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FM. All right, let's get in the show.

Welcome to Distribution first, the show where we flip content marketing on its head

and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week I

share playbooks, motivations, stories and strategies to help you repurpose and

distribute your content because you deserve to get the most out of everything you

create.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of Distribution first.

I always say I'm excited. I realized that before when I was re listening to

some shows, I was like, I'm so excited, but I am so excited to have

Ian on the show today from Caspian Studios and we're going to talk all

about owned media portfolio. What the heck's an owned

media portfolio? Why you might think about creating an own media

portfolio and why that works for even.

I think it actually works for every business. I think regardless whether you are a

solopreneur, whether you are running a multi

billion dollar company, I think it works for everybody in some way, shape or

form. It just might change a little bit. And Ian, we're definitely going to get

into that here on the show as well. But welcome to distribution first, man. Yeah,

excited to be here. Ever since I've met you and saw distribution first, I

immediately was like, oh, this guy gets it. I love your content, love the

show, and it truly all needs to be distribution

first. That is for sure. 100%. Yeah, we'll

actually touch into that, some of this with this own media portfolio stuff. And I

think maybe let's just start with that blanket statement. So I'm coming

into this obviously with some context, you are as well. But if somebody's thinking

about, okay, what the heck's an owned media portfolio? Like, how would you describe this

to them? Yeah, so the way that I would think about it is

we're all making original content now, right?

I think gone are the days of sort of just like syndicating

stuff and just making sort of like SEO

content or things like that. And so an own media portfolio

is sort of the collection of your sort of like

edutainment, the stuff that you're making that is helpful

and educational and hopefully entertaining

and stuff that you're making for your audience. And it could be,

it could be stuff that helps them on their customer journey, although I think a

lot more of that stuff is sort of like lives in product marketing land.

Surely content is going to play a huge role in crafting that and creating it

as well. And we see that a lot. But the own media portfolio is

the stuff that is your original content. And I think

it's comprised of three specific groups, shorts,

shows and moonshots. And we'll get into, you know, these

three things a bunch. But I think the way that you think about it is

shorts are short form content, whether that's.

It's usually probably short form video content designed for social media,

designed for scrolling. So shorts are designed for scrolling, basically, like in

your feed. I believe you have a great phrase, which we'll get into about

scrollers versus searchers, which I love. But yeah, shorts are designed for

scrolling, shows are designed for subscribing. So these

are more of like long form podcasts or video series. They're found usually via

apps, perhaps on your website. Those are more of like a weekly cadence,

whereas shorts are more of a daily cadence. And then the final thing being moonshots.

And these are sort of designed for binging. This is like an immersive,

unique story, whether it's fiction, whether it's documentary or film, a huge

research report, something like that, that are released usually like yearly or semi

yearly, something like that. So I believe that the own media

portfolio is like a balanced investment portfolio

and that your content needs to be diversified. And the short sort of

like the small bets that keep you top of mind, the shows being the medium

bets that drive pipeline a little bit more predictably. And then

moonshots are like the big bets that maximize roi. Yeah. And it's funny,

so thinking through this, it ties really, really well for anybody

who is deep into my, my sort of content with the three C content

method, which is cut content, which is sort of like shorts

core content, which is sort of like shows, and then cornerstone content, which is

sort of like moonshots. I've never sort of envisioned it as the,

I like how you framed it as like a portfolio and how those things sort

of blend and you want that nice mix. I've always sort of

inherently felt that as somebody who created content in house and now

creates content for my own stuff, that in the outhouse,

I'm now in the outhouse. Absolutely. Thousand percent. Thousand

percent. I'm going to start using it from now on. And now that

I'm creating content in the house, it's like, it's why I built the show

first. I had launched my company

basically in, I don't know, November of

2022, and then by 2023, January, I

already had the show going. It was like a two months, I was like, I

got to do a show. And so even on my own, that's why I said

in the beginning, I think you don't even have to have this massive organization

behind you to be able to do something like this. I think finding those right

pieces and being able to repurpose, cut up,

distribute, make all that stuff work harder for you. So if you have this show

that's consistently coming out, then you're able to use those shorts. And

then I think what's unique with your moonshot idea, though, is, like, that's something

completely different. Right? Like, that's something that's just, like, a little

bit off the wall. Can we talk about moonshots? Because I think that's something that

I don't always think about. Yeah. And I think that the first two are pretty

self explanatory at this point. I think that, like, in terms of

adoption, it's still like, if you look at, like, the cloud 100, for

example, or if you look at which, you know, I think are, generally speaking, extremely

innovative companies, usually. Or if you look at, you know, Fortune 500, even the

amount of people that are doing shorts and shows correctly, I think is

really low, but it is happening. And usually they're like,

those people have some really sharp folks on their team, but I think people, generally

speaking, sort of, like, get that you need short form video

content. They get that you need either a newsletter, that's good.

I shouldn't even say newsletter, but like something, you know, an email subscribe thing.

I kind of look at that as, like a show, but neither here nor there.

And I think they kind of get that. And they know that you sort of

need to build subscribers. And I agree that sort of, like, in the 401 level,

we're trying to figure out how to make, like, the best versions of those. Right.

The more optimization phase, I think probably half the market is still in, like,

what should I create phase, which is exciting. But the moonshots, basically everyone

is not doing this. And I think that it's because

we sort of, like, first

misunderstand the sort of

value dynamics of investments.

And if you talk to most good cmos,

they do set aside money for experiments. It's usually 10% of their budget for

experiments. Now, the problem is that a lot of those

experiments are still sort of like one off experiments, or

there are things that don't necessarily compound, or they're sort of

like flash in the pants. So, like an experiment might be, I'm going to do

a subway takeover, which, like, a subway takeover can have an outsized

result. Like, it can have a huge result. That's what's great about it, right?

Is millions of people are going to see this, and hopefully a bunch

of those are in your target market. You know, a bunch of those won't be.

There's going to be a ton of waste. But that's okay because waste

inherently is where there is value, right? If you have a lot

of waste, that's not ideal. But if you're casting a wide enough net,

then you can also, you know, if you reduce waste by 50% and

you're reaching millions of people, bang, you just made something that, that's reaching a lot

of people. So something like that could be potentially a

moonshot. But to me, it's not because

it's not content, right? It's something that. It's an ad.

It's advertising, right? And at its core, if you

used that billboard to, like, promote your content, then now you're

talking my language. And we actually see this with one of our customers,

workado. They have an amazing show, new automation mindset and a book

that went with it. And they promote their show on the Nasdaq. New episodes,

their podcast, they promote on the Nasdaq. How cool is that? Right? How

innovative is that? Hey, we're not just going to promote, like, what we're doing with

our product and all that sort of stuff. We're going to promote episodes of our

show and the guests on the Nasdaq. So anyways, that's how you do it. That's

like, that's the 401 level type stuff. So back to

moonshots. So the thing about creating

something great and something

immersive or something entertaining is that

in b two b world, most CFO's are going to

say, what is this? Right? They're just going to be like, I'm going

to spend how much on what now? Right? 300 grand

for? We're going to go shoot a tv commercial or something like that, right? It's

pretty common. And B two B, we don't do a lot of commercials like that.

So big expensive thing. And again, that's actually advertising, right? That's

not content. Whereas if you were to take that sort of money and create

something where people could binge it, they could binge the entire thing, and

this thing could have a viral moment. It could go viral, right?

Which is like something that in B two B, we're never really that concerned with

because we're dealing with, like, small audiences, generally speaking. B two C,

much more important to go viral because you get sort of the upside. But in

b, two B, we basically make almost nothing that's worth going viral.

Right. Like most things are not going to ever go viral. Whereas a

moonshot, you're doing something that's so out there, that's so

crazy, that's so interesting, that's so compelling that someone

would binge it the way that they would binge, like a Netflix series or something

like that, or a great documentary like Tiger King Right. Those are things that

you binge. And the thing that's great about creating something that people binge is that

they go tell their friends, they tell their spouse, they want to talk about it

with someone. Like, there's no outlet. You got to go tell someone. Right. And that

is what is remarkable. That's remarkable content. And if you make a moonshot and you

make something that's good enough, then people go talk about it. And we've done a

couple of these and it's worked incredibly well because

it's something that people can consume in a way that they

only consume for their favorite shows or their favorite pieces

of content. And we can get into examples here in a second. But it's something

that is different from most of the other stuff you're doing. It can, you

know, as they say in startup plan, it can return the entire fund. Right. If

your fund is a $25 million fund and you hit a moonshot,

bet you were early investor in whatever, in Google or something,

and then you return 100 x, right? You return all the

money and then you made 250 million bang ten

x return. Thats what investors are looking to do. And thats what were looking to

do with our moonshot content. Its like how could we create something that could have

so much value that it could potentially have an outsized ROI?

And thats great to pair with shorts and shows, which can have a little bit

more of a consistent RoI. And its great to pair with the existing stuff that

youre doing, which is incremental ROI, which is like your paid

ads and your SEO strategy and other things like that. Yeah, I think

thats where content is really evolving. Im seeing it a lot more

now. In particular as an outsider who talks to

and works with multiple companies at any given time, versus being an in

house marketer where I was really only obviously only focused on one company at a

time and trying to do that. So talking to all these different companies, different

vps, market like content has really evolved. It used to be

as simple as were going to blog. Yeah. And I mean, that's

what content marketing was. And that's how I think a lot of people honestly

still default to blogging for their

entire content strategy, and I think

they default to wanting to create one or two

things that works across everything. So, like you

talked about earlier, like, this type of content fits a very specific

spot in the buyer journey. It's not trying to sell

product at this point. It's not trying to move them

in any way, shape, or form toward what you're probably right toward what you're going

to buy, because who wants to binge product content? You know?

No, you never would. And those are like, those are solving a

solution for you, right? It's like, how to content is

great. Like, you should be doing how to content. You should be doing ton of

how to content, right? But that's not all you should be

doing, right? And I think that that's a key distinction. I mean, I look at,

so I wrote this book, the serialized content framework, and, you know, we studied a

bunch of stuff, looked at a bunch of, like, the best companies that are making

what I call serialized content, which is basically something that is a

serial. It's not some, it's not a one off, right? The antithesis of

the one off is a serial, right? Which means that you come back for episode

2345, et cetera. And so the best companies are making stuff like this,

making podcasts like yours, making video series, things like that.

And so we said, okay, well, these are some of the best business ones. What

are some of the best ones in general? How does Hollywood do this? Right? And

so I believe serialized content is eating the world. And this sort of binge worthy

content is what's so popular. And everyone is obsessed with series, right? Whether it's

like literally the show cereal or Silicon Valley or Dirty John or only murders in

the building, things like this. All of these types of shows

are people's favorite shows, right? Which is really important.

And people have really zero tolerance for bad content because

there's so much out there with YouTube, and you have

mrBeast, all this stuff, all these people that are creating at a much higher

level than we are creating b two b. So the barrier is actually quite

high. And if you look at how Disney builds their content, it's

with serialized content. This is why that Marvel Studios has the

multiverse, is why they build out all this stuff. And that's sort of,

people are quibble with like, oh, maybe there's little fatigue there. It's like,

it's literally the best. The only reason why there's fatigue is because

they are looking for moonshots every single time, right? They're

just looking for moonshots. That's the entire business model is

making moonshots, right? And they made the most successful series of all time, or

movie series of all time, financially speaking. Look at what Disney did with Star

wars. It's a lot easier to market a sequel

than market the original. And this is like, a fundamental truth, right?

Sequels a lot of times stink. They don't need to put as much thought into

it. Usually the original story was really good, et cetera, et cetera. But in b

two b content, we're stuck in this one off mindset of, like,

everything we do is dead end content. And it's like you might be like, well,

there's a post that's like the next post. You know, hey, if you like this,

go listen to it's dead end content. Like, once they're done with

this, they're done with it. They're gone because they can't subscribe to it.

They can't make this part of their journey. They can't make it part of

something consistent. Is there anything that you could tap a

button on your blog that you would subscribe

to get more like that? It's like, well, they could put their email address and

get stuff every week, but that's not exactly what they were just

reading. What they were reading is whatever it is. How to

buy sass in 2024, the next piece of content, you say,

oh, would you be interested in this? And the person may or may not be,

but ultimately, it's not the same feel. It's not the same

structure. It's not the same characters. It's not all the things that they were familiar

with in the first piece. And that's why building a series is so, so

important. And this is like, what Hollywood gets is it's

so much easier to have guardians of Galaxy three because you

already know Star Lord, you already know all this stuff. It's way, way, way

easier. And we just don't do that. And that's the thing. Like, I even

experienced this when I was at metadata, and we did demand genu, and it was

a, for all intents and purposes, a pretty

typical podcast. I mean, we had two co hosts that kind of went back and

forth. It was a little differentiated, but it was not any sort of, like,

scripted, super highly edited. Like, it wasn't to that level of

content. But what it did was it made

Mark and Jason known, liked, and trusted in the industry.

Every single week, you got to hear what their thoughts were

on demand generation on marketing, on how to do it right.

You know what I mean? And so it's like there's such a, when

you talk about the ROI and the CFO, like, what doesn't show up on a

balance sheet is your salespeople hopping out

a call and how much easier that is, or people self

qualifying in or out based on what you've said,

based on what they know, what you do. It's a massive shift

in how people, I mean, you know this, like, nobody wants to go into

a sale, especially in b two B. They're doing most of that research

upfront as much as humanly possible before they make any buying

decision. Without a doubt. And I think your show is successful because we

wanted to know what Mark and Jason did. And then in the spirit of sequels,

surprise, surprise, they both have new shows. And those shows are better

than the last show, right? So they even got better. Like,

their sequels are better and the show that they were doing together was

fantastic and that y'all built and it put metadata on the map. So I had

drinks with Jason a couple months ago and he was like, yeah, we

built, we punched above our weight so much and the show is a huge part

of that. And we did this for qualify, too. Lots of companies, if you're smaller,

you know, you sort of build a show and, and it gives you a lot

of credibility in the market because you're putting stuff out there that's different, that's interesting.

And like the whole, like, podcasts are, there's too many and all this sort of

stuff, it's like, yo, there are too many books in the world, and yet people

write books every year. There are too many tv shows. They're still going to make

tv shows. Do you know why? Because, like, humans seek to understand, right?

It's like, we're not going to go back and watch Cagney and Lacy or whatever.

Maybe you will. But it's like, we want new stuff, we want novel stuff. And

what is interesting is tomorrow, we want to know what our

peers are doing tomorrow. How do we invest today

so that tomorrow is better? And, like, we're always going to be interested

in that. And therefore, new shows, new podcasts, new

series, new documentaries, new fiction, like, all that stuff

is so important to understand the world around us and to be able to build

towards a better future. That's what we're all trying to do. Yeah. And the way

media has shifted, literally every media property

has shifted and been impacted by, by YouTube, by social

media, by like the most popular, some of the most

popular content on the planet has nothing to do with

a cable network or a movie studio or any of that. It's these

independent shows that know how to create

really interesting, good content or just know who their audience is. And so they talk

to their audience and you can pick and choose. I think that's a huge part,

too. If there was, it cracks me up with the podcast. There's too many

podcasts. It's like, there's too many blogs. Yeah, exactly.

Every company has a blog. Like, what do you mean there are too many podcasts?

Like, are you just not going to do a blog then? I said, they're like,

I think there's two. I think it's oversaturated. There's too many blogs. I'm like,

you're doing a webinar tomorrow. There are

too many webinars, too. There's too much of everything. But therein lies the key. Right?

It's not about making it. It's about making it great.

It's about making it stand out. And that is where people often.

I completely agree. There are too many bad shows. I completely agree with that.

Let's go into that. What are your tips to try to dissect that then, like,

somebody comes to you and is like, ian, how do I even think about getting

the show to a point, whether it's existing or I want to do something? Like,

how do I make it unique? How do I make it differentiated? Yeah.

So first off, the way that I think about a show is that you have

to make a promise to the listener that your show, no matter what

show it is, is a promise to the listener, and you have to deliver on

that promise every time. If your show is jeopardy, it is

questions in the form of answers. Right? We got single jeopardy. Got double

jeopardy. And we got final jeopardy. Same format, same structure.

Been doing it for 50 years or whatever. You know exactly what you're going to

get every single time. Right? So first off,

how many shows actually have a structure in any way

and a promise to the listener in any way? I think the answer is few

and far between. So the first thing is, I think you need to make a

promise and you need to have a correct structure to be able to deliver on

that. The second thing is, there's so little

editing that is done on anybody's

show, yet all of the most popular things

you've ever consumed in your life were edited,

right? Name a favorite thing. I don't know if you like

the book, good to great. If you like hard thing about hard things. If you

like a Marvel movie, if you like comic book series.

Whatever it is, it was edited by an editor. Probably many editors,

probably many people. I forget the exact number now, but someone was. We're talking

one time. They're like, oh, my favorite show is. Wait, wait, don't tell me. And

I forget the exact number. So this could be wrong, but it's like ten people

who work on that show might be more. It might be 20 people. I was

talking from a b, two b standpoint. I was talking to someone. They just got

nominated for a. Webby is not. Not caspian. You know how much

their podcast team costs? 750 grand a year. Who

for their podcast? And I was like, whoa, that's a lot.

And he's like, yeah, we have five people work on it. It's great.

It's a best in class podcast. It's a show that

people are like, wow, this is incredible. They do real

journalism, real reporting, all this sort of stuff. He's like, we couldn't

make it any other way. That is the stuff I'm talking about. It's like,

so this brings me to. .3 go the extra mile.

There is no traffic on the extra mile. I promise you this. Go

further than your competitors. Go further than your peers. Do

something that they don't do. And I think you need to find

a hook. You need to find something that

is different. I'll give you a great example. Wistia came out with

documentary a couple years ago called 110. 100.

So they basically, they had an agency make videos for

$1,000. They were

commercials. And that is a brilliant

hook. You know? Exactly. I just explained it to you, explained to the audience.

You're like, I want to see that. That's great. I've seen it. It was amazing.

I remember I knew exactly what you're going to say. Yeah, that is the sort

of thing. So it was funny. I was just on. I was just on their

podcast months ago, and I was talking to Chris, and I was like. He was

like, what questions you have for me? And I'm like, chris, why the heck didn't

you make season two? I was like, you had a hit. Yeah.

So that takes it from a one off to a series,

right? So then you go, okay, what's season two of? 110? 100?

Go find another agency. Go do the same thing again. Right? It's

that simple. It's like, we already made. We spent all the time. We

build the tank, we put the armor on, we put the tracks on. We made

this amazing thing. Now go into production, go into the Ford factory. Let's make

a thousand of these things. And, yeah, so people don't end up doing that. That's,

number four is make it a machine. Make that thing a machine.

Be able to deliver that promise, that hook over

and over and over again so it's consistent and repeatable, and

they know exactly what they're going to get every single time. You got to make

that thing consistent and repeatable. And when, this is the old marketing adage, when

you're sick of saying it, people are starting to hear it, right? You gotta say

that thing over and over and over again. And when

we look at, like, the top shows, Rogan, Bill

Simmons, all these people, they've been doing this forever, for a

decade or more, they had thousands and thousands of

episodes that they've done right. So you can't compare yourself to them.

You look at Conan O'Brien, you know, his show is amazing or smart

list amazing. They have made a promise and they deliver

on that promise, but they also are natural born comedians and

entertainers. You probably don't have that right. So number five

here is you got to try to be funny. You got to

have some levity. You have to have something

that gets, put a smile on people's face. It can't just be so

serious. And you probably do not have a professional comedian on your

staff. You probably do not, as someone who's done thousands of hours of late night

tv. But there's something there. There's some levity. An example of the way

that we do this in one of our shows is we do a lot of,

like, silly drops for our segments that are, you know, we just pull quotes

from movies. That's a great way. Right. This is outsourcing your funny to

someone else who said a funny line to will Ferrell or whoever to make

a drop with a Will Ferrell joke in it. We do this segment called the

trust tree, and you hear, like, now we're entering the circle of trust,

you know, like in the trust tree, in the nest, are we not? So anyways,

funny drops and it just, it breaks it up, breaks things up for the

listener, generally speaking. You want to do about seven minute segments, which is

somehow wired in our brains that seven minutes is, is sort of like when

we're done with the topic, people are probably donating out now, but you want to

be able to add that levity, break it up, keep it a little bit faster,

pace a little bit more interesting. Yeah. And if you do all that stuff,

you're probably going to be pretty well off and, and then I'll add a 6th

thing here is. And perhaps the most important, well, actually, odd, two more.

Number six. Perhaps the most important is distribution first,

because you need to think that way. There we go, man. None of this. If

you don't distribute it, who cares? So go put some paid spend behind it. Figure

that out. Number seven, though, which is perhaps the most important, is do something

that only you can do. So in the army, we say, if I were you

can win, you wouldn't go do a battle. If you're like, hey, I think we're

gonna lose this one. Like, I don't wanna. Let's choose another battle place to

go fight where we can win. Right in. Content is much the same. There's

some advantage that you have at your company. I don't know what that is. You

might not even know what that is. But there is an advantage that you have

that other people can't compete with you on. And you need

to find that, and you need to look at your show and say,

what is it about this that nobody can replicate? If they had the

same guest on if. Oh, my goodness. We had Jason on. Jason's the

best speaker. He came on my show, and then he came on, went on someone

else's show and go, man. Jason gives the same answers on our shows. Well, you're

not differentiated enough. There's something there that you're missing. You're not

putting the puzzle piece together in the right way. Maybe if Jason

comes on your show and the way that he, the way that you ask all

the questions is in a way that's very intuitive for the listener, and

maybe we don't. He doesn't go off on as many tangents or something like that.

Or maybe your show is all about tangents or. I don't know. And so I'll

give you an example of this. So the way that we do this at Caspian,

so we have this show. Remarkable. And as you know, as a

guest. I do. I do. It's, the show is where we bring on

someone who's a head of content marketing or, or head of marketing or CMO or

whatever, and we talk about their favorite piece of content ever. And usually it's

like, you know, a Hollywood thing or an ad or whatever it is. And most

of the time, 99% of the time, they've never been asked about this before in

their life. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. So it's like, okay, so that's novel.

They've never been asked it. So we're getting a first time answer from them. So

that's interesting. And then it's also interesting because we're like pulling

these b two b lessons out. And I think we're uniquely situated in the b

two b marketing world because we sit sort of in between Hollywood and b

two b marketing at Caspian that I think we have a unique

angle of blending Hollywood storytelling with b two b.

So I don't think anyone could, they could copy our show, but you could

take all the formats and the beats and everything, but I think it would not

be the same as our show. So anyways, yeah, I totally agree. I think to

that point, too, it's, I just did a big old training on this. Inside

the distribution first community, we were talking about povs and unique povs

and having those as a basis for your content to

understand. Those are the things based on your experience,

your personality, what you find passion, you know, what

you're passionate about, what you find funny. Where do you stand out? You

could talk about the exact same topics. You could put Ross Simmons on

a show and get amazing distribution content. You could put me on

a show and get amazing distribution content. You might like both of us.

You might like one of us, but you can pick and choose and we're going

to come at it from completely different angles. Ross has like an amazing story

about how he got started, like fantasy football and like all his online journey.

It's wonderful. My story is completely different. Right. And so I'm

bringing my unique angles and my unique perspectives to that. And even in this show,

like, as you're thinking, I'm like listing, I'm thinking through like

123-4560 like, okay, like, how do I. But I think for me, like, one of

the unique things with a show is like somehow, some way I can make any

good old marketer end up bending that angle enough to talk about

distribution and repurposing in some way, shape or form because it's all going to come

back to that in some way for this show. And so it's how do you

find that unique angle and how you can bring it to the show? Yeah, I

would just add in to your point there that something we didn't really necessarily

discuss in those things and maybe is an extra point here, is

just niche down is just like niche down and just find the community

that really needs it. That really needs to hear what you have to say

because they talk about it, right? They post about it on message

boards or maybe they don't post about it because no one's

ever really asked them. That's with remarkable, I mean, I think about that

show and like, that's something no one is ever posting about. And truly,

you can make an argument, nobody cares. Like, if we don't come out with another

episode, nobody's, everybody's going to be perfectly fine. But I think

its important to share

inspiration and education

with your community. In our case, community of marketing

and content people. That pushes them, that

sparks ideas, that makes them think of new things. Because we are creatives.

We have to be in taking other creative things in order to

create ourselves. And so originally, I really

wanted to push that show and be like, it's an idea about inspo, right? It's

an idea to help you get the creative juices going. And that didn't sound, didn't

sound as fun or as good of a hook, but that's really what it is,

right? That's what it is. And we know that our audience needs that. We know

that because I need that when I'm creating, I need inspiration. And we know

that they need that. Even if they're not going to go post on a message

board of, hey, I need Inspo today. What the heck are y'all watching? What are

you listening to? But people do ask me that, you know, like, oh, what's your

favorite show? And I'm like, hey, well, let's make a show about favorite shows anyways.

Yeah, no, I'm with you there. And I think the balance for, I know for

me personally is it's very easy to get stuck in inspiration

mode of like, oh, I'm going to watch what they're doing. I'm not like, I'm

a huge advocate for reverse engineering. You've already mentioned, like, three or four different

companies, Disney and Marvel and Silicon Valley. Like, all of these different show, like,

reverse it. What makes that interesting? What makes that unique? What makes that cool?

And then I think the next point after that is what you said before about

niching down is like, all right, now lean into your niche and your

uniqueness. And how do you do that for your people? Not

copy paste. Oh, now I'm going to make the remarkable show

for x, Y and Z audience or whatever. You know what I mean? It's easy

to try and copy paste that in and I think finding those unique

angles for what you want to talk about and for what, you

know. But then, yeah, find that inspiration and how you can do that. There's been

so many little things that I've added to the show, to

my clips, to just, I'll see a cool clip and be like, oh, I like

how that cut from that way to that way. How can I maybe think about

doing something like that next time on mine? Or. You know what I mean? You're

just constantly looking for those ideas. Yeah. Don't make hot ones

for your. For your demographic.

Make. You don't say. I said you don't say,

but make your version of hot ones. Right. Just don't feed people

hot wings and do the, you know, whatever. And if you want to. If you

want to do that, fine. If you want to do that, I'm not here to

judge you. Do whatever works. If it works, it works. But what's

your version of hot ones? Right, like, how the hot ones is about taking

someone, asking really good questions and putting

them in a place of physical discomfort such

that their answers, you're going to get better answers

because they're doing this thing. And really what it is is there's an a

story and a b story. The a story is, can they. Can

they finish all the wings? And the b story is what in their life

journey got them to where they are sitting there eating wings. Right. And so what's

your version of that? It's like, hey, maybe it's people tying knots while they're answering

questions or whatever. I don't know. That's a terrible idea. Rubik's cube. But,

um. But, yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, before we bounce, I got

one more question I got to drill into here as we're thinking about how to

do this stuff, because I think one of the questions that I've been

seeing more and more is around the shorts side

of the house in terms of, we've got the show, we've got a

podcast, we've got webinars, whatever they are. Maybe we even did

a documentary for our company. How do we think about taking

those and creating valuable shorts out

of those bigger pieces of content? Yeah. Well, two things here.

Number one, I think about this a lot. Like, we did this show, murder in

HR, which was hugely successful, got a. Over a million listeners in the first

season. We're coming back. Season two is going to be this fall. And I was

thinking about this because we can't do shorts.

So I'm thinking about, like, okay, well, we could do a trailer. We did a

trailer last season that did pretty good. So maybe we could do a cool trailer,

but we can't put the actors in the trailer. Cause we're just recording their voices

and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, how do we do

shorts? And it's kind of been making me think about shorts, right? Because there are

certain things you just have to get creative on. And I don't know the answer

to this question, but theres no short really

that we could create. And so were thinking about this. Okay, how do we tease

season two? How do we tease whats going on? We had a bunch of really

creative ideas for shorts for season one, for our

trailer of like what could we do? We did a really cool one for

our show, the hacker Chronicles, this little trailer where it was sort

of someone clicking around on a desktop and

clicking into a folder and finding a photo. And then that

photo is pixelated and it comes into view. And then you see Michael

C. Hall, who played Dexter and he's the bad guy in season two. We're like,

oh, that's kind of cool. So yeah, so the first part about shorts and like

I said, I've been thinking about this with murder and hr is like, what if

you have a piece of content that there's no obvious short? How do you make

it? Maybe we could make shorts about the making of. Maybe we could

go and do some stuff there. Maybe some behind the scenes

content would do really well in shorts. Maybe we can talk about

writing it. Maybe we could talk about bring fans on and maybe talk about why

they love the show and record that and create some shorts there. So there's always

a process, even if it's really hard to figure out what the shorts should be.

The second piece here is for the clips and stuff like that. My piece on

creating a great short is just let it live in feed. You know, you hear

about zero click content, just let it live in feed. That's fine. Just

make it the best piece of content possible. Just let it live in feed. And

I think that a lot of times people are just like, like subscribe rate review.

Who cares? Like literally, who cares? I don't care. I don't care

if you ever listen to an episode of my podcast for your

entire life, but the fact that you see little clips of it and

that's all you'd consume, that's great. You're a listener, right? That's

all I care about is that hopefully I provide a little bit of value to

you. So I think that they should be able to live on their own in

the feeds and maybe throw some paid on that for LinkedIn. I think

that could do pretty well. And then the final thing here is, and I

challenge people to think about this, is with your

content, when you record something good, what would the aftershow

be? What would be when we cut back to you in the studio.

What would be the synthesis of this information? How could

you take what they said, put a little twist on it? How could you

take what they said and use those as,

you know, their three best thing that they said, or actually on social media, just

do one, because one is better. If that piece of

content had a little idea in there that you really liked, and that's the

thesis of your five paragraph essay, right. What would be the

thing that you would say about this, that you could put that clip in? Like,

hey, I talked to Jane Doe, and she is

obsessed with ABM. And then it plays this little click

from her talking about ABM, and you're like, but she thinks about it in a

way that's different from everybody else. And you hook the listener in with

that. Then you play the clip of her talking about it different. And instead of.

And the final piece of the clip would be, instead of giving an answer

to a question, I'm stealing this from Seth Godin, who. This is how he writes

his blog. So Seth, for reference, he said that his blog got great when

he stopped trying to answer everything and started asking

questions, questions that his blog is about asking his listeners

questions or his readers questions, not about giving them the

answers. And I thought, wow, gosh, Seth, the best. So the final part

of the clip would be a question and not a question on social media,

just designed to get all the stuff, but just a genuine question of, like, what

if we all thought about ABM that way? How would it

change how we did budgeting? I don't know, but I'm going to look

into it or whatever, and that's how you end it. To me, that's really compelling.

That's different. That's taking something and putting your spin

on the content rather than just putting it out there. So again, I see

virtually none of this happening on LinkedIn.

I love that we could end that way. Nobody's doing any of this. But I

think that's where I get excited about is, out of all the things

we talked about, I think some of the things that I see are the biggest

needs in content. Regardless of whether you're doing a stinking blog posted on

LinkedIn, doing a show, doing a moonshot, whatever it is, one

you touched on. Niche down. You've got a niche down. You can't be just another

podcast company. You can't just be another marketing

consultant. You can't just be another x, y and z. You

can't. There's too much. The other thing is consistency. I think

is so, so underrated. So, like you said, I

think Wistia, man, if they would have done a season two, a season three, I

think that thing could have just crushed and crushed and crushed, and they could have

been really consistent with that. I think even just having,

like, when you go harkening back to the beginning of the episode, when talking about

the investment portfolio and why you have that show as part of the investment

portfolio, why you have the shorts as part of the investment portfolio, because

they're bringing a different level of consistency. The show is probably

bringing weekly, monthly rhythms. The shorts are bringing daily

rhythms to where I'm always just, dang it, I'm always seeing stuff

about this show. I'm always seeing stuff about you in different ways in different

formats. And then the third thing, I think, is what you touched on earlier,

which ties with consistency, which is you gotta repeat yourself,

and you cannot be afraid to repeat yourself. You cannot be afraid

to say the same thing over and over and over again. I've been talking about

the same thing for three years, and I feel like I barely scratched the surface.

And we're just now hitting a point where it's starting to

resonate. Yeah, I mean, I feel like you're telling that directly to me, Ian, you

need to repeat yourself. Cause that's. I'm so guilty of that. I'm like, I wrote

this 69 page book, and I have all this other stuff, and,

like, have I ever post. I'm speaking into your soul right now,

postcode? Like, literally. Oh, I.

God, I put in my email signature. Does that count? But no, I hear

you. And, like, every single chapter of that book

should be posted on LinkedIn. I could guarantee. It's like, so

you're speaking to my soul. Send it to me after the show. I'll look at

it. I'll give you some pointers. Anyway, yeah, super fun to have you on, man.

I think this is a blast, talking through this stuff. And I think it gives

me a ton of ideas to kind of rethink even again. Just a little bit

of diff, little bit of differentiation. You don't have to be, like, wild and crazy,

but, man, just a little bit. Especially in b two b can stand out.

So I'm glad you were here to chat us through it, Ian, always. Thanks, Justin.

Appreciate having me on, and we'll talk soon. Absolutely. Thanks, man.

Later.

All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode of distribution first,

and thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you so,

so much, and I hope you're able to apply what you learned in this

episode one way or another into your content strategy as

well. Speaking of strategy, we have a lot of things going on this year that

are going to help you build your brand, ten x your content and

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So you don't miss a thing. I look forward to serving you in the next

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