How Digital Marketer (Ryan Deiss) Created Effective Content Marketing After Spending $15M On Testing

You don't need to follow up with somebody forever if they're not interested. That's called stalking, right?

Do you want to impact the world and still turn a profit? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to Growth Everywhere. This is the show where you'll find real conversations with real entrepreneurs. They'll share everything from their biggest struggle to the exact strategies they use on a daily basis. So if you're ready for a value-packed interview, listen on. Here's your host, Eric Siu.

Hey everyone, just a quick heads up that we're giving away an ebook called 29 Growth Hacking Quick Wins. We co-authored this book with Matan Griffel of One Month, and it'll give you a solid base on where you can create growth ideas from. So all you need to do is text QUICKTIPS to 33444. That's the word quick, Q-U-I-C-K, and tips. T-I-P, S as in sugar, 2-3-3-4-4-4, and you get instant access. All right everyone, today we have Ryan Deiss, who's the founder and CEO of Digital Marketer. Over the last 36 months, Ryan and his team have invested over $15 million on marketing tests, sent over a billion emails, and run approximately 3,000 split and multivariate tests. He's a heavy hitter in the digital marketing space, and you have to check out their blog, digitalmarketer.com. and look at what they do. It's amazing stuff. Ryan, how are you doing today?

Great, man. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. Thanks for being on the show. So why don't you talk a little bit about who you are and kind of what you do?

Sure. So I guess I'm best known, like you said, for being the co-founder and CEO of Digital Marketer, and that's where we take all the cool stuff that we do across all of our different properties in a number of different markets, and we kind of report on what's working. And so mostly what I do is I get to just market different products and launch different products and just have a lot of fun. So I get to, you know, a lot of people talk about entrepreneurial ADD, and that's kind of built into our business model, so it's nice. I get to play a lot.

I love that. I love that. And so Digital Marketer isn't just one thing. I mean, you guys have a bunch of different companies, so can you talk a little bit about those?

Yeah, I mean, we own MakeupTutorials.com. We own SurvivalLife.com. We actually recently acquired Sewing.com. We haven't launched that yet, so there's probably nothing there if you go there, but we're going to launch a big sewing property there. We have different associations in the craft space and the beauty space. So we pretty much sell everything from flashlights to worm farms to eyeliner and makeup brushes and all that stuff.

Yeah.

It seems kind of crazy, but our model actually is the same really no matter what we're selling.

Awesome, okay. And can you talk a little bit about that model?

Yeah, sure. So in everything that we do, I firmly believe that the hardest thing in the world to do in business is to gather a crowd, right? It's to get an audience, and there's lots of people out there who have great products, and they build a great product, and then nobody's there to buy it. And so we really want to make sure that before we go through the effort of creating a great product, or launching an e-commerce site, or, you know, building anything, whether it's physical or digital, we want to make sure, number one, can we gather a crowd? You know, can we build an audience? So everything starts for us with digital media. And all of our businesses are built around markets. I firmly believe that there's no such thing as mass media anymore. People like to aggregate around the things that they're interested in, and if they're interested in sports, they'll go to a sports site, and if they're interested in crafting, then they'll go to a crafting site. We're very complex as human beings, and we can hold all these things, but we still want to compartmentalize.

Right.

So, you know, as opposed to building it around a regional area or something like that, or having like a general news site, we're big in the kind of interest-based market, or we might even do things around, you know, a particular job or, you know, that kind of career market. But once we know we can gather a crowd that they all, you know, think and feel in much the same way, at least as it relates to to particular things, then we can start selling them stuff. As a general rule, we don't monetize through advertising. There's all these— right now, the digital media crowd is freaking out because of all the ad blockers and stuff. For us, we're like, okay, doesn't really matter, because we like to monetize through the sale of our own products.

Got it. Okay. Now, the properties that you guys run right now, just for context for the audience, approximately how big are they? In terms of monthly visitors?

I mean, we have properties that receive many millions of visitors. We have properties that receive tens of thousands. It kind of depends on the size, the relative size of that particular market. I think that's kind of one of the things is we went to a digital publishing conference recently. I'm not going to name the one that it was, but there were so many people there. that get way more traffic than we do. I mean, if you have a property that's getting, you know, 6, 7 million unique visitors, like, you know, DIYReady.com, which is one of our, you know, it's one of our properties in the do-it-yourself kind of home improvement crafting space, right? That property gets, you know, a few million visitors a month. Now, in some cases, that sounds like a lot, but for a media property, that's nothing, you know, really to hit critical mass, if you're doing advertising, you need tens of millions of uniques, and even that's kind of on the low end, right? But for us, because all of our properties are so niched, because they're so specific, we can be more specific with our offerings and we can monetize so much more efficiently. So when we're talking to people about how we're able to monetize our visitors and our email subscribers, nobody really believes us. But it's because we know exactly what our people want, and we give them exactly what they want. We don't have to guess. We're not monetizing through programmatic advertising, which is kind of, who knows what it's going to be, going to the highest bidder. We're just able to make very specific offerings.

Got it. Okay. Now, people are probably wondering, you've built up the audiences for all these cool sites, and you're known for building traffic. You have a freaking conference that is called Traffic and Conversion Conference, which we'll talk about in a little bit. If a company is starting from, let's say they're starting from scratch, maybe they got a $500,000 seed round, how do they go about building that audience? What would you recommend? And this is a loaded question. We can just talk about the high-level stuff.

Sure. A lot of it depends on, do you have more money or do you have more time? Like, what's the thing that you have going for you? So I would say to a company that just got a half a million dollar seed round, And you have a product, you have something to sell, I'm a big believer in paid advertising. And we use paid advertising to actually build our organic traffic, right? Do you want me to kind of like— I know we don't want to dive too much into the weeds, but do you kind of want me to explain our model?

Absolutely.

A little bit of how we do that? Yeah, so what a lot of people want to do is they want to buy advertising and they want to drive that advertising straight to a landing page, and that's effective, right? That makes a lot of sense, you know, especially if you're selling software, you know, you got people driving it straight to a demo page or something, you know, go to our— get a free trial for this. Well, in most cases, the conversion rates on that are going to be fairly low, and most people who I know who are doing that, they're going way backwards on acquisition. It's costing them a fortune to acquire, you know, to acquire these customers. Now, if you're funded, And you know that your LTV is 3 times your customer acquisition cost, then that's okay, as long as you got enough cash in the bank and you're going to realize that LTV before you run out of money, then I guess that's fine. I've never had the benefit of that, right? We've never gone out and sought funding early on. We had to make it pay, but at the same time, if you just drive traffic to to an offer and they leave and they're gone and that's it, you know, you're not really— that's it, you got that one shot and they're gone. Now an improvement to that is to drive traffic to content, you know, and particularly gated content, right, so that's where you have these landing pages, hey opt in to get this, you know, special report or this template pack, right, and that's been used, you know, from the beginning and that's more effective because at least then if they opt in you get multiple bites at the apple. But what we're doing now that's most effective of all, you have to wait a little bit to see the ROIs, but we're actually driving paid traffic to high-quality content. So we're driving paid traffic to a blog post, so not gated content, right, and not a blog post that is basically, you know, an offer in disguise, like driving, buying advertising to actual content. Real live content, and yeah, we'll have a sidebar, you know, ad, you know, and we'll have stuff within the, you know, within the content that we're hopefully somebody if they're ready, they'll, you know, they'll opt in or they'll maybe they'll take a demo or something like that, but what I'm most interested in is the pixel. I'm most interested in setting a retargeting pixel so I can follow up with them through retargeting ads. So what we're doing now is we're buying advertising, and the list that I'm interested in building initially at least is not a, you know, list of demos, you know, not a list of subscribers even, but I'm interested in building our pixeled audience list. So how many people can we pixel with Facebook retargeting and Google retargeting so that now we've given value in advance, right? They came to our site, they read it, I didn't make them jump through a hoop, it wasn't quid pro quo, it wasn't, hey, give me your email address and then I'll give you some content. It's, hey, I'm so glad you're here, here's some great content. You know, maybe they click around, but now I know they came to my site and I can follow up. I get multiple bites at the apple through retargeting, and then it's in those retargeting ads where we ask people to, you know, give us their name and email address or take a demo, but it's only after we delivered value in advance. And so for us, what we're finding is that after, you know, 30 days and definitely 60 days, our Cost per lead and cost per conversion is much lower than we were seeing when we were driving straight to a landing page, and we got happier people. You know, they're buying better because we gave value in advance. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally makes sense. So what it sounds like is you're building goodwill and value with these people, this cold audience first, and then you're warming them up later.

Yeah, I think what you're doing is what normal human beings would do in a normal relationship. Typically, you don't walk up to somebody that you meet. Are you single, Eric?

I am. Okay.

You wouldn't walk up to a girl in a bar and be like, hey, I'd love to buy you a drink if afterwards we can go make out. Right? You wouldn't do that. Nobody would do that, but that's so often what we do. Hey, if you give me your contact information, then I'll let you preview you know, our app. If you give me your contact information, I'll give you this, right? Everything on the web is quid pro quo, and it's because we want— it comes from a good place, right? It's because we want tracking. It's because we want to know that it works. It's because we want our marketing and our advertising to be measurable. And look, I'm a direct response guy. I mean, I cut my teeth in direct response. You know, I am not afraid or ashamed of any type of direct response Marketing. I'm simply suggesting— what I'm simply suggesting is to look at a new metric. Instead of looking at CPL, or instead of looking at cost per lead, or cost per acquisition, or your CACs, instead of looking at that initially, look at CPP. Look at cost per pixel. Look at how much is it costing you to set a pixel and do your follow-up later on.

Right.

Instead of saying, hey, I'll buy you a drink if you'll make out with me, it's just, hey, can I buy you a drink? Yeah, and then you talk to him like a normal human being and don't seem like a total creepy weirdo. Maybe then you get a kiss.

Totally.

We know this intuitively in human relationships. At least I hope everybody listening does. But for some reason we get online and we just go all pervy.

I totally get it. You're supposed to give value first, then maybe you'll get something back. You're not supposed to naturally expect something back, which is what we're seeing right now. So, we talked about cost per pixel. So, just from what you've seen so far, from B2B sides, what are you usually getting for a cost per pixel, and B2C, what are you usually seeing?

You know, it totally depends. I mean, because obviously what we're getting on the digital marketer side is going to be a little more expensive than what we're seeing in certain little niche markets, but it's going to be anywhere from $0.25 to $0.60.

Okay.

Right? I mean, and here's a— calculating CPP is actually pretty simple. It's also the same as your cost per click that you're paying in your advertising.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So I mean, that's, you know, that's kind of what's— it's the same, because as soon as they click and they come to your page, that's when you're setting that retargeting pixel. But now, you know, Facebook and Google, they allow you to place people into segmented retargeting lists. So for example, if somebody comes to our prepper site, like so these are for people who want to go out in the woods and survive, they're like survivalist preparedness-minded individuals. If they come and they're reading a bunch of content about water purification, right, we know that. We can tag our content and say, okay, this is content about water purification, whereas if they're reading it about—

Cooking.

How to create a shelter, or, you know, maybe, you know, how to get out of Dodge, or build a bug-out bag, or something like that, like we can tag that differently, so we can have our follow-up ads be targeted to the content that they came to in the first place. So not only are we giving value first, but we're following up with far more relevant advertising, so it's more effective overall.

Got it, okay, yeah, let's piggyback on that. So, you know, we've gotten the pixel already, so You know, what happens after? Do you send them more content? Do you push them to an offer? What happens?

Yeah, so usually if they hit the page, then what we're going to give them is a content upgrade, right, also known as a lead magnet, right. We're going to offer them something that's more than a blog post to get them to give us their contact information and permission to follow up with them, right. So they come, they read a blog post. You know, let's say they come to the Digital Marketer site and they read a blog post about Facebook advertising, for example. So we're going to follow up with them now about, hey, get our, you know, 7 best, you know, Facebook ad templates, right. These are the Facebook ad templates that are working the best for us. Now they'll have to opt in to get that content. So we follow up if they read a blog post, then we're following up trying to get them to opt in. Now if they opt in but they don't buy, Now we're following up to try to get them to upgrade their experience again, whether it's to buy a low-ticket offer or schedule a demo. So the ads are always trying to get them to move the next step, and at the same time, once they opt in, we also have email follow-up, you know, encouraging them to schedule an appointment, or encouraging them to take a demo, or encouraging them to, you know, buy a product, whatever it is that we're trying to do. Right.

Okay, that makes sense. It almost sounds like you get to do the email marketing through Facebook before the real email marketing even happens.

I think it's a great analogy, right? And we do look, when I look at our targeted audiences, like for example, if we go into Facebook, and I look at my targeted audiences, and all the segments that they're broken down on, at any given time, we'll have well over a million people targeted in Digital Marketer alone, right? Over a million people. Now Facebook cycles them out if they don't come back and get a new pixel set after, I think it's 60 days, Facebook is like, okay, you can't retarget this person anymore, which is appropriate. You don't need to follow up with somebody forever if they're not interested. That's called stalking, right? So again, if it's not cool offline, then don't do it online. So I can look at that though, but a million people. I'm kind of like my own little mini ad network, right, and these are people that I all know, they came to my site, I know which page they came to, I can create ads just for them, I can tailor specific messaging, and I can follow up in a way that's very organic, it's very native to the experience that they already have, it's going to the same properties that they go to anyway. And then when you get, also when the email is happening at the same time and it's the same offer. That's just like driving down the road and hearing a radio spot while simultaneously looking at a billboard for the same thing, right? It's this effect that happens where it's like, wow, I'm seeing this everywhere, and you can achieve top-of-mind awareness for really inexpensively.

Huh, interesting. So can you give us one example of a content promotion funnel that you have live right now?

Sure.

I mean, we have tons of them live. I mean, if on— we advertise, so we'll go to Facebook and Google also, and if you are looking for anything related to content marketing, or we might even target on Facebook folks that are— that they like Single Grain or they're listening to this podcast, and people that we know who are targeted, we're going to send them to an ad about come to a specific blog post. Right, and so that blog post might be something, you know, about— we have blog posts about how to create a content engine or something like that, right. And so they come to that blog post, and they read it, and now we're following up with them for a lead magnet offer for 212 blog post ideas. So we know they're interested in blog— we know that they're interested in content marketing. Right, they clicked on an ad related to content marketing, they came to a blog post related to content marketing, so now we're going to follow up with them with a relevant lead magnet offer for, hey, give us your name and email address and you can have our special report, 212 Blog Post Ideas, you know, never run out of ideas again for creating content. So we give them that, then the people who do opt in for that, we make them an offer to buy a, just a little $7 you know, kind of course, you know, we call them execution plans, that is again related to content marketing. Here's how we do content marketing. Here's how we build a content engine and get all the content for all our different properties. If they buy that, then we send them up, you know, through our funnel into becoming hopefully a Lab member, and maybe buying our content marketing certification. But we're able to make very relevant offers all along the way because they've already raised their hand and said, Yes, I'm interested in that.

Genius, genius, genius. And I think a lot of people are going to start doing this more and more. So anyone listening to this, I think the time to jump on this is right now. I guess another question that just popped into my head, Ryan, is what is the breakdown in terms of how you distribute your ads in terms of content promotion, email opt-ins, and then offers and things like that?

Well, so I mean, it really depends on how many people we have pixeled at a given time. So, you know, if somebody— at this point, we actually have so many people pixeled that I believe we only allocate about 20% of our ad budget to ice-cold traffic driving into content. Now, that wasn't the case at the beginning, right? In the beginning, we had a fairly small subscriber list, a fairly small customer list, you know, we uploaded, you know, those We created custom audiences in Facebook, right, and so we were able to do targeted advertising to them, but we hadn't built up our custom audiences yet, and so we were spending 80% of our ad budget, you know, advertising to cold traffic, sending them to blog posts, pixeling them, but as we get more people pixeled, now it makes a lot more sense, and frankly, it's a lot more economical to advertise to our pixeled audiences. That's why I say it's a little bit of a build. It takes a little bit of time to do that. It's a little bit of an investment on the front end. If you're tracking, if you're looking at like a 7-day ROI or even a 30-day ROI, it might look a little bit ugly at first. It takes a little faith that the process is going to work out, and that's why most people don't do it. They're not willing to make that investment, but at this point— We just have so many people pixeled that it's just very economical to continue running ads to the most relevant folks. Even when we email our list, right, when we send an email out to our list telling them, hey, we just have a new blog post that we published today. It's on this subject matter. Go check it out. Well, obviously the people who click on that and go and read the blog post, we're re-pixeling them based on that subject. So now we know, okay, great, they're interested in this. Let's follow up with them about this.

Got it. Okay, that makes sense. So it's 80% in the beginning and then you gradually get down to the 20% level, which is where you're at now. So let's say, you know, let's go back to that startup that got, you know, that $500K seed round. What size should they get that pixel audience to? And this is a general question, so you can just give like general numbers, but what size should that audience be before they start to kind of switch That proportion or distribution?

Well, really it comes down to budget, right? Like how much are you, in many cases, how much are you able to spend? Because early on when you're just getting started with Facebook, you know, for example, they're only going to let you spend, you know, maybe $50, $100 a day. So that's where, like given, you know, given the choice, I wouldn't want to keep it, I wouldn't necessarily want to go 80/20. I'd want to spend all that I can spend as long as it's profitable to my pixel audience, and spend all that I can spend as long as I can get it over here. I only have to adjust it as a function of limits and of budgets. Now we're spending a whole lot of thousands of dollars a day. Digital Marketer and some of our other properties, it's in excess of $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a day that we're investing in media. But in all of them, we do run up against— in some cases we run up against a budget, whether it's with Facebook or Google, because they'll only let you spend so much a day until you build up credit, and in other cases it's our own Company budget, right? We've got to watch cash flows too. And so it's really, it's looking at, okay, we've got this big pixeled audience over here, you know, yeah, we want to make sure that we keep fresh blood coming in, but let's go ahead and do some harvesting as well. And so that's when you're going to kind of shift more of it. So it has less to do with, okay, when I have this many people pixeled, then I'll do more, and more to do with how do you allocate the budget that you have available to you. But I'll tell you, for most, you can get started $10 a day running traffic to an audience, and you're driving a fair number of clicks. I mean, you're going to get, after a month, you're going to have hundreds, thousands of people pixeled, and they're going to forward, if it's good content, there's a viral coefficient that kicks in, right? They're going to forward it on to other people who are also going to get pixeled. They're going to click around to multiple. And get pixeled, you know, have multiple pixels. They're going to, you know, they're going to subscribe to your email list and forward those on to other people who are going to get pixeled. So it's amazing how fast it grows with a fairly small ad budget devoted to just the pixeling.

Got it. And I think one big key point to bring up is that you cannot drive traffic to crap content. So Digital Marketer does really good content. It's long form. Ryan, do you want to talk about how you guys do your content?

Yeah, I mean, Russ Henneberry, who's our director, editorial director, would be a far better person to speak to on the actual process. I can tell you from our perspective, we want to make sure most of our posts are going to be anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 words. They're going to have a lot of screenshots in them, and people tell us all the time, wow, this particular blog post was better than a lot of courses that I bought. And that's when we know we've got a good one. And so in the beginning when we started, kind of what I said to Russ is I said, give me 10 amazing pieces of content, right? Give me 10 amazing pieces of content. I want 3 of them, you know, somehow related to traffic, give me a couple of them related to conversion, give me another one related to, you know, maybe related to content or organic. And let's kind of create our categories, but let's just have amazingly awesome flagship content, the type of stuff that somebody would turn into a special report. Let's give them that amazing content in the form of an ungated blog post. Let's put it out there, because you're right. I mean, if your content is crap, or if you say, oh, this is free. I'm not going to give them my best stuff. I'm going to keep that behind the firewall. And you pay to drive traffic to it, the more traffic that you buy, the more money you're spending just to convince everybody that you suck. So it has to be great. I mean, that's like if you finally get— Eric, if you finally get the girl to agree to go have coffee with you, if you just sit there the whole time licking your lips and pinching your nipples and being a freaking weirdo, it doesn't matter that you bought her coffee. You're a freaking weirdo. And the longer you sit there and the longer you do that, hopefully you don't do that, but you know—

That's what I do, man. Why you got to call me out?

I think we figured your problem out.

I'm touching nipples, man.

Exactly. But no, I mean, that's the thing. It has to be amazing. If you're going to drive traffic to it, it has to be amazing. And, you know, I'm really proud of our content. And those 10 original pieces of content that we have, we still publish content on a regular basis. But there's a bunch of them like our customer value optimization post, right? We go back and update that all the time, all the time. So I think it's just as important to update some of your legacy flagship content as it is to post more and more and more.

That totally makes sense because I mean from a search engine perspective, from an SEO perspective, if you're already ranking well for that piece of content and you're adding more text to it, you're adding more content to it, it's going to rank even better and you're going to get long tail traffic too. All these little things, you talk about paid, there's the content marketing aspect, there's the SEO aspect, they all play in together.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, we didn't even talk about the SEO aspect, but one of the things that we found, and I'm not a big SEO guy, not that I don't believe in it, but that's more y'all's world, right? You're much better at that than we are, but what we found is that SEO becomes a lot easier If you do all the stuff that you know you're supposed to do, right, you title it appropriately, you know, you do all just the basic on-page stuff that just don't be an idiot kind of thing, and you drive a lot of volume to it, we found just a lot of traffic going to a post will cause it to rise, right, not necessarily links but just traffic, and we've seen this time and time again. I haven't— we haven't run actual, you know, double-blind studies on anything but we see it. The posts that we pay to drive traffic to are the ones that rank— they rank the highest for the most keywords, and I don't think that that's an accident. So I think when you do this, when you make the investment, it really does pay off long-term. You don't just have the viral coefficient of people forwarding it on because it's great, you also have the organic coefficient. Of it starting to rank, and now you're getting— now you're setting pixels for free, right? When people just find it in the search engine and they come, you're setting that pixel for free. That brings your average cost way, way down.

Right. Yeah, that's— I mean, that's the big benefit, but I think, you know, you talked about links the other second too. So I mean, aside from driving traffic, you know, getting people to share it socially through email as well, you're going to get the links at the end of the day. You're going to rank higher too. Just at the end of the day, you do the basic stuff, you produce really good shit. I emphasize really good shit. I mean, a good example of that is I think of Brian Dean from Backlinko. You don't need to produce a lot of content. A lot of people are probably cringing right now. It's like, oh, how much good content do I have to produce? His blog, literally there's 10 or 12 flagship pieces and he gets over 100K visits a month. That's all you really need. You only need 10 really good pieces. Like you mentioned, to start off, and then you can talk about increasing your volume down the road if you're just starting out, right?

Yeah, and even the— yeah, that's exactly what we did. Give me 10 amazing pieces of content, and the other posts that we've done have really— most of them are in support of those other 10 pieces of content, right? Or they're at least relevant, you know, they relate to it. So we have interlinking from those back to the flagship. And that is what has worked. That's what's worked the best for us.

Got it. Now, you coined a term a few weeks ago that I heard. The term is native commerce. So how does that relate to all of this?

Yeah, so I don't think I coined that term. I'm about 99% sure I heard it from somewhere else.

Let's just say you did it.

Yeah, because I can't remember the source. So at some point, if you forget the source, then you just get to claim it. Native commerce is this whole idea of the merger of media, the merger of content and commerce. In the past, historically, those were treated completely separately. If we think about a newspaper magazine— a newspaper magazine. If we think about a newspaper or a magazine, which is a thing, not the word that I tried to invent. If we think about a newspaper or magazine, historically, you had an editorial department and you had an advertising department. There was the classic Chinese wall up between those two. They didn't talk. Advertising definitely was not allowed to influence editorial. It's always happened, right? You see it kind of in the form of the advertorial where there's been some influence, and that's where this whole notion of native advertising What we're talking about with native commerce though, and where it's different from native advertising, is you become the place. You create the property. You create the destination. We like to think about it as we create the theme park. If you think about Disneyland, you come to Disneyland or you go to Disney World, you go and you ride a ride, and where do you exit through? The gift shop, right? You go, you ride the ride, and then you exit through the gift shop. That's the exact same way that we think about native— that's exactly the same way that we think about native content and native commerce, right? So a digital marketer, it's really simple for us to say, here's a bunch of great content. Hey, if you like this, you're going to love our premium content, right? That makes a lot of sense and everybody's familiar with that, but on Survival Life, We do the same thing. We say, here's how you should build, you know, your bug-out bag, your stow bag. Okay, if you want to build it, here's all the stuff you need. Oh, by the way, we sell it over here, right?

Uh-huh.

And so that's all we're doing. That's it. That's all we're doing. On makeup tutorials, we're saying, okay, if you want to create this amazing, beautiful smoky eye that Jennifer Lawrence had when she walked the red carpet, here's how you do it, and we'll create content showing how to do it. Oh, by the way, if you want the makeup brush that we just used in this video, You can get it here, and it's ours, right? So what most content companies are doing is they want to monetize through advertising. That's not our thing. We're native commerce. We want to use content to gather the crowd. We want the content to be the theme park, but then we want to say, okay, if you like this, here you go, buy this thing. Now the trick to do it is you have to be transparent, right? You got to tell them, and oh, by the way, it's ours. You have to be totally and completely transparent, but if you do a great job, if you create a really fun theme park experience, they would rather buy from you than go to Amazon and buy it there.

Right.

They would rather do that, especially if you have unique products that aren't available at Amazon, or you have a better deal that isn't on Amazon. That's how, if you're in the physical product space, that's how you can decommoditize a commodity. If you're in the software space, software as a service, People think about it, content marketing, in that way. I think about Clay Collins, when he first launched LeadPages, where he was saying, hey, so let me show you about this really cool landing page that you can build, that we tested it out. It looks like this, and it's got this thing over here, and the form's over here, and it's the 2-step, and blah, blah. He would teach, here's how to build one of these pages, and then he'd say, and here's A template, you know, here's a Photoshop template or, you know, whatever, an HTML template if you want to, you know, build it yourself, or if you're a LeadPages user, it's already built in, right? Brilliant. That's native commerce, and it goes beyond just, oh look, we're providing great content and you like our content and you think I'm great, so maybe one of these days you'll give me money. No, it's you provide great content and then you tell them, okay, the next logical step if you want to do this is to buy this. Totally makes sense.

And the earlier point where you said the hardest thing about a business is growing an audience, and I believe in that fundamentally. I think even if you're starting out or you've been around for a while, you don't need a ton of visitors. Like you mentioned, you might have some properties where maybe it's less than 100,000 visits a month, right? And then you have a couple million. But at the end of the day, the goal is— it's probably better for you— not probably, it is better for you to sell your own products because, well, you're the only one who can sell it. A lot more margin, right? So I think startup or really mature company, I think it's really worth your time to look into native commerce and check out what Digital Marketer has to say about all this stuff because it all applies to it. I want to switch gears really quick. So about, I think it was February, you had your Traffic and Conversion Conference. I took a few of my team members there and it was an amazing experience. So why don't you talk a little bit about Traffic and Conversion Conference?

Yeah, so Traffic Conversion Summit, just to clarify in case people are looking for it and doing the Googles. No, it's fine, I don't care. But yeah, Traffic Conversion Summit, it's our annual event. We've been doing it for the last 7 years, and it started off as just me and my business partner and our team saying, hey, let's kind of put on an event and show people what we're doing because we think it's kind of cool. Sorry. About 180 people showed up, much to our surprise. All we did was teach. All we did every session, we just said, hey, here's what we're doing that's working. The next one we showed them a different thing that was working. It was just kind of this open the kimono kind of thing. This was back when you really only had 2 types of conferences. You had the types of conferences where it's the multi-speaker pitch fest event. Where it's one speaker after another going up and they talk about their subject and then they sell something. Next guy comes up and talks about something and they sell something. Have you been to any of those?

Yeah, I have, and they're a snooze fest.

They're terrible, right? I mean, it's not good. It's like you're just at a Tupperware party kind of thing. And so there was that going on, and then the other thing that was going on was the big kind of corporate-y thing where it was one person coming up and talking about just delivering kind of the generic corporate keynote with no meaningful specifics, no data, no how-to, just people saying, Facebook is good, and Twitter, yeah. You kind of leave and you're like, I guess that was interesting, but there was no actionable stuff. It was just people, at best they were throwing out theory. What we found is that it grew. People talked about it and it continued to grow, and that was always our thing, is we're just going to open the kimono and show you exactly what we're doing, here's what's working. We're not going to bring in a bunch of speakers, it's just kind of us saying, people on the Digital Marketer team and people who work with our different portfolio companies saying, here's what's cool, here's what's working now, and here's kind of what we see working in the future. The event now is well over 3,000 people, and it's great. We haven't even put up the official sales page for it yet. and we're already more than 2/3 sold out for this year. So it's kind of nice. It's built into a little nice brand, and it's going back to creating the place, right? That's kind of becoming a place. It's becoming a place where people come every year, and for me, I think it's the best thing that we do, and I just have a lot of fun doing it. So that's cool that you came out. You coming out again this year?

I will be there. I mean, here's the thing, right? A lot of different marketers I know, and they always talk about T&C being the one event to go to. So it doesn't—

again, it doesn't matter what space you're in.

tech world, whatever world you're in, if you're into growing your business, you should probably be at this event. Well, wrapping up here, just another question or two. What's one big struggle you faced while growing Digital Marketer?

Oh gosh, good question, because there have been quite a few. So for us, it was really getting clarity on who our market is, right, and over the years It's been different because all I ever talked about was what I was doing. So when I was kind of the guy in the trenches getting started without any money, trying just to pay my bills, I talked about that. When I wasn't that guy and I was more of the small business person, then we talked about that. Trying to figure out where we belong has been tough. Who are you going to advocate for? Where are you going to plant that flag? Because I do believe that Businesses today need to be market-centric. They need to advocate for a specific market, and we lost our way a lot over the years. It was actually the thing that saved us was Traffic Conversion Summit. There were many years where that was kind of the only good thing we did because we just didn't know what the heck we were doing. So for us, planting a flag and saying, okay, we're here to serve small business owners, right? So startup folks can get a lot out of what we talk about, but you really have to know what your product is, right? We're not the guys to tell you, here's how to go create your product. Here's how to go source a product. Here's how to go build your course, right? There's people out there who talk about that, and I think that's fine, right? It's valuable, but that's not us. Everything that Digital Marketer is about is, it's really about supporting the small business owner. The startup that has some funding and they have a product, they're ready to go sell some stuff, they're ready to go market, they're ready to start gathering their audience. Once we said, all right, our mission and vision here at Digital Marketer is to double the size of 10,000 businesses, 10,000 small businesses in 5 years or less, then we got clarity. Then we were able to say, okay, this is the type of work that we should be putting out, this is the value that we bring. I think just clarifying our market and then clarifying our mission and vision, as cheesy as that sounds, because I'm not a big kumbaya guy, as cheesy as that sounds, that was the thing that held us back the longest. When we figured it out, that was the thing that propelled us faster than anything we've ever done, including having a hit product.

Right. I totally agree with that. When you said that last year, I was like, wow, they're really onto something now. There's a mission. There's a North Star. Same thing with Facebook connecting the world, or Google bringing knowledge together. I think that's incredible. Ryan, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you online?

Come to digitalmarketer.com. Go to check out our blog, digitalmarketer.com/blog, and read. Hopefully you like some of the stuff, and as I've already confessed, you will be pixeled and you'll be seeing my smiling face probably following you all around the internet. Hopefully you'll enjoy that and come hang out with us, and if you want to check out TrafficAndConversionSummit.com. It's in February. It's kind of a little ways off, but I actually think— this is kind of crazy— we are going to sell out before we even get into next year at the rate that we're going.

Wow.

We might sell out by the end of November, but definitely we'll sell out before we get into January, which is pretty cool, pretty exciting, although it leaves me with a giant promotional hole in January that I got to fill.

Yeah, but everyone—

Good problem to have.

Better get those tickets because last year was packed as hell.

Yeah, we fill it up to the point where the fire marshal almost kicked us out 2 years ago.

True story, true story. All right, Ryan, thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks, buddy.

Hey everyone, just a quick heads up that we're giving away an ebook called 29 Growth Hacking Quick Wins. We co-authored this book with Matan Griffel of One Month, and it'll give you a solid base on where you can create growth ideas from. So, all you need to do is text QUICKTIPS to 33444. That's the word quick, Q-U-I-C-K, and tips, T-I-P-S as in sugar, to 33444 and you get instant access.

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