Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:12 — 26.4MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Spotify | Amazon Music | Email | TuneIn | RSS | More
Dan dropped additional nuggets of sales and marketing goodness in the EXTENDED Interview. Be sure to click here to access all of our great extended interviews, transcripts and more within our Insider's Club.
You can try it for the entire month for only $1.00!
[button link=”https://baconpodcast.com/dollar-special/”]READ MORE >[/button]
Dan R Morris is the founder of Blogging Concentrated, a global training and development company for Advanced Level Bloggers, has been working in the online space since 2004. His career began in the infomercial world helping convert traffic driven from TV and Radio spots into online customers. He has since worked with hundreds of bloggers on perfecting their online revenue strategy utilizing the tools of social media, SEO and web copy.
There are no retired bloggers, which means we have to get real smart real quick.
Podcast Transcription
Brian Basilico: Peeps, I'm very excited to have this guest today. He is amazing. His name is Dan R. Morris and the R we figured out is either ridonculous, or ravishing, or whatever you want the R to be, but anyways him and his counterpart Rachel Martin run Blogging Concentrated and I had the opportunity of seeing these guys in Chicago. They're friends with a lot of my friends and they just do an amazing job of helping people to profit from their blogs, to grow their blogs, to do that kind of stuff and he's an excellent presenter. If you haven't listened to his podcast Amplified, go check it out.
Hey, Dan, how are you doing today, man?
Dan Morris: Dude, I'm always good.
Brian: I know you are. So again it was a pleasure meeting you guys in Chicago, and you have such a great online presence, and you guys do a great job. But what I really want to find out is how did you go from building Walgreens stores to traveling the world talking about blogging?
» Expand To View More - Click Here Dan: Well, there's no real roundabout answer to that. It's very hard to draw a straight line between those two things. I'm lucky having paper and then you could write on a piece of paper and draw a line. But you're using that paper, then you would have to know that I was a developer for Walgreens and I worked for a couple of different companies. I was actually an employee and I built 65 stores all over the country for them. The guy that own the company, he's rich. Rich like you see in the movies, that kind of rich. It's funny, the whole concept of being rich is different depending on how rich you are and I remember going out to dinner to Joe's Crab Shack to have that stone crab out in Chicago and I'm with him and some guys and these other guys, they were all rich too, and they were having discussion about do they consider themselves to be rich and all of them agreed that you're not rich until you have $50 million liquid, $50 million that you could access at any point. I thought that is an interesting definition of rich because most of us, that's an unfathomable rich. Winning the million-dollar lottery is rich, but we all know that Donald Trump got a very small million-dollar loan from his daddy, it started. So a million is different to different people. So when you are rich and I don't know how this comes about, but people know and when they know, they decide that you are an opportunity for them to grow. I'm not going to say not two days go by in the course of the six years I worked for them that somebody did not come to the door, or a package arrived in the mail, with some sort of offer. Now, sometimes the offer was, “I don't have any money, please send me some.” Then a lot of times it was, “I have this idea of a business and here is the idea. Would you be interested?” And sometimes people would fly in and you have a bunch of people with the common [inaudible] and they'd be pitching them on an idea. The concept is when you're rich, life gets even easier. That's true to some extent because you all of a sudden got opportunities that other people have never even considered. But in that same breathe, all of the people who came to the door looking for money, somebody like that could change their lives, could help them get to their dreams. That's the whole point. So of all the things that came across the desks, we only bought one. We bought the worldwide marketing rights to an antioxidant nutritional product, which we started selling on TV infomercials and radio infomercials. Aside from doing the Walgreens stuff, I was all of a sudden a web guy. I was in charge of, if they saw the TV commercial and they googled the products and they got to the website, “How do we get them to buy the product?” I just sort of stumbled onto it and I had a pretty finite job. My job was when people got to the site, we make them convert. I worked a lot with the TV and radio infomercials to help them work better, but primarily I was responsible for making the web work. We got pretty good at it. I would say we got pretty good and one day, somebody from Wen Hair Care called. They have [treatment] hair in that group – I cannot remember the name of that group. Anyway, they called and said, “We use the same fulfillment house that you use and you even have a lot more product on the shelves than we have, but we can tell from all of the public data that you're not buying that much TV time, you're not buying that much radio time. Where are you selling your product?” We told him how we were converting on the web and then converting people to [inaudible] and we have saved the sale programs and loyalty programs and once you get to have a customer, we were trying to get you to become a customer for 14 months. So we helped them and then at some point, somebody asked me to come speak at a blogging conference. I did and I talked about conversions and then a month later, a blogger emailed me and said, “After your talk, we're doing 1000% better and the husband quit his job. So we're all very thankful for what you had teach us.” I decided at that moment that that was my life calling, to that Wen Hair Care so 28 more years was not nearly as impressive as helping a family get to the point where they can work together. That's when we decided, “You know what? It's time to shift gears” and that's sort of how Blogging Concentrated came about. Brian: That's amazing. How did you hook up with Rachel as far as being a team? Dan: I met Rachel at a blogging conference. I was speaking, she attended and somehow we all went into this lunch room and we got seated at the same table. Through that conversation, I decided that she was somebody I probably needed to know, but I didn't really know why, she just seem pretty smart and then I got home and checked out her blog Findingjoy.net and it's pretty impressive. She's got some Facebook post that have a million likes on – not a Facebook post, blogs where million people from Facebook have liked. So I asked her if she wanted to join a mastermind group with me and another person. Not a [paid group], but the three of us would help each other grow our businesses and she just got off for a book deal and her book deal publisher was in Denver and I just happened to be starting the very first Blogging Concentrated in Denver and on the same time like the same weekend. She decided to come and help Blogging Concentrated and I decided to help her negotiate her book deal. That's pretty much where it started. After that I realized I couldn't do it without her so we just kept going. Brian: Yes, you guys are amazing together. You finish each other's sentences and it's amazing thing to watch when you got two people in the room that can play off each other so well. Dan: Before you skip that, there's a book out there called Outliers. Did you read that? Brian: Oh, Outliers? No. Dan: Outliers is a pretty impressive book. I highly recommend everyone in your audience reading Outliers, at least the first half. Basically [inaudible] point. I can't think the name of that guy – Malcolm Gladwell, that's the one. So he postulated that in order to become an outlier, to become an expert in your industry or whatever you're doing, you need 10,000 hours of work. Brian: Right. Dan: He used Steve Jobs, he used The Beatles, he used I think the founder of the Girl Scouts and he used a bunch of different people to prove this 10,000-hour rule. What Rachel and I have determined in giving our event – and I think that we have now spoken together 60 or 70 times, is that every single time, we get better, something changes. We do things like, “All right, at this particular event, let's practice the transition between the two of us. So how about when you're ready, the moment you're ready and you know that I'm going to be finishing my sentence, how about you take one step forward with your right foot and then I will know for sure that I'm handing the baton and you're ready to take over?” Each event we try to actually get better. The concept of what you're saying where we finish each other's sentences, I'm just going to tell you, it is definitely a product of work. Brian: It shows, it really shows. So let's get back to the concept of blogging because I blog, I got a lot of friends who blog and one of the things that you guys talk about is monetization of the blog. When people are doing blogs, they're doing it a lot of times out of passion. I know it's Finding Joy, is Rachel's blog? Dan: Yes. Brian: She does it out of passion because she is home-schooling, she's a mom, she loves talking about her kids and all those things. Then all of a sudden she's in the Huffington Post and she's getting a million downloads. That just doesn't happen overnight. How does somebody take their passion and turn it into something that could be considered a business? And the other thing I love about what you said on your website is there are no retired bloggers. Dan: No. There are no retired bloggers, it's not a field that offers that option. So you're either going to be a diary/hobby blogger, or you've got to really think about what you're doing because for most of us who have families, there is somebody in the other room waiting for you to get off the computer. Unless you're changing about, “What am I really doing here? Because I'm wasting someone else's time. I could be spending time with them, I could be molding them, I could be teaching them, I could be spending the kind of quality time in life that we all want with the other people in the room.” The spouse, or the kids, or whatever. So if you're not changing strategically, then you end up spending a bunch of time on Facebook and tomorrow you start over and like nothing got accomplished. For Rachel, Rachel started her blog as a passion, I would say, but there was a point in time when the passion definitely fuels the writing, but for her, the science fuels the success. She was very early into reading the Facebook developer's blog and some of these other sources where you get really technical high-level information about how to manage your online presence. She was using Facebook [inaudible] years before most people even started talking about it. And it's not the passion, it's just the realization that she has the craft of connection, is really what she has. She knows how to write something that really, really resonates with an audience and she knows that to the tune of many, many, many viral blog post and she almost can tell you when she just published whether or not a post is going to go viral based on her ability to figure out what she said is really a connection. She'll read blog comments and she'll pull a comment out and she'll turn that comment into an article because she knows that whoever commented was probably sitting at a very raw spot and was probably in some pain or some sort of situation where the words really struck a nerve in her and she decides, “This is it. This is what I need to write next. I can see the words and know how other people resonate with it” and then she writes it. And on the flip side, what you don't see at Findingjoy.net, on the front are posts like she's got a gluten-free pumpkin bread, I think, and her post there is 100% keyword-driven where her son has Celiac Disease, so her family lives gluten-free for him. So she repurposes some of the things that they do based on keywords and drives a lot of backend traffic that isn't the connection traffic to the blog. It's all about thinking about, “How can I get the right people to this particular place?” But monetization, I think most people don't grasp this idea, but monetization is not the practice of finding a brand to sponsor you to write a post or to put ads on your site because those two activities are the kind of activities that don't build a business. You can get bloggings to pay you $800 to write a blog post about their store. But tomorrow, you got to start all over again because that $800 is kind of gone. There's no long-term value to that. And then ads are pretty much optimization of the exit plan. If somebody clicks an ad, they leave. So once the traffic stops like all of that revenue goes away, there will be even no way to consider retirement with either of those two options unless you make a lot of money and you have a money manager. We talk about one of our curriculum which we call “pages.” When you came in Chicago, we did our circle's curriculum, but one of them, we do this called pages of about 43 different ways to generate revenue and our very favorite way is to monetize the audience because the audience – people buy stuff and they're most loyal to the things that they buy. So people who love Starbucks coffee, they love, they speak, they talk about Starbucks coffee, but really, they buy Starbucks coffee. The same people with Apple users, they buy Apple products. People put their money where their heart is. So what we want you to do is when you start a blog – and it doesn't matter what the passion is, it doesn't matter whatsoever because there are people out there who have the same passion as you and they want those, they want to feel that, they want to share in that, they want to join that and they're going to wear the shirt that says, “I'm a marathon runner.” I don't know if you can produce that, your Teespring on your site and you can pay Teespring $10 for each “I Love Marathon” shirt that you sell, but you sell them for $20. That means you make $10 a shirt, you just monetized. But if you monetize an audience, you've made them happier like all of a sudden, they get to where “I Love Marathon” to the mall, which is a status of how they just think; so if you can learn to monetize the audience, then you can start to monetize in a completely different way than finite ways like ads and sponsored posts. So we really, really talk about how do we not only develop an audience, but how do we develop an audience and a community through money because when you get people buying stuff that they're excited about, it doesn't need to say, “I love Findingjoy.net.” It needs to say, “This is who I am, I love blogging.” At Blogging Concentrated, we have a shirt of the month every single month and it's always something like “must write faster,” or “I look better on Twitter,” or, “swag bag regifter,” or just the word “publish” because publish is a huge thing for us in the blogging world. That's a major button. So we really want bloggers to think about not only their passion at different way, but think about it in terms of money. What do people with your passion buy that screams, “I love this thing. It's books, it's quotes on the wall, it's bookmarks, it's custom playing cards and t-shirts. There's a lot of things out there and there's an enormous number of ways to sell things that your audience will like without having to put anything in your garage. There are definitely ways that other people take possession, other people print and ship, and all you got to do is have a buy button on your site. Brian: Yes, that's incredible and that's one of the takeaways that I got from your session, just to learn about and let me take it another step further – a lot of people, when they're dealing with their passion, they feel guilty about taking money for it and that becomes a barrier for them to becoming successful. Would you agree with that? Dan: Well, I think that most of that is because of the way America works. We live here, we grew up here, you know from day one what a lemonade stand is. I lived in Romania in '94 and I taught at the University for Enterprise and I spent an entire three weeks trying to explain the lemonade stand to the students, the idea of it, the conflict of it and for us, the lemonade stand is such a basic concept. You don't even have to teach it, somehow you grow up knowing what it is. Well, at the same time that you know what a lemonade stand is, you are taught this really weird sense of empathy of giving and not taking, and people make greed out to be some sort of a nasty word. You end up growing up with this weird sense of what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do with the people you come in contact with. I think it's just sort of born into us somehow that greed is bad. You're supposed to donate your time to the church, you're supposed to help nonprofits. You're never supposed to actually take personal profit out of the situation and it's really weird because this is the most innovative entrepreneurial nation in the world and yet our government, our schools, our lifestyle, they almost teach against the [cons] of all the way through school and the only thing they ever tell you about is placement rate because they want you to work for a company, they want you to be employees, they want you to be a great employee, they want you to retire, but at no point in time does anyone really hounded you is how to make money. The very, very best way to make money is the way Apple is doing it, the way Nike is doing it, the way Pepsi is doing it and that is sell things that people like because people like to buy things. That is just the way it is. People like to buy things and why we are not that confident and hammered into us at our school, I do not know. Brian: Incredible points and it's very, very true. People buy to passion. They have a passion for something. I'm a profound Apple junkie and people who are not Mac people, they're on their PC because they get it cheaper and things like that and I understand the brand essence, I understand free upgrades to the latest operating system, the fact that everything works together and I don't have to pay for Microsoft Word, that everything syncs. It's a lifestyle thing for me and that's the biggest challenge with all of this. Now, one of the things that you talk about in your conferences is you say that you like to tap into all your experience, but every little thing we do should build upon itself and you're trying to find ways to help people build upon what they're doing with their blogs. So how do people who are blogging take it to the next step? Dan: Well a lot of people get stuck in the concept of the sponsored post, in the concept of the news stations – the local TV station has asked me to come down and do a 10-minute segment because they saw my blog. They jump at these opportunities without really thinking about it, “All right, what does this do for me in two months, in six months or in two years?” Because if we really cannot afford doing jumping at opportunities that only manifest success bay and then that's pretty much it. With the concept of the sponsored post where most people go [inaudible] is they're asked by Duncan Hines to write a cake recipe. So they come up with the cake, and they make it, and they photo it, and they write the recipe, and they write the post, and that's it and then they get their money. But what they fail to realize is that they have a 100% control of their success. So when they tell Duncan Hines, “I want to write a post called ‘Best birthday cake for kids.'” How about you don't do that? How about you do keyword research? Figure out what the cake recipe would be great that people are searching for and there are not a lot of competition, where you can totally write the perfect post of about what attracts search engine traffic from now to the end of time, and then you get paid by Duncan Hines to actually write and do the research. You can then create a sponsored post that actually brings you traffic for months, and months, and months to come instead of one that you just got your $200 and it was over. When people go and do a new segment on the TV news – the only people who watch TV who actually are going to see it are the very small percentage of people who live in that particular channel's viewing area and then the smaller percentage of people who are actually near a TV, and then a smaller percentage of people who are actually paying attention to that particular channel at that moment in time, and then it starts to somehow benefit you of that small group of people, what percentage of them have decided that they're going to walk through a computer and type in your web address? It's a tiny, tiny percentage. So if you get a TV news segment, instead of thinking about this great opportunity, think about, “What are the assets I can create while I'm at the news station that I can put on my YouTube channel? Can I get behind the scenes pictures with the newscasters? Can I get me holding my product in front of the news station logo? Can I get the recording of the 15-minute segment?” Or whatever you're on so that you create an asset while you're there instead of basically taking the liability out of your week because now you've just spent two hours and you ended up with nothing. Brian: Great points. So Dan, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see bloggers do? You guys talk to people all over the country all over the world and you've seen a lot of people who blog and some of them obviously have gone from zero to hero and other people just sit there mired in their muck. What are the biggest problems that you see? Dan: Number one problem is the failure to recognize the value of the audience. Lifestyle bloggers will write about kid/toy reviews, and fashion, and food, and Connecticut like all being their browser bar and they'll have a navigation bar item for essential oils and then they'll have a navigation bar for Popsicles. What they fail to realize is that they're really serving only one audience. Every single thing on the navigation bar serve that audience. Does every single pixel on your entire website serve that audience? Do you have a Circle of Mom's badge in your sidebar that you've got from the Circle of Moms because you're a part of their forum and they ask you to put a badge at your site? The only thing that helps in the Circle of Moms. They just got a link. That doesn't help you, that doesn't help you, that doesn't [help everyone] in family. So if you put your audience first, “Who am I talking to?” And, “What am I trying to get them to do? What am I trying to get them to go? How am I helping them grow as people? How am I helping them become better?” Even if that means you're an entertainment blogger, “How am I trying to get them to last?” If you put them first and they are the filter, then everything that you do should be filtered through that length of, “Who is it that I'm serving?” And 99% of bloggers make no money and most of the time it's because the filter is, “What do I want to do?” Not, “What's going to help my people?” If you can refocus on the audience and then have everything go to the filter of your audience, all of a sudden you have focus and purpose. That's a huge difference from writing just because you want to write. Brian: Here is a tough question, how do you know who your audience is? Dan: Most of the time we don't have a hard time helping you figure that out, but I definitely see people who have a hard time figuring it out. If somebody hires us to help them figure out like the site name, what are their book name or their navigation bar, like what should it be, we start by asking the negatives. Because for me, it's very easy for me to get you to focus if I can get you to start eliminating. The first question might be, “Okay, how many people in southern Saudi Arabia are you trying to reach today? How many people there want what you have?” And then most bloggers are like, “Well, I'm not focused on that.” I'm like, “Oh, you're not. Okay, I see. So how many people who are working on oil barges right now that are on their computer in the ship, what kind of content are you having there to serve them?” Then they're like, “Well, I'm not writing for people on oil barges.” I go, “Oh, that's interesting because you didn't know who you're writing for a minute ago. Now it seems to me you're becoming a little bit more clear about who you're not writing to.” And then if I keep asking questions like that, the negative questions, “How many 90-year-old Harley Davidson gang bikers are you writing about?” If I could start canceling people out, for most people it helps them to really focus on who and then a lot of people end up with, “Well, never mind, I'm just writing for moms who are over 35.” Then the next question is, “Can you think of one single mom in your life who is 35, who would not read your blog, who doesn't care about it and why? If you can think of that person and why they don't care, then can you help me narrow down who your audience really is because you already know why that person wouldn't care. What makes them not care? Because when you figure that out, then you realize what it is about your stuff that people do care.” Brian: Dan, man, this has been awesome and I know that you've got ways to help people get their arms around more of how to use blogging to grow their business. So, you've got a system that's going to be able to help them. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Dan: We have always tried to be a one-product company and that is we like to produce all kinds of classes, courses, books, that kind of stuff for our membership which we call BC Prime. Because we find out that if we produce eight things this month, then that means eight sales pages, and eight product launches, and eight sets of tweets and all that stuff is just a pain. So we are pretty much a one-product company, but if you check and I'll give you the URL, if you look at the show notes for this podcast, I will give you an opportunity to see the kind of things that we put out. We have a book called “23 Things to Sell Among 25 Niches” because I really want to open up your eyes to the tiniest things that you could do on your blog that you would never really have thought about before. Even the idea of even if you are a beer blogger, could you not make a set of custom playing cards – Customplayingcards.com, or you create a definition of a different kind of beer on each card and now you have this really cool set for your entire audience of people who are just beer-lovers and then profit from it. So we came up with 25 different niches and then for each one, we just brainstorm 23 different things you could sell to just give you an idea of really how you could monetize an audience and explode the concept of, “How do I create a community of people who love this?” Brian: Dan, I know this is like literally scratching the surface, man. There are so much great stuff. Hopefully people will go and get that report that you offered and I'd really like them to have an opportunity to contact you and/or Rachel. What's the best way for them to do that? Dan: I would say Free Weekly Mastermind is our group on Facebook. That's where a lot of questions, and answers, and conversation occurs for our community. Otherwise I'm at “Danrmorris” everywhere on the web, on Twitter, on [inaudible], wherever you want to be and I believe Rachel is “Finding_joy” pretty much everywhere you want to be. So if you head over to Facebook, to Free Weekly Mastermind, the group, we'd love to have you. Brian: Awesome, man. Hey, again, I know you're busy, you're driving 15 hours and like ding! You show up at the last minute, so I know you're all over the place. I appreciate your time. I know my audience got a lot out of this and I look forward to seeing you again at the next Blogging Concentrated and get together with you. So, thanks, man, I appreciate it. Dan: Thanks for having me. It's fantastic. We always love it. » Close View More - Click Here