430: Grow Your Email List with ConvertKit’s Creator Network with Nathan Barry

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Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you're listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, Nathan Berry from ConvertKit is back on the podcast after a few years to chat more about email and ConvertKit's new project called the Creator Network. In in this interview, Nathan shares more about what the Creator Network is, why they decided to start the Creator Network, and how you can get started with the Creator Network if you're not already involved. Nathan also walks listeners through some case studies from the Creator Network that show how creators from all sectors are having success within the Creator Network and why collaboration with other creators is key to seeing success here. He also shares a little bit more about ConvertKit's recent acquisition of Sparkloop and how that plays into the potential for monetization within the Creator Network and some other tips for optimizing your profile on the Creator Network to see success. It's a really interesting episode from a strategic business perspective and also just kind of inspiring to think about another way you might want to monetize your business or think about growth for your business. So we'll just let Bjork and Nathan take it away.

Nathan, welcome back to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

A lot's, a lot's happened since we last chatted. It was years ago. It's been multiple years. Yeah, the COVID time warp makes it hard to understand when exactly it was, but a lot has happened. At ConvertKit. There's kind of three different pieces that I thought would be helpful to talk about. One, my guess is the vast majority of people who are listening understand convertkit what it is. I would also guess the majority of people who listen would be using ConvertKit, but we can kind of touch base on what that is and how it works and why people should be using that. Bloggers, publishers, creators should be using ConvertKit. And then there's two things that I'm really excited to talk to you about. We've kind of dipped our toe into each one. Creator Network and sparkloop. But before we do that, let's take a step back. What is ConvertKit?

Yeah, so it is. My background's as a blogger and creator and I set out to build a tool made for creators for email marketing. So that's where we started. Now we're trying to build the best place to earn a living as a creator on the Internet. So you know, it started with email, opt in forms and automation and selling digital products. And then it's expanded into the things I think you mostly want to talk about, which is the creator network and our sponsor network and in more ways to just like to earn a living and grow faster. So it's turning into a one stop shop for everything but different from a social network. It's really where you as the creator have full access. It's your audience. You can see, see exactly what people are doing, what they're buying, what they're engaging with. So we're trying to build a lot of the, the like upside and benefits of a social network without the downsides of like oh yeah and by the way, Facebook owns all your data. You know, it's actually like.

And you own all your data totally and can change an algorithm that suddenly. Yeah, something that was working really well for you. You had a lot of momentum with it suddenly doesn't. I just joined the. There's like a meta creator group and essentially it's just, it's like a customer support group on Facebook of people being like, why is the thing that I was doing not working anymore? Like, why am I not getting, why is nobody viewing my videos anymore? Why am I not getting any traction here? And with email and other things beyond that, like building a product, selling a product, the point that I hear you making is that you control that. And so ConvertKit starting as this place of like, hey, email, opt in forms, but now expanding beyond that and thinking of it as like, okay, you are a creator, you create things online and what are the ways that you capture value and not always but often convert that into revenue and ConvertKit wanting to be the solution for creators who are doing that. Is that more or less what you're saying?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And even just taking it in all these other platforms, you deliver the same message to everyone kind of regardless. Right? But not everyone has the same level of interaction with you.

Right.

I might have joined you list yesterday and someone else might have joined six months ago and already purchased, you know, whatever product and engaged with everything. And when I'm putting out a tweet or I'm putting out a post on Facebook, like there's nothing was like, hey, let's talk to this person differently if they've bought five things from me versus this other person who is brand new. And so like, I guess we're just, we're pitching this launch. Here we go, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And someone's like, wow, I just signed up. And Nathan is like, he's just pitching nonstop. Wow. I guess this is how it's always going to be. And you're like, no, no, no, I do like a once a year launch.

You know, and with email you can.

Just say like, oh, hey, people who joined the last 14 days, let's not even include them in the launch. Or let's send them one note and say, hey, we're launching this now. If you want to hear more about it, click this. Otherwise, you know, here's this other thing. And the people who have bought four products from you already, you can say like, I've got a fifth that I think you're gonna love. Here's why. And, and you can personalize and change all that messaging and the timing of it, and you can automate that, which is pretty wild. And so it's really the difference. That's what convertk has always been good at. And now we're trying to get good at the growth side as well, where, you know, the advantage that Facebook and Twitter and Instagram have always had is they have discovery built in, right? If you put out, can you explain.

Like, when you say discovery, what that means?

Yeah. So it's always been this fragmented market where you email is the best way to connect with your audience.

Yep.

But emails never go viral. I cannot think of a single someone.

Writes unless there's like 20 years when it's like a email you're forwarding.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. They don't go viral in a good way. I guess the ones that go viral is when, like, worst case, Apple and Google are, you know, what's the word? Not collaborating. The negative version of that on, like, let's not hire each other's employees.

Yeah.

And then like years later, it leaks and people are like, that's illegal. That's the version of emails that go viral.

Yeah, yeah.

You generally don't want it. But, you know, if I put out some content, if I put out a great reel on Instagram that, you know, my friends, my followers will engage with that, that'll get traction. The algorithm will say, like, hey, people seem to watch this towards the end and like it. Let's show it to more people. Oh, those people like it. Let's show it to more and more people. And then you get to the point that something is being viewed, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of times. And so that's the best way to engage with other basically to grow your audience. And so a lot of creators have a hub and spoke model where they have their channels that are best for attracting new visitors. And that's usually people usually have one or two social channels that they're most invested in. And then, you know, especially in the food space. Right. Search is going to be a huge one. It's high intent. So I'd be like, okay, my methods of discovery are organic search and then Instagram and Facebook. But none of those are great at retaining.

You think of search, somebody comes, they leave. The percentage of people who are actually, like, bookmarking something to come back is.

It's pretty low. And so that's where we're using email to be able to say, like, hey, download these recipes, you know, meal plans, whatever else, and then stay in our community. Like, yeah, don't just drive by and get the recipe and leave like, yep, come hang out for a while. Maybe we won't get you on your first visit. We might. It might be your third visit. We're like, oh, I've cooked a recipe from this site before. This looks familiar.

Yeah.

And so really it's those two sides in that hub and spoke, where distribution comes from the spokes of the social platforms in organic search. And then your core retention usually comes from email. And so what we're doing that is starting to be interesting is being able to provide distribution as well through the creator network of partnering other creators with each other, and then they can grow faster off of inbound traffic.

Cool. So like painting that picture, ConvertKit was built originally, you, being the founder of the company, had this idea of like, hey, we need to build something for creators, for bloggers, for publishers. That's going to be, give them the ability to segment, which means what you're talking about, like, hey, you don't have the same conversation with your best friend as you do with somebody you just met. You want to replicate that in all different forms, including your email communication. So if somebody's brand new, you want to send them an introductory email, but if they've been around forever, you're not going to send them the same email.

Right.

And so ConvertKit has this ability to do this segmenting, to really speak to people in a well thought out way, to automate that process that's always been there in kind of the heart and soul of what it is. But what you're saying is now looking at the landscape, there's this reality that you had to do a lot of work to get those people in. You had to get search traffic, you had to build following on Facebook or Instagram, you had to have a cta, a call to action, to say, sign up for my email, on your blog, on your Instagram, you'd get those people in. What I hear you saying now is that you're starting to think about and your team starting to think about, how do we build in some of that functionality where you can, you can do that within the network of ConvertKit creators? Is that more or less accurate?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And so thinking about the collaborations that are already happening and how can you make them happen on autopilot, right? Like every big inflection point in my career as a creator usually came from a conference and not because I sat in a, you know, in row seven of the conference and was like, had my mind blown by a talk. That did happen sometimes, but nine times out of ten it was because of someone that I met, you know, in the hallway at that conference or at a dinner or something else. And then that formed either a collaboration where we're guest posting or, you know, I'm just learning from them, or we started a mastermind group or something else. And so really the most everyone's like, okay, how can I have an algorithm that, you know, drives you more growth. And what we realized is all of the personal, like personal professional growth and audience growth comes from other audiences. Right. We go on YouTube and if you look at YouTube's advice on how do you grow my YouTube channel, they'll say, do collaborations. Yeah, collaborate with other creators. And you go to that. You're like, okay, shoot. Like now we've got a, what are we going to plan? Like, you know, we've got to make a video together, we've got to do all this. You put in a bunch of effort and you get this one spike of subscribers. And so the question that we were thinking about a lot is how do you automate collaborations?

Yeah.

And make it run constantly. And so now the way that it works is inside of ConvertKit in the Creator Network. And you go in, it says, hey, who do you want to recommend? And so I can say, oh, I want to recommend these four creators that are, that I personally enjoy their content. It's a genuine recommendation. And then when someone subscribes to my newsletter, it'll pop up and say, hey, thanks so much for subscribing. Why don't you check out these other creators that I recommend? And then you sign up, I go from there. Someone can say like, no thanks. Or it's like, yeah, I'd love to check this out. So you ended up with these almost pods of creators where there's one, like if you use even some big creators like James Clear, Sahil Bloom, Ryan Holiday, Susan Cain, they all recommend each other. And because they're some of the fastest growing newsletters on the Internet, when they recommend each other, they send a lot of recommendations. Yeah, you know, James Clear, when he's recommending other people, he's referring out a thousand subscribers a day or more. And so then what happens is everyone grows faster because someone signs up for James newsletter, he's recommending Sahil and Ryan Holiday and Susan Cain. So someone says like, oh, I don't know Susan Cain's work. Okay, great, yeah, I'll sign up for her stuff and then vice versa. And so what we found is everyone grows about 50% faster through the creator network.

And so to talk through what that actually looks like, so you have, you sign, you're a ConvertKit member, you have to be using ConvertKit. All this is built in functionality. You go to the Creator Network, like I'm looking at for Pinch of Yam. We were looking at our creator network and we can see we have 30 people recommending pinch of Yum. We Signed up. I don't know, it was maybe a few weeks ago, a couple months ago. So thank you to anybody who's recommending Pinch of Yam, Shout out. Lamperts lately is the latest one to do that. So thank you. And then if you imagine as a reader or as a user or subscriber, what's happening is somebody will come to Lamperts Lately and they'll say, hey, I want to join her email list. Maybe it's a pop up. Maybe it's like an opt in on an email or on a blog post. They go through the process, they put in their first name, their email address, they say subscribe on the next page. There's a confirmation ish type thing.

Plus you should also some other recommendations.

Of people to follow. Is that the general flow? And then you can say, okay, your, your information's already been put in. So you're essentially just opting in to allow additional emails from these people that this creator has recommended. Is that the general workflow?

Yeah. So basically it's saying, okay, you think these other people are good? So yeah, I'll check them out as well. Like discovery was a hard problem as a creator. It's hard to get discovered. And then you also often are looking for more people that are interesting. You and I have been in the blogging world for a long time and so we can go back to like the blog role, which was this little collection of links that sat in like the lower half of the sidebar on your WordPress blog. And it was just like, hey, who. This is who I think is cool. And I would discover so many people through the blog role because it's like, oh, who does Chris Gillebo think is cool? Yeah, oh, Leo Bavato. I didn't know about Leo Bavato. You know, like I discovered Chris Gillo through Tim Ferriss. And then like you get this string of people down from there and this is sort of recreating that of just like here's who I genuinely think has. Has great content.

Yep.

And then people often recommend each other. Right. And so you might form a partnership with people who are growing at a similar size and say, oh, let's recommend each other and then we'll grow faster. The other thing is, if you go to the, what happens in social networks right now it's pretty common to have like to do giveaways or something or to say, hey, let's come together and promote this event together or do a collaboration on Instagram. And basically what happens is, you know, we're Promoting each other's social profiles, building that up. Hopefully some of that traffic is coming back to the website, sticking around on the email list, etc. But now what happens is the more I promote your social content, the more it amplifies that and the more subscribers you're gonna get. But the cool thing is you're promoting me in your subscriber flow.

Yeah.

So basically, the more I promote your social content, it's a little roundabout, but then the more subscribers I get.

Yeah. Point being, there's like, you're aligning incentives.

Correct. To.

And I think Charlie Munger, you know, Warren Buffett's kind of business partner, says, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. And it's like, what does it look like to align incentives around recommendations? And if you have somebody that you know is recommending you, your incentive is going to be to promote their content. Because in some way, some of that comes back to you. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. Oh, yeah, totally. And if you think about it even in the simplest way, like a mastermind group, I hope, you know, every creator listening to this has a group of people or is in the process of forming a group of people who they can rely on for advice and help and everything else. And before maybe there's some co promotion or stuff like that that happens. But now in a masterminding group, you could actually just be recommending each other. And if one of you in the group goes viral, the others do too, which is kind of wild. There's this interaction, trying to remember who it was. I think it was a creator named Josh Spector on Twitter who said, I just got a huge spike in subscribers today, and I'm still trying to figure out where those came from. And it was like four or five hundred subscribers.

Yeah.

That he got that day on a, I don't know, 20,000 subscriber list or something. So he's like, this is a. You know, I'm getting normally like 20 to 50 a day, and I just got 500. What's up? And then Jay Clous raises his hand on. Just on Twitter and is like, oh, that was me. I had a post that went viral on LinkedIn that added like 700 subscribers or 800 subscribers for myself, and I recommended you. And so you went.

You went viral at the time as a secondary, like, downstream effect of that.

Yeah. And so it's like we've had this idea of when one creator wins, all creators win. And we talked about it at a high level as a business, even Thinking a few years ago, five years ago, six years ago, like a full time career as a creator was a pretty weird thing. And so everyone who normalized that and made that happen, you're like, oh, okay, now someone else is saying, oh, I could do that. It's normalized in the industry. We can charge more for sponsorships. Audiences are growing, all that. And so it was like at a high level, when one creator wins, all credits win. And now this is like very tangible.

Like, like literally the more your list.

Grows, the more my list grows.

Yeah, it's. I was just thinking the other day I was reflecting on that and thinking about my inner circle. Not because it's like we're in the space and we've connected with these people and now that's our circle, but really like my inner circle of friends who I've known for like 10 to 15 years and their like career evolution into roles that are creators. Some of them just like full time on social media, but a lot of them in support of people who are doing those roles. Like, we have a friend who does video full time for Lindsay and doing food video, and then a friend who does, you know, has like 3 million followers on Instagram and TikTok. And you know, we have all of these different people who are, you're starting to see that as, as something that is like existing within the world, the role of the creator. And my guess is as you do more of the work with ConvertKit around, you know, helping and supporting creators, seeing that as well. So if nothing else, encouragement to people who are listening, whether you're in it or after it, that that's something that can happen. So let's talk about the creator network you're using ConvertKit. We, what does it actually look like? I mean, we don't have to go into like tutorial mode, but like what does it look like to get up and running? And then do you have. One of the questions I had as we were setting up our profile, like, do you have any tips for like internally optimizing to make it appealing for people to sign up and recommend you? Yeah, yeah.

So the first thing is when you set it up, we have this, this discover tab inside the creator network where you can browse and search for creators. And so you could say, okay, in who's on in food, who's on in business investing.

Right.

These different categories and what types of creators. Right. So you say, okay, I really want to connect with bloggers versus podcasters, et cetera. So I think the first thing is when it asks You. What categories you want to be in, pay attention to that, because that's how other people will find you.

Like, when I'm looking at mine, is this the. Specifically the recommended for you section? So, like, I'm seeing, like, I saw the Perfect Loaf Lorenzo, who we interviewed on the podcast, like, great site, great following. That was one of the recommended for you. For me, when I'm looking.

It's still a relatively basic algorithm at this point, but it's. It's basically looking at the overlap between subscribers and each of your audiences and then the categories that you chose and type of creator you said you are. And trying to do that. That's the biggest thing for us to get better at, is to have really good recommendations.

Yep.

Where you know who you should partner with.

Yep.

So setting up that profile, well, you know, it's just like the rest of your web presence. Good photos, good copy, all of that. But then really what I'd say is, as much as I wish the Creator Network was magical, it's not. And so what you. What you need to do. Or I would say the. The people who are having the most success on it don't just set up a profile and step back and be like, all right, well, let's see what happens. They're actively saying, okay, who is a good fit for my audience? And they're going through their masterminding groups, who they met at conferences and everything else, and saying, hey, I'm on the Creator Network. Do you want to recommend each other? I'm adding about 50 subscribers a day. You know, does that seem like a decent match if we recommend each other and they're forming those deliberate partnerships?

Sure.

In the same way that if you're doing YouTube collabs. Right. You can't just start a YouTube channel and sit back and be like, all right, well, people will.

People are going to clap, like, recommend my content.

People want to clap, like, I can't hang my sign in the window. It's like you have to actually go out and say, like, hey, I'd love to. Love to partner up.

Yeah.

And then the other cool thing is you're not. The. The UI limits you to showing, like, three to five recommendations in the subscription flow because. And I personally like three or four. Sure, we let you do five, but that feels like too much. That. That's too much. And so what you can do is you can control who goes in different slots. So let's say that you and I both have wildly popular food blogs, and we're recommending each other because we Feel like we're complimentary to each other. We might pin each other in that top slot and then leave the other two slots as random rotations.

Oh, sure.

And so then what I can do is like, I could partner with seven other people.

Yep.

Who rotate through those slots.

Got it. And.

And show up kind of, I guess, round robin.

Yep. And that way you can have one be permanent.

Yeah.

And then what you can do is you can have other ones be. You could pick 10. Like, hey, I have 10 people that I'm close with and they're gonna have two slots. So, like, every fifth visitor will see the same. Yeah, okay.

Exactly. And so you can control that. And we're gonna build more advanced functionality there because we also want it. Like, I've seen a few creators do this where they have the big partnerships they've lined up people on their level, and it's like, look, we're mutually promoting each other. You know, if you take like James Clear and Mark Manson. Right. Two wildly popular authors. Makes sense. They're recommending each other all the time. But we've seen creators then kind of use this last slot, not to get anything back, but sort of their pay it forward.

Sure.

And they're like, I'm going to rotate through like five or six up and coming creators that I think are doing really interesting things.

Yep.

And, you know, use that last law for it.

What I love about that, and we talk about this often, is for. If you're just starting out, one of the things that can be most discouraging is like, you know, you're doing good work, but you don't have the traction yet.

Yeah.

But what we often talk about is what matters isn't necessarily how many in those early stages, but it's who. And there you never know who is going to come across your content. And if it's good and if it's like, at a certain caliber, eventually you will get recognized. And I feel like that's a great example where you can be really early stages in writing, in video, like, whatever it is. But if it's excellent, like, people will find you and they'll notice that. And this would be a great example of that where you might have somebody who has a huge following. Look and see, like you're doing good work and recommend that. Not because you also have a huge following, but because they want to be associated with good quality work. And I love that idea of paying it forward.

Yeah. It's a genuine recommendation. Right.

That's the thing of, like, if you.

Think of someone who's a tastemaker. Right. They're the ones who are saying like this is worth paying attention to. And now I'm paying attention to you because you told me this is worth paying attention to and you were right and you told me that's worth paying attention to and you were right again. And so now it's like, honestly, whatever you point me at in the future I'm gonna. Yeah, you know, I'm gonna sign up for a checkout because you're consistently, you consistently have great taste.

Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on. Let's say you are in that situation where you've elected to have five recommendations. So you get somebody who signs up and they're like, yeah, I'll do these five creators as well. And then suddenly they're a part of six automations for like email onboarding. How do you balance that? Like in some ways you're sharing your attention which helps you mutually grow your following. But the potential downside of that is more distributed attention during the process of getting onboarded.

Well, that's a good, a good way to go back to what we're talking about is getting like automation and segmentation. The right message to the right person at the right time.

Yeah.

The nice thing is because of the rest of the platform we've built, you can choose to what level you want to participate. You could put the creator network on all of your forms. You could do it on just certain forms, maybe a more general opt in form and the ones that like a perfect lead in to the course that you're selling or the meal plan or something else. Maybe you leave it off of that because you know that has a really dialed in email sequence for it. The other thing you can do is you get to know did this subscriber come in from a recommendation or did they come in, you know, through organic. Through my own.

Oh, interesting. Like you can tell where they're coming in from. Yeah.

And you can automate differently based on that.

Sure.

So if you came in straight through my lead magnet where I don't have creator network turned on, I might have a tighter cadence of the emails that I'm sending you. I might be every other day or that kind of thing. But if you came in through a recommendation from someone else, I'm like, okay, you're probably getting probably got recommended three or four other creators at the same time.

Yep.

So I might slow down. Well, I'd do two things. First I'd introduce myself.

Right.

There's a decent chance that you joined my email list. You don't actually know who I am.

Yeah, right, you do.

Or actually you didn't come to my website. So I could say, this is what I'm all about. Right. And I could change that flow accordingly. And so we haven't released this yet, but what we're about to release is even the ability to customize it based on who the recommendation came from.

Sure.

So if you take James Clear and Tim Ferriss, right. As an example, someone might know James's work. They might not, but they, you know, they sign up for Tim's list because they want to learn more. He recommends James. Now they're on James. Listen.

Right.

What James can do is send a custom automation email. Says like, hey, here's how you join my list. You came over through Tim. Tim and I are good friends. Here's a podcast episode where Tim interviewed me on his podcast. If you're looking for an introduction like that to my work, that's a great place to start. And so you have like this smooth handoff and you can customize all of that. It could be a single email.

Sure.

For each of your main referral sources that you customize. Right. You and I are recommending each other. I'm gonna be like, okay, that time that we were at Tastemakers together, like, here's a photo. You know, like, we're gonna try to bridge that gap and add as much credibility as possible. And I'm gonna write that email once and it's gonna work for me for years to come.

Yeah. Which is great.

But yeah, the point is you have to be aware of the context of a subscriber and tweak it accordingly. And I would back off my automations in this environment knowing that they're probably gonna get a few others.

That makes sense. And so in the situation where you are recommending other people to be strategic about that and say, not only am I going to place that in certain areas, probably more general areas as opposed to specific like product or sales related areas. So you're focusing on kind of more general. Catch all. But also you could potentially decide to change the frequency of it, knowing that there might be more additional emails that people are getting during that time.

Yeah. And I would chat if I was doing a big promotion with or a big partnership with a couple other creators, say, hey, let's all recommend each other. This will be good for everybody. Let's also promote each other on social. Right. Because those early, you know, that early reply to a Tweet or a LinkedIn post or an Instagram, like that matters in the algorithm. Yeah, people will disown and be like, oh, that's just an engagement pod. And it's like, look, if you're making great content, it is your duty to get that in front of as many people as possible. And if the algorithm says like, replies in the first 10 minutes means more people will see it, then like feed the algorithm. And so I would just be deliberate and say, hey, let's promote each other's content on social. Let's promote each other in creator Network. And then let's just think through, okay, if I sign up for all of your lists simultaneously, what am I getting? Like, hey, you know, I don't know, Sarah, like, why did you back off that like twice a day email sequence that you have going on? Because that, that's not going to jive well with everybody. Let's. Yeah, you know, you can customize it from there.

That's really cool. So it's been fun for us to get up and running on it and would love to, you know, we're excited to, to dive deep into it and, and have already seen, you know, I'm getting the emails, people saying like, hey, just got one today. Like, this blog is recommending you. So it's cool to see that loop working. The other thing kind of related to this, but in a little bit of a different category. So creator network, you log into ConvertKit, you can go there. Do you have to have a certain plan level? Like my guess is that, or is it just open to anybody? Okay, yep, we might change that in the future.

Right now is just a good way to help filter for quality. There's a lot of sketchiness that happens on the Internet. Yeah.

Especially when there's no money associated with it. Yeah.

So we started with paid. We'll probably open it up to the free plans as well. But for now, just pay.

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But recently also ConvertKit acquired another email company called Sparkloop. Can you talk about what Sparkloop is and how it's similar and also how it's different?

Yeah. So Sparkloop did a couple really interesting things. First, if you've ever seen, like, an email referral program where if it's, hey, you know, refer three friends and unlock this meal plan, refer five friends and get this tote bag or this T shirt for free, refer 25 friends and you get to, like, have dinner with us at, you know, who knows what. Right. Hopefully somewhere a little bit better. Quick side note that I think people will appreciate. Years ago, I was going to the Everything Food Conference in Salt Lake City.

Sure.

And at the same time, this must have been six years ago, I was hiring an executive assistant. And we often for a remote job, especially back then, you get tons of applicants and. And so you want to filter. I like to ask a simple question to just filter from 500 applicants down to, like a hundred. And I want something that'll take you 10 minutes to answer. So it's not like this big investment. But even just like, will they reply is a good filter. And so one thing that I did is I was like, okay, I'm going to the Everything Food Conference in Salt Lake City on these dates. I want to host a dinner for some of the speakers. Just suggest three places, you know, that we should have dinner. And there was a. It's a basic filter. Right. Like you. I gave you the name of the conference so you can Google it and find the location. And so I thought it was a really good test, but there were so many that people were like, you know, there's Olive Garden, Cheesecake Factory. And I was like, this is a food blogging conference.

McDonald's, Subway, and Burger King.

I was like, if I took a bunch of food bloggers to Cheesecake Factory.

Like, I would not close any business. But there's so many options. That's the.

There's so many options. Anyway, on a more relevant tangent, okay, so with Sparkloop, they. They first had that referral program tool and we partnered with them on it. It's in the creator Pro plan on ConvertKit, you get it for free. And then what they did next I thought was super, super interesting is they, they looked at the problem of like advertising to grow your email list. Right. All businesses, you know, every e commerce brand, they're advertising to get sales. All the big newsletters are advertising, you know, running ads on Facebook and Twitter and Google and everywhere else to get in front of more people, grow their email list. And so what Sparkloop observed is that there's a problem. There's a lot of risk in that. Like if I'm thinking about I'm going to run an ad on Facebook to try to get an email subscriber, I'm basically first, I have the visuals, I'm paying for the most part on a cost per impression basis.

And that is for people who aren't familiar in the ad world.

Yeah. So basically it's CPMS is the abbreviation and it's cost per thousand. And so basically what that's saying is I'm paying for every thousand views, Maybe I'm paying $5 or $20 or something for every thousand views that this ad gets. And then down from that there's cost per click. And that's basically saying, hey, I'm paying for everyone who clicks the ad rather than who views it. And so you can choose different things in there. But basically if I'm advertising on Facebook or Instagram, I'm paying for impressions or clicks. The conversion rate, you know, through to a landing page is up to me.

Yep.

And then I need a conversion rate from the landing page to signing up for the email. And then I need like, is that a random email address or is that a real human. Are they engaged?

Yeah.

And so as we go from, you know, a view all the way through to an engaged subscriber, there's a lot of variables in there and there's a lot of risk. So I could reasonably spend $5,000 on views and not get many engaged subscribers.

And these are newsletters like people who are running the. The newsletter is their business like or it very much so in support of their business. Which I think for people in our space who think like publishing first and then newsletter as a good catch all, it's a little bit of a mind shift to think actually there's a lot of businesses and really successful ones. Would they exist to like get people on the list and then they market either their own ads on that list or product. Do you have an example of like a company that would be doing this?

Oh, I mean there's so many in the space. I don't know in the food space quite as well. But anyone who has. Who sells their own products, and they're going to have a higher revenue per subscriber. So whether that's cookbooks, courses, meal plans, all of that, it's gonna good.

And these are. These are people who have, like, the other thing they probably have pretty dialed in is like, I know that for every one person, for every person who signs up, that's worth $3 to me or $2. Like, they have those metrics dialed in because they have a product and they can see, okay, if 100 people sign up today, then three months down the line, I track those hundred people and I see that they've bought $100 worth of products. You can kind of correlate that one to one and say, like, okay, an email subscriber is worth a dollar to me, so if I can spend 50 cents to make a dollar, you'll do that all day long. But what you're saying is kind of the traditional avenues of advertising aren't always the best way to do that.

Yeah, there's a lot of risk in there. And then the other problem is, like, who are you paying for that? So if you have that $5,000 budget, and let's say it works out all the way down, you're paying A$52 per subscriber, and that does work out, then what you're running into is like, wait a second, like, all of this money is going to Twitter, Facebook, right? Like, I think Mark Zuckerberg's good on the amount of money that he has. I don't need, like, as a creator, it's not part of my job. I'm like, you know what? Like, to grow my business, I would like to pay Zuckerberg more money. And so I look out here, what Spark did is they looked at the industry and they said, well, hold on. You've got creators who want to earn more money and creators who are very good at capturing attention. There's no one better in the world at capturing attention than creators. And so they made this marketplace and they said, basically, we will allow one group of creators or brands or publishers, sponsors to say, hey, I'll pay $2 or $1.50 or whatever for every engaged subscriber that someone sends me. And you only have to pay for the engaged subscribers. And then on the other side, creators can go through and browse this marketplace and say, oh, like, oh, pinch of yum. I love that site. I'd recommend them for free. I'll happily get paid, you know, $2 for every engaged subscriber that I send over to them. And so you end up with this marketplace where it's connecting creators with each other, it's cutting out, you know, Facebook or whoever else. And the risk is way lower because you're only paying for who's engaged.

And so now there's not as much potential for something to shift with the advertising. That then decreases the traffic, which then decreases the amount of subscribers you get. It's like a subscriber is a subscriber. And so if you know you can pay $2 per subscriber, you can set that as, like, your payment and then you can just run it without any shifts in the earnings. Yeah, or spend. Yeah, yeah.

And so, and you get to set the criteria, as the advisor saying, hey, engaged me means they've opened at least three emails in the first 14 days they were on the list. Right. And if they haven't met that criteria, then I don't have to pay for them.

Yep.

And you define that up front.

Got it. And that's tracked then within ConvertKit or is there some tracking pixel that Sparkloop puts in that tracks it?

So Sparkloop, the cool thing about it is this is an open network, and so Sparkloop integrates with, like, 18 different email providers. And so you get to see the subscriber be referred in ConvertKit and then say, like, it's paid by a big publisher who uses, like, Sail through or something like that, or Marketo or one of these, like, enterprise tools. Then they can be tracked all the way through to how they behave, and sparkup will go, cool, that subscriber should be paid for. This one should not.

That's great. And so one of the things that we often try and talk about and really shine a light on is, like, there are different ways that you can create an income. You can do product, you can do advertising, you can do sponsor content. Like, you can do actual product. One of the things that I think is often left out of the equation is, like, things like this, where there's creative ways that you can do. It's kind of like advertising, but you're doing it in different places and in different ways. Do you have any metrics? It's probably really hard to know specifically, but, like, any example of, like, hey, if I'm getting a thousand subscribers a month and I sign up for and use Sparkloop, here's maybe how much I could be earning, or is it too difficult because of the number of variables that exist no.

So the cool thing is a lot of monetization methods require a big audience, and this one doesn't. It's. It's pretty proportional. So thinking about, let's see, a thousand subscribers a month, let's say that you have three slots in your recommendation, and you. And two of them are free recommendations, and one of them is paid. What about $2 per subscriber is the recommendation? So you have a few numbers here. So if we were to go a thousand subscribers, let's say 60% of them end up taking you up on your recommendation. That's about what we've seen. So 600amonth, you're referring out somewhere. And then what you're going to have is maybe let's discount a little bit more. Let's go 50%, take you up on this paid recommendation, because some will select, you know, maybe just one out of the three or something else. But then from there, if you're making. So you have 500 subscribers a month, you're referring out to this paid recommendation. You're making $2 per subscriber. And then let's say that, you know, about half of those are going to stay engaged enough that you'll get paid for them.

Sure.

That's going to depend on the rules. So in this case, you know, a thousand times 50%. So we're at $502 per subscriber, back up to 1,000, and we say 50%. So I think it'd be fair to say if you had a thousand subscribers a month and you're making one paid recommendation, you'd be making five to maybe $600 a month, which is having a single slot there. Now, the other factors, you could, you could do three paid recommendations. You go all in on that. You say, hey, monetization is most important to me. So I'm going to do that.

Yep.

Well, if we're at that point, then we're going to be more like a thousand to fifteen hundred a month off of that. So there's all kinds of things that you could do. It's a pretty quick way to monetize your organic traffic.

Yep.

The other thing is you don't have to stay in your industry.

Sure.

So, for example, as a food blog, you don't have to only recommend food blogs. Right. Someone who enjoys food blogs probably enjoys, like, news. Right. And so Morning Brew or something like that, or the Skim or the Hustle, some of these other, like, major newsletters that are all active advertisers on Sparkloop, you know, they're all paying two, three dollars, four dollars per subscriber. And so you could recommend, you know, a food blog that you're getting paid for and you could recommend, you know, one of these other publications. So there's a ton of different options.

So what does that look like, the signup process for that? So ConvertKit, obviously you're signing up for an account and then Once you're in ConvertKit, you can join the creator network and that's where you're organically. It's almost like that's your. The what you're trading on there is like social equity. Sparkloop, what you're trading on is like financial equity, like cold hard trading with cash. And so it's kind of a different bucket. And the signup process probably looks different, even though what's happening to the reader or the subscriber is going to look the same. It's like an option to sign up. But what does it look like for a creator to go through the process of signing up for and integrating with sparkloop?

Yeah. So basically what you can do is you create an account with Sparkloop and then you connect it to ConvertKit and then you can configure who you're recommending inside of ConvertKit. The tools are a little bit separate now since we acquired Sparkloop and we're. Well, we're actually going to keep them independent long term, but you'll be able to set it all up inside of ConvertKit because it's really important to us that the network stays open. And as much as I want everyone to use ConvertKit, like, I'm not going to force it, you know, you're using ActiveCampaign or Mailchimp or something else.

Right.

You can participate in this just the same way. Yeah. And so you set it up and configure it in Sparkloop. You can do the same thing where you could choose four or five paid recommendations and then rotate through a single slot where you can fill all your slots with paid recommendations. Because the other thing that we're doing is as a sponsor, you could say, hey, a subscriber's worth a different amount to me based on different things. Maybe a subscriber in the US is worth $2 to me, but a subscriber in Asia is worth $1. And so what Sparkloop will do is when a visitor comes in and it goes to load that form, it'll say, oh, this visitor is in the US So let's show this program that pays the most in the U.S. so let's maximize your earnings as a publisher for this particular visitor. But then, you know, if this program doesn't pay for anyone outside of the US for example, then oh, it's slot in a different program. So we don't waste that, that visit and that recommendation opportunity. So there's a lot of interesting like algorithm things happening behind the scenes to make sure that you as the publisher earn the most and you as the sponsor get the highest quality recommendation.

That's really cool. ConvertKit creator network, SparkLoop. And then Nathan, you have your own stuff, like you're creating courses as a creator and publishing content on your own site like you're in the weeds doing it, which is awesome. So just as we wrap up, can you talk about that a little bit? And then we'll do a little shout out to ConvertKit if people want to sign up.

Yeah, it sounds good. So I'm obsessive about this stuff. Like this is my world. I'm not someone who came in. Cause I'm like, I actually see this a lot in the creator economy, as I guess they call it now, where people are like, oh, this is a great opportunity. We should invest and start in this. Or you know, you see this money flowing in.

Business opportunity. Yeah, yeah.

And it's just like, no, this is, this is what I live and breathe. Right. These are my people. This is what I hang out with. I use ConvertKit every single day as a customer for my own blog. And then I, I love thinking about like business models and flywheels. And so something I'm working on now is a course about flywheels. I think it's a concept that's not well understood.

Can you talk about what that means? I mean, if people know that word. But like, what does that function?

Yeah. So basically the analogy I came to is years ago I was in a country called Lesotho, which is a landlocked country inside of South Africa. This is in 2008. And we were working on installing a well there. And with that we like electricity was not common or it was common but unreliable. And so we didn't want to have an electric pump for the only source of water for this orphanage we were putting in the well. So if you think about that, like normally you need a pump that's not electric. You think about a hand pump, right? And it's like what you might find in a campground or something. And that's great for a campground, but it's not gonna work in, you know, if it's the source of the only source of water. For a hundred kids. And so what we installed instead is a flywheel. So if you imagine the. The physics of a hand pump, it's this up and down, this long handle. You. There's a direct correlation between the effort that you put in, the results that you get out. You stop pumping, you stop getting water. The flywheel is interesting. It's this big metal wheel that sits on top of the pump. And as you turn it, it's really hard to turn at first, but instead of this linear up, down motion, it's this continuous circular motion. And once it builds momentum, it gets easier and easier over time. And so there starts to be a disconnect between the effort that you put in and the results you get. It's a form of leverage. And so what ends up happening is you get to the point where this flywheel, like when we actually installed it on as well. At first, it took me and my friend Luke, like, both pushing as hard as we could to get it turning. And then after a little while, like, we could both do it kind of easily. And then he stepped away, and I could do it, and then I could do it with one hand. And then it just had all this momentum. Yeah. And I'm just. I can, like, with one finger, I.

Can keep it going.

And so it's that concept applied to business where what if you could take. What if you could put systems in place in your business that follow three rules? Right. It's a continuous process that feeds itself. It's circular, it gets easier with time, and it produces more with time with the same amount of effort. So I guess tying this together with Sparkloop and Creator Network and all of that, there's a creator named Sahil Bloom who. I'm a big fan of his stuff, and he has this flywheel implemented that I love. And he's on a mission to get to a million subscribers on his email list. That is his singular goal. You know, put out great content, grow to a million subscribers. Cause he's got a book coming out, and he knows that's the best way to spread his ideas to as many people as possible. So what he does is he has subscribers coming in from his social. He's. He focuses on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Then when someone comes in, they hit the creator network form, and he's partnered with James Clear and other creators at his level, and they're recommending each other. So every subscriber turns into more at that Creator Network recommendation. Then he sends out his email twice a week and through the ConvertKit sponsor network. We sell advertisements in his newsletter or sponsorships. And so that's how he makes money. There's direct correlation to how many subscribers he has and how much money he makes for each sponsorship. Then what he does is he takes all the money he makes from the sponsorships and he dumps it all back into the Sparkloop and says, hey, I.

Would grow his list. Yeah, yeah, yeah, to grow my list.

And then the bit. So what happens is the bigger his list is, the more money he makes, which means his list goes faster, which means his list is bigger, which is the more money he makes, and so on. So he started out the year like 150,000 subscribers, and now we're recording this in September. He's like a little over 500,000 subscribers. He's not going to pull off a million by in the calendar year, but.

He'Ll get there eventually.

But we'll give him like three more months.

Yeah, totally.

And so this Flywheel is just like an early rotation of the Flywheel might have put off $10,000 and 5,000 subscribers, and now these later rotations are putting off like $50,000 and tens of thousands of subscribers. So you just watch it snowball and build momentum.

Cool.

And it's, it's totally awesome.

Yeah.

And so just one example, there's so many.

Point being with the Flywheel, that's a course that you're creating to talk to business owners, creators about what it looks like to build those structures and systems in your business.

Yeah. Because I. This is the stuff that I obsess over. And so, yeah, so I'm doing that. I've got the Flywheel course coming out just nathanberry.com if you want to check that out. And then the other thing that I'm kind of obsessing over right now is this concept that I'm calling the Billion Dollar Creator. And the super quick version is as creators, we're the best at capturing attention. And just a question of what do you want to direct that attention to? It could be advertising, it could be an affiliate deal, it could be your own digital product. It could be a substantial brand like Mark Sisson with Mark's Daily Apple. He captured a whole bunch of attention. He was great at monetizing it. He was probably making, I'm guessing a million dollars a year off of his blog back in 2014, 2015, a time without. I mean, it's still an insane amount of money, but like at the time that was like unheard of amounts of money. He ended up directing that attention towards A business that he started called Primal Kitchen.

Sure.

And saying like, hey, you know, in the paleo diet world, let's get like, it'd be great to have like salad dressings and mayonnaise and all of that that was, was Paleo friendly. So let's start that he uses his audience to kickstart it. Anyway, the short version is he ends up selling it to Kraft two years later for $200 million. And so the billion dollar creator idea is like, if you have this attention, what's the highest ROI place you could direct that attention and thinking about how can you build equity in something? So I wrote an essay on this called the Billion Dollar Creator. And then I just started a new podcast with another creator called Rachel Rogers and we're kicking it off with a podcast tour. I'm going to New York in two days for our first live recording. We've got a sold out venue there and it's super fun. So yeah, I'm like in the creator world, in the SaaS world, totally both.

Of those things and those overlap in a very real way for you. So yes, we'll be sure to link up to all those in the show notes, obviously convertkit.com if people want to sign up there. Nathan, it's so great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Hey.

Hey.

Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We really appreciate you tuning in to this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I'm here with a special announcement. Are you ready for this? Because I'm hoping you're sitting down. It's a big one. So one of the things that we pride ourselves here at FoodBuggerPro on is the fact that we always are contributing content to the membership. So our members memberships are always growing in value because we're adding new courses, we're doing new events, we're adding new deals. It's just a constantly changing and evolving membership in a good way because things change very often and new strategies, you know, need to be talked about, et cetera. So one of the new pieces of content that we're really excited about for 2023, they're called coaching calls. So we've been asked for coaching calls or one on one calls with Bjork or with the team just so many times over the past few years. And we're finally doing it for our membership. So you can work through your specific blogging and business questions with the one, the only Bjork in these calls. So you and Bjork will discuss your blog and your business and record each conversation and add it to the membership so the greater Food Blogger Pro community can learn from the advice shared there. So any active Food Blogger Pro member has the opportunity to take part in one of these coaching calls. We actually have an application that members can submit and you can find that over on foodbloggerpro.com live. Um, so if you're an active member, be sure to go there and you can submit an application. But essentially we'll go through the applications and reach out to you if we think there would be a good time for you to come on and have a coaching call with Bjork. So we are just so excited about this. And if you're not a member and really excited about the opportunity, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com join to learn more about the membership and get signed up right there. Otherwise, we're really excited. We're just so excited about this new content idea and we hope you are too. So that does it for us this week. We will see you next time. And until then, make it a great week.

Sa.