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What if you could save 12+ hours per week in your business? Being a solopreneur sometimes focuses too much on the “solo” part: doing all the jobs, figuring things out yourself, and spending too much time in your business. But we didn’t start out own solo business to spend all of our time at our desk.
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Tim Stoddart: I despise Facebook. I really despise all social media. I hate spending time on it. It’s like a net negative in my life.
Joe Casabona: This was my first impression of Tim Stoddart, and I was hooked. If you’re feeling frustrated and discouraged by the lack of engagement by relying solely on social media posts, you’re not alone. But you, like me, might be taking the wrong approach. Tim says long-form content is king, and he should know. He’s the CEO of Copyblogger and he writes prolifically. If you’ve been struggling to make an impact through short-form content, this interview is a must-listen.
Here are some of the things to look for. Some would make you believe that people don’t have the attention spans for long-form content due to lack of interest. Tim disagrees. Why would you want to go after people who aren’t interested in what you’re doing in the first place? Tim is also a prolific reader, which is the source of all of his ideas for his own writing. He says, “Reading enables me to bounce ideas back and forth.” He even shares the five books that created his, quote-unquote, ‘lexicon of thinking’.
Finally, he talks about building in public. He doesn’t like the term “building in public”, and much prefers to say that he’s documenting his journey because there’s no debating your own experience. And if you share your experience, you give people into insight, into how you work and you build your personal brand, which Tim says is incredibly important.
I loved this interview. Tim is generous and he has a wealth of information, so much so that I decided to make the usually members-only extended version of this episode available for everybody. So I hope you enjoy it. And if you do like it, consider becoming a member over at casabona.org/join. But for now, let’s get into the intro and then the interview.
[00:02:10]
Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast where you get free coaching calls from successful creators. Each week you get actionable advice on how you can build a better content business to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host, Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.
[00:02:32]
Joe Casabona: All right, welcome to Episode 323. I’m here with Tim Stoddart, the CEO of Copyblogger, and as we speak, the sole owner of Copyblogger. This is not breaking news because it happened a few months ago now. But Tim, welcome to the show. First of all, before I start talking too much, thanks for being here.
Tim Stoddart: Thank you. Yeah, I really enjoyed getting to spend some time with you in Boise the other weekend. So I’m thrilled that we can sit down and chat.
Joe Casabona: Likewise. I was really excited to see you there. We had connected briefly at CEX. And I’ll just say right off the bat, shout out to Chenell Basilio and Cat Mulvihill. I don’t usually go to a lot of talks at conferences, because I go the word… I’m mostly used to going to WordCamps. I’m sure you’ve been to WordCamps. No? Wow. I guess I just assume Copyblogger is a strictly WordPress thing when it’s really not at all.
Tim Stoddart: It is. I just don’t go to events.
Joe Casabona: Well, not to be mean or anything, but most talks that WordCamps are not great because, you know, it’s mostly volunteers and they don’t get to spend as much time on their talks as maybe they would like. So I usually just hang out in the hallway. But Cat and Chennel were like, “You should really go to Tim’s talk. I think it’s going to be good for you.” And I’m like, “Okay, cool.”
So we sat down, Austin Church was with us. Two minutes into your talk, Austin leans over and goes, “This talk feels like it was tailor-made for you.” And I’m like, “Yeah, it really did.” Because you just talked about social media and email in a way that feels very counter-cultural. So I think you started off with like you hate Facebook, right? You don’t want to be on Facebook anymore.
Tim Stoddart: I despise Facebook. I really despise all social media. I hate spending time on it. It’s like a net negative in my life.
Joe Casabona: I really felt that way for a long time. I actually was not on Twitter at CEX until Justin Moore told me, You’ve got to be on Twitter if you want to coach people.” So I went back on Twitter. And I engage a little bit there. Did you tweet this the other day? Like, lots of work on muting stuff today. Was that you?
Tim Stoddart: That was me, yes. I’m an active muter in Twitter. I like to keep my feed drama and anxiety-free.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, likewise. Aggressively mute. I was talking to somebody else and they were like, “Hey, who should I follow? Right now my feed is just like whiny American politics.” And I’m like, “Let me share my mute filter. Let me share the very long page of things I’ve muted over the years.” So I don’t see any of that stuff anymore. I think that’s great.
So one of the things that you talked through is your kind of flywheel for posting on social media and the fact that it starts with blog posts. I really like this because I feel like short-form has kind of screwed me over the last year. I really focused on only short-form instead of really pumping out long-form content, which I think I’m better at. So can you tell us a little bit more about your writing process, like how you come up with ideas for blog posts and how that fits into your weekly, your daily schedule?
Tim Stoddart: I think I’m always going to believe that long-form is a much better… what’s the word for it? Like pound for pound. You get more bang for your buck basically when you invest your time into long-form. There’s a guy named [inaudible 00:05:49] who is pretty famous, a lot of people know him. And years and years ago, it was probably like nine years ago at this point when I was working on my first website, it was called Sober Nation, I was going through a lot of the same stuff where I was building a huge Facebook following and the Facebook was getting a ton of traffic, but it wasn’t necessarily converting into anything.
Maybe it was on Twitter. I can’t even remember where I read it. Maybe it was an email or something. The gist of it… I’m not going to get the quote exactly right, but the gist of it was, “Hey, [inaudible 00:06:20], why do you spend so much time writing sales pages and writing blog posts if most people don’t read the whole thing?” So he says like, “Well, you know who does read the whole thing?” And he goes, “It is buyers.” I was like, “Huh, that makes a lot of sense.
Like, why wouldn’t I just go directly after the people who are actually interested in the higher level concepts that long-form writing in particular, but also podcasts and even videos, just higher level, more articulated arguments or concepts or ideas? Why wouldn’t I just speak directly to them instead of pretending like everybody is too stupid and have too short attention spans to spend 7 to 8, maybe, God forbid, even 10 minutes reading an article, you know? So that’s the game that I’ve played all of these years, and I’m really happy I stuck with it.
In terms of where do I get my ideas from, I gotta tell you, I don’t have a good system of idea creation. I read a lot. I really think that that has a big thing to do with it. But when I was a kid, really one of the only roles I can ever remember having in my household was that I had to read a half an hour every day. Even since I was little I’ve always gotten up pretty early. I remember really, really distinctively getting up at dawn. In the house I grew up, they had the big old school heater van. Like the big square metal ones, you know? And my room was right above the actual heater.
And I grew up in Philly in the Northeast. So, in the wintertime, I just distinctively remember waking up early, sitting right by my heater van with a book, like Goosebumps, you know, R.L. Stine. So it was just like a big part of my life for as long as I can remember.
No one’s ever directly asked me that question before. But I think if I had to answer it, I would say that I read every day and I have for the vast majority of my life. So I think that it is reading that enables me to continuously bounce ideas back and forth in my head until eventually I come up with something worth writing about for that week.
Joe Casabona: That’s such a great point. Because I think a lot of people spend too much time in echo chambers and only consume content that can directly benefit them in their job. We’re recording out of time in a little bit. But I had another interview today with a guy named Andy who says one of the things he does is read books that are not in his professional world. And that gives him ideas for what he can write about, which is… I think that’s super great.
Also, I live in West Chester, Pennsylvania now. I’m from New York originally, but my wife’s family’s from around here. I guess if you’re familiar with the area, specifically Downingtown, which Donald Trump famously called “shithole” back in 2016-
Tim Stoddart: Yeah, I remember. Bad things happen in Philadelphia. And then the very next day, the entire city was littered with shirts of gritty. Just the whole front of the t-shirt was gritty and it just said, Bad things happen in Philadelphia. I just think the most perfect thing you could do to that city is to give them an excuse to make a gritty t-shirt that says bad things happen.
Joe Casabona: As a quick side quest, I’ll never forget this. When they revealed or unveiled gritty, the entire city of Philly was like, “This looks terrible.” And then the rest of the country was like, “That is terrible.” And Philly was like, how dare you?
Tim Stoddart: Exactly. I love gritty issues. Like, one of my favorite things ever. They cracks me up. I love them.
Joe Casabona: Amazing. In the WordPress space, there’s the Wapuu thing and you have custom localized ones for the WordCamps. And we did like a gritty Wapuu for WordCamp Philly one year. Awesome. I like this. It’s very simple. You read a lot and it helps you generate ideas. And then when you sit down your idea to write and think about stuff.
Now you are the CEO of Copyblogger, but you also have a couple of other… Like you have the Sober Nation website. Is there anything else that I’m missing here? This is what I have in your bio. But do you have any other personal blogs or anything like that?
Tim Stoddart: Just Tim Stodz. I mean, there’s a bunch of other websites that my team and I have built and manage and own. It’s basically a media company at this point. Almost like a holdings company. But in terms of the work that I personally do, mostly timstodz.com. I’ve just started getting to the point now that I have a month and a half or so under my belt of full management of Copyblogger, just getting to the point where I’m publishing there as well.
But there too, even though the content is similar, the style of writing is very, very different. Whereas Copyblogger is just strictly educational, it’s pretty technical, it’s for the people who want to learn. Whereas on my personal blog, a lot of what I do really is write about my own adventures in business, in marketing, in sales. Even just like insecurities or ideas that I’m going with.
I don’t really like the term ‘build in public’ because that feels like, you know, if I make a sale, I post a screenshot of the sale and it’s like, “Hey, look how much money I made. You can make this much money too.” Not there’s anything necessarily wrong with that. It’s just not the avenue that I choose to go.
I like to think of them more as like I’m documenting my journey, I’m sharing my experience. When people talk about this inside the Copyblogger Academy, when we’re looking for content ideas, the thing that I always tell them is, Don’t teach, share your experience. Don’t come up with topics. Just share your experience. That’s really what I do on Tim Stodz, my personal blog more than anywhere else. It’s not the biggest following, but it’s the people that know me the best because it’s my own name. I think people engage with that pretty well.
Joe Casabona: I like that. I also love the framing “documenting your journey.” I don’t know if you follow Khe Hy on Twitter. He’s fantastic. So he said he just got to 40,000 followers without thread boying, which is my favorite term in the world now. I’m just gonna use it for the next three months, whenever I can. But it’s like you see these thread boys with an eye? For those who don’t know, it’s got to be thread boy with an eye. And they’re like, Here’s what you need to do. Like, wake up, don’t shower, start working in the first 30 minutes. And I’m like, Don’t shower? Is that? Yeah, you’re gonna tell me that I’m gonna build a million-dollar business by not showering. That’s such terrible advice.
And then later, when people push back, they’re like, Well, this is just what’s worked for me. And I’m like, I know that’s a bad hook but it’s disingenuous to be like, get all this work done by waking up at 5:00 am and showering and working three hours straight, or whatever. Just drives me crazy.
Tim Stoddart: I agree. I had a mentor tell me once, which is really where I came up with this concept. He said, “I don’t have advice to give you I just have experience to share.” And what’s important about that is there’s no actual debating experience. Somebody can’t say that you’re right or wrong or that they agree with you or you’re stupid, or that you’re even smart. It’s just this is my experience. And if you can learn something from it, great. If not, then it’s not for you. And that’s not a big deal.
So, regardless of what kind of content I’m creating, coincidentally, live by some of those things. I definitely shower. But I’ve always woken up really early. I’m one of the weirdos that takes freezing cold showers. I’ve done it for years. I think the application for me has been that I don’t care if you do what I do, and I don’t have anything to sell you about doing what I do. This is just what I do. And if you like it, then follow along. And if you don’t, that’s fine, too.
Joe Casabona: I don’t have anything to sell you. I think this is the part the… Because there’s… I don’t want to talk smack on anybody, so I’m not going to name names. There’s someone who’s like, Oh, last year, I wrote eight books and this year I’m gonna write 16. And I’m like 16… These are just going to be crappy books. Like there’s no way around it. But this person also sells like a cohort where he tells people how to write at volume and I’m like, Okay, what you’re doing is kind of… it feels disingenuous. That’s the thread-boying stuff I don’t like. Where I feel like your approach… What I really liked about your CEX talk is you’re just like, This is how I do it. And this works for me and I like it. I hate social media, so I try to minimize my time there.
Tim Stoddart: Thanks. I don’t know how else to be. I’ve always been a little bit overly honest.
Joe Casabona: That’s the Philly in you. That’s like East Coast, like northeast. We don’t have time to not be direct, right?
Tim Stoddart: My wife and I lived in Nashville for a couple years. It was one of the things that we noticed… And this is culturally, by the way. I don’t think one way is better than the other. But people exchange politeness and pleasantries for directness, as opposed to the other way around. Not being direct makes me feel uncomfortable a lot of times. There were a bunch of times.
For instance, I remember getting my car fixed on in this mechanic in Nashville. And I just remember thinking, like, Just tell me what. I don’t care if it’s bad news. Just tell me what. It took much longer than I usually have those kinds of conversations, you know. So I agree. I think directness is a form of respect. I’m not rude. I’m not rude to anybody. Honestly, I think being rude to people is kind of a waste of my time. I have better things to do than be mean to you. It’s just the way that I like to communicate is always, this is what I’ve done and this were the results of it. And if that works, great. And if not, totally fine. There’s somebody else for you.
Joe Casabona: I love that. It reminds me of… Have you seen Colin Quinn stand up in New York story?
Tim Stoddart: No.
Joe Casabona: Oh, my gosh, I like… my parents grew up in Manhattan and we’re Italian. He kind of goes through the whole history of New York. But one of the things he says is people think New Yorkers are rude, we’re just trying not to waste your time. So when I walk in and I’m like, Give me two slices, I’m really trying to move the line along so that I’m not wasting anybody’s time. But they’re like, Why are you being so rude? I’m like, yeah, exactly. If you like stand-up comedy, I’d strongly recommend it. It’s really good.
Now, despite hating social media, well, I think we all probably feel like there needs to be some presence on there. So you have to borrow, I think, probably the most said term at Craft & Commerce this past year. You have your own kind of flywheel for how you create those posts. So I have the text in front of me. This is not a test. So what do you do with your blog posts to turn it into social media?
Tim Stoddart: Just chop it up. One of the things about social media, which I think creates a lot of anxiety for people is to be successful on social media requires so much volume of content that they think they have to come up with something new all the time. If you go through my Twitter feed, you’ll notice that I say much of the same stuff. Sometimes I’ll repeat myself. Not always. A lot of times it’s just different variations of the same concepts and maybe a different way to look at it.
But there’s two lessons from that. One is that I think… there’s people that have different arguments with this. But I think it’s better to be specific. I think it’s better to be known to do something specific. And then as you can build a brand and build some awareness around your ideas, it’s much easier to expand as opposed to start out being like a generalist. I don’t even know what you would call it. Probably an influencer is the right word, where you’re just famous for being you.
I think trying to start off that way is very, very difficult. So from a pragmatic standpoint, it’s easier to specialize in a specific thing and then grow out from there. But also from a personal standpoint, because it is social media… Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger, he’s one of my good friends, he was like a hero to me for a vast majority of my life, he said, You always have to remember that there is somebody reading your stuff for the first time. So even though you think you’re repeating yourself is the first time that somebody is going to see it. And if you continuously swap out your message and try to reinvent yourself with the ideas and the content that you’re creating, then you’re missing two opportunities. You’re missing for the opportunity for you personally to connect with that person and then you’re also missing the opportunity for the person to connect with you on what it is that you believe in and what you’re actually trying to do.
So that’s always how I’ve approached it. And what does that have to do with blog posts? Well, even if you look at my blog, my personal blog, it’s a lot of the same ideas. I’ve read probably like six or seven books that have shaped my whole… let’s call it like the lexicon of my thinking around business. Think and Grow Rich, probably the most influential one. The E Myth by Robert Gerber. It really taught me about systems, and I really loved that. Linchpin by Seth Godin. Probably the book that changed my life more than any. Rich Dad Poor Dad taught me about wealth. Even though Robert Kiyosaki is a bit of a nutcase, that book is an absolute classic. Everybody who’s interested in being wealthy should read it because it taught me the difference between having money and having wealth, where having wealth means owning assets and having money just means having money. You can lose your money instantly, but your assets are always creating wealth for you.
There’s a couple more, but there’s five or six or seven books that really have created the framework of what it is that I like to share with people and how I’m trying to apply those lessons in my own life and then basically just sharing the results. So even though I’m taking a blog post and I’m chopping it down into, let’s call them micro pieces of content, in reality, even the blog posts are different variations of a lot of the same ideas. And it helps me. When I write, it helps me think.
And that’s why I respect writers so much, because great writers are great thinkers. So if you can write well, you can think well. And in doing so, the writing is just as much a process of growth for me, as much as it is a tool to brand myself, let’s say. That’s kind of a system that I just fell into. I didn’t plant it. It’s just what I do. I love to write. I created a way to make it much less complicated than it needs to be.
Joe Casabona: There’s a lot of really great stuff here. First of all, Brian Clark, lots of respect for him. I mean, he’s like… I’m going to say an OG, but he’s kind of an OG in the blogging space maybe. You have to remember there’s always someone reading your stuff for the first time. This is super important.
The way that this idea was crystallized for me is someone was like, What’s your open rate on your email newsletter? I’m like, like 46%.” Like, Okay, that’s good. Usually, it’s around 30% or whatever.” Now look at your last post, like on Twitter, and look at how many people viewed it versus how many people interacted with it versus how many people follow you. And I’m like, yeah, people are seeing just a tiny percentage of what I’m putting out. Or a tiny percentage of people even in my orbit are seeing what I put out. So publishing the same idea a bunch of times is fine. You’re gaining new followers. Maybe you reword it in a way that resonates with them differently.
On both Twitter and LinkedIn today I published my… feel like it’s like quarterly… If you say people just want to hear the raw conversation, I think that it’s lazy. And the way I framed it say it was like, You can’t be Joe Rogan. Nobody can be Joe Rogan except Joe Rogan. So you can’t do the things that Joe Rogan does because you don’t have 11 million downloads per episode on an exclusive platform. That got more and different and even comments from the same people who probably forgot I wrote it. So I really like that.
And then great writers are great thinking. Like getting into the habit of writing is, I think, one of the best things you can do for yourself. Even if you don’t publish it, right? But like writing… I write every morning by hand on my Kindle scribe or an actual notebook. And then, I don’t know, I write probably 2,000 or 3,000 words a day based on whatever I’m creating. Like you said, it helps me think.
Tim Stoddart: I’m with you. I think I would push back on something that you said. I mean, look, I don’t go anywhere without my notebook. If I turn the camera, I got piles and piles of notebooks. It’s just how I’ve been. I have basically documented my entire life by writing every morning. And I do like an inventory every night as well.
But I think that there’s an important distinction, which is you do have to publish because if you don’t publish, it doesn’t count. It’s a bad habit for people to create art in whatever it is that they’re doing, whether they’re, I don’t know, making jewelry or a painter or even if they’re a lawyer. You know, there’s art in everything. It’s the gift that you share with the world is basically art.
And I don’t think it helps anybody to keep all of your paintings in your closet. And I don’t think it helps anybody to keep some of your best ideas hidden away in a filing cabinet. Sure is writing. And if the process of you’re doing that is just to scatter your brain, cool. There’s totally a place for that. I’m not saying that if you don’t publish your writing that you’re a fraud. There’s plenty of things that I write that I don’t publish.
In the world that we live in right now, way, way more of a problem to be invisible than it is to be ridiculed. And we’re all so scared of being ridiculed and we’re all so scared of putting our stuff out there. But in reality, not being ridiculed is way more dangerous. But it just doesn’t feel that way because our brains are so hard-wired to live in caves. And we think that being isolated and being kicked out of the tribe like you’re dead, basically you get kicked out of the cave or you offend the chief and something eats you. Like you’re alone in nature, you’re dead. That’s really powerful and it’s still very powerful.
Internally, those forces really mean… especially like the oldest evolutionary force that makes all of us. And the act of putting yourself out there every day is a daily… What would you say? It’s a daily mastery of the survival mechanisms that don’t actually serve you anymore. And so, yeah, write every day. Totally. But if you don’t publish it, it doesn’t count.
And that’s, I think, a really important thing that I’ve done for years and years and years. And drop by drop, drop I drop it fills the bucket. Everything that you put out there, even if you don’t think people are reading it, they are. It’s just something that I think is important that passes a lot of people by.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, they are. Or they will. I mean, you can write a blog post and then maybe six months from now someone finds it in shares or whatever. I wrote a blog post in 2010 about like setting up… it was like quick filters or something in Gmail that is to this day my top performing blog posts. So I mean, you’re right. Absolutely, if you don’t publish, it doesn’t count.
I think that’s funny because I tell people the same thing about like, how do you get comfortable in front of the microphone, in front of the camera? And I’m like, You have to record. I know that’s a really annoying answer, but the more you do it, the more comfortable you’ll be. So I gave listeners an out by saying you don’t have to record, but you should do what Tim does and publish.
Also, I want to touch on this because again, this is the second time a little behind-the-scenes stuff. People are going to be hearing this for like four weeks now because I recorded the next month of podcast interviews today. In another interview that’s coming out in a few weeks, we also touched on this fear of being ridiculed. The way he put it was like, you want to have provocative opinions that stand out. They’re going to help you stand out. I said like probably in like mid-2020, I got like real gun shy about posting anything on social media. Because this was the height of like, say the wrong thing and you’re canceled, it felt like.
And even though I’m really direct, most of the time—I’m a New York Italian, we just always say how we’re feeling—I feel like I internalized that and I’m finally just coming around to, no, I should have provocative opinions. I certainly don’t care if I get ridiculed, but I kind of was worried about getting dragged on Twitter, which I guess is the same thing. So I’m really glad you brought that up. I feel like it’s going to be a recurring theme for the summer.
Tim Stoddart: Probably. Yeah, And there’s a nuance there because Twitter especially… I’m less and less excited about Twitter. I don’t even know how many of these people are people. I don’t think a lot of them. Seriously. I’m starting to think there’s multimillion-dollar troll firms where there’s just hundreds and thousands of people that do nothing but reply to stuff just to make people angry. I’m really, really careful about that.
But the only reason why I say that is because I think it’s important to make the distinction between having an opinion and being provocative. And this is something that I’ve recently just learned. My wife was talking about it and one of her… I think it was a class she was in. Maybe it was a psychology class or something. But she talked about the half-life of anger and tribalism and about how much more longevity there is in positive affirmation and positive service, where it’s pretty easy to get quick dopamine hits and to get… I mean, in the 2023 version, we say go viral. It’s pretty easy to do that by making people angry, but it’s a very bad strategy.
So I guess it’s just semantics. Now, whether we’re talking about being provocative, I suppose there’s a difference in being provocative than just being a dick and… I think being provocative as a strategy, Like I’m going to intentionally be provocative because I want people to notice me, I don’t think that makes any sense because people are going to forget about you really quickly. And it’s true that people don’t forget the way that you made them feel. Why would you want to make people feel a way about your work that is going to disincentivize them to buy from you?
I’m an entrepreneur and I see that as almost a separator where I don’t view myself as a creator. And if you do view yourself as a creator, I’m not saying that that’s bad. I’m just saying that one of the things that I learned from Copyblogger is that your content isn’t your product. Your content is your marketing for your product or for your service. So creating content for the sake of creating content where like this is what I created, look at it, that’s not something that I’ve ever done.
And if you want your content to be the product, you have to be a little bit provocative because that’s like the best way to get the content itself spread. But if the things that I create are actually a mechanism of trust and a mechanism of not just good feeling, you know, like a connection, let’s call it, then that’s like a much, much better way to build a business. And I’ve always stuck to that way and I don’t think I would to be very famous, but I think I’d be pretty wealthy.
Joe Casabona: I’ve heard this put it a few different ways. One is like in 200 years people are going to remember Bill Gates, but they’re not going to remember Steve Jobs, which like right now feels like heresy, right, because Steve Jobs is… But Steve Jobs is a within-our-lifetime hero who didn’t do a lot of outward philanthropy. I’m not saying he didn’t do anything, but Bill Gates does a lot more outward philanthropy. So that will be the name that people remember. Again, I know that’s like heresy to like the Apple tech people, and I’m really sorry, but it’s probably true.
Tim Stoddart: PCs are better.
Joe Casabona: What’s that?
Tim Stoddart: I said PCs are better.
Joe Casabona: Oh, dang, that’s provocative. But again, let’s look at… I’ll try to keep it bipartisan here. But like Bill O’Reilly, [inaudible 00:31:24] bills now, fired in disgrace from Fox News, gone. The biggest name in television, basically, gone. Keith Olbermann, not quite the biggest name, but pretty similar, right? Like he was fired in disgrace from multiple places but most recently, MSNBC. People aren’t really talking about Keith Olbermann anymore.
And more recently like Tucker, right? I haven’t heard about Tucker since he’s been fired really. He tried launching the Twitter show. He was regularly trending on Twitter for what he said on national television. So I think you’re absolutely right. Like, Tucker’s going to have his little Twitter show. He’ll probably start a podcast. He’ll be fine for himself because he’s stoked anger in enough people. But like you said, he’s a provocateur. When he stops provoking people, he doesn’t have anything anymore.
Tim Stoddart: Yeah. I’m not disagreeing with you. It’s important to stand for something. It’s like Tupac said, right? If you won’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. Like be about something. Totally. When people ask me about social media, I’m not about social media. I want to get everything I can out of social media and I don’t want to give nothing to it. You’re not getting any of my money. I’m going to take and take and take everything I can from social media. I’m about doing real writing for real people, which means by proxy, I’m against short-term dopamine hits. I stand for something. It’s not to say that you cower away from conflict maybe. It’s not about that. It’s just being provocative as a strategy to be known, it’s a really terrible… and it’s stressful. Like it’s stupid. Why would I actually want to live my life so that way? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
Joe Casabona: That’s like people who argue with people on Twitter all day, right? I had a friend who every time Donald Trump tweeted, he would like tweet something not nice, I guess, to put it lightly at him. And I’m like, What are you doing, man? This is such a wait… Why do you even follow him if he annoys you that much? It’s just not worth it. My friend would watch political shows of people he hated. And I’m like, Why? He’s like, I don’t know. And I’m like, Stop, You’re so mad for no reason right now. So I fully agree. There’s a difference between…
Again, let’s go back to my editing your podcast comment. I want podcasters to have good shows that grow, and most podcasters need to edit their podcast because of it, right? I’m not saying if you don’t edit your podcast, you’re stupid, right? That’s provocative. If you really want to put time and effort into your podcast, it needs to be edited. Most people don’t just want the raw conversation. Or it least needs to be prepped. So your recent episode where you guys did breakdowns of landing pages, which I really enjoyed-
Tim Stoddart: Oh, cool. I don’t know you listen to the show. Thank you.
Joe Casabona: Oh yeah, totally. I don’t know if that was edited, but it was certainly prepared. Like you didn’t just go, Oh, let’s find some stuff to talk about. Like you had, Eric… Is that your co-host’s name?
Tim Stoddart: Ethan.
Joe Casabona: Ethan. Sorry. Yeah.
Tim Stoddart: Yeah. And it was edited. Of course, it was.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, right. Yeah. Cool. I was like, fishing to make sure I wasn’t just insulting you to your face, I guess.
Tim Stoddart: No, you can. Do you know how many times I screw up doing it? I screw up all the time. There’s plenty of times where… my editor’s name is Isaac. So can I curse on your show?
Joe Casabona: Sure.
Tim Stoddart: Okay. So if we’re doing something, I fuck up and I’m like, “Oh, shit, Isaac, I fucked up.” And then, I’ll just say the timestamps and I’ll be like, Edit here. Okay, here we go. And then I’ll put them back in. So, of course, I edit. Nobody wants to hear that. Nobody wants to hear, “Oh, can we start over again?” But my goal is to make the best show possible. So I’m going to edit.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, for sure. Again, this is maybe Wes Kaos said this. Like, a spiky point of view. Maybe that’s the better way to put it is people who say, my listeners want to hear the raw conversation are being lazy. Like they just don’t want to put the time into editing. So they’ve convinced themselves that they don’t need to edit. But again, that’s different from saying like, Hey, you’re a dumb person or whatever. Like anybody who edit is terrible… or who doesn’t edit is terrible.
Man, this is great. I want to end with potentially another speaking point of view here. Because the other thing that you broke down in your CEX talk was your email sequences. I follow Jason Resnick. He has a really complicated welcome sequence. He’s a good friend of mine. He’s great. I follow Rob and Kennedy from Email Marketing Heroes. Super smart guys. Obviously, they’re killing it. They know what they’re doing.
But I tried implementing their process probably at my scale, and I don’t think it’s working for me. It’s clearly not because I’m not selling something to my email list every day, which is what it seems like they’re doing. Whereas your email sequence, again, like really people sign up, they get a little like… what is it? A couple of emails welcome sequence, one email, welcome sequence. And then it’s like, Hey, I have a membership. You should buy it if you like it, right?
Tim Stoddart: Basically, yeah.
Joe Casabona: So maybe you could talk us through that in a better way than I just talked through it because I was doing it from memory. Kind of talk about why you’re doing it that way, why you don’t have this giant Rube Goldberg machine of personalization like we’re apparently told we’re supposed to have.
Tim Stoddart: That’s an interesting question. No one’s ever said that to me before. There’s three things. Most people… And I’m not saying this is bad by any means, I’m always happy to have this conversation. But my journey is a little bit unique in like my past and stuff. So I think people gravitate a little bit more towards that as opposed to some of the technical stuff that I’ve learned along the way.
But I think the technical stuff is really fun. And I’ll tell you why I think it’s really fun. And that’s because I like money. And I do all of this because I want to make money. I don’t do all of this because I want to make stuff. I would make stuff anyway as a hobby, but that’s a hobby.
So for instance, I’m like pretty into Muay Thai, the martial arts for years and years and years and I really love it. I’m not going to turn that into a business because that is just an art for me that I get to share with other people. But if I am doing something as part of my business, there’s one goal. I don’t care about anything else other than the money that it made. I have found that people who are overcomplicating it are almost getting in the way of their money. And I’ve done that, but I don’t want to do it. It didn’t work for me.
So here’s what I have to say. One, I’m a good salesperson and I became a good salesperson by being a good copywriter. And it’s not something that is easy and it takes a long time and it takes a lot of practice. And like you said, how do you get good? Hit record. Like it’s repetitions. I don’t think people spend enough time on repetitions and appreciating repetitions.
I’ve done a ton of reps on sales copy, a ton of reps on sales email and I’m decent at it. You know, I don’t think anybody… the people that say they’re good copywriters, right… it’s almost like martial arts. Like you don’t fear the person that says that they’re good. You fear the person that like doesn’t say anything. I try to always be open to learning new stuff, but copy is a numbers game and my numbers are where I’m happy with them. So there’s that.
Also from the simplicity point of view, this was kind of another Copyblogger thing that I really, really took to heart. So don’t let me get too into the weeds here, but Copyblogger, when I bought it and for the majority of its life, was nothing but a website. The business of Copyblogger was actually a bunch of different products that the blog of Copyblogger drove attention to. So it’s content marketing. People would read Copyblogger, they sign up for the email list and then people would use the email list to sell some of the products. And one of those products was a website theme store called StudioPress, really, really famous, really groundbreaking. The way that it structured with Genesis and like parent and child themes and stuff. Anybody who’s a WordPress nerd.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, I loved it.
Tim Stoddart: I still use it. My personal blog is still on StudioPress.
Joe Casabona: Is it the Authority theme?
Tim Stoddart: I think so.
Joe Casabona: I was looking at it and I’m like, This looks familiar.
Tim Stoddart: Yeah, I think it is. But nonetheless, one of the keystones of Studio Press back in the day was simple things don’t break. When I read that… I remember exactly where I was when I read it. I was like, Damn, that is so freaking true. I mean, what stands the test of time, right? Like, wheels do pretty good. Do you know what I mean?
Joe Casabona: So much so that people even say, don’t reinvent the wheel. It’s been around forever and it doesn’t need fixing.
Tim Stoddart: It doesn’t need fixing. Yeah, exactly. It just saves my mental bandwidth. It saves the sophistication that I get pretty confused with. I’m smart, I guess but I’m not overly smart and I get just as tripped up trying to untangle these email sequence webs as anybody else does.
So I have bypassed the sequencing game with the specificity game. If you sign up for Copyblogger, there’s only one thing you’re interested in. And if you don’t like that one thing, then there’s really no difference in me creating a bunch of sequences and sub-niches, because why would I do that? You didn’t like the one thing that you were here for in the first place, so it’s not for you. And the same is true with my agency.
If you go to Stodzy, there’s only one reason that you would be to that website. And if my five-day sale sequence didn’t convince you to book a sales call with me, then you were never going to book a sales call in the first place. I guess in a way, it’s kind of 6 to 1 and a half dozen or the other or whatever the expression is, right? Because hour for hour it probably takes me just as much time in that I’ve created more brands than I think I needed to if I were better at sequencing and being sophisticated and having multiple audiences under one brand, Right?
But me and my compartmentalized brain, I like things when everything fits in its own little drawer, when I can just label things and be like, Okay, this goes there. So I’ve created a lot of websites. And each one of those websites has a very, very specific audience, and each one of those audiences only gets a specific offer. And if they don’t like that offer, then they were never going to buy it because the only reason why they would be on the website at the first place is to check out the offer at least. I’m not even saying I’m right, it’s just what’s worked for me. And I’m not changing it. I’m sticking with it.
Joe Casabona: And I think it’s really smart, right? Because again, we hear niche down, niche down, make sure you really know who you’re talking to. Again, going back to my crazy sequence, I had, I think it was five or six different paths. Once they went through my welcome sequence, it’s like, have you launched your podcast? Have you pod faded? Do you want to improve your process? Do you want to make money? Are you not interested in podcasting at all?
And then I’m like, These are all different audiences. I want to help brands launch their podcast, but they’re probably not joining my mailing list. I want to help podcasters improve their workflow. So I got rid of it all. I’m like, You’re here because you’re spending too much time on your podcast. I think if that’s not true, here’s a big old unsubscribe button. I think that’s just so… It gives you clarity right on who you want to talk to.
I’ll just say straight up, right? Usually, I do a pro version of this show for members. I’m really enjoying this conversation, so I’m going to make this entire episode free for all listeners. The benefit of signing up for the Pro show is getting it ad-free. So if you don’t want to hear the ads in the middle that you’ve probably already heard at this point, you can sign up at Casabona.org/join.
But something that you mentioned at CEX… Somebody asked you like, why do you have two different ConvertKit accounts when you could tag people differently based on the signup form? You said like, well, one is your personal brand, one is not. I thought that was a really smart answer. I mean, the idea was one of those brands you might be able to sell and you don’t want to tie to your personal account.
Tim Stoddart: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to have a personal brand. There’s one side of me that wants to roll my eyes at it because it’s just so gimmicky. But there’s the other side of me that’s like, No, we have to take this seriously because the more and more work long tails, then the more of an individual business every person is. And that’s not necessarily a marketing gimmick. That’s like a reality of the world economy these days.
Like you have to actually take that seriously. You have to understand that who you are means something. And a great quote that I heard that I always stuck with is it’s not about what you know, and it’s not even about who you know. It’s about who knows you. That is your personal brand. Like who knows you? And if they know you, do they know of you? And if they know of you, do they have a way to interact with you digitally or whatever that means? In my case, it’s usually a newsletter.
So that sounds great. The problem is people are really complicate it. When someone say, like, what’s your personal brand about? I’d be like, Well, I don’t know. I write about martial arts. I write about trying to figure out how to be a dad. I write about traveling. We live in Denver now, and the mountains are very new to me. I’ve skateboarded my entire life. I have this badass electric skateboard in my office. I write about that sometimes. I write about obviously a business at work on money.
But like trying to answer what is your personal brand is like trying to say, Who are you? I don’t fucking know. I’m Tim. What do you want me to say? I’m Tim. Your personal brand from a technical standpoint… Ethan and I just did a show on this actually where we really, really thought about it. It’s like an opportunity machine for you. It’s a digital networking tool. It’s a way the more people who know you, the more opportunities come to you. And I’ve really transitioned my thinking to that way.
Whereas Copyblogger isn’t that. Copyblogger is a standalone brand within itself. It isn’t connected to anybody emotionally. Sure, people might know me, but it’s kind of just the same version of that question where people say like, “Oh, who’s Tim?” Oh, “Tim owns Copyblogger.” Tim is in Copyblogger. Tim owns Copyblogger.
I think it’s better that way because like I said, it just helps me compartmentalize things where if I’m doing something, I know exactly what I’m doing it for and who I’m doing it for. But it makes it a lot easier to separate the two mentally, emotionally, and financially. If Copyblogger isn’t part of my life one day, it’s not because I gave up a piece of myself. It’s because I gave up a brand.
I think it’s a much better business decision that way. Just as much as it is a better personal decision. Because that shit gets weird. You know, it really does. It gets weird. People blend the two. I’ve seen people lose sight of the separation between who they are and how they make their money. That’s not a good place to be. I don’t go there.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s tough. And then from the other end, it’s like you could… I mean, I remember… Pat Flynn has spent the last few years kind of untangling himself from SPI. Pat was a spy for a long time. And then, like, when I signed up for the community for a while, I noticed that Pat was never there. That made me not want to renew. I kind of signed up to get some time with Pat.
And it makes perfect sense from his point of view. He has other stuff he’s doing, and it’s grown to a point where he can’t possibly manage it by himself and it shouldn’t just be him anymore. But there are some growing pains there, right? Because for a lot of early followers, I assume, like SPI was Pat Flynn and Pat Flynn was SPI. Now it’s a community. But it’s like a dangerous line you walk where you could be so tangled with the brand that it negatively impacts you or negatively impacts the business.
And then, I mean, from a practical standpoint… I think about this all the time. Like if someone said, Would you sell this podcast if the right offer came, and I was like, I’m like, Well, I can’t say no or yes to some theoretical number. I’d have to see the number and see how it makes me feel. But from a due diligence standpoint, it would be an absolute nightmare. All of my books are mixed, income from the podcast is just Joe’s income. Anybody who sign up for the mailing list, just sign up for my mailing list and not How I Built It mailing list or whatever. I mean, doing it that way just makes the due diligence part a lot easier as well.
Tim Stoddart: Agreed. Totally. The thing about that is you don’t realize that it’s going to be a problem until one day it’s a problem.
Joe Casabona: Most people don’t go into starting a business, going like, I’m probably going to sell this. I’m gonna start seeking venture capital, right? Because then it’s like you either go public or you sell. But like if some guy is just starting a business, he’s probably not like, Oh, maybe I’ll sell this one day.
Tim Stoddart: So the problem comes and you’re like, I really wish I did this before. So, I mean, look, it’s not like some huge insight I’ve had. I experienced it and I learned my lesson and I’ll never make that mistake again.
Joe Casabona: For sure. This was like Pippin Williamson… Do you know Pippin? Pippin Plugins. He did like AffiliateWP and easy digital downloads. But he came on the show years ago. He’s the first person who really crystallized that in my head. He’s like, Oh, every plugin has different bookkeeping. Like, what if I want to sell one? I’m like, Dang, that’s really… you are so much smarter than me.
Tim Stoddart: Just more experience.
Joe Casabona: Yeah. Tim, this has been great. I want to mention one more thing, because you mentioned the fighters, right? The guy who says he’s such a good fighter versus the guy who doesn’t say anything. I have a personal friend who experienced that. He wanted to fight this guy so bad. And the guy was like, “I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to fight.” He’s like, “Come on, bring it on.”
And then he swung at the guy and the guy just (bleep) out of him. Just so hard. Turns out he was like a black belt in some form of martial arts, and he just didn’t want to fight. Like he knew what would happen. And I’m like, Man, you got to slow your roll. Well, he’s not worth it at that point. Like, you don’t know who you’re fighting.
Tim Stoddart: I have a little bit of a theory about that as well, because in order to get good at something… like being good at anything is so humbling. In the case of martial arts, it’s extra humbling just because it’s like very primal. You’re like, there’s a person that could kill me. And you have to actually just admit it, you know? Like, okay, this person would kill me, I have to be okay with that. And it’s hard.
In anything in life, the process of getting good at it is just so painful that I think it’s cleansing. And then I think that process of being cleansed of the burden makes it so that you actually don’t even care if people know that you’re good at it anymore. I don’t know. I guess that’s a little bit philosophical. But I’ve thought about that a lot.
With all the noise that you see and all the people that say, like, I know exactly how to do this. Listen to me, this is the way to do it. This is what it has to do with our conversation. I observe that a lot on the banter on social media. And every time I see that, the first thing I think of is like, This person hasn’t actually been cleansed through pain of failure. Because how could they be? Because if they failed enough times, they would actually know that there’s no one right way to do anything and that their way was just their way.
And if they knew that, they wouldn’t be so eager to tell people how to do something. Rather they would do, which is what I believe, which is to share their experience. So maybe it comes around full circle. It’s actually a bigger conversation. That’s why I think martial arts is just so good because it’s the fast track to learning that painful life lesson that everybody inevitably gets to. And some people just get to it much quicker than others, and I think they’re much happier than others.
Joe Casabona: Yeah, for sure. They’ve proved through pain and so they don’t need to tell people, right? They don’t need to scream, Know how good I am, know how smart I am. I mean, there’s a lot of ways it’s been put, right? Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘speak softly and carry a big stick’. My high school’s motto was non vox, sed votum. “Not words, but deeds.” And that sticks with me all the time. So I don’t need to tell people like, this is the one right way to do this. I’ll tell you what I’ve done. And if you think I can help you, I can help you. I think that’s a much better way to live your life, because then you don’t have this chip on your shoulder. You’re like, You need to always prove yourself.
Tim Stoddart: Yeah, you’re not insecure. Well, it’s not that you’re not insecure, right? Everybody has insecurities. It’s just the contentedness that comes from learning lessons the real way makes it so that you don’t actually care if anybody thinks that you’re right or not. It’s just like this strange life paradox.
It’s kind of one of those things where you’re a dad now and you turn into a dad, you’re like, Man, my dad was right about so much. I can just picture trying to tell my son about the stupid things he’s going to do. And I’m like, “I don’t know how to explain this to you, and I know you’re not going to listen to me because you’re just dumb and you haven’t gotten the shit kicked out of you yet and I love you anyway. But man, I’m going to laugh so hard in the same way that my dad is laughing now when you come to me 20 years from now, like, Oh, Dad, you’re right about so much.”
It’s like this really cruel joke that the universe plays where they just don’t make it possible to listen to your dad. And it’s kind of life’s way of doing that. It’s like, Well, you’re not going to listen to me even though I’m trying to teach you these lessons everywhere. So, you know what? Just figure it out by yourself and go through all this pain. And then after the fact, you’ll be like, Oh, I was right all along.
Joe Casabona: My dad had said to me, like, “Oh, I remember when I was a teenager and knew everything.” My daughter is six and I just laid that line on her because she is… I was telling my parents, I’m like, She’s just like, she has opinions on everything and she thinks she’s always right and she’s always got something to say. And they just start laughing because I just described myself to them. Like, Dang! Brutal. I know. I just like roasted myself inadvertently, which is crazy.
Tim, this has been so much fun. We’ve been talking for an hour now. I want to respect your time, but I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope those of you who have listened, who got all of the extra bits, also enjoyed it as well. But Tim, if people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?
Tim Stoddart: My website, Timstodz.com. I send out a newsletter every Friday, and people like it, so I hope you will too.
Joe Casabona: Awesome. I will link to that and everything we talked about over in the show notes at howibuilt.it/323. Find all the links, more about our sponsors, sign up for pro. I’ll also link to Authority Pro. While you were talking, I checked the source and I confirmed that it’s Authority Pro. I don’t know if you know. That I was a WordPress developer for like 20 years before I moved into podcasting. I worked for Crowd Favorite and all that stuff. So very different turn from WordPress development to podcast coaching. But Tim, thanks so much for spending some time with me and the listeners today. I really appreciate it.
Tim Stoddart: Likewise. Bye, bro. Talk soon.
Joe Casabona: Thank you for listening. Thanks to our sponsors. And until next time, get out there and build something.