Jay Baer on “Generosity Marketing” and the Power of Business Podcasting

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Brian Clark: Hey everyone, Brian Clark here with another episode of Rainmaker FM. Today we’re breaking our normal programming just a bit to bring in a very special guest. We’re going to have more guests periodically, but this is a guy and a friend that I really thought should be the first one.

So Jay Baer, you know him most likely as the bestselling author of Youtility, which if you have not read is one of those few bibles of content marketing. And as someone who has been doing this a while, I feel like my opinion on that has some credence. Definitely pick it up and take a look if you haven’t read it. If you have read it, you know and are familiar with Mr. Jay Baer.

I’m going to ask Jay to bring us up to speed on his path to best-selling author and content marketing celebrity in his own right. But in general, Jay has managed five marketing service firms, which is amazing. And in the process of that he has worked with over 700 brands, 30 in the Fortune 500. That’s kind of ridiculous.

I want to find out and I know his shop is growing, I know they’re doing interesting things but it is better to hear it from him than me. Jay, how are you?

Jay Baer: Hello my friend. Thanks very much for having me. Greetings to everybody out there at Rainmaker FM Nation.

Brian Clark: Very nice. So as I warned you, I’d love for you to give us more details. So you were born and you’re here today, please fill in the gap.

Jay Baer: I feel like what Chris Brogan said a few years ago, “It took me ten years to become an overnight sensation.” I started in online in 1994 so pre-browser, pre-Yahoo, and way pre-Google.

I was originally in political consulting. I ran political campaigns. I went from there to corporate marketing and from there I had a brief, and I mean brief, a foray working for the Government as a spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections.

My job was essentially to give tours of the juvenile prison, which isn’t even as fun as I just made it sound in the previous sentence. I had been there about four months (and this is a true story), they put me in charge of a 13 person business card redesign committee. I thought, “Wow, that seems like a lot of people involved in this process, that doesn’t really fit my thinking on life and in business.”

At the same time I had dinner with some friends of mine from college who had started the very first internet company in Arizona and they said, “Hey, this company that we built is starting to get a little bit bigger and we don’t know anything about marketing.” And I said, “Well, that’s okay because when you say the word ‘internet,’ I don’t know what that word means, but I will literally do anything other than giving another tour of this prison.”

So I walked in the next morning and quit, and found myself the Vice President of Marketing for an internet company without ever having been on the internet. That is an interesting place to find yourself.

So that company ended up getting pretty large and we sold it to MindSpring and I started another company and another company and another company and another company. And here we are at Convince & Convert, which I started in 2008 to provide true strategic consulting services.

We’re not an agency, but many of our clients are agencies in fact. We work with medium sized and large global brands to help them with content marketing strategy and social media strategy, governance, metrics, competitive analysis, and things like that. We probably operate more like an analyst firm or like a McKinsey & Co., than we do like an agency. That’s because we don’t get involved in tactical work.

Befitting the Rainmaker audience, the company is purely virtual. We have staff members all over the United States. We only have one company meeting per year and we have four phone calls per year, period. Everything else though, is with Teamwork, which is like Basecamp but I prefer it and Skype. And that’s how it rolls.

Brian Clark: Interesting. How many people do you have now?

Jay Baer: Ten.

Brian Clark: Ten, okay. I did not know you were virtual, or as we like to say geographically agnostic.

Why Good People Are Good to Find

Jay Baer: Absolutely. We’re in all time zones and it works out pretty well. The other thing that many people don’t know about Convince & Convert, is that all of our team members with the exception of myself, also have their own consultancies on the side. So everybody who works with us spends half to two-thirds of their time with Convince & Convert and the balance of their time working on their own clients.

Everybody is a 1099 in our company and sort of has that motivation and mentality and skillset to be a sole proprietor. I really look for those kind people when I bring folks on the team because it takes a special kind of person to say, “Hey, go work on a social media strategy for some of the biggest companies in the world. You’re never going to see that company. You’re never going to meet that company, and you’re never going to have a meeting with your team. It’s going to be all on the phone.” Not everybody can do that and so we’re pretty careful about who we bring into the fold.

Brian Clark: That’s interesting because that was my exact sworn plan when I started Copyblogger. There would be no partners and there would be no employees after coming out of my last three businesses, which almost killed me. Now we have 42 employees and 4 partners.

I think whatever you have to do is, you look at what the goal is and what needs to get done to get you there? I think you’re familiar with the story. I didn’t even have a product or service much less some grand goal of creating X, Y, or Z, you kind of roll with it.

Jay Baer: Yeah.

Brian Clark: Anyway, thank you for that summary.

Jay Baer: I’ll add that there’s no doubt that it gets harder to maintain that thesis as you get bigger. At some point it starts to change the dynamics when you get more people. In fact, just 31 days ago we added a Director of Operations to the team. We did that because we got to the point where we needed somebody in that role because it just gets too loosey-goosey.

Brian Clark: I would recommend to anyone starting out, to start that way. Even if you do go with a partnership to some degree, hiring people is capital intensive. I think Joe Pulizzi over at Content Marketing World, with this fantastic conference, has only got one or two actual employees. It’s like he’s a force of his own.

Jay Baer: Absolutely. It can be really effective, but the corollary to that is you absolutely have to have the right people.

One of the challenges with that kind of business is that even though we’ll be on the Inc. List next year, we’re growing fast. And having that sort of setup does prevent you from growing even faster because you’ve got to be really, really careful about whom you add to the team. You can’t babysit. It’s impossible to babysit them.

Brian Clark: Again, we have employees but it takes a special type of employee to be trusted to sit in front of a screen and not look at cat photos all day and to actually do the work. I feel blessed that we have this team. Every day I think about what if I had to get to a hundred employees next year. Everyone has come from the audience. It has been beneficial and I feel lucky and I do think about that.

So, your first book was The Now Revolution with our friend Amber Naslund. What year was that?

Jay Baer: It was 2011.

Brian Clark: Okay. And then Youtility came two years or one year after that?

Jay Baer: Two years after that, so it was last summer.

Brian Clark: That book has really had some influence. I remember when I saw you do your keynote at Content Marketing World, the first time I heard you talk about Youtility and I was like, “That’s damn good.” And the book didn’t disappoint.

Where We’re Headed After the Launch and Popularity of Youtility

So Youtility has become in its own way its own “buzzword” I guess, to represent what we’re trying to accomplish with content marketing. Where are we going from here? What’s beyond Youtility?

Jay Baer: First, I don’t think we have conquered Youtility. You and me and the people that listen to the show and the people who consume the content that you and your team create are at the very vanguard of this line of thinking. As you know, we do a lot of big corporate consulting and I do a lot of bringing the Youtility message to major corporations.

In those organizations, this concept of help rather than hype is by no means something that has been embraced. In some cases they’ve got their toe in the water a little bit. But we’ve got a long way to get Youtility and that thinking sort of embedded in the culture of organizations across the board.

It really is a cultural imperative more so than a content marketing imperative.

Certainly the manifestation of it and the tactical execution of it could be classified as content marketing, but you have to believe in the power of giving away value. Most companies simply do not because they haven’t had to historically. They could just advertise their way out of it. I think we’ve got a long way to go to reach sort of peak Youtility if you will.

The Decline of Online Reading?

What I think is really interesting coming down the road is how the Youtility execution layer is changing really, really quickly. A lot of the things we talk about in the book even a year ago were blogging and mobile apps and things like that. Now, you see such a tremendous rise of multimedia content and short form video in particular. So whether it is Vine, Instagram Video, short videos on YouTube, short videos posted natively to Facebook, and podcasting of course.

As a four-time author now, it kind of breaks my heart, but Johnny don’t read. Right? Johnny don’t want to read anymore.

Brian Clark: I’ve been saying that since 2007 when we launched a training program as our first product called Teaching Sells. The arguments I had to make are, “No, people will buy content,” which no one wanted to believe in 2007. It’s hard to believe that now with the rise of eLearning and online courses and all that.

Jay Baer: Of course.

Brian Clark: The other thing was people don’t read. You do because you’re my audience and we’re readers. Right?

Jay Baer: Right.

Brian Clark: That’s why Copyblogger has been so text heavy throughout time, but I think you’re noticing that we’re branching out more into audio and video.

Jay Baer: You have to.

Brian Clark: There’s only so many people that are readers, but you can’t leave them behind. I do want to talk a couple other Youtility focused books, and you do work with some gigantic organizations.

These are for the people that are little closer to my heart. You’ve got one for accountants and you’ve got one for realtors, which these are the professional services’ small business engines of our economy.

Jay Baer: Absolutely. Youtility applies as a concept to every business. I really believe that.

Brian Clark: I do too.

How Your Business Can Move Vertically from One Strong Product

Jay Baer: Big, small, B2B, B2C, government, all that. In order to actually do it, I think it is sometimes easier for people to see themselves in the stories even more than they might in the regular book.

I essentially stole a play from the chicken soup playbook as well as the e-myth playbook and said, “Geez, we could tell stories in a vertical.” So Youtility for Accountants came out in March and has done really well within that community. That’s certainly a type of professional service provider that typically has not embraced that type of marketing at all.

Just two weeks ago we released Youtility for Real Estate, which has been on and off the number one Kindle book for real estate on Amazon for the last couple weeks since we released it. I think it is actually the best thing I’ve ever written. I think it is better than the Youtility hardcover. That’s because I’ve had another year to year and a half to think through the principles and organize my thoughts better.

There are so many realtors out there and they all do the exact same thing. There’s very little differentiation between any of them in terms of how they go about building their business. And so Youtility is a recipe for doing it in a different way and it has been really successful.

We’ve had great coauthors on both of those projects. Darren Root, a friend of mine who is a very popular famous thought leader in the accounting space and Erica Campbell Byrum is the head of digital marketing for Homes.com and for Rent.com. She coauthored the Youtility for Real Estate book.

It’s nice to have those vertical subject matter experts alongside to help me find case studies and to add a little industry gravitas to the proceedings. Those books are virtual only, which has been an interesting dynamic to not have a physical book. They’re just $2.99 in Kindle iPlay, Google Play, iTunes, and all that. It’s less than three bucks, which is remarkable. We look at it more as a marketing exercise for the real book than it is necessarily going to make at $2.99.

Brian Clark: Interesting. This is something I’ve seen and I think influenced me early on because being generous, giving things away, and giving value away to make money some other way is the basis of my entire career. I would never argue with the utility of generosity. You see that in your very best real estate agents and you see that in your very best accountants.

Jay Baer: Yeah.

Brian Clark: I remember my first accountant was that kind of guy. And still, you have people who are trying to squeeze every dollar out or are kind of ruthless.

The Power of Generosity

Is it easier at the professional services or small business level? I ask because generosity is a personality trait and the enterprise can’t culturally assimilate that.

Jay Baer: I think that’s some of it, but I think some it, Brian,