The Best Membership Marketing Strategies in 2024 That Work!
Discover effective membership marketing strategies for 2024! Elevate your brand’s success with innovative tactics that genuinely resonate with members.
Are you ready to take your membership marketing strategy to the next level in 2024? This show explores proven techniques to help you attract new members and keep them engaged long-term. Learn about cutting-edge tools and approaches that industry leaders swear by, ensuring maximum impact for your efforts. Dive into this valuable content.
With Special Guest Ryan Robinson.
#1 – What critical things do you feel people need to understand connected to launching a successful new membership-focused website?
#2 – What were some of the most important things you learned connected to your first couple of course launches that you feel would be helpful to share with the audience?
#3 – Digital marketing, in general, seems to be in flux, connected to how AI will fundamentally change the space. What are your thoughts on this?
#4 – Are there any particular areas of digital marketing that get you excited that you feel a lot of people don’t know about or misunderstand?
#5—How do you see AI changing online business, including your own, in the next 18 months?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of you?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:49.130] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 87. Got a great special guest here, folks. We got Ryan Robinson in the house. He’s a prolific blogger, podcaster, community builder, and entrepreneur, has many hats and has been very successful in many of these separate areas, but they all have a linkage about building community online in one way or another. He’s a true expert on this subject. I thought you would get enormous value by listening to what he’s learned in his journey of entrepreneurship and building membership websites for himself and for several clients. Ryan, would you like to introduce yourself to the audience quickly?
[00:01:59.210] – Ryan Robinson
Hey, you did a Great job. Thank you for having me. And yeah, I’ve been doing the blogging content creation, community building thing for, man, approaching 15 years here soon, which is crazy.
[00:02:12.380] – Jonathan Denwood
When did you start doing it when you were 10?
[00:02:14.090] – Ryan Robinson
I was like, I started doing it pretty much when I was in college. My college professor for Internet marketing, as it was called back then, had us all register domain names. It was the first thing we did when we sat down in class, and it sparked my interest.
[00:02:31.520] – Jonathan Denwood
So you can blame him for everything that- I can blame him.
[00:02:34.440] – Ryan Robinson
I’m still in touch with him because he was so influential in my life’s course, which is very cool.
[00:02:42.990] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes. I have interviewed Ryan on another podcast before, and he must have enjoyed it because he agreed to return. I think he likes my English humor in some ways. It’s going to be a fabulous show. Like I said, we’ll be delving into what he thinks you need to understand and do connected to building a successful membership website in 2024, and a number of other interesting questions I’ve got for him. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we’ve got some great special offers from the major sponsors, plus a created list of the best WordPress plugins that will help you build a membership website on WordPress, which I honestly feel is still the best solution if you want to develop a real membership business online, plus a load of other free goodies. You can get all this by going over to wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you’ll find all the goodies there. What more could you ask for?
[00:04:14.620] – Ryan Robinson
I love it.
[00:04:15.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get on that page. It’s funny, Ryan. The amount of people, it’s become a bit of a tagline. I don’t know. It just came out in one episode that I had people starting to email me, so they found it hilarious. So I’ve just kept on doing it, Ryan. It’s funny what people really like, isn’t it, Ryan?
[00:04:38.930] – Ryan Robinson
It is. See, this is actually interesting as it relates to community building, is that I really believe strongly that the people who want to join your community, follow your content, and engage with you, really like your weird personality quirks. That’s how it goes.
[00:04:57.590] – Jonathan Denwood
Is that a polite way to say, I’m going to take a note, Ryan?
[00:05:01.050] – Ryan Robinson
Well, I didn’t say that. Those were your words.
[00:05:05.900] – Jonathan Denwood
He’s such a dipper, that. I don’t know if this will be shocking, Ryan, but I can be diplomatic when I want to. It’s just that a lot of the time, I just don’t want to.
[00:05:17.550] – Ryan Robinson
I know that’s shocking. I do think the secret superpower for everyone is when you unlock what your weird is, and you figure out how to weave it into the content you create.
[00:05:28.190] – Jonathan Denwood
The only thing I would say in my defense It’s unlike a few people I know in podcasting and influencers. When you meet me in person, I’m not much different to what I am in a podcast, where I’ve met quite a few other people, and it’s a total act, basically. They’re totally different. Let’s go on to one of my questions. What do you think of some of the critical things people need to understand connected to launching a membership website in 2024? I still think even if you haven’t got a load of experience, you can still get the thing going and you can get the thing on the right journey. I think if you got a bit of marketing online experience, it’s going to be easier, but I think you can still do it. But what do you think are some of the key things, one or two key things that people got to really understand?
[00:06:29.960] – Ryan Robinson
I actually believe that membership communities are one of the best ways to start monetizing an audience online. And the reason why I like it the best is that you can do it with a really small audience. You don’t need to have a community with hundreds of people when you start. It can literally be like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 people, and you have a membership community. People will pay you X dollars amount a month in order to create some content with them, maybe host some live bring them some exclusive stuff. Just from the perspective of what a community is, I think that’s the core foundation of any really good starting point. And from my perspective, this is all about attracting the right audience. You have to really spend some time learning what problems the people have within your target market that you can uniquely help them solve. Start working with people one-on-one. I’m a big big fan of doing unscalable things when you’re getting started. So find those people who really resonate with you, and maybe you go and you find them on Reddit or Quora or in the comment section of other websites where That audience you want to reach already exists.
[00:07:46.970] – Ryan Robinson
Maybe you do some guests, join some podcasts, YouTube channels, et cetera. But the key principle here is, I think, find individuals, especially when you’re starting the community building, membership building process, and really have genuine, authentic, real conversations with them. Get them on a Zoom call, chat with them over text or email, and figure out how you can actually help them rather than, say, going out and building a ton of content and then putting together this membership structure and a perfectly-looking website and then hoping that people come. I think the more that you can do this organically by just actually connecting with real people, people and then inviting them to join the V1, let’s say, of your membership program, the better.
[00:08:38.340] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I’ve been highly influenced by a friend of mine, Rob Rowland, of the Startups For The Rest Of Us podcast. I don’t know if Rob’s in your radar at all, but he’s wrote a number of books and he’s very influential in the bootstrap startup world. And I religiously listen to his podcast and he’s become a friend over the years. In bootstrap startup world, you’ve got this concept of minimum viable product, and I just nicked his idea. And I talk a lot about adapting startup concepts and applying them to membership. I go on about building the minimum viable course a lot. So would you agree with that?
[00:09:32.300] – Ryan Robinson
Oh, my gosh. I think that’s actually the only way to do it, because my first course that I made 12 years ago or something like that, I was doing a lot of freelance work. And so people that I knew started asking me for advice on how to build a freelance business. And so I did a course that was about how to land more freelance clients. And I had a little bit of an audience. I was blogging already, but I didn’t have a huge audience. And I made this mistake. So I had to learn this the painful way of going out and building the course first. And so today, what I do anytime I’m launching new educational products is actually pre-sell the course. So I put in the work ahead of time to figure out, All right, here’s what the course I think should be. Now, let me start sending some emails to my community. Let me publish some blog posts. Let me maybe drop out a podcast episode, a YouTube video, or do a guest post and link to a waiting list where people sign up or ideally, pre-order the course. So voting with your wallet is definitely the best way to get people to say, All right, yes, I confidently want to buy this course when it’s ready.
[00:10:45.420] – Ryan Robinson
And of course, offer people a 50 % discount or something for doing the pre-order with you. And then you have your first crop of people in your community to test your content with. You can invite them to a Facebook group or Discord, Slack, School, whatever you want to use as that community platform. I mean, you guys do this great yourselves. And so inviting people to help you as you’re creating content and testing it and getting feedback is such a great way to build out a course or a community.
[00:11:20.420] – Jonathan Denwood
Another concept I’ve totally stolen from Rob is, at least I give him credit. He says he It doesn’t mind. Lodges, you mentioned his name. If you even still did his ideas. But I think he got this from other sources himself. I’m just interested in to put this to you to see how important you feel it is. Is the concept he puts forward regularly, a painkiller or a vitamin, and you really want a solution that’s a painkiller. I think if you’re doing your first course, you You need a little bit of urgency and you need to be solving a pain problem. Rather, you can still be successful going the aspirational, the vitamin route, but I think you’re best going to solving a problem, and there have been some urgency in the people that are seeking. That’s why I think a lot of people that are around certification, or you’ve got a that have to take a specific test or there’s some urgency that’s required and you can provide a solution. I think that’s… I’ve noticed in the people, the many people that we help and host, those that are in that area seem to do very well.
[00:12:50.380] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah. I mean, there’s such a difference between someone paying for something that’s a nice to have versus what they perceive to be a must have. So What I think is when you’re mapping out what that course idea is for you, figure out what is the tangible thing at the end of the course that someone is going to really feel they’re getting. And ideally, does that create some change or positive impact in their lives on a skill they want to build? Or I think the best case scenario is creating some course product or community with the goal of helping people grow their business. The closer you can connect what your course outcome is to revenue earned for the people who are taking your course, the more essential it becomes to them. And I think the stronger your marketing messaging can be, too.
[00:13:47.440] – Jonathan Denwood
So you’ve done a lot of courses. You’ve built a lot of courses yourself. What’s been some of the biggest surprises you’ve encountered in your own journey, especially the in the early years? Was there a couple of things that you learned that you were surprised about?
[00:14:09.100] – Ryan Robinson
A couple, yeah. The first one that stands out to me, honestly, is that people would pay me for a course. First of all, that concept just blew my mind 10 years ago. I think I was 24 10 years ago, and that was around when I started launching my first courses. I knew some stuff, of course, but looking back in hindsight, I was a 24-year-old dude, and I had done some cool stuff. But at the same time, most of the people who were buying my course were older than me. And that’s a really fascinating thing where I had this life experience that ended up being really valuable to share the lessons that I’d learned from. And so that was a bit of a surprise. But honestly, I think the biggest surprise, and this one remains constant, is how few people will actually go through an entire course from start to finish and get something… Then implement that stuff and get a real positive impact or change in their business and their life on their skills that they’re trying to build. That one still surprises me. You would assume, oh, anyone who’s paying $300, $500 for a course, they’re going to finish it and they’re going to want to get results from So they see an ROI, right?
[00:15:31.160] – Ryan Robinson
But I think a lot of people want to get that course. They want the end result. But then when it comes to doing the actual hard work of implementation of something that’s outside of their comfort zone, why they got the course anyway. That’s where a lot of people will fall down. So when I think through structuring a course these days, I really try and strategically help people continue with momentum. And so if If you start with the hardest module in your course right at the beginning, that’s pretty risky. A lot of people are going to hit that wall and be like, Oh, no, what did I do?
[00:16:13.350] – Jonathan Denwood
It also depends on what the audience is. Is it a beginner course? Is it intermediate? If it’s an advanced course, the expectation and going into the weeds very quickly, they’re going to expect that in a way and not going in deep, quick. It will be the opposite of a beginner’s intermediate course. Is this making sense? Am I correct? You’re the one that’s got a lot more experience. I’ve consumed a load of courses and I’ve helped a load of people set them up, but I’ve never run that many myself.
[00:16:53.400] – Ryan Robinson
From my experience, if you have what you would consider to be an advanced level of expertise at your craft, the thing that you’re teaching a course on, then teaching it to other people who are advanced and just want to level up is the best thing you can do. If you have an advanced audience, they are going to be so much more invested in, I guess, getting an outcome that’s desirable from consuming your course content. And those are the people who, they’re not starting at zero. They’re already at one or two, and they want to get closer to 10. And And so the more that you can work with people who have some skill baseline, some momentum baseline, the more people are going to get results from your course. So I mean, I’ve taught to a wide range of skill level, let’s say beginner, intermediate, advanced, and I definitely prefer the advanced. The beginner crew is always going to have a higher, let’s say, drop out rate of not completing the course and not getting what they hoped they would get from it.
[00:18:02.690] – Jonathan Denwood
I think the other thing is, you mentioned this at the beginning, is that people… It’s great to have great aspirations. Obviously, I’m originally from England, so I’m just dire. I have no aspirations at all. But I do like Americans in general. You’re very aspirational. Bless your little hearts. But the reality is, if for some reason you got… Because this is another… This is Bootstrap Startup Cliché episode, folks. I’m going to come out with another cliché from Startup World, Ryan. Product fit, market product fit. I twisted it and turned it into Student Market Fit. I like that. If you did click sick and you had hundreds and it’s your first course. It ain’t going to pan out that well anyway, because you’re going to be totally overwhelmed, aren’t you?
[00:19:09.590] – Ryan Robinson
Totally. It’s not good to start with hundreds of students in your first course You’re going to… I would totally bond that if I were starting out.
[00:19:21.340] – Jonathan Denwood
You got no resources, no online help, because the amount of questions that come in is much higher than you think it’s going to be great.
[00:19:31.870] – Ryan Robinson
Totally. I think someone who’s relatively new to course creation, you get inspired, the aspirational piece, by seeing how many creators out there have had $50,000 course launch, $100,000 course launch, $1 million course launch for some people, right? And you want to aspire to that, too, right? That’s a natural thing, but you don’t just get there overnight. And honestly, anyone who does drive those numbers in their first course sale, you’re going to be overwhelmed. And so I’m a huge advocate of doing things the slow way, especially with courses, because You don’t want to break yourself in the process of building a community because then the experience is bad. And if the experience is bad, they’re not going to want a word of mouth, tell their friends, colleagues, other people in their space about your course. You would rather, in my opinion, do it slower, curate the experience to be great. Also, you’re going to iterate your content a ton based on feedback from your early students. And so taking that natural progression is actually the best thing you can do.
[00:20:50.670] – Jonathan Denwood
I link it to sports, really. It’s just teat golf. Yeah, anybody gets involved in golf as a career, their aspiration is probably to be like Jack Nicholson or one of the giants. And there’s always the possibility. But in percentage terms, it’s extremely unlikely. But becoming a golf professional and owning a… Or partial ownership of a shop, part of a golf course and owning the training side of it. I know quite a few people that do that, and they’ve got a very nice living and they’ve got a very nice life because they like golf and their lives all around golf. It’s not my cup of tea, So you don’t have to be Jack Nicholson to have a really good life in professional sport, do you?
[00:21:53.960] – Ryan Robinson
No way. Oftentimes, what I find, so I interact with, I interview, I know, I get to become friends with a lot of creators. And what I see is oftentimes it is the people who are a little bit underground, the ones who aren’t publishing videos with headlines talking about their seven-figure course launch or something like that. It’s those people who are underground, at least a little bit, who often have the best balance, too, in their lives. And I don’t know, from my perspective, I don’t need a business that makes $10 million a year in order to be happy or fulfilled. I think that, to me, is not worth the trade-off of how much work and honestly stress that often invites.
[00:22:43.730] – Jonathan Denwood
So if you had to frame A friend or a colleague or somebody on your radar and you’re giving them some consultation, what would you map out as the… They’ve got experience in their industry. They seem They seem to have the right attitude in providing value. Obviously, people want financially to do well, but it’s combining those two needs in a legitimate way. What are the few one or two steps, but they got no experience on online marketing, or not a lot. What would be a couple things that you would advise them that they need to do that would maybe mooch the needle a little bit. So it’s more chance it’s going to be a success, Ryan.
[00:23:41.160] – Ryan Robinson
I love this scenario because The way that I approach this will immediately show you where you’re at and if you’re actually in the right place or not to pursue building a course in this exact moment in time. Because if you are in this place and you don’t have somewhere between 5 and 10 people that you can immediately call, text, email, LinkedIn message, people that you actually really know, even if it’s an online relationship, and ask them if they would buy a course from you on this fill in the blank topic, then I think you’re in a position where you need to take a step back and figure out how to build more of those connections. Because if you’re starting from place and you don’t have that crew of, say, 10 people who are going to test your early content with you, then I think you got to do a little bit of the audience building and relationship cultivating stuff first. But in my opinion, start with 10 people. If you can get 10 people to pre order a course from you, and of course, spend some time mapping out what the content is going to be, give people an idea of what they can expect as an outcome on the other side of it, then I think that’s the absolute What best thing you can do.
[00:25:04.000] – Jonathan Denwood
I think you covered this earlier, right? Early on in our conversation, but you used the word conversation, building online relationships. Can you put a bit more meat on that a little bit? What do you really mean in your own mind? That really means.
[00:25:30.430] – Ryan Robinson
With cultivating online relationships with people?
[00:25:33.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes.
[00:25:34.340] – Ryan Robinson
What I really try and do myself, and again, I go through phases. I’m human. I go through phases of how social I’m feeling, right? And so what I really like to do is to think ahead of time, even if I come across a creator that I want to connect with just organically on, say, YouTube or Instagram, or a friend sends me their stuff, and I connected in my mind of like, Oh, This would be a cool person if I could collaborate with them. But often case, for me at least, I’m not quite ready. I’m not in the perfect position to say, maximize the potential of win-win-win with that other creator. And so I’ll take a step back. I won’t send them an email or a DM right away. I’ll say, All right, I want to collaborate with so-and-so because I think I can provide value to him, I can provide value to his audience, and I benefit, too. So I really like to think through what is the strategy that gets a win for everybody here? And often, that ends up being leaning into what my strengths are. And so for me, that’s content creation.
[00:26:49.170] – Ryan Robinson
I’ll usually eventually reach out with some video or guest post idea that I’ve put some thought into and identified, Hey, this is a gap in the content on your channel or on your blog, and I would love to fill that for you. Can I make this video and a companion blog post for you? And that’s a really compelling offer to someone who has an audience that wants more content on these topics. And when the content is coming from me, in this case, a creator who has done this for a long time, it’s really appealing. So I think that’s perhaps a little bit different advice than, say, when you’re just getting started. But if you can figure out a way to structure a win-win-win for the creator, their audience, and for you all in the mix, that’s the name of the game.
[00:27:43.620] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, to you all. Thanks for that. I think it’s a good place for us to go for our middle break. We’ve got some more messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a feast of knowledge from Ryan. He seems to be still laughing at my jokes, so that’s a good sign. Before we go into the second half of this great interview, I want to point out we’ve got a great free resource. If you’re looking to build your membership website, we’ve got a great community on Facebook. It’s the Membership Machine Facebook Group. Totally free. It’s a mixture of WordPress professionals and people like you trying to build a membership website. Why don’t you go and join us? I’m always posting new content on there. If you got any questions, that’s a great resource for you. So go over there. Let’s go into the world of AI. I’ve got some good news for you, Ryan. Ryan, I think with a partner, I’m just going by my from our last chat, has an AI-based product. Kirk signed up, my co-host in my other podcast, Ryan, and he’s been using it, and he’s been giving me some good He’s impressed, Ryan.
[00:29:16.750] – Jonathan Denwood
He’s been singing the praises of it.
[00:29:19.600] – Ryan Robinson
Oh, I love it. I love it. Yeah, I had a back and forth with him, too, and it seems like he’s digging the content that it creates. And we’re talking about blogger here, by the way. This is my suite of ’78, ’79 right now tools. We’re always adding more for content creators, and most of them are AI-powered.
[00:29:41.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, he’s been saying good things about it. So you got a bit of knowledge about AI then. We do really have a true expert here, folks. We have somebody that’s been highly successful in the digital world and the membership world. Ryan really does know his stuff. There’s a lot of flux about AI and about content. Obviously, there’s enormous forces at play, and there’s a lot on the line here. Any disruptive technology, there’s going to be winners and there’s going to be losers. How do you envision how AI is going to change digital? Only a small question, but we can spend a bit of time on it. How do you see digital marketing being changed in the next couple of years by AI?
[00:30:56.740] – Ryan Robinson
I think it’s already completely changed. And there’s a lot of people that haven’t yet adapted to it. And here’s what my take is. I think that AI is simply a tool. It’s never going to replace human creators because AI, let’s say at least today, who knows? I don’t want to eat my own words 20 years from now, but AI today cannot empathize. It cannot feel. It does not have true human experience. It’s an emulation, a simulation of- It sounds like most of American corporate leadership, doesn’t it? Yes, it does. No coincidence is there. It’s probably trained on a lot of that material.
[00:31:45.990] – Jonathan Denwood
Sorry, I couldn’t resist it. Sorry, Ryan.
[00:31:49.780] – Ryan Robinson
Well, here’s what I think, though. I really believe that AI, at least as far as, let’s say, for marketing and content creators, it’s It’s going to be a tool, and it’s a tool that is somewhat self-learning. These models are being trained and leveled up constantly. And so we’re going to see these tools continue to get better and better and better. And so from my perspective, AI helping out with written-based content, primarily, is the no-brainer use case today, and it’s getting so good. As you said, Kirk’s been using Right Blogger, and he’s been pretty pumped about the results of the content he’s creating with it. I’ve found it to be an incredibly useful-And he’s fussy.
[00:32:32.950] – Jonathan Denwood
He’s fussy. He’s actually written a couple of books. He’s actually written a couple of books in the motor industry. He’s quite a large influence So in the motor sport dealership, motorcycle, motor car industry, that’s where he makes most of his money. So he’s fussy. So that’s reasonably high praise, Ryan.
[00:32:59.890] – Ryan Robinson
And it’s only getting better, too. What I find is the best use case for AI today is really taking things off your plate that you don’t enjoy so much. And so I don’t know about you, but I go through phases of how much I love writing a blog post from start to finish, how much I love outlining, how much I love headlines, meta descriptions, all the different various components, optimizing it for SEO. These are things that sometimes I love, sometimes I just don’t like at all. And so tools that can outsource these bits and pieces to you, at least first draughts, are a really, really great use case for AI. And I think what the future of digital marketing looks like, and we’re seeing it already, this is not a surprise, is that video content pretty much overnight, just became the most important thing that you can do and get better at, build your skill, build your craft, knock down those limiting self beliefs if you’re afraid to be on camera. That’s the stuff that I don’t know where AI is going to be with video, say 10 years from now. But today, AI video is not amazing.
[00:34:15.580] – Ryan Robinson
And I think it’ll really take a long time if it ever can get to a place of real, genuine human level content. And even then, it won’t be the same. It’ll be different. So I think there’s always going to be a market for high-quality human-grade content, if we want to call it that.
[00:34:35.760] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve been thinking a bit about this myself, and one word comes to me, and it’s called experience. And what I mean by this, Ryan, is stay with me on this, Ryan, and then give me an honest critique, because actually, being honest here, I think you have much more knowledge than in this subject. Ai, when it’s used well, enhances experience. When it’s done badly, it detracts experience. Example, YouTube. I published, I’m grinding it out. What YouTube wants and what other platforms wants is very different, and I’m trying not having to duplicate content just for one platform, and it’s tricky. But I notice on YouTube, since AI artwork. There’s loads of thumbnails that are misleading. They have a very attractive lady on the thumbnail, and when you click the video, it’s some old geezer like me. Going on for half an hour. It’s misleading. That’s a very primitive example. But that’s not enhancing the experience, that’s detracting the experience. Because I tend to not watch it because I think I’ve been misled. I was expecting a very attractive lady with something interesting to say, and I’ve got some old geeser like me and my face. It’s not a very attractive proposition, is It’s a little bit, Ryan.
[00:36:32.700] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s a very brutal, but do you think I’m on the right track there?
[00:36:37.490] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah, what I would chalk this up to being is just it’s a misalignment of a use case for AI. There’s nothing wrong with using AI for image generation, but you got to think about the use case for it. If you’re using AI to generate some stock images that you have a particular vision for it and you can’t find the right stock image somewhere, have AI create one and put that somewhere in your blog post or use it as you’re editing a YouTube video or something. I think that’s great, but it should not be used as a tool to essentially mislead people. And I guess People have been doing misleading marketing forever. This is just a new way to do it.
[00:37:21.970] – Jonathan Denwood
So where do you think we are in the eLearn in the membership space? Because obviously, I did an episode last week. It was a fun episode with a lady called Nicole, and she has a small but growing YouTube following on one of them. There’s a whole niche of people that do reviews on about online grifters.
[00:37:46.410] – Ryan Robinson
Oh, yeah. I think of coffee Zilla as the big huge one.
[00:37:52.440] – Jonathan Denwood
She’s mercensely copied that, but she’s a female, and it’s not many females. There’s a few that got into it, but she She does quite a good job. She hasn’t got a very large YouTube channel, but it is growing, and I have been watching her stuff. I brought one, and we had a feast about some of the leading, in my opinion. There was a lot of my opinion in that video last week, Ryan.
[00:38:16.560] – Ryan Robinson
Did you guys talk about the Mr. Beast saga? Did that come up?
[00:38:20.800] – Jonathan Denwood
No, we had a list of, in my opinion, Ryan, some of the biggest grifters in the online space. Who’s who of negative talent, in my opinion. There was a lot of my opinion and Nicole’s opinion. But it seems part of American culture as well. But there must be a receptive audience, because obviously anybody that’s got any experience of online marketing, if the audience is totally unreceptive, you’re going to get nowhere. Okay. Obviously, marketing has linkage to propaganda as well, but there always has to be a receptive audience, because you can’t make people… I don’t know how effective a digital marketer you are or propagandist. The audience must be receptive to the messages, a core message. Damage, in my opinion. But how much damage do you think? Because I think there is a subculture that there seems to be an enormous amount of opportunity still in membership, but it also seems to be a little bit tarnished by these, in my opinion, these digital grifters. What’s your own thoughts about all this, Ryan?
[00:39:53.460] – Ryan Robinson
I actually have a lot of thoughts about this. So something that I’m extremely careful not to do on all of my course landing pages and in my marketing material is I do not make promises of what your outcome is going to be after the course.
[00:40:09.640] – Jonathan Denwood
I have noticed that, actually. You could have made so much more money if you just promised the Earth, couldn’t you?
[00:40:16.550] – Ryan Robinson
I mean, here’s the thing about the fine line between marketing and, let’s say, misleading. I don’t want to say grifting, but misleading, is that if you promise specific outcomes for people, That, in my opinion, is almost always going to be misleading because what you’re teaching is based on your own unique experiences throughout the entire course of your life. Everything that you’ve learned, everyone you’ve met, all the experiences you’ve had have led you to where you are today. And every other person who joins your membership community or course is coming from a different set of experiences. And while some people, hell, yeah, can get the same results or even than you, most people are not going to get the exact same results. That’s just the reality of it. So I really try not to lean into that promise of my flagship course is called Built to Blog, and I teach everything from starting a blog, all the technical bits, all the way up to driving traffic, monetizing, building relationships, and doing the whole spectrum of the blogging business. But I don’t promise people Hey, this course will get you to a $1,000 a month blog or a $10,000 a month blog, because that’s just unrealistic for the vast majority of people.
[00:41:39.180] – Ryan Robinson
So many things have to go right, and the timing has to align. And I think there’s just a really careful nuanced line. You got to walk between marketing and misleading people. So you got to know what feels right to you inside. And I think looking at Other course landing pages will show you if you tune into how you’re feeling when you’re reading through some other course landing pages, you’ll feel what’s right or what’s not to you. And oftentimes, things like income claims, that stuff doesn’t feel right to me.
[00:42:18.290] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think you’re totally right there. Let’s talk a little bit about SEO and blogging and content production. I think Google’s in a bit of a tricky spot, but I also think those that say, obviously, Google’s facing ever-increasing legal challenges to itself. Because in my opinion, it is a monopoly, and it’s been there for a long time. And in some ways, it seems to be getting more aggressive. When it comes to profitability, I think it’s last quarter was one of the best quarters that Google’s ever had.
[00:43:05.840] – Ryan Robinson
When you have a monopoly, you don’t want to let go of a monopoly.
[00:43:11.060] – Jonathan Denwood
No. People say, Oh, AI will destroy search. I think search is a much more complicated and multifaceted animal than people realize. I think there’s all sorts of kinds of searches and outcomes. Have you been thinking about this at all? If so, have you got any thoughts about this?
[00:43:43.380] – Ryan Robinson
Oh, man, so many thoughts. So from my perspective-Oh, please share them, right? What I’m seeing happen, this is the big thing, right? So we can pontificate all we want. But what I’m seeing happen is that I’m actually getting more traffic these days. I’m not getting less traffic as a result of Google beginning to roll out some of the AI-featured snippets, whatever we want to call them, the Google search or generative search experience.
[00:44:12.250] – Jonathan Denwood
I think they’re trying stuff out, but there’s something missing, isn’t there? Or is it just me?
[00:44:20.880] – Ryan Robinson
Oh, there’s something missing for sure. I mean, you’ll probably remember it was maybe a month or two ago when they rolled it out across almost every search query at first. And there was an online frenzy going on of people googling stuff like, how many rocks should I eat per day? And the AI was pulling snippets and advice from these joke websites. And it was saying, the average American should consume 2-3 pebbles a day for optimal health. And it’s like, what the hell?
[00:44:55.990] – Jonathan Denwood
And so I’ve been doing that for years, Ryan.
[00:44:58.700] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah, just a couple of pebbles a day. But this is a great example of AI not being ready yet to answer mass queries, and especially on stuff like medical health, nutrition. There’s some really third rail topics there that I think Google is now going to be way more sensitive to putting the AI results for. And so here’s the thing. Seo SEO has been dead about once a year, every year for the past 10 plus years that I’ve been paying attention to it. And it’s never actually dying. It’s just changing. Seo is always changing, but it’s just changing in different ways now than it was before. And so figuring out how you can land, call it a featured snippet, or become the top-sided source in these kinds of AI search results is of the name of the game now because people will always, some percentage of people, will always want the quick answer to something. And reading the AI-generated answer is essentially no different than reading what’s pulled into the featured snippet, which is that top result that’s been around for years now. And for those people who want the quick answer, that’s all they’re ever going to need.
[00:46:25.130] – Ryan Robinson
But when you bring someone to your blog or a YouTube video who wants to go deeper on the subject matter related to that quick answer, that’s when it’s still a really important SEO plate to get to the top of Google search results. So that hasn’t changed essentially at all. And if anything, it gives you the opportunity to create more in-depth content, more personality-driven content. And that’s why I really recommend video these days as a way to teach more in-depth, more interesting things with your audience beyond just what a written blog post can do.
[00:47:06.120] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think it’s all… I think you must have read my mind. I think you were spot on with your observations there because I think if you just want a short, quick answer, how many miles do I have to drive from Carston City to Denver? What are some of the best stopping points from Carston City to Denver? If you put that into search at the present moment, it’s just terrible. The stuff that is shown to you is- And arguably, you don’t want to go to someone’s blog to read that a thing and try and pick out the needle in the haystack.
[00:47:49.370] – Ryan Robinson
You want a quick answer.
[00:47:50.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you might do. It shows you a quick list of the things that you might like, and then it has links, and you click on the link to find out more about that particular a stop-off point or attraction. But that search at the present moment is awful. I think there’s also the commercial pressure on Google. It’s schizoid, isn’t it? I think that can happen to a lot of bigger businesses. There’s so many competing issues or requirements that it becomes a skitz-side organization where it’s fighting different parts of itself. I think you can clearly see that in Google because even before AI, it had some considerable problems. The ever-increasing amount of sponsored links, which is great for the bottom line, but it was getting the constant change of content that they would show. Most of it, in my opinion, was pooled in and didn’t have any real value to the search intent of the person that put the query in. It seemed to be getting worse. I think AI has only added gas to the bonfire. What do you think of what I’ve just said?
[00:49:21.290] – Ryan Robinson
I think what we’re looking at is we’re looking at AI taking its first baby steps, or maybe it’s still crawling even. I think a big company like Google, they often drink their own Kool-Aid to an extent. And I think they rolled out something that was so far from ready that they thought, Hey, this thing is ready to run and give people the best answer.
[00:49:45.430] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think they were forced a little bit by OpenAI, weren’t they?
[00:49:48.870] – Ryan Robinson
Yeah. Oh, they were caught totally off guard, which is, I mean, honestly, for a company like Google, that’s embarrassing. I think that was a public embarrassment for them to be caught so off guard from a pretty much new to the world company on something that changed their industry. And so, yeah, you see a lot of quick trigger action stuff going on from Google right now. And I would expect them to potentially make more mistakes with rolling out all this AI products because they’re trying to do it in a hurry now.
[00:50:23.300] – Jonathan Denwood
So what do you think in a year’s time or 18 months? Because if I ask you any further out than that, I think I’m just asking you to make very broad, I can’t talk, Ryan. That’s a problem for a podcaster, isn’t it? Spectative views. If I can ask you, where do you think this is going to affect the success of blogging in a year’s time? Because you said you got more traffic and you know other people that got more traffic. Do you think if you play it the right way and you Keep yourself educated, the fundamentals aren’t going to fundamentally change in the next year, 18 months. Is that your feeling?
[00:51:09.270] – Ryan Robinson
I think that’s at least mostly true. I think this AI is introducing changes in a way that we have not seen changes before. So there’s always going to be some curveballs with this one. But from my perspective, things that will go away are things like glossary pages. If one of your biggest traffic sources you were relying upon was a glossary of all the terms in your industry, and that used to be responsible for a lot of traffic for you, that’s the stuff that AI is going to do a great job of answering, and maybe already. But moving into the future, those kinds of traffic sources are going to be wiped out. But arguably, that’s not really the traffic you ever would have wanted.
[00:51:56.540] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s low quality intent traffic, isn’t it? You got to such a volume to it to turn that into any quality lead. That is just a volume game, isn’t it?
[00:52:11.850] – Ryan Robinson
What I’m seeing is that there’s going to be a huge shift to long tail topics and really meeting the intent of the searcher with something that’s really value rich. So not just cursory content, not Just using tools like write blogger to generate a quick article and not read it and not edit it, inject your own life experiences into it before publishing. These are all really important things if you’re using AI tools, you got to weave yourself into them. And so what I see happening a year, 18 months down the line, is people continuing to figure out the ways to weave AI into your content creation process and find the components and pieces that genuinely help you to unlock more time for what you like doing in your content. And take again this long tail focus. So what are the more particular specific queries that people are asking related to your niche, your industry that you can help out with? And then do that as much as you can, please, with video. And then you can use tools like AI. Inside of Right Blogger, we actually have the YouTube video to blog post generator. It’s my favorite tool.
[00:53:28.230] – Ryan Robinson
It takes any YouTube video you publish, and it turns it into a first draft blog post for you in less than a minute. Those are the kinds of use cases where if you adopt a video first creation process, you’ll be able to use these tools to actually help you repurpose your content around and spread it to different platforms.
[00:53:49.480] – Jonathan Denwood
So let’s go to the last question and a quick follow after that, and then we wrap it up. I think we asked you this question. It’s one of my regular questions on the other show, the WP Tonic. If you had a time machine like H. G. Wells or Doctor Who, love my Doctor Who, I’m English, folks. As a kid, the cyber robots and the Daleks, they used to scare the hell out of me. I used to hide behind the settee. They used to scare heaps out of me. Still do. I still hide under the settee, folks. There we go. Truth. Truth to power. If you had your own time machine and you could go back and you just could… In your 20s, that was so long ago, I can’t remember any of it, but For you, you’re still a young snapper snapper. If you could go back and just give yourself one or two quick tips, like not coming on this podcast, what would you tell yourself?
[00:55:01.350] – Ryan Robinson
Something went seriously wrong if I’m here today.
[00:55:05.230] – Jonathan Denwood
No. Exactly. This is funny. I was going to point it out, but you’re quick. So you’ve worked it out yourself, haven’t you?
[00:55:13.000] – Ryan Robinson
The biggest thing, honestly, this is very real. This is not a regret I have, but this is what I would tell my, say, 24-year-old self, Start making videos today. If I can go back 10 years, I would start making videos immediately. That was when you YouTube wasn’t new by any stretch of the imagination, but that was definitely when a lot of people who are, say, popular creators who have massive YouTube followings got their start 10-ish years ago. And that is really telling. And that’s not to say that you can’t start today and build up a following because you can. And in fact, that’s what I’m doing, right? So I’m almost at 5,000 subscribers on YouTube, and it’s a grind. But as you know, too. It just takes time and repetition and consistency and learning the craft, getting better at things like lighting and scripting videos.
[00:56:11.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Don’t bother me there. I just knock you out. I think I just keep knocking it out. But I’m trying to work out what I can do that can affect multiple platforms. And that’s tricky because they’re They’re all different, aren’t they? Totally. So that’s a tricky thing.
[00:56:36.370] – Ryan Robinson
I think the hindsight advice, though, is always going to be, for me, at least, it’s going to be pretty platform-related. So it would be like, Hey, take YouTube seriously or take Instagram real seriously as soon as that came out. But some of the stuff you just can’t know, you got to go through it your own way.
[00:56:54.530] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I just like podcasting. I like, and I do like YouTube. But in some ways, I watch too much of it. But I think it’s better to watch YouTube than the American television. There’s only so many murders that you can watch, isn’t it?
[00:57:13.880] – Ryan Robinson
It’s everything turned in the truth, right?
[00:57:15.060] – Jonathan Denwood
I mean, they wonder why there’s a violent crime problem. Well, maybe it’s to do your television churning out violence and murder all the time.
[00:57:24.860] – Ryan Robinson
If that’s what you think is going on, that’s what ends up going on more.
[00:57:30.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Just a little bit of insight. I might be wrong, beloved listeners and viewers. Ryan, it’s been a fun discussion. I think you’ve enjoyed it. I get a sense. I think we’ve covered a ton of stuff. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you personally, your AI company, and whatever else you want to promote, Ryan? I think you’ve earned the right to have a suitable plug of what you want, Ryan. You provided a lot of, aren’t you?
[00:58:00.920] – Ryan Robinson
Thank you. I appreciate that. And I hope so, too. If anyone wants to send me hate mail, I’m Ryan at ryrob. com. My blog, ryrob. Com, R-Y-R-O-B. That’s my home base for all things on the Internet, and you can find me very quickly from there. But yeah, Right Blogger is my main focus today, R-I-G-H-T blogger. Com. And that’s our tool suite. We’ve got almost 3000 active customers using all our different tools to help create more content. I think the actual use case for AI repurposing it. So, you need to figure out ways to better promote and distribute your content. And these are the things AI can help out with a lot right now.
[00:58:45.370] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I ask a quick ending question? How do you deal with negativity online? Because I think that’s something people fear about putting themselves online. Because there is a lot of negativity out there. You put a YouTube video, and they say, Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about, blah, blah, blah. And you think, Well, the obvious answer is, Don’t watch the video, mate, if you don’t… But how do you deal with it yourself?
[00:59:20.640] – Ryan Robinson
I think the best piece of advice that someone shared with me once was that if you’re going to create content, if you’re going to publish yourself online, whether it’s written or video, audio, whatever, it doesn’t matter. You have to accept and expect to be embarrassed by it. If you look at the people who are literally on top of their game at creating the content you like, they did not get there overnight. The only way to get to be excellent at your craft is to go through being shitty at it for a while. And when you’re publishing stuff that doesn’t look like the top-level-looking stuff in your space, it will be embarrassing. People are going to throw some comments at it, and you have to be okay with that because here’s what I believe. Life is such a journey, and if you take negative feedback from someone and internalize it, and you change who you are and what you’re doing based on it, you’re going to end up being disappointed in yourself over time. So my advice is that you embrace the haters because, from my perspective, most people who leave negative comments online are not the ones who create content at all.
[01:00:41.210] – Ryan Robinson
They’re just consuming it and being very critical about it.
[01:00:45.910] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s a fantastic insight. Ryan, I think you’re spot on If you get critical feedback from someone who’s another creator in your space, then that is the stuff to consider how you can take in that feedback.
[01:00:59.980] – Ryan Robinson
But remember, most people leaving hate comments are not making something. If you’re making stuff, you’re already doing it.
[01:01:06.650] – Jonathan Denwood
A lot of them are professional trolls, aren’t they? Totally. All right, Ryan, it’s been fab. We’re going to end it now. Listeners and viewers, we have some great guests and topics coming up in the next few weeks. We will be back next week. See you soon. Bye.
WP-Tonic & The Membership Machine Facebook Group
Why don’t you sign up and be part of the Membership Machine Show & WP-Tonic Facebook group, where you can get all the best advice and support connected to building your membership or community website on WordPress?
Facebook Group
