Category: Books

Email is a powerful medium. At minimum, it serves a company’s need for transacting with vendors & customers, etc. But some companies go much further, putting it at the centre of their business. The author of today’s book, has done this in three distinct businesses. How did he get there? Just listen to his story. 

In his  primary school years, Matt Paulson played games like SimCity on his family’s PC. Keen to share what he learned with other fans, he made a website and watched as visitors started coming by the hundreds. Learning that you could make money by putting banner ads on your site, he signed his little website up and small cheques started rolling in. But for the time being, it just served him as a way to make pocket money.

Like many University students, he found himself in the middle of his studies, needing money to cover tuition costs. The college newspaper had part-time job openings for writers. Between that and taking freelance gigs on ProBlogger, mainly about personal finance, he managed to get by.

Matt then fused his writing skills with selling banner ads like he’d done before. He launched a finance blog that generated about the same income as you’d make on a computer science graduate’s salary. He made  many websites along this theme, and because they were highly dependent on Google’s algorithm for traffic, they rode some high highs and low lows. In the aftermath of one rankings smackdown, he resolved to never give a tech platform the power to damage his business like this.

The solution was to manage their own content distribution. That meant showing their brand on a variety of finance portals, but also networking directly with their audience, getting them used to seeing the site’s brand in places like their email inbox. So they launched an email newsletter. That newsletter, called MarketBeat, now has three million email subscribers. Financial product companies pay top dollar to advertise in the newsletter, to get a piece of the one million monthly outbound clicks it receives. Along with premium subscription products, this business now employees thirteen people and grosses more than $25 million in top-line annual revenue.

You now know the story of a young guy who founded an email empire. And while he’s proud of it, he’s equally passionate about living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota with his wife and 3 young kids. 

Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Matt’s book “Email Marketing Demystified,” (3rd edition release date: fall 2022)
• CCPA
• Email coregistration
• Matt’s personal website
• Matt’s LinkedIn Profile and Twitter Profile

Our guest came out of university not knowing what field he was going to go into. But he managed to get an internship at ad agency Saatchi and Saatchi. From there he went to work on a variety of accounts, dream clients like Penguin Books, Budweiser and Sony PlayStation. He then settled into the online entertainment space working with goalpoker.com and jackpotparty.com. And in between that and some unpublished novel writing, he found his real groove, giving advice on what young marketers could learn from things he had done. So after a career that’s done just about everything that you could do agency and client side in marketing he’s now sharing his advice.

NB: I apologize for technical issues we had with the recording – hope you’ll listen to what Harry has to say

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Ads by Car manufacturer Skoda
• Two types of campaigns, parallel to film-making’s Above the Line / Below the Line functions
• Harry’s LinkedIn Profile
• The book’s website

EXCERPT: Don’t be Derailed by Rejection

You’re going to get rejected. A lot. That’s just a given, and if you’re on A Grade student who’s sailed through school, university, and sporting success with the gilded sheen of a winner, this is going to sting a little.

Get used to it.

This isn’t a game of round pegs for round holes. Every hole has more edges than a jigsaw and there are always shit loads of more qualified people trying desperately to mould themselves to fit in. The bravery you need to defeat this early rejection will just be a leather jerkin when compared to the metaphorical suit of armour you’ll need later on, when whole campaigns or businesses you’ve poured your soul into are rejected without so much as a thank you email.

The best plan is not the most correct plan. It’s not the one that requires barricading your door, working day and night for a week to write out. It’s the one you stick to. 

This logic can apply to diets, preparing a speech, training for competition, or keeping a New year’s resolution. It can also be applied to one thing that is rarely fully implemented – a marketing plan. A great hack to overcome false-starts is to follow a program that’s short enough, you see results in as little as 30 days. And that’s the tactic used in today’s book.  

Written in 2019, “Action Tracking” is aimed at formulating a digital marketing strategy. Its author, Katrina German, came by her expertise here in a circuitous way. She’s worked in different media, from books, to television to running a technology company. The common element was that they all centred around communicating stories, and reaching and marketing to the audiences hearing them. She’s been helping companies for the last 6 years. Tying digital actions by sales and marketing to a coherent plan that’s aligned with their strategy. 

But this talk isn’t just about scaffolding and building your online strategy. We talk about the drawbacks of current social channels. The issue of social media’s impact on mental welfare was brought to the fore by the 2020 movie “The Social Dilemma.” The platforms knew about their negative impact on audiences before we as marketers did, but now that we are aware, we can’t ignore our impact. When we use sensational headlines so our messages spread further, it ups the ante for all posts to please the algorithm. This degrades everyone’s experience and subjects our followers to mentally-corrosive content.  This isn’t the kind of Internet Katrina wanted to see, and so she did something about it. Her most recent reincarnation is as founder of Ethical Digital, a Canadian agency that respects the voices of women and Indigenous and other minority communities. Their belief is that more inclusion in the ranks of marketing practitioners will improve the digital experience for everyone. I can’t argue with her here and I hope you stick around to hear this upbeat tone at the end of our talk.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Using Ads to test your Headlines, a tactic made famous by Tim Ferris
• Google Analytics Chrome Extension (uses GA3)
• Google Keyword Planner
• Google Trends
• CMSs like Squarespace
• Marketing Automation tools like ActiveCampaign and MailChimp
• Documentary “The Social Dilemma”
• Katrina’s LinkedIn Profile and Twitter profile

Back in the early 2000s Our guest was in the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve. That occupation was rocked by the events of  9/11, bringing him into  active duty service for four years, and eventually serving for a total of 20 years. 

After doing a master’s in marketing from Southern Illinois University, he felt he should put these skills to work for academic institutions, he went to work at  University College at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is now the Marketing Director. 

Through this journey, he saw a transition happening with how digital content works. Since the early days of the internet, content marketing has been the battle cry of countless marketing experts promising free attention forever in return for creating quality content. However,  the majority of the work of matching content with consumers is done by algorithms on the dominant search, social, and e-commerce platforms. This once in a century paradigm shift requires new strategies for marketers. 

I bet you don’t just want to survive this data revolution but you probably want to move past this old regime.

Our guest chronicled how to make this change in his recent book, The Death of Content as King 

You’ll want to hear what Jon Hinderliter has to say about his 2020 book.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

• Jon’s concept of a ‘data democracy’ like the early days of the Internet
• Jon’s LinkedIn Profile and Twitter Profile
• The book’s website