The Transcript

Behind the Scenes: The Reimagining of Copyblogger.com

Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Brian Clark: Hey, rainmakers. Welcome to another episode of the show that talks all about creating digital products and services for growing your own online empire. I’m your host, Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media, and as has been the case lately, I have a co-host, a new voice to listen to, a very smart person, Pamela Wilson.

Many of you may know Pamela as, I think, the longest running guest poster on Copyblogger. She contributed from the outside, had her own business for many, many years, and I’m proud to say that now she is on the inside. Pamela, how are you doing?

Pamela Wilson: I’m doing great. I’m happy to be here.

Brian Clark: I’m happy you’re here, too. All right. Tell everyone what your official title is. I’m actually losing track. We’re growing so fast lately.

Pamela Wilson: My official title at the moment is vice president of educational content. It’s specific enough to sound really interesting, but not specific enough to tell you exactly all the little pies I have my fingers in.

Brian Clark: You do. When you first came on with us, you were very, very much entrenched helping us out with Rainmaker and getting the onboarding into a better process, and then knowledge base, the video — all of that great stuff. Then you shifted over.

Now, that title actually makes sense. We just got together last week in Nashville and had a great meeting. At some point, I think that’s a very descriptive job title for you, but right now, I think it’s easiest to say that Pamela runs Copyblogger.com. She’s the latest in a long line of people.

First there was me. Then there was me and Sonia. Then there was Sonia, then Robert. Then Jerod did a year before he transitioned, and now Pamela has taken over that role. The best thing that I could say about this, Pamela, is that everyone who has run Copyblogger is still with the company and in upper management. So congratulations, or don’t screw up — which one do you prefer?

Pamela Wilson: That’s a relief that people are sticking around after they’ve gone through what I’m going through right now.

Brian Clark: Trial by fire?

Pamela Wilson: That’s right. That’s a good sign.

Brian Clark: Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the things we covered at the meeting. It was super productive and, for me, at least, super exciting. Copyblogger’s nine and half years old now. It’s kind of crazy to think about it. We’ve always been good about evolving, both in terms of content, types of content, design especially. We’ve had the same one for a while. We’ll talk about that. I just feel like this one is a really big one. There’s been a lot of things that I’ve wanted to see done over at Copyblogger.com that we just didn’t have time for, so they got put to the side a little bit.

Then you came on board, and you said, “I want to do this, this, this, this, and this.” I’m like, “Yes.” You’re like, “Wait a minute. I was expecting more feedback than that.” I’m like, “No, it’s like you read my mind.” It’s so funny that you complain that you would have an idea, you’ll send it to me, I’ll say, “Sounds good,” and then you’re like, “I don’t think he’s even paying attention to me.” But no, you’re on target.

Then the funny story here is that we had a little bit of a screw up. You got a three-paragraph email from me, and you’re like, “Okay, he’s paying attention, number one, and number two, I think I like those two-word answers better.”

Pamela Wilson: Right. I was giving you a hard time. This was last week. We were all sitting at a big table eating dinner. I said, “If you get an email from Brian that has two or three words, that’s great. If it has two or three paragraphs, you need to sit down and take a deep breath before you start reading it.”

Brian Clark: It wasn’t that bad.

Pamela Wilson: No, it wasn’t bad at all.

Brian Clark: I think I ended with a smiley face. Come on now.

Pamela Wilson: No, and honestly, it was well-deserved. It was something we should have caught. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of ideas, and the interesting thing is, having been a reader for so many years, it feels like a tremendous honor to be in a position to make some of the changes that I would have loved to have experienced as a reader. It’s a wonderful position to be in. I’m excited about all the things we’re talking about doing going forward.

Brian Clark: Yeah, I think that’s the perspective that matters and why you were so on point. I don’t know that these things were obvious to everyone, but that’s why they were gnawing at me. The fact that you keyed in on them was just a good sign for me. It just validated that we both were on the same path.

Our Multi-Content Platform Future

Brian Clark: Talking about Copyblogger just a bit, Copyblogger is what started it all, Copyblogger.com. It’s the mother ship of the company and has been. It’s interesting because it’s more important than ever, yet we’re really trying to balance things out between Rainmaker.FM, Copyblogger, and StudioPress going forward, which might lead some to believe that, “Okay, so Copyblogger’s less important.” No, it just means the other two sites need to become as important. Copyblogger will continue to set the standard.

That’s really how I view the work you’re about to do. In some sense, we’re trying to take some of that load off of Copyblogger and let it become what it is at its core. Sometimes people don’t realize it, because we talk about StudioPress, Synthesis, and Rainmaker Platform, but at its heart, Copyblogger is a membership site.

It’s a particular model that we started two years ago and then we let stay while we worked on other things. This is an overarching membership model site approach that we’ll be talking about more in the future. It is something that scales, and you can replicate this model. So more on that later.

Coming in to Copyblogger, you had to think about even more than that. Any good membership site has its attraction content. It’s got its email capture process, which is in place. It’s got the back-end sale and all that. You’re able to come with some infrastructure built in, yet still have to reimagine how that all works.

Let’s talk about content. I think people have been noticing that Copyblogger has rejuvenated a bit in many ways — images, the content, different types of posts that we’ve never done before. I’ll shut up, and you tell us a little bit about what you’ve implemented so far.

Re-Focusing on Copyblogger s Core Audience

Pamela Wilson: The first thing to know is that my background is publication design. I’ve done that for decades, publication design and putting together publications. I very much see Copyblogger as a publication. It doesn’t have pages that you turn with your fingers, but it’s definitely a publication. I approach it that way in terms of the content that we put on the blog and the way we treat our images. All the elements, in my opinion, are elements of a really good publication. That’s my angle. That’s my approach to everything.

The one thing that we have been trying to do lately is to become very clear about the audience that we’re serving. As a business, we’re seeing that the Rainmaker Platform and Rainmaker.FM serve one specific audience, StudioPress serves a slightly different audience, and then Copyblogger serves its own audience.

Our audience is people who identify themselves as professional content marketers. They either identify themselves as professional content marketers because 1) they have that as their business and they offer that as a service, 2) they identify themselves as professional content marketers because they are business people who use content marketing in their businesses, or 3) maybe they’re in a large organization and they’re working in the content marketing field.

They self-identify as someone who takes content marketing seriously and who uses it within a business context. Those are the people we’re really trying to serve with our content.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s dead-on. I think that’s been the case, yet we meandered a little. We got a little fuzzy on that. Also, with your background, when I started Copyblogger, it quickly was one of the first people to ever take outside writers, which wasn’t done in blogging at that time. I saw it as a magazine, not a blog, despite the name, yet I had no magazine experience whatsoever.

I think that’s part of the reason why we just seem to see eye to eye on this. You have the specific philosophical and conceptual understanding of what I’m struggling with all along, which is, “Yeah, it’s a magazine.”

Why a History in Print Magazines Helps

Pamela Wilson: It is. It’s a magazine. There are elements from the magazine world that we can use when we talk about how we put content on Copyblogger. For example, one thing that you see in magazines is, typically toward the front of the magazine, you have columnists. These are people who write for the magazine every month. They have specific voices that people cue into, they relate to, and they enjoy reading.

That’s one of the things that we’re trying to feature on Copyblogger — these specific voices. This is our new philosophy about guest posting. We are going away from this model of just taking guest posts from anyone. Instead, we’re trying to develop specific voices that people get to know over time.

We’re helping those people to develop voices around topics that they really have expertise in, topics that they’re known for. We’re working with them personally so that we can feature their best knowledge on the blog and develop those voices so that people get to know them over time.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. We’ve always been selective about guest posting. Again, going back to that magazine style, not only did I accept them early on, I edited every one myself. Sometimes — dirty little secret — I rewrote certain people’s complete post. These are really well-known people, but they were just a little off.

Pamela Wilson: I know.

Brian Clark: That’s not a scalable solution.

Pamela Wilson: No.

Brian Clark: So you’ve got to have an editorial approach that says, “Okay, if it’s that far off the mark, then we can’t do it,” right?

Pamela Wilson: Right. There’s a style to Copyblogger posts that does well, and that’s what we’re always aiming for. There are times that, if you’re just accepting guest posts from anywhere, you end up with this post that you do so much more work on than if you’d just written it yourself from scratch. We need to figure out how to best use our resources.

When we thought about it, it seemed to work better to just develop a small group of writers whose work we knew and who had expertise in specific areas that we wanted to be able to share with our readers. Then just work with those people, put them on a schedule so that they knew when they would need to get their piece in. That’s worked really well.

Brian Clark: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about the new images that we’re using. You weren’t involved in this conversation until it came to execution, I guess, but I was grumping out at Robert, saying, “We need better images.” Robert’s been complaining about image. He knew that, but I kept saying, “Okay, it’s not that big a deal with the talent we have in this company to produce these images.”

He pushed back a little bit, and he said, “Well, this, that,” and I’m like, “No, we got to do something.” I think that was the last I was in it. Then you showed up. Tell us the story. Once it gets turned over and I see that something great happened, I’m happy. I don’t necessarily know how the sausage was made to get to that point.

The Power of the Right Images and Colors

Pamela Wilson: It was interesting because we decided early on that, if we’re going to do these images, we wanted to make them look very custom. The thing that happens with blogs occasionally, especially if it’s a big site like Copyblogger, is you’ll buy an image, you put it up on your site, and then people just pull it off your site. It’s not branded with your name or anything like that. People just pull the image and use it on their own sites or grab the URL to the image if you’re not doing it right and put it on their own sites. It’s not a good idea.

We wanted to do something branded. We also wanted those images to be able to stand by themselves in social media and always look like they came from Copyblogger. From a visual standpoint, the way that sausage is made is you choose a set of brand colors. You choose from the colors that you’ve always used on your site, and you choose specific fonts. You do not stray from those two choices. You stick to those colors. You stick to those fonts.

It’s just a matter of working within those limitations. When you do that, everything that you put together looks like it came from the same organization. It’s amazing actually.

Brian Clark: Branding 101, on one hand, yet not a lot of people were doing it for many, many years.

Pamela Wilson: Yes, and that’s something I talked about all the time on Big Brand System. Those are basic building blocks of putting together a visual brand that’s recognizable. We made that decision early on. We have the Copyblogger red, the Copyblogger green, and the Copyblogger blue. We do not vary from those three colors. Then we have our font that we’ve used very consistently. Then, it’s just a matter of picking images that add shades of meaning to the words that are already on the page.

You’ll see occasionally we go for humor. You can’t do that every single time, but we go for humor once in a while just to keep them interesting. We try to make them visually interesting and try to get the reader to think a little bit by looking at the image. For example, the one we ran just this past week was talking about landing pages. We have this big jet coming in for a landing. It’s just like a slight shade of meaning that you’re adding to the words. It makes it interesting.

Then the other thing that we do — this part I’m doing basically — I’m coming up with text for those images. It’s an opportunity to almost have a second headline at the...