to produce a video, like you have to worry about your appearance, your audio, and then you have to edit. That’s a lot more work. But that’s good because that means there’s less competition in that space as well. It’s funny too, though, because even though the barriers to creating a great YouTube are higher, I would agree with that. It’s hard to be…

27:59
Charismatic and and you know the kind of person that can carry an entire ten minutes of video But at the same time I have also seen some videos do really well where there is no one on screen necessarily I you know in fact people have taken audio clips from my podcast or from appearances I’ve been on and turn those With or without permission into YouTube clips that sometimes get a bunch of downloads

28:26
And it’s not as if there has to be somebody, a host on camera necessarily. I also see in the programming space, a lot of people just doing screencasts and getting a lot of views with that. If the subject is something that people are looking for, and again, there’s not a whole lot of other videos on that topic, or you do a better job of answering people’s questions, then you might be able to be okay without having to have

28:55
high production value. Sure, sure. I will say that the keywords that I go for on the blog versus YouTube, like the YouTube competition is far, far less. Yeah. Orders of magnitude less. Yeah. Yeah. And I did want to comment on your friction comment. I think reducing the friction for content creation is probably the most important factor, really. I didn’t create YouTube videos for the longest time because it took me 20 minutes to set up the lights, the cameras, and all that stuff. And by the time I set up, I just didn’t want to do it anymore.

29:25
Yeah, but now I have like a place where I can just sit down hit a button and just start recording Yeah, absolutely and I you know I’d say the same is true of of any kind of content that you’re gonna create for me lately It’s insane, but we we’ve been living winters in Mexico for 11 or 12 years now and up until this year I would roam from spot to spot throughout the house and When I had calls it was always kind of an

29:54
effort to, I would take them in our master bedroom because that’s where the good internet was and so on. And it was just a kind of a giant pain. This year finally, I went and bought this crappy little desk and I have my microphone clamped to it. have a light clamp to it if I need to do a video and I bought this internet booster. So it’s good back here and so on. And, and now it’s like taking calls or doing a podcast or whatever is super easy.

30:23
to the point where I’m able to do a couple a day and it’s not a big deal. But that friction before influenced the things that I developed, the things that I published. And it’s just crazy to me to think that even though I know that these things are true and I thought that I had learned these lessons before, just finding a good quiet place for you to be able to, whether it’s write or record audio or record video, where it’s set up or you don’t have a lot of work,

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to do to get in that flow, it’s so important. And you’re right, like just remove all that friction.

31:02
So I did also want to touch on social media because you did go off on a little bit of a rant recently on social. So first of all, what are your feelings about using social to grow your business? That’s another episode in itself. Yeah, I almost jumped into that for a yesterday because I’ve got some. did you? And man, people have some strong opinions there. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Using social to grow your business. So.

31:28
There are certainly platforms where I’ve seen people grow, like Instagram, where I’ve seen people grow huge audiences and turn those into businesses. For me personally, there’s a lot of friction in participating on Instagram and Facebook and places like that. I just don’t leave with a good feeling afterwards. But I’ve found that Twitter is a lot more my speed for some reason. so I’ve decided, I actually just closed all of my Facebook accounts for

31:58
for quite a few reasons that I’ve written about extensively recently, but I close Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, all that stuff. So I’m weaned off of Facebook entirely. And that feels good. Were you getting any traffic from those platforms for your content? I was and I do. And the thing is you don’t even necessarily have to be on those platforms in order to get traffic from them because your readers are probably on those platforms and they might be sharing your stuff there.

32:24
I didn’t find that I was necessarily getting a big boost in any sort of benefits to my business from being there myself. And, you know, that’s probably in part because I didn’t participate much there. But again, it comes back to friction just because it wasn’t a place that I enjoyed participating in. Can we talk about Twitter for a moment? Twitter is actually something I’ve never gotten into. I mean, I have an account and I have followers, but how do you use that platform?

32:53
Well, for me, it is a couple of things. One is it’s a place where I connect with people that I know who are on there and where I have met people over the years just through interactions on Twitter. It definitely leads to opportunities sometimes. In fact, I was just writing this earlier this week about my goal of being on 50 different podcasts in 2021. And several people reached out to me on Twitter that

33:22
I maybe knew at arm’s length or whatever, but they saw it there and it worked. So definitely you can connect with people, you can form relationships. And then the other thing is it helps me discover content and understand what people are thinking about before they have fully developed an idea. And likewise, I’m able to write about things there and sort of judge people’s opinions and reactions to it.

33:50
before I go and spend the time to fully develop a piece of content. So, you know, for example, if I’m writing about the annoyances I have with social media or like I said yesterday, I decided to write about my annoyance with the energy consumption of Bitcoin and why nobody seems to care or talk about it. And it’s an interesting way to kind of dabble in an idea and to start to judge people’s feedback and reactions and

34:20
to start gathering your thoughts before you sit down to create a video or a podcast episode or a blog post. Twitter really isn’t a traffic play. It’s not a trap or like a research. Yeah, exactly. It’s not necessarily a traffic play. It could be. mean, and some people have really big audiences and I, I see some people who are popular on Twitter being able to drive sales directly to courses and other things that they’re creating. For me,

34:48
That’s not it exactly. I would say my email list is the most valuable thing that does that and the search traffic that I get to content. So Twitter isn’t necessarily that for me, but it is for some people, certainly. But it’s usually, you you have to be in a certain genre of content to make Twitter make sense for you as a traffic play, I would say. So when you’re first writing content, obviously you want people to read it.

35:16
what are your main ways to actually get people to read your content? Well, for me or for somebody starting out, because they’re kind of two different things. Right. So let’s say you were starting out and this is kind of ties in, You’re not really starting over from scratch, but you’re starting over in a way, right? Yeah. So for someone new as you, what would you do to get that initial readership? Well, so, you know, if you are blogging, for example, like I said,

35:44
getting search traffic can take some time and there’s nothing more frustrating than publishing and not having any sort of attention to it and not getting any feedback to know whether or not what you’re writing is interesting and useful and so on. in those early, early days, I encourage people to try to find community somewhere online. There are places out there, depending on what you’re into. Like for example, let’s say,

36:12
you’re into software development. There are tons of places where people are gathered to learn software and to talk about it. If you’re into building software as a service, like a startup of some sort, like there is a community called IndieHackers, for example. So I would find whatever that community is for you, your topic, it might be on Reddit, it might be an independent community that’s out there. Plug in there where people are already spending time.

36:41
talking about that topic and participate in those conversations. And then when you have, when you publish something, put it out there for feedback and don’t just try to, you know, publish a link on a platform and say, I wrote this, please come check it out. Instead, you know, pick apart your content and publish it directly on that platform so that people can read it right there. And so they don’t feel like you’re just trying to take advantage of them or the platform by drawing people back to your site in the beginning.

37:11
so that you have to realize that your goal is not to get eyes on your content, like a massive amount of eyes on your content, your goal is to get anyone to read the thing and to give you feedback on whether or not they agree with your idea, whether or not they find it valuable, whether or not it’s unique and interesting and so on. And so again, like for example, when I write a blog post instead of just,

37:39
going on Twitter and publishing a link and hoping people are going to come back to my site, I go into the post, pick apart the main five points or whatever, and then I publish them as separate tweets and let that conversation evolve directly on Twitter because I know that what matters is just that my ideas are out there, that people are resonating with them or reacting to them and not necessarily where they’re consuming those ideas. Eventually I’ll get people to come back to my site.

38:08
and people who are reading those things in tweets or on Reddit or whatever might click through, look at your profile because they’re curious, click on the link and come back to your site. But the mistake that I see a lot of newbies making is just thinking that they’re going to go on Facebook or Twitter or wherever and just start publishing links to their own site without using the platform or the medium in the way that it was intended.

38:35
and sort of violating whatever those social norms are. Yeah, I mean, that never works, really. Yeah. So you’re suggesting essentially writing your content directly on the platform itself, right? Yes, or, you know, writing it. These days, what I tend to do is I write my content as an email first. I write it thinking about sending it to my email list. You could do the same thinking that you’re going to email this to a friend. You know, you could write it.

39:03
And this would be great, actually, if you had no audience to begin with, but you had a friend who was willing to read your thoughts and maybe interested in the topic. You could compose your content as an email to your friend, hey, I was thinking about this, and bang out an email to them. And then once you’re done with that, take that, publish it on your blog, publish it on Twitter, publish it on Reddit, turn it into a podcast episode. There’s a million ways you can turn one…

39:32
thought into a lot of different mediums. And this is something that I think a lot of times people feel like they have to reinvent the wheel every time or that everything has to be unique. once you start to understand that the people that seem to be everywhere aren’t actually publishing unique thoughts everywhere. They’re just taking that piece of content and turning it into what the platform expects the content to look like. Not simply, again, posting links everywhere, but generating something that

40:01
can live and stand on its own in each of the environments that you send it to. How deliberate are you about trying to rank in search? I would say for personal writing, not very deliberate. For business writing, a lot more deliberate. And I’ll also say that I think that there are two purposes for a piece of content. One is

40:29
of course, to be discovered by a broader audience. The second is to forge a deeper connection with your existing audience or with anyone who is consuming that content. And a lot of times I will separate the two of those things in my mind so that sometimes I’m writing for engagement, other times I’m writing for discoverability. And the kind of content that might do well on SEO to attract someone who is typing a specific

40:59
question into Google is not the same kind of content that’s going to forge a strong bond and convince someone that you might be someone worth following, trusting, and hopefully eventually buying something from. It’s interesting. So I follow that model as well, except I write primarily for search discoverability. And then the more engaging stuff is part of the content that I send out via email. It seems like you mix both, right?

41:28
on the same publication? do, I do. Yeah, definitely. And I guess, you know, the the idea there is that sometimes I’m writing purely for search. And in that case, I’m hoping that people will come get the answer they’re looking for. But then, you know, around that content or at the end of that content, I will try to continue the conversation and and get them to discover something else on my site that I know can forge a deeper connection with them.

41:58
And, you I think that’s all you can think of this as funnel marketing. Obviously, you know, you get people at the top of the funnel who are a very broad audience and you’re trying to move them down to having deeper and deeper connection with you over time. I hear you and I know you’ve actually mentioned email marketing a lot in this interview today.

42:21
How are you dealing with kind of like the decline in just open rates and click through rates? Because a lot of people are doing email marketing these days and it’s just getting kind of noisy. Yeah. So in terms of email marketing, yes, it’s noisy. But I think that any channel that is effective for a period of time will become noisy. And if you think about it, everything’s noisy these days. There’s so much content out there. even YouTube is noisy. If somebody’s watching your video, they’re

42:51
There are dozens of other videos that YouTube places around that video, or if somebody’s searching for a video, yours is just gonna be one of a bunch that’s showing up there. And so the answer to how you succeed at email marketing, despite it being noisy, I think is similar to the answer to how you succeed anywhere, because every channel is noisy. And that is, you have to strive to create content that is better, more valuable.

43:20
more likely to change someone’s life or at least change their day than the other content that’s out there. You want to be the person who is being opened amongst the sea of emails. In sending these emails lately, I’m literally getting people saying, yours is the only email I actually open and read. And that is what you have to do. And it’s the same with YouTube. you think about, you mentioned Mr. Beast, for example. If you love Mr. Beast,

43:49
then you’re going to make a point to open Mr. Beast’s YouTube videos and to watch them every time he publishes something and you might ignore all the others that are in your feed. I wrote about this 10 years ago and people had the same concern. There’s too many blogs out there, how do I succeed? And my answer was to write epic shit. what I mean by that is that you can learn all the…

44:17
tactics in the world, the SEO tactics and how to stand out on a platform. But at the end of the day, what matters is the substance of your content and how potentially life changing it is, or at least how much better, more interesting, more useful it is than the other content that’s out there. So Corbett, I think that’s like the best answer to that question ever. A lot of people, when they come to me wanting to start a business, they’re always like, what’s the easiest way to get started?

44:45
And the problem with easy is that means everyone can do it and there’s a lot of noise. But technically everything’s saturated these days, right? No one’s reinventing the wheel for the most part. And so the really the best way to stand out is just to do things better than everyone else. And that’s like the answer to everything in life almost. Yeah, if you think about it, you wouldn’t expect to, you know, ask, well, how can I become a how can I make a living as a a marathoner and, you know, just be your

45:15
your couch potato self and go out there and sort of half ass run a marathon and win a race and earn a living doing so. You would have to train and become one of the best in the world in order to have a career there. And the same is true for just about anything. If it’s easy, then there are going to be a million people doing it and the amount of money that you can make or the amount of success you can expect.

45:44
diminishes over time unless you fight and work to become really good at honing your skills and becoming better. And for a lot of people that takes many, many years, you might look at Mr. Beast or someone like that and think, my god, that’s amazing. How can he create that video? Well, he’s probably been at it for a very long time, and he’s put in a lot of hours.

46:11
It’s not necessarily the 10,000 hour rule that was a big thing several years back. You have to put in at least 10,000 hours to become good enough at something. I don’t necessarily think that’s true online because there are so many new topics all the time. Sometimes you can be an early voice and have a lot less experience than that and still succeed. But it’s not going to be easy. None of this is easy. It can be incredibly fun. It can be incredibly rewarding, but…

46:39
The people who take this stuff and by this stuff, mean, you know, building an online business or growing an audience online. The people who take it seriously, I can tell you, are spending are treating this like a full time job. You know, they show up, they they put in their hard work every day, eight or eight or nine or 10 hours sometimes. And they’re working to learn and grow and get better at that thing so that they can compete. Exactly. Hey, Corbett.

47:08
What are you up to going forward? I know you just did this reboot. What are you working on now and where can people find you? Yeah, so I am working on Fizzle, which is the thing that I launched eight years ago. I was inspired by a friend of mine, Dana Schultz, who runs Minimalist Baker, which is a massive site that attracts tens of millions of people every month. And she got burned out at some point a couple of years ago and took a step back and considered actually calling it quits, even though it was so successful because it was

47:36
It was stressful and wasn’t sure if that’s what she wanted to do. But after taking a little time off, she realized that she did love it and maybe that she could change her relationship to that work and recommit to it. And since then, it’s done even better over the past couple of years and she’s super happy doing it. And I had a bit of the same epiphany myself with Fizzle. And after the past few years of working on a lot of different projects, I realized that Fizzle

48:06
which is a community and training library for entrepreneurs. I realized that it is the thing that I love. It’s sort of my first love in a way and I still love it. And so I’m recommitting to it and we’re actually opening it up to a broader set of instructors, to guest instructors. And I’m really looking forward to continuing to grow the library of content there. That’s over at fizzle.co. Oh, I didn’t realize.

48:35
If you need any, I want to talk about e-commerce, let me know. Awesome. Happy to contribute something. You know, it’s funny, Corbett, you mentioned a lot of businesses are just mental, right? And how you look at things. If you view things as like you’re getting tired of working on something, then you’re not going to have fun doing it. Whereas if you have like a renewed vigor for something, then it’s more likely to succeed. Yeah. I think it’s a lot like, you know, any long-term

49:02
pursuit. It’s a lot like marriage in a way. You have to continue to put effort and continue to look at ways to make something fresh if you’ve been doing it for a long time. you know, like a lot of people, I had never spent more than four or five years in any one, you know, role in my career or in my entrepreneurship journey. And here I am now finding myself eight years into this project. So I think it’s expected that you might lose your way a little bit.

49:30
But with recommitment, you can see any project as through fresh eyes. And I think that’s an important thing to do. Yeah. So if any of you guys are listening out there, go check out fizzle.co. I was actually a part of the community at one point, I want to say many years ago, probably six years ago. And I can only imagine it’s gotten so much bigger and better since then. thanks a lot for coming on the show, Corbett. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Steve. Appreciate it, too.

49:58
Hope you enjoyed the episode. As I mentioned before, Corbett is someone who I looked up to way back in 2009 when I first started my blog. For more information about this episode, go to mywebcoderjob.com slash episode 359. And once again, I want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve.

50:26
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for eCommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows, an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I use these tools on my blog. If you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store,

50:55
head on over to mywifecoderjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.