Speakers:
SPEAKERS
Clint Murphy, Ross Simmonds
Clint Murphy 00:10
Welcome back to another episode of the growth Guide. Today we have Ross Simmonds on the show to discuss his book, Create Once, Distribute Forever: How great creators spread their ideas and how you can too. Ross is an entrepreneur and marketing strategist, and he’s the founder of Foundation marketing, A B2B, content marketing agency that combines data and creativity to support successful and ambitious software brands world. Foundation has worked with brands like Canva, Jobber, end Boarder and more. In this episode, Ross shares insights on overcoming the spotlight effect in the art of repurposing content to maximize its impact across various platforms. Ross also highlights the power of engaging with audiences, understanding social media metrics and the impact of valuable partnerships. Tune in for strategies to level up your social media game. This is a conversation that I had a ton of fun with. I think you’re gonna enjoy it.
Clint Murphy 01:25
Ross, welcome to the podcast. We’re going to dive straight into your book, which I love, Create Once, Distribute, Forever. And so where we’re going to start is with that concept right there. Creation, distribution. We have the age old adage from, I believe you said it was Bill Gates when he said “content is king”. And we’ve seen that shift slowly over time. People live it like it’s a little too much gospel. Now what you say is this idea that there’s a shift in the paradigm, because creating is no longer enough. Now we need to embrace the distribution. Can you get people started with what has shifted in why are we looking at distribution over content?
Ross Simmonds 02:18
Yeah, at the end of the day, content will always be at the foundation of the internet. Good content like your podcast, good content like we see from folks like Mr. Beast, all of those stories will forever be important. And I think we’ve over estimated as a culture like the only thing that matters is the content, when, in reality, the greatness and the goodness of your content does matter, but it’s not everything. And what I mean by that is, right now, I am confident that there are some great creators, some great podcasts, some great YouTubers, some great bloggers, some great writers. There’s probably even great academics who have published some game changing like technology, some game changing ideas that simply will not have an impact on anyone because they don’t understand the power of distribution. And the reason why their great content gets lost is for a few different reasons, one of them being the Internet has become noisier than ever before because everybody has mobile phones. There’s more content created every single minute than was created in all of 1998 right? Like we are creating so much content every single minute of every single day, between the tiks, the toks, the tweets, the posts on LinkedIn, the shares on Reddit, the stories, the carousels, the podcasts, there’s so much more noise than ever before. So you have to stand out amongst all of that. And you have to recognize that amongst that noise are people who are trying to get in front of the exact same people as you. So there’s more competitors than ever before, right? If you were to go back into the 1940s it was a way easier time to be a video producer, to run a video shop, to be a comedian, because in many ways, there was less people trying to do those things. But today, it’s like the number one thing that even high school grads want to be, they want to be YouTubers, right? So, and we think of that shift, we have to recognize that there’s more noise, but then there’s another shift that has happened, and that is the fragmentation of attention. So people’s attention is no longer exclusively placed on TV. Back in the day, everybody watched TV. We watched the same shows at the same time. It was a cultural experience, but now fragmentation has happened across media and content so people are able to tune into only what they want to hear about. I can go into a Facebook group and hear stories from people that I care about. I can subscribe to certain YouTube channels. I can follow certain accounts on x. I can follow certain pages on LinkedIn. I get to decide, in many ways, what content I want to consume, or at least I like to believe I can, because the final piece of this is the impact of the algorithm. And the algorithms are also making our lives even more difficult as creators to get the stories out there, because you need to understand the nuances of every single platform and how every single platform is different, and not a lot of people take the time and energy to realize that a video that might resonate with people on LinkedIn, might fall flat on X, might take off on Tiktok, but might thrive on IG. The channels are different. The algorithms are different, and what goes into a good post on one channel might not be the same on others. So, long story short, amongst all of that chaos, yes, it’s important to create valuable content, but you must understand the importance of distributing your stories, because it’s noisier than ever before. It’s more difficult due to the algorithm, and your audience is already distracted with tons and tons of other channels that are tailoring stories to them.
Clint Murphy 05:42
Wow, so much to unpack in that one answer. So what I want to do with you is break it up into pieces. So let’s maybe start with one channel, and then we’ll talk through it a little and because what we want for that listener is step one. You said there’s so much noise out there, because there’s so many creators, there’s so many people generating content, putting it out there, and the algorithm spinning it the way it wants to spin. It used to be that if you had followers that determined whether you got seen. Now it’s a for you page. It’s based on virality, although there’s ways to game it depending on which platform you are on, because the algo always changes. So that’s one element, and then we have an element that says, Okay, that’s that platform. But now I have all these platforms. How do I choose which one I’m gonna go on? And you’re going dark, you will, you should be on multiple of them, and we’ll tell you why. So let’s maybe start with one platform. Let’s pick Twitter, maybe my favorite, and let’s say that person who’s listening, who, because I absolutely agree with you, probably the best writers on Twitter, they might not even have any followers. No one knows who they are because they haven’t figured out you need an idea you need to know how to present that idea, and then you need to know how to distribute it well. For that person who’s on Twitter, what are they doing wrong, and what are some things they should be thinking about in terms of their overall approach, so they can stand out amidst all of that competition.
Ross Simmonds 07:07
Yeah, and I think this is where it comes back to the importance of having good content, but also recognizing in many ways little cheat codes to get additional distribution to your great content. So because Twitter is in many ways saturated, right? Like if you were to jump in in 2022, 2021 and you are creating great threads. You are popping off every single month with amazing content assets, you could stand out pretty easily, but over the last four years, the game has essentially changed, and now what I believe folks have to do is really think a little bit differently around the types of content that they can create that is going to generate and initiate, in many ways, virality. So what can you do to leverage and it’s already been released by Elon, essentially the algorithm around what actually gets more impressions and more shares, which is essentially replies. So you have to ask yourself, how can I start a conversation on X, how can I start a dialog where people want to communicate with me, where people are responding to me and things like that. That’s where your mental mindset should start. It’s like, how can I get people talking? Now, when you think about that, you have to also recognize that to get people talking, you too should do talking like a lot of people go on these accounts and they think, Oh, I can just have a monologue. No, it should be a dialogue. You should be engaging with people. And ideally, if you’re first in, like, you’re early in your Twitter journey, your X journey, you should be engaging with some accounts that are a little bit bigger than you. Now you might be thinking, okay, do I go after the person with 1.5 million followers? That’s not what I would recommend. And the reason is simple, that person is not going to see you amongst all of the noise and amongst all the chaos. So what I would advise you to do is find somebody who might have 5000, 10,000, 20, 50,000 more followers than you, and start to build the relationship with them. And then over time, as you strengthen that relationship, eventually, if you’re supporting them and helping them grow. They might give you a retweet, they might start to give you replies, and that gives you even additional reach. And then eventually your content will start to spread more and more frequently. And then eventually you might even start giving shout outs to them. And that stuff all compounds over time to grow your account. And if you can do that well, then eventually you’re going to build up a following where every single time you press publish on X, you’re going to see engagement rates that align with your goals and with your objectives. Now here’s the other thing that folks need to recognize. All of these platforms change. So the advice that I would give you today might be very different than the advice that I give you in six months. Recently, there’s been a lot of conversation on X around how they are investing a lot more time into video content, specifically vertical video so I would personally be thinking about, can I create vertical video content assets that resonate with people on x, or can I leverage this new feature called articles that they might start to push a lot of emphasis in with the algorithm, because this is a new product launch and maybe they want this to work, so maybe I’d experiment with that, or maybe I’m going to say I’m going to double down on threads, but unlike everybody else who’s just doing text threads, I’m going to take a page out of like Clint’s book and be like, alright, I’m going to add in some amazing visuals to take people on a visual journey. Alright, that allows you to differentiate from everybody else who’s putting like 20% of the effort in and that allows you to win on these accounts, that allows you to win on that channel. So that’s where I would start, and start to engage and be focused on growing your account and just be consistent. What about you? You like, you use the channel, you thrived on the channel. I’d be curious to get your take. Like, what do you think folks should be thinking about when they’re on X and trying to grow their account?
Clint Murphy 10:41
Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve never talked about it on talked about it on the podcast. This is, this will be the first time.
Ross Simmonds 10:45
Really, yeah, that’s amazing. I love it. This is great.
Clint Murphy 10:48
You know, you nailed it. And we’re gonna talk later about this idea of remixing, and the oddity that so many people have with sharing their own content that they wrote, not recognizing that every three to six months you have a completely different audience. You should be able to redo it. And as your audience gets larger, I think the timeline between repurposing gets longer, but what you’re able to do is you’re able to go back and say what went viral before, and how can I make it go viral again? And you do exactly what you just did. I think we had one last week. My wife now works with me in the business, and so does a lot of my repurposing of old content. And what I’ve had her do is say, hey, send me the hook and let me see a preview of the thread and I’ll edit or review it. And so she sent me one about razors. I tweaked the hook. I borrowed a bit of a line from Sahil, and then had a different second line. And then we did what you said, we added, we go to YouTube, and we cut out really good shorts that relate to my written content, and then publish that, and it goes viral now, and I want to get to your four E’s and talk about that, because there’s an important element there. And I’ve tried to illustrate to people, there’s a difference between going viral and benefiting from going viral. And so I’d love to get into that with you, because what a lot of people do is they do the thread where they say you see it everywhere on Twitter. Now, this is David Goggins. He’s unfuckable. Unfuck with-a-ble. I’ve watched 20 hours of his videos. Here’s the top eight takeaways, and it goes viral. The problem with that virality is a lot of those accounts, they don’t pick up any DMS, they don’t pick up followers, and they don’t pick up actual benefit from it, other than going viral. And so I look at it, and yes, I’m adding videos to the threads, and the videos are people that are famous, or the Simpsons, but the written content is my ideas, and so it’s leading to follows. It’s leading to conversation. It’s leading to DMs because people are saying, oh, these are your ideas, even if you’re illustrating it with someone else’s point. That subtle difference is what I learned early. My most viral threat of all time was Microsoft Excel. I think we had 60 million views on it. I think I picked up 50,000 something stupid, 30 to 50,000 followers in like, a weekend.
Ross Simmonds 13:10
Instant trust.
Ross Simmonds 13:10
Amazing.
Clint Murphy 13:10
But what was the benefit, Ross, like, am I ever going to create an Excel course? I’m not going to be Miss Excel. No, right, yes. So what are you going for? And what do you want? And I think you nailed it. You have to be a reply person. Build relationships, take it to the DMS, have conversations with people. The one thing I’d suggest to a lot of people, because the for you page seems to really be getting to people, is the use of private lists, and building the private lists in a way where so for you, I would have a marketing private list. For me, I have a real estate private list and an SMB, small to medium sized business private list. And every day, set a goal to jump in that for at least 30 to 60 minutes and just engage with people. Some people eventually block you because they’re like, I don’t know you, but 30 to 40 people follow you, and now someone else who’s in real estate sees that 30 of their friends who are in real estate also follow you in the circle, and that gives you..
Clint Murphy 13:12
Yes, instant trust. And so when you reply to them, they don’t think you’re a troll, because they notice that 30 of their friends follow you. So it builds that relationship. So expanding on what you said, everything was perfect. That’s all I did.
Ross Simmonds 14:21
Yeah, I like it. I agree. I love your point around understand what your goal is. And with me, when I think about distribution, the goal is to get something that is of value to your customers, your ideal customer, the people you’re trying to reach, trying to distribute that idea, that piece of content, because you know, when someone consumes it, there’s going to be a business related action. So when I’m talking about, hey folks, you need to distribute things. Think about an individual asset that you’ve created. It could be a course, it could be a checklist. It could be your newsletter list. It could be a blog post that you created on a certain topic that you know is a great lead magnet to capture leads, whatever it might be. And when you create your threads. In that thread, you might be talking about something on a completely different lane, but you’re referencing the most important asset that you’ve developed, which is that piece of content that you’re trying to distribute. And when you do that, that’s when the magic happens. And I believe one of the biggest mistakes that I see on X is that people are chasing the virality instead of chasing the actual outcome that leads to wires and transfers to your bank account, like that’s what I’m trying to get. So if you can’t pay your bills with likes, you can’t pay your bills with replies, but you can pay your bills with people who become leads, who become clients, who become customers, who become investors, who might want to be a partner, all of those things. So it’s important that when you log into these channels, you go in with intention, rather than just like, Okay, I’m just here to have fun, unless you’re retired, and then have fun. Have all the fun.
Clint Murphy 15:54
And then just have fun. Yeah, for sure. And have you seen some of this controversy lately going on with the real estate Twitter, and there’s a couple accounts out there that are just being trying to expose, if you will, certain accounts. And those accounts did what you and I are talking about, right? They used virality, they used relationships to grow and to generate investors into their projects, and now these people are calling them out and saying, hey, you’re not generating returns, you’re not doing a good job, and a bunch of them are leading the platform. Now, not trying to get into with you here, because neither of us probably knows enough to say whether any of these people have done anything wrong. But you know what is that element of you’re putting yourself out there, and you’re generating your income, and you’re generating your livelihood from social media. And there are some downsides, right? Like these, these attacks are vicious, and I can only imagine going home to my two kids, your three kids going home at night, and you’re trying to keep your mind on the little ones. In the back of your mind, you’re getting crucified on this friggin social media platform that generates your livelihood. Like, what happens there, Ross? Like, what do you say to the people who are afraid of that?
Ross Simmonds 17:07
Yeah, I get it. So I was in Rome with my family a few weeks back, and I started to go down the rabbit hole of studying the Roman Empire. And I learned this concept about the Bread and Circus, which was essentially the Roman Empires, they essentially gave the people bread and they had circus acts running non stop to distract them from the fact that there was a lot of corruption, that it was the downfall of the Empire as they knew it. Now, when I think of social and I think of creators, I think oftentimes we get caught up in the bread and circus of social media. We get caught up in people trying to tear each other down, people trying to be trolls, people trying to hate on other people for doing their best to try to win, to try to do right for investors, to try to do right for businesses, all of that stuff. And to, for me, the recommendation to everyone is to ignore the bread and circus, even if it’s about you ignore it and stay focused on where you want to go. Because at the end of the day, if you are not having emails from your investors directly, if your clients aren’t churning, if you are still getting inbound and people are raving and they’re leaving you testimonials, then you’re probably doing a pretty good job. And for the most part, anyone who thinks they might be not doing something right, is definitely in the mindset of their like a borderline, like imposter syndrome, where they’re probably thinking about how they can do right so much that they are doing right. So to me, I think folks need to recognize, like, when you decide that you’re going to be a public creator, you’re in the same game that a celebrity would be. And when those celebrities would walk into a grocery store and they’d see the tabloids, and the tabloids were ripping them to shreds and showing pictures of them, their kids and everything else, that’s like the extreme, like, imagine the emotions they went through. So you’re going through it on a little channel, on a little platform where not everybody knows you. And we think it’s a big community, it’s not that big, but like that is in my my viewpoint, what we have to remember is that at the end of the day, if you put yourself out there, there’s going to be haters, there’s going to be some critique. Not everyone’s going to like you, but you have to be one, confident that you are doing right by your customers, your clients, etc, and then just stay focused on where you want to go, and then go, go there. Win it. Go, accomplish your goals and achieve your achieve what you’re trying to achieve, and show everybody that you were right.
Clint Murphy 19:37
I feel like people are already calling it the Huberman method, where his response to the whole debacle of that hit piece was just gonna keep producing, not even gonna acknowledge it. I’m not even gonna take a step out of my lane, just gonna keep moving forward and ignore the noise, and no one even thinks about it anymore. You know what I mean. But everybody in this situation has dove into the circus, and they’re trying to grab a piece of the bread and it’s just chaotic because we’re giving it in a way to your point. We’re fanning the flames, instead of just saying, alright, let’s just move on with our day and ignore this. This is a beautiful answer. I love that. So we talked about one platform. I love it. What you talk about is this idea that we want to go from one to the other, right? So we’re writing on Twitter, we’re creating tweets, we’re creating long content. Maybe we’re publishing our own videos, and when we write a tweet, or we write a thread, or we create our own short form video for Twitter, what else should we be doing with that? And where should we be taking it? And how should we be thinking of that process of going wider?
Ross Simmonds 20:36
Yeah, so I’m a big believer in creating once and distributing forever, hence the name of the book. So I always like to start with, if an asset, there’s two types of assets. You have big ones and you have small ones. If you have a small one and you share it on X, all you’re looking for is a signal. You’re looking to see. Is this generating a lot of likes? Is this generating a lot of replies, a lot of retweets, something like bookmarks, something like that when you see that, that’s a signal to you that this is a topic that you can elaborate on. That’s a signal that that one individual tweet should probably be screenshot and then shared on LinkedIn as an image. It should be shared on instagram as an image. You should also convert it in Canva to a video and share that as a reel. You should also share that on your story. You should share it on Tiktok as a video as well, and that’s your initial repurposing of that individual idea. But once that’s done, what you should do is grab a cup of coffee or tea, depending on your preference, and start to think in depth around how can I elaborate on this idea a little bit deeper to make something that’s long form? And then you craft and write a thread that would go well on X, and then you turn that same thread into a long form status update on LinkedIn. You now have, in many ways, something that could live on your site forever as a blog post. You press publish on it as a blog post. In that blog post, you’re embedding the original thread that you created. You’re sharing that blog post on your X account, on your LinkedIn account. You’re also republishing it as an article on LinkedIn using their article feature. Maybe you tinker and experiment with X’s article feature. You’re taking that article that you publish on your site, and you’re submitting it to a subreddit where you know your audience is spending time. Now you’re looking at it and you’re like, Okay, that’s probably enough. But I would say no. Now you want to take that thread, turn it into a carousel, that carousel can now live as a PDF on LinkedIn. It can also live as a carousel on Instagram. You can now look at all of this content that you’ve created and say, I’m going to set up a camera and I’m going to look into it. I’m going to say and describe what this thread was all about. Now you have a video that you can share on all of the video platforms as well. You can now share that video on all of the text focused channels as well, and you can embed now that video that you recorded into the blog post that you created. So it’s indexed in YouTube, it’s indexed in Google, and you can capture search organic traffic. So that is the play that I would take with one short form content asset. On the long form side, it would be similar, except let’s throw in newsletters. Let’s throw in the idea of plugging it in a question on Quora, let’s find somebody who’s asking a question and read it about a topic that is relevant to me, and then dropping a comment with a link to that question. Start to think about where your audience is spending time, and distribute the content assets wildly to a point where you get more bang from your buck. So many people will spend 10 hours, 15 hours, coming up with an amazing piece of content, and then they’ll spend 10 minutes promoting it. And it is a shame, it’s an absolute shame. I see it happen time and time again where brands creators will record a YouTube video, they’ll put in the fancy edits, they’ll share it on Twitter once, and they’ll think that they’re already made it and that everybody’s gonna see it on that day? No, it doesn’t work that way. The people who are online at 9pm on a Friday are not always the same people who are online at 6am on a Tuesday. So reschedule, reshare, republish, remix your content and use it as much as possible so you can extract as much value as you can out of these things that you create.
Clint Murphy 24:04
So are you a fan then, like, let’s say you have individual tweets that have done really well in the past. Are you a fan of using Well, I know you are, because you have a tweet scheduled in 2089 but you know this idea of, like, Tweet Hunter, or some of the other tools, they have the evergreen feature right where you you indicate, hey, here are my top 150 Tweets. Like, even though it’s three months old, reposted every X number of months in, there’s value on that in Twitter. Like, it’s the algo still says, hey, yeah, we like you to do that.
Ross Simmonds 24:33
Yeah, 100% like, even if you the word that I view, it is, like, at the end of the day, if I can take a piece of content, a tweet that six months ago, 12 months ago, was able to generate for me 20k let’s say I’m going to retweet that every other week to see how many times I can reap the benefit of getting a 20k potential project right? So even if you reach a smaller portion of your audience. Now the downside is so low. The downside is that maybe one person unfollows you that was never going to come to pay your bills anyway, and wasn’t going to buy your course, wasn’t going to pay, wasn’t ever going to become a client, was never going to partner with you on anything. Was never going to buy a guide that you created. They weren’t going to buy a pair of socks that you sell. None of the things that you do they would have ever bought. Okay, who cares? There’s literally billions of people in the world. So yes, I am a big believer in taking old pieces and retweeting them and re sharing them time and time again. Now that’s on X. On LinkedIn. I don’t think it works as well, because in their algorithm, it’s really connected directly to recency when things are being published. The same thing exists on Facebook and Instagram, I don’t think those platforms lend itself as well to like let’s just re share this. You have to natively republish it as a new asset and then give it essentially new hashtag, new captions, and let it switch, let it like, soar and thrive. But on x in particular, people don’t care if a post that is valuable was published back in 2023 in 2024.
Clint Murphy 26:04
Okay, so that was where I was going to take it, because there’s two different ways we can look at republishing right? We can simply repost the old post and see if it can get some legs again. The other way is to take the exact same post, pull it out of the system, put it and then post it as a new post, which you’re saying to do on LinkedIn, do on Instagram or Facebook as an example. But on Twitter, you’re comfortable just sticking in like, hey, I’ve got 100 evergreen ones that just every three months they post, and it’s all automated, and I’ve got one or two going a day.
Ross Simmonds 26:33
But what I would rather is that you take it and make it 20 times better. So like, if a piece, remix it. So like there’s pieces that I would have shared back in 2022 that resonated and took off. I could just take the same copy and re share it, or I can add some images, or to your point, go find videos that support the ideas that I shared in that original thread. Or if the data is out of date, maybe I should update it with new info and new research and new data. And if people resonate with it today, and it’s likely that they would, because people are still the same people that we were 10 years ago, 15, 20, years ago, the same types of emotions and chemicals, all that is still the same. So when we share that new content with new data, new insights, it still resonates with people, and people overestimate, myself included, how often people actually see what we share like I will put up a thread or put up a post on LinkedIn or on x, and I’ll think that everybody’s seen this before. Everyone knew that we shared publicly 40 plus breakdowns of SaaS companies and how they grew. No, I get emails every single time I share that saying, Wow, thank you so much for opening this up like that has been open for six months. What do you mean?
Clint Murphy 27:46
Yeah, totally, totally.
Ross Simmonds 27:47
So I encourage people to, like, underestimate how many people you actually reach.
Clint Murphy 27:52
I mean, it’s the spotlight effect, right? We always think everyone’s paying attention to us. In reality, almost no one is, and the only people that notice are people like you or me. Like, I know, Nick Huber has about 30 tweets that he just repurposes over and over. Like, when I see the one with the hospital bed, and it’s like, you know, women will never understand how much men go through to have kids. You know, the little couch that, you know which one I’m talking about right now. Like, okay, I’ve seen that three times now. But the average person who isn’t paying as much attention because they don’t do this as part of their mission. They’re not noticing that you or me or him, or any other one, anyone else in this creator space, are doing that. So we need to let go of that fear, and then we also need to acknowledge, like that’s content that we created, like it’s our work. Why can’t I share it? Right?
Ross Simmonds 28:37
There’s a reason why Taylor Swift can go out and redo all of her album and bring them back. And everybody loves the new songs again. They’re the singing songs, just their Undertale name, new album, material, blah, blah, blah, couple things different, here and there, but everybody hits it up. Why? Because good content deserves to live forever, right? I still listen to old music that I loved back in the day. There’s also a reason why Disney keeps coming out with the same movies over and over again. How many lion kings do we need to see? Right? Like it’s over and over, replay your greatest hits, and if you can embrace that idea of replaying your greatest hits and modifying them slightly, then you win, and that’s exactly the game that everyone should be playing.
Clint Murphy 29:21
So let’s use me as an example, because I do do some of what you’re talking about, but I realize in reading the book, not enough, and so Twitter’s been my main platform, so I do a lot of my writing there. One of the things we have tended to find, and I think you get at this a little in the book, is generally when people go from Twitter to other platforms, they tend to be more successful than some of the people coming from those platforms to Twitter, and I think that’s because, especially in the old days, when you had the tight requirement on number of words at 280 characters, is you had to be able to boil down complicated things into bite sized pieces. And once you had those bite sized pieces, they could be reels, they could be carousels. They could be anything across platforms, but when you try to take a video and turn it into a tweet, it’s a little harder. So that’s one thing. So Twitter was my main area, and now what we do is we take the Twitter, we repurpose it as carousels in Canvas, in Canva, onto LinkedIn, then we do that on to Instagram. LinkedIn has gone extremely well. Instagram just goes Okay, so, and we’re going to come back to your idea of exploring a new platform every year, because I haven’t solved the Insta algo. LinkedIn, Twitter, we feel pretty good, but that’s where we stop. And where I see you going is there’s two that I feel like I’m sleeping on, because I’ve been hearing more and more people talk about and people that like really do this at a high level, like yourself, and those are Quora and Reddit, right? So Quora and Reddit, if my goal is to drive people, so I have two or three simple goals, drive to the newsletter, drive to the podcast, and then business wise over time, as I talk more about real estate, access to deal, flow, capital, people. So how do I use Reddit and Quora on top of what I’m already doing? If I’m a listener here and saying, oh, like, and then once we’re done that, like, the next thing becomes, like, how do you even have time to do this every day?
Ross Simmonds 31:12
Yeah, yeah. 100% so Reddit is my favorite channel. I love Reddit. It’s hands down, one of my favorite places to go, to learn, but to engage, to consume content. I love Reddit. Reddit doesn’t always love me. I’ve been blocked eight times, banned from it, but I have continuously come back, and I’ve been back for about three years without any bands or any and the reason is simple. When you go into Reddit and you’re thinking about distributing your content, the first thing you need to do is understand that there’s these things called subreddits, and within every single subreddit are communities. So the same way that on x, we have, like the real estate community, we have the marketing community, the SEO community, there’s a barbecue community, there’s all these different versions of x, so to speak. On Reddit, it’s very clear who is who, because they’re all within these subreddits. So what I advise everyone to do before you go into these communities and you start to ask questions or share content and seed them with your links, is to go into these communities and sort the content by top posts. And when you sort the content by top posts, you’re going to quickly start to understand what types of stories these individuals within this community want. And you might see, let’s say you go into a subreddit dedicated to real estate. All right, let’s sort it by top posts. And the top posts all happened to be a bunch of people breaking down with a lot of transparency around how they were able to leverage a home that they did a flip and get a HELOC and all of this stuff. And they were very transparent around the way that they were able to get their first home cool. So what do you do? You look at that and you start to answer and create a post that is similar to theirs, except with your story, your journey, your message, but also inside of that, you’re going to link to a few things that you’ve created. So what I like to do is, if I’m responding to a post or I’m creating a post, I might link to my own Instagram account. I’ll link to my YouTube account. I’ll link to hey, I also created a video on this topic a few months ago. You can check it out here, but you do it subtly. You don’t go all in on hey. You have to read this YouTube video to relay my thoughts. You have to add value directly in the community and then give people the optionality to be able to decide if they want to click. When you do that, you’re more likely to be kind of seen as one of us, one of the Redditors who are trying to add value to the community. And then below all of that, you can say, I also publish if you’re interested. I also publish a newsletter on this topic. I have a podcast, would love feedback, blah blah Redditors love when you ask them if to give you feedback, because it gives them an opportunity to engage in a community. Now that’s how I approach Reddit. On Quora. I’m a very SEO driven mindset when it comes to this channel. It used to be a very active channel where people are spending time every single day. Now it’s an organic SEO play. And what I do for Quora is I identify the URLs, the questions that are ranking in Google for certain things that are relevant to me. So right now, a core there’s probably a ranking question on what are the top podcasts on professional development for, let’s say, entrepreneurs cool. I would find that question, and I would answer that question, but I wouldn’t make it all about me. The first two are going to be two of my friends. The third one is going to be me, and then the next few are going to be people who I aspire to be like, and brands like podcasts that I love, that everybody knows about. That way my friends are getting love, and they’re like, why am I getting so many new subscribers? And I love adding good value and good karma to the world. And then two, three, I’m going to start to get a bunch of subscribers, and you can do this same strategy on Reddit, Quora, etc, to kind of fill up the questions the communities that are relevant to you with content assets that are ultimately going to lead to value for yourself.
Clint Murphy 34:55
I love that. Are you doing the same thing on LinkedIn with these new articles that are out in the ability to use those articles to become, you know, top voice because you’re, you know, you’re responding to all the marketing or all the SaaS articles. Have you seen people who are kind of gaming that top voice system by using articles and replying to articles?
Ross Simmonds 35:21
There’s been two elements of it. So one, I encourage anyone who wants to, like, own a little bit of credibility in their space to answer like, five questions that are relevant within your niche, and that’ll get you the top voice. And once you have that, it’s a great badge of honor, you’ll actually get more engagement on the post that you share announcing that you’re a top voice, and your community will love it, your people will love it. They’ll celebrate it, et cetera, and that will go well for you. But here’s where recently, I’ve been doing an analysis of how often LinkedIn URLs are showing up in Google, and over the last six months, it started to rank extremely highly for keywords that you would typically find on a blog or on a website. So the articles feature, if you can use that to create SEO optimized articles, you can actually start to rank and dominate the entire search engine results page, where you’re ranking number three with a LinkedIn article and number four with your own website. And all of that is connected to so I’ve been experimenting with that for my own brand. We’ve been experimenting with it for clients, and the results have been very, very promising. Will it forever be the way? No, we talked about this earlier. Algorithms change. I don’t know. In six months if Google is going to get very mad at Microsoft, who owns LinkedIn, and be like, Nah, we’re done with you guys, because open AI is trying to get us and you guys have invested in open AI, lots of chaos can happen, right? So you never know what’s going to happen. But while the opportunity exists, tap in, lock in and take advantage of it.
Clint Murphy 36:52
Let’s play around a little there with the remixing in the usage of LinkedIn articles, Twitter articles, blog posts in newsletters, right? So we have our newsletter. It’s part of our email list, and let’s make sure we come back to this idea of why we want to own our list, because of the algos, right? Renting Versus owning, as we always talk about it, right? So we have this idea our newsletter. Let’s say we’re using ConvertKit or Beehiiv. We can set it up so that they do automatically go to our website as a blog post, right like most of them have that feature now. So then the second question becomes, do you take those article newsletters, and maybe you don’t do it right away, maybe you take, like, all of your stuff that’s three months old, but turn it into LinkedIn articles and turn it into Twitter articles, so that you’re getting that long form content as an article that you already wrote as a newsletter, and now, because your idea distribute forever, like, why wouldn’t you turn it and why wouldn’t you then link it in a Reddit or subreddit and link it to a Quora question, because you wrote about that topic for you know, 2000 words, why wouldn’t you hit every single possible thing you can.
Ross Simmonds 38:06
Exactly and there’s two things that I would give as pro tips. You want to adjust the titles on each of the pieces that are on a LinkedIn article, an X article and your website article, because you don’t want to cannibalize you don’t want it to be automatically seen as duplicate content where every title is the same, because if you go to you’ll rarely see three articles in a row that all have the same title. So you want to slightly change it. So if your first one was five ways to grow your Tiktok account, the second one might be everything you need to know to grow your Tiktok account. So you’re going to adjust and shift your titles to make sure that Google doesn’t view it as duplicate content. Another opportunity that exists on LinkedIn is they now have their own newsletter functionality where you can create a LinkedIn newsletter, where people can subscribe exclusively through LinkedIn to be notified when you press publish on a newsletter, so to speak, and that can be a great way to build up those subscribers that we talked about, which is very important now, again, because you don’t own the email, it’s a little bit tricky, because that is the most important thing.
Clint Murphy 39:13
Yeah, yeah. Now you’re locked in. So talk about that. We have this whole situation that we have people who you know, people who I know, who you get to 50,000 100,000 followers. You’re making money off the platform. You’re getting newsletter readers, and all of a sudden your account gets suspended, or the algorithm changes, and your reach goes from meteoric to nothing overnight. So why do we want to make sure that we have somewhere worth sending them, whether that’s our podcast, our newsletter. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Ross Simmonds 39:48
Yeah, the best bait and switch that has ever happened in social media history was Facebook convincing everyone to pay to get likes on their page, and then force you to pay to reach the people who have already liked you. It was the biggest bait and switch, and every single social network has noticed it, and they’ve been like, we’re going to replicate that same philosophy. So great. You’ve grown your LinkedIn followers to 400,000 people. You’re only going to reach 40 people today. How is that fair? It doesn’t feel fair. So my advice in the early days of any platform, and pretty much immediately, is that people should strive to take people off of these social channels and to build your email list, because once you have people’s email, typically, the email that you have today is going to be the same email for the next 5, 10, maybe forever, and because of that, you want to capture those emails so you can constantly have that open line of communication, so you can constantly distribute to your audience. I love all of the social media channels, but the number one channel that is constantly showed up and paid significant dividends for me is my email newsletter. When I send an email, if it’s timely, if it’s relevant, if I have a request, if I have a launch, whatever it is, the ROI out of my newsletter surpasses all of the social media channels pretty much combined. Because I nurtured those relationships. I strengthened them. I show up in their inbox. We’ve gotten people from like publicly traded companies who will get an email from us anw they’ll reply back, literally, to the newsletter, and they’re like, We want you to apply for this RFP. The RFP is like, 200, 300k can you throw your hat in the ring? We throw our hat in the ring. We win the deal, because somebody has been subscribed to my newsletter for like, two years. That’s wild. So I encourage everyone to build your list. It is one of the most important things that you can do as a creator online today.
Clint Murphy 41:42
Yeah, the you know what you just said really resonated. I mentioned it on a podcast I was recording last week where I was being interviewed about this pivot from being a full time CFO in real estate to owning my own shop. And I mentioned early on there may be some fractional CFO work, and I’d met with an owner of a real estate development shop, and he felt like he knew me simply through my LinkedIn posts. And so within 10 minutes, we weren’t even talking like, get to know you. We were on a whiteboard drawing out a reorganization for his company, sharing, like, pretty pertinent information about money and shareholders and, you know? And it was just like, that would have never happened if he didn’t feel like, hey, I listen to your podcast, I read your newsletter, and I see what you post on LinkedIn. So I feel like I know you. I feel like we have a relationship already. So it’s really a good way to build it. You mentioned ROI for that platform. How do you look at each platform and assess what is the return that I get from this platform, and where do you see the biggest bangs for your buck across the social media platforms?
Ross Simmonds 42:52
Yeah, so we look at a few different metrics depending on our client, but for myself, I’ll start there. So typically, what I’m looking at is like organic referral traffic. I’m looking to see, like, where people are coming from in terms of the referral sources. So we go into analytics, and we’re looking to see how many people are landing on these assets, through Twitter, through LinkedIn, through Facebook, through Reddit, through Quora, through all of these things. And then we continue to modify and make bets based off of the trends that we’re seeing. So when we start to see trends, we say, Okay, we’re going to double down a little bit on this channel. Because it’s working. It’s resonating. There’s some things that are a little bit more qualitative that you measure, which are like DMs. So there’s not an easy way to measure the DMs that are happening on different platforms, but there’s a level of intrigue that starts to happen when you see a bunch of DMs from people asking you questions that are related to assets, asking you about your services and things like that. And that’s quite magical across the board, but you have to qualitatively follow that, unless you’re small, if you’re small and you’re, like, just getting started. Like, if I was to rewind back five years, I would probably have a spreadsheet that would track how many DMs I’m getting from every single channel. I don’t have time to do that anymore, but I would have back in the day. In addition to that, we are big HubSpot fans. I have foundation in and I’m a big believer in it. And with HubSpot, yeah, you we use that to track our pipeline, our revenue, our lead source, all of those things, to see where the revenue is coming from. And with our partners, we enforce essentially, that they do the same. We’re like, you need to be on HubSpot, because we want to see if the content that we’re creating and distributing is leading to people buying and becoming customers. Because that makes it easier for me to be able to say, look, we just published for you 30 blog posts in the last quarter. These blog posts that you might have paid x amount for was 3x the amount of revenue, because we created these things, and it’s going to continue, because they’re ranking organically. So those are the types of stories that we want to be able to tell. For some clients that have a longer deal flow, it might be looking at pipeline, things like that. So it definitely varies depending on your business. And if you’re in ecomm, it’s very simple. It’s just like, swipe the credit card. Where’s the sources of all the people swiping and then look for trends to see, like, did you have an asset that went viral that led to a significant spike in sales? If so, that’s a signal to double down on what you did there, over and over and over again.
Clint Murphy 45:13
So as you talk through the data and using HubSpot, one of the things I love that you talked about was this idea of the Sherlock homeboy method too and I love matrices. So can you describe a bit like, what is this matrix and what are the different categories? Which categories do we want to avoid? Where do we want to spend our most time? And then you have this idea of, there’s one here, where you should be spending time, because other people are ignoring it, right?
Ross Simmonds 45:39
Yeah. So I like to call myself Sherlock homeboy whenever I start a new project, because I dive deep to understand where customers and audience are spending time online. And I encourage everyone to kind of start there. Identify who it is you’re trying to connect with, who is your audience, who is going to be your best customers? And then you have to do an analysis to understand where they’re spending time, and then you’re going to map where they’re spending time against the volume of people who are there, as well as the volume of competitors who are there. And in the top right quadrant, where you’re going to see the most competitors, you’re going to see the most people, that is essentially where you’re going to see like your cash cow, so to speak. That’s your money channels. Your Money channels have all of your people, they also have all of your competitors, but those are money channels. You can be there, you can be active, and you can see the cash come in, and you know that they work. But there’s also going to be something that is a rocket channel. And a rocket channel is where all of your people are, but none of your competitors are, and that’s when it becomes very interesting, because you have to ask yourself, are we onto something that nobody else is? Is this going to take off? And are we early on this channel? This is something that has worked in my career time and time again, whether it was Reddit or SlideShare. I’ve tapped into these channels early, even Instagram. Like six years ago, I was able to tap in early, generate lots of revenue on the back of it, like you want to experiment with these rocket channels, where you know your ICP is spending time, but your competitors haven’t really figured it out yet. And then there’s things like questionable channels. These are things that are traditionally, like, more traditional, like, they’re baked into an industry’s culture where they’re investing in magazines and stuff like that. All of your competitors are there, but none of your customers are and you’re like, why do they keep investing in that? Stay away from it. Avoid it. Just like, don’t go there. And then the final piece of the puzzle is essentially the ones that are just like a complete dead zone where no competitors are there, no one that you want to target is there, and it’s a very small channel. Now I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t test those channels at all, because it’s very possible that that channel eventually starts to show signs of taking off, and if you can learn it before everybody else, you might find yourself with a competitive advantage that you can lose use long term, but with no question, you want to leverage the rocket channels and the money channels, because that’s where you Know your audience is, and that’s where you can ring the cash register for the longest period of time.
Clint Murphy 48:05
You raised something there that super important, that out that I want people to think about, because it’s something I push my wife on. She’s very good at, and she’s going to edit this, so she’ll get mad at me on this one. She’s very good at, like, taking what I’ve done and following like you post this at this time. This is what you do, very robotic, right? A bit administrative. What I try to push her on is, on every platform you have, 20 to 30 people. Put them on your watch list, because they’re studying the algo. They’re doing, what you’re doing, Ross, they’re doing what I’m doing when I have the capacity. And they’re saying what’s working right now, right? Like the infographics on LinkedIn six months ago, worked great for a period of time, and then everybody does it, and then it’s arbitrage. It’s gone. And so what are you doing across these platforms so that when that arbitrage opportunity comes up, that’s there, and it’s only there for a window like you and I both just said, adding video to your threads. I’m gonna keep doing it for the next two months. I guarantee you, in three months, everybody has videos in their threads, and then that’ll die. What are you doing to capture those moments while they’re there and then make them yours for that short time that they give that virality and they give that juice to the equation before they go away.
Ross Simmonds 49:19
So there’s two things that I would advise folks do. One is no best practice is best practice until someone creates it. So you have to be comfortable doing things that no one else is doing on a platform and seeing how the community responds and experiment relentlessly. Like try things that make you feel like this is weird. Try things that make you feel like no one is doing this. No one’s uploading an hour long video, except for a few people on X. Nobody wants to see long form content, but see what happens. Test it out. Run your own experiments. That would be the first thing that I would advise. And then the second piece, to be able to stay on top of the trends I have special situation, because I have a bunch of brilliant minds that work with me at Foundation, who are constantly monitoring trends and studying reports, and they’re feeding ideas to me all the time. But I’m also in a bunch of creator groups. So I join Slack groups. I join Discord groups where creators are talking, where they’re sharing ideas, where they’re showing their results, and I’m able to lurk and see and then start making educated decisions around okay, so everyone’s saying that they are seeing a dip in the LinkedIn algorithm recently. What are they all doing? They’re all doing the same type of content. Okay? LinkedIn just announced that they’re just rolling out this new video thing, and it’s vertical. I need to go all in on vertical video. So I’m going to get an editor to chop up a bunch of vertical video for me, and then I’m going to experiment with that and see what happens. Oh, everybody’s saying that you have to have only three hashtags on LinkedIn. Now let’s try 10. See what happens. Do I notice a difference? Do I notice that three works better? I start to run again my own experiment. So that is, in my opinion, the best approach. But then after you run the experiments, you mentioned this earlier, and I think a lot of people need to hear this again, like there’s magic in the DMs. DM your friends and ask them what they’re seeing. DM them and just be like, hey, you’re winning. I’m winning. I want you to win. Are you noticing anything different? Like, my last few posts have been flat, like any ideas, and you can have a conversation, and folks remember, like, I really think that a lot of people on the internet forget that it’s other people on the internet, like, we’re all just people, right, right? Like, I’m like, It’s networking. Like, don’t be so robotic. Don’t be afraid to slide in the DMs and tell somebody I loved your posts. Don’t be afraid to like something. Don’t be afraid to say Happy Father’s Day to a random person that you like, appreciate on Father’s Day. Like, just be human. Like so many people have gotten into this toxic, robotic stance of, I need to be a persona. No, just be you. Be, be who you are. Connect, build relationships, and when you do that good things come your way. And I truly believe that.
Clint Murphy 52:02
Have you met or spent time with or seen the content by Save your Sons? and account? Harrison,
Ross Simmonds 52:08
I’ve seen some of their stuff. Yeah. I have seen some of their stuff.
Clint Murphy 52:11
Yeah. So Harrison, you know, he reminds me a lot of you as you go through this, because I’ve never met someone who analyzes content across the platforms, at the level he does, like.
Ross Simmonds 52:23
I have to check out more of this stuff.
Clint Murphy 52:25
Yeah Yeah check out this stuff because he’s now.
Ross Simmonds 52:27
I know the visuals that he throws in are just amazing. He has, like, these old fashioned style graphics.
Clint Murphy 52:33
Like with the dog behind the back, and it’s like, you know? It’s like, yeah, he’s genius. But he, he’s taken that to Instagram. He’s taken it to Tiktok, and he studies, you know, to the level of you need people to watch for 15 seconds, and if you cross 15 seconds, you’re going viral. And it’s like, wow. Like, that’s a level of detail. So to your point, when you talk to people and say, what’s working, what isn’t working, because on Twitter, he has a spreadsheet where he has the stats on every tweet he’s ever written, like ever, you know, daily. It’s just It blows me away, the level my kind of person, that’s my guy, yeah, right, like, the level of detail that some of these people go to. So we’re thinking of writing content, and we’re thinking of creating the idea. And this is going to differ across various platforms. What are the four E’s, and how are we supposed to use them, Ross.
Ross Simmonds 53:24
Yeah, so the four E’s are essentially my foundational belief on what types of stories and assets you should create, in general on the internet. And if the pieces that you’re creating don’t fall into one of the four E’s, it’s probably not a piece that’s worth pressing publish on. So it’s educational content. You’re providing people with insight and information that they didn’t have before. So that could be how to that could be breaking research, that could be showing someone how to accomplish something, that could be sharing frameworks, ideas, theories, things that they don’t know. That’s educational content, then you want to create engaging content. So engaging content is the content that stirs up a dialogue. It gets people going, it gets people having conversations. It might get them mad, it might get them feeling inspired. It might get them feeling good. Whatever it is you’re going to get the people going. It’s provocative, right? Then from there, you’re going to have content that is what I would consider entertaining, and it doesn’t always mean you have to be hilarious. Entertaining content could be inspirational. It could be motivational. You want to essentially give someone a feeling of bliss and give them an emotion that makes them feel good. That is entertaining content. And then the final one is empowering content. And empowering content is something that for years I didn’t really talk about I always focused on engaging, educate and entertain, and those were what I call the three E’s. And then recently, I started to notice a trend, a trend that happens when you celebrate other people, when you celebrate the community, when you celebrate people that have gone through your program, through a case study, a testimonial, you celebrate others and you help them win. That is when you start to see an increased amount of engagement. And I went through the archives and I found a thread that you created, I think, back in 2022 where you started to give show notes to a bunch of other accounts, and you were like, Twitter, can give you an MBA if you follow some of these people, and you tagged all of these people. That’s empowering content, you give these people shoutouts, one of them retweeted it and was like, I got 400 new followers because of this post that you did. And it’s like, that is the magic, folks. When you empower other people, they win. And you know what? You now have forever a connection to that person because you celebrated them, and that relationship will never deteriorate because you gave them 400 followers, you potentially help them generate more income, which potentially help them give their kids a better life. Whatever it may be, chef’s kiss like that is another type of content that matters a lot on the internet.
Clint Murphy 55:55
And people, you know, what’s interesting to me, Ross on that one, is a lot of large accounts tend to not do that, right? They tend to, and so this is one that fascinates me a little. They don’t reply to that many people, and I think part of that is because I reply a lot. I’ll reply to 100 people a day, 200 people a day, because it’s like, I feel like I’m building a relationship that way. But what it does is now people are less likely to turn your notifications on because too many posts, and so it forces some of these larger accounts to almost never reply. But then I find it’s cold and sterile. And then a lot of people like, if I retweet someone’s post, because, hey, they’re always commenting on my stuff, they’re adding value to me. And I see they wrote something that makes sense, I’ll retweet it, and they get a bunch of followers. And I’m like, hey, that’s great for them. But some people feel like, well, no, I can’t retweet that person because, like, I only retweet stuff where it’s like a sponsored opportunity. But then don’t you start to feel a little emotionless and sterile from these accounts when they’re where they post a question and you answer and they don’t reply to anybody.
Ross Simmonds 56:56
Those are the worst. Those are the worst. And everyone sees it right. Like, and I think I don’t know what the I think I know what the motive is. The motive is, hey, more questions that we ask, the more replies. More replies equals potentially more followers. But I would want to see the analytics to see if that actually leads to more followers. I think it leads to more impressions, which might lead to on X, an increase in the amount of like, kickback that you might get at the end of a month with your account, if you’re verified all of that stuff. Like, maybe that’s the game, but if that’s the game, you have to recognize, like, sometimes people are asking some very impactful questions, like, what is something that changed your life? And then people are dropping, like, their deepest perspective on their emotions, and they get met with no reply. I’m like, this is cold that is so horrible. It’s like, like, That’s brutal, that’s brutal. Like, you gotta show them something. Show them something.
Clint Murphy 57:47
Yeah, I feel the exact same way. You can’t ask someone life, like, what’s had the most impact on your life, and the answer, you don’t even like it or reply to it. I mean, right?
Ross Simmonds 57:55
Especially if it’s like, somebody pouring out their heart and soul, like, I would feel bad about that. Like, sometimes I get like, everybody’s busy. I get that. But if I see someone who takes the time to write me an essay because they resonated with something, I’m putting it in my calendar at some point to reply back to them. And it might be four lines, it might be two lines, but I am getting back to the person who put so much energy into trying to, like, engage and interact with me, and I found that to work well, like I have found people. There was one person who bought something from me back in like, 2019 and they needed a refund because something had happened in their life. And I was like, Look, I got you no worries at all. I’ll take care of this. I’ll give you a refund. You keep access to the course. You keep access. When things are better your life, take care of it. Fast forward, like, six years. This person comes into my DMs and they’re like, Ross, I’m working at this top brand. We want to work with you. I didn’t even recognize the name. And then I get on the call and they’re like, Ross, do you remember me? I was like, nope, not really. But he was like, back in the day, this is what happened. This is what happened. This is what happened. And I was like, yeah, that’s powerful, that it came back around six years later. And like, to me, I think that’s the key of the internet. It’s like, treat people good, try your best, and good things will happen.
Clint Murphy 59:15
And it ties in. You know, you’ve got the four E’s. I always say people, you want your audience to know you, like you, and trust you. And the four E’s really tie into that, because each E, you know, educational content, I’m going to trust you, engaging content, I’m going to start to like you, because I’m engaging with you, right? And then when you share your personal stories, you’re bringing up that emotion, right? And now they’re like, Okay, I know you. And so when you’re able to do that, and you’re able to use the four E’s to get into those buckets, like, boom, now you’ve got people who don’t just see you as someone on Twitter. They’re like, now they see Ross, now they see Clint, and they really want to see you be successful. I love those four Es as we talk to people who are listening about growth, because that’s one of the grow and get your message out there so that you can share your content. One of the ways that not enough people use is the idea that they can just steal an audience. So how do you steal someone’s audience? And we use the term steal an audience, but we mean in an ethical way, because there are ways to do that. How do we steal someone’s audience? And one of the things I loved you talked about related to that is this idea of different partnership opportunities. What can that look like as part of the audience stealing?
Ross Simmonds 1:00:33
Yeah, partnerships are massively they’re rightly estimated in proper business, but they’re underestimated in the digital social media world, business partnerships are everything in business. 100% partnerships are everything in business. That’s the first starting point. And when it comes to the internet and it comes to growing your audience, partnerships can be ridiculously valuable as well. What does a partnership look like in business? It’s a connection that you might start organically through social where you might say, in the DMs, and you build a relationship, etc, with someone. Hey, I’m working on something, and I’m super excited to get it out there to the market. Would you be interested in me sending you a free access to it, just for a review? And that person’s saying, Yeah, no worries. But in addition to that, after I review it, Are you cool with me promoting this to my newsletter and maybe getting an affiliate link where I can get a kickback? Cool, 100% let’s do that, and then that person is now incentivized to partner with you and promote you and share your stuff and amplify your stuff, so you’re more likely to win. You can do that with ease on so many of the different platforms, whether it’s Gumroad or ConvertKit, whatever it might be like, you can set up those type of relationships with people where they get a kickback if they promote something for you. There’s also just good old fashioned handshake relationships where you just build up a private group chat with some people, and you’re like, Hey folks, we all want to see each other win. Whenever someone puts up a post, just drop it in the DMs here, and we’re all going to give it some replies. We’re all going to like it, we’re all going to share it, etc. We’re all going to win together, and we’re all going to go to Italy someday and chill out with our families and have a great time. That can also be a partnership. It’s more of a handshake, it’s more of just a mutual friendship, of let’s all win together. That can be a partnership as well. There’s so many different ways that you can win if you partner up with people, because at the end of the day, you can go so much further when you win as a group. On Instagram. Back in the day, we had this account where we were selling coffee, and we essentially found like 10 different accounts that targeted entrepreneurs. Our coffee was targeted towards entrepreneurs. Helped them with entrepreneurship all that stuff. Like we had posters, all these things. We targeted a bunch of entrepreneur accounts, and we made a list, and we said, every Monday, we’re gonna show to this account. Every Tuesday, this account, Thursday, Wednesday, Friday. And everybody just promoted each other, and it allowed us to go from 1000 followers to over 100,000 followers in the matter of like, five months, because we were intentional around wanting everyone to win and everyone to promote each other’s content.
Clint Murphy 1:03:08
And that’s what people don’t realize, right? Is level of intentionality that has to go into into the mission. And that’s part of what I talk about with my wife, Ross, is for her to be as successful on Instagram as I was on Twitter. You need those cohorts, you need those groups, you need those relationships, you need the DMs. And I think of Twitter, I don’t know if you’ve ever come across Kurtis Hanni’s account, but you know, Curtis and I found each other when we had to your point, we had like, 1000 or less followers, and we created about 10 groups over time together, and they weren’t just, you know, a lot of people hear what we’re saying and they say, well, those are engagement groups, and you’re breaking the rules it’s like, well, no, that’s not what it is like. We create groups where we’re friends, where we believe in each other, where we talk about the algo. We talk about what’s working, what isn’t. We help each other write better content, and then, because we’re friends, if you drop something, I want to know you drop something, and you tell me, I tell you, and and then we go read it. If I resonate, I drop a comment and like it. Because we’re friends. Like, so I think people.
Ross Simmonds 1:04:10
Everyone acts like, that’s not the way that the music industry is operating.
Clint Murphy 1:04:13
Yeah, Like, like, like.
Ross Simmonds 1:04:15
If everybody’s on a label, they all support everybody who else is on their label.
Clint Murphy 1:04:19
That’s what you do. And like, for three years, we’ve done that, and we’ve talked each other through, like, leaving our jobs and starting businesses. And like, people don’t realize that once you start to build these relationships on social and you start to distribute, these relationships become very powerful. And then to your point, all of a sudden, you know, you’re in California at a Mastermind together with some of the biggest accounts on the platform, and just learning, and every level you learn, how little you know about that level ahead of you, and you’re like, holy, shoot, this game is so much bigger than I thought it was, right?
Ross Simmonds 1:04:55
And that’s the best part of it to me. It’s like, I love the fact that I can be in Nova Scotia, Canada, connected to some of the greatest minds, I believe, like in in the field, and be able to build relationships with them and be inspired by those who are doing better. And like, you can get salty, you can, like, talk trash, or you can look at people, and you can be like, I’m going to root for you, I’m going to celebrate you, I’m going to cheer for you, and I want you to win, and then I’m going to buy a ticket and show up at this event, because you’re going to be going to be there, and we’re going to all win together. That’s the beauty of the instrument.
Clint Murphy 1:05:25
Let’s do a last question on the book related to that. And it’s this idea, and we talked a little bit about it early when we said Reddit, and why you love it so much. Is this idea of community based distribution. So what is community based distribution, and why is it something that not enough of us like? Why does so many of us ignore it?
Ross Simmonds 1:05:46
Yeah, I think a lot of us ignore it because we are afraid of a few things. One, we’re afraid that we’re going to be judged, and we’re afraid that we’re going to come off too promotional. So we don’t want to go into groups where we’re there for the first time and we’re sharing something, and what if people don’t like it and they kick us out and we get blocked, like people are afraid of that they don’t want to be that guy who seems too promotional. Two, we’re afraid that we’re going to go into a community where we know we want to belong and where we want to be a part of but everybody’s going to reject the stories that we share. We’re going to share something that we put our heart and soul into, and people are going to reject it. They’re going to say, We don’t like that. We’re not a fan, and that’s not a good idea. In reality, folks like there’s two things that happen in that scenario. Either one, you’re going to get really good feedback that you shouldn’t have shared something that wasn’t good, and then you can learn from that and build something better and then come back even better from it. Or you’re going to have a good debate, where you can challenge people, and people can start to see the way you think. The other reason why I think a lot of people are fearful of going into communities is because sometimes communities get a bad rap, especially sites like Reddit. As soon as we said Reddit, I think two people probably turned off the podcast and walked away. They’re like, I’m done, dynamo, right? I’m breaking out into hives already. I’m nervous, right? Like people get so fearful because they have heard horror stories about going into these channels and getting blocked, and that is why I tell people before you go into any community, whether it’s a Facebook group, whether it’s a Slack channel, whether it’s a Discord, whether it’s inside of a school community, whatever it might be before you go into these spaces, take some time embrace the inner Sherlock homeboy and try to study the way in which that community operates. Understand their rules and regulations, on how they communicate, the way they share, the way they speak. What is okay as it relates to promoting things? Where can you promote things, understand the rules that body these communities, and then after you understand it, go in with one intention to educate, engage, entertain and empower and add as much value as you can to those communities. And those communities will give you so much value back the trajectory of your career because of it will be ridiculous.
Clint Murphy 1:08:01
The, do you have some time for some rapid fire questions.
Ross Simmonds 1:08:04
All right, let’s do it. Let’s do it.
Clint Murphy 1:08:06
What’s one book that’s really had a significant impact on your life?
Ross Simmonds 1:08:09
Clayton Christensen, How Will You Will Measure your Life? It is a book that I read every year. It’s really good.
Clint Murphy 1:08:17
I love that sounds that sounds amazing.
Ross Simmonds 1:08:19
Oh you haven’t read it. You got to.
Clint Murphy 1:08:22
the. What’s on the bookshelf right now? What are you chewing on that your’re enjoying.
Ross Simmonds 1:08:27
Oh, so right now I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of old fashioned books. So I have never read, like The Godfather trilogy or any of that. So I’ve been reading like all the old school stuff. So I’m like, trying to catch up. I’ve got Lord of the Rings coming up. I’m like, I didn’t read a lot of the classics, The Great Gatsby, all those. I’ve been just like, going down a rabbit hole of the classics. Because I told myself, I’m going to tell you, like, exactly how weird my brain is. I was like, and we talked about mortality becoming a thing. I was like, I don’t want to die without reading the best books, so I need to go and read some of the best books before I’m done on this earth. So I’m taking the time to go back and, like, go through some of the classics, some of the best literature that has ever been written.
Clint Murphy 1:09:13
Hilarious, because that totally resonates, I have a list, you know, I’ve gone to a bunch of websites, and have a list of like, the top 100 to 200 like books that you should read and, and I’ve been thinking about this idea of maybe I don’t always have to have a guest on the show. Maybe I read one of these old books and then say, hey, the author’s not alive anymore. But people think this is a killer book, I’m gonna read it, and then all talk about it on the show. And here’s what I learned without, you know, little like Founders podcast. Okay, so really love what you said there. What’s something in the last year for under 1000 bucks that Ross has bought that you think to yourself, I wish I’d bought this sooner,
Ross Simmonds 1:09:52
An eye mask.
Clint Murphy 1:09:53
Which one are you using?
Ross Simmonds 1:09:55
Oh, I got like three. So I’m rotating between one that has like this Lavender scent in it, and that puts me to sleep. I found one from from Whoop so I’m a big Whoop user, and they had one that had, like, this puffy thing that goes around your eyes, and that has been a game changer for me as well. I’m always trying to optimize my sleep and not to a point where I’m anxious when I go to sleep, because I need to have perfection, like I can sleep almost anywhere. But I’m a big believer, after spending, I’d say, the first 25 years of my life, not caring about sleep and thinking that sleep was the cousin of death, and I didn’t want to do it. Now, I’m like, sleep is really important, so I try to make sure that my sleeps are good.
Clint Murphy 1:10:36
Do you use earplugs as well?
Ross Simmonds 1:10:38
I have not going down the ear plug path. But I have a reason. I have three little ones, and I need to know when they are running down that hall. I do not want them just jumping on Dad and breaking my back. So, yeah, I try to, I haven’t gone the ear plug route yet.
Clint Murphy 1:10:53
Yeah, it’s interesting with I always contrast this between my wife and I, is that I think something happens to moms when they become moms in that the slightest sound, like they’re awake in dads, it’s there probably for like, the first couple months of the birth, and then all of a sudden it’s like, sometimes my kids come in the room and have a conversation with my wife and I, like, I’ll sleep through it, like I don’t even know they you know, she’ll be like, Hey, we woke you up in the middle of the night. We all had a conversation. I’m like, no, that didn’t happen. Like, what’s one lifestyle change, behavior change, or habit that you’ve adopted that is had a major impact on your life, no time limit, just your whole life. The number one.
Ross Simmonds 1:11:35
The biggest thing, the number one thing that changed my life was calendars. I lived a very spontaneous life, and I didn’t even know it was spontaneous. I just thought that was how everybody lived. I just woke up every day and did what I thought I was supposed to do, and had a to do list and things like that, and really keep track of how much hours were going towards different tasks. But when I started to invest time and energy in creating a calendar, and I actually calendared everything in my life, from personal to professional, everything changed. Everything got better. I never lost track of time. I was way more productive, way more efficient, way more intentional, because I could review how I spent my month, my quarter, and then readjust if I noticed that I was doing something that didn’t align with my values. If I want to be a great dad, then I better start showing up for gymnastics, and I better have that time blocked off in my calendar, and I better be there. If I’m not there, then I can see it in my calendar and I can adjust the next month. So the calendar has been a game changer for me. Even pre kids, like, I would love trying to be a great son. So it’s like, I gotta see mom on Sundays. So like, all right, let me find time in my calendar on Sundays to get out to see mom, dad, all that stuff. And it’s like, those are little things, but the calendar has been a game changer.
Clint Murphy 1:12:50
That’s wonderful. I love that,
Ross Simmonds 1:12:53
Sorry that my rapid fires aren’t
Clint Murphy 1:12:54
No no, I’m the same way. I like that. So we went pretty far. We went pretty wide, deep on the book, but I want to make sure that you know the last word. Is there anything that we missed that you want to leave the audience with to think about when they think about create once, distribute forever?
Ross Simmonds 1:13:15
Yeah, I would tell everyone to think about something that they believe that they’ve created in the last six months, 12 months, 24 months that they thought was valuable, that they thought the internet would care about, that people in their community would care about, and then ask them and challenge them to re promote that thing, republish it, because on that day in which you originally shared it, everyone might have been caught up with the news. Someone who you could have viewed as like your ideal customer, could have been busy with kids or with another problem, a challenge at work, they could have had so many things going on. So I challenge you to re share it, and if you’re still on the fence after this entire conversation with Clint of like, should I actually promote my work? Should I distribute my stories? Recognize that right now, there is probably somebody who’s scrolling through LinkedIn, scrolling through X, struggling with a problem, with an issue, that if you had the courage to re share something that you created, could unblock them so they wouldn’t have to suffer anymore. And that should, on its own, be the reason why you promote your thing, because you could help somebody who is currently struggling, but because you don’t have the courage to reproduce it, they might struggle for the rest of their life. So go share that thing.
Clint Murphy 1:14:35
Oh, that’s beautiful. And where is the best spot for people to find you, Ross?
Ross Simmonds 1:14:40
Yeah, you can find me on all of your favorite social media channels. I’m on Instagram, I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Facebook, Reddit, you name it, all the channels @thecoolestschool, or just do a quick search for Ross you’ll find me. My website is rossimmonds.com you can get the book on Amazon, on Indigo, on all of your favorite online bookstores. And Clint, before we wrap this up. I want to give you a major shoutout. Thanks for having me on thanks for all the value that you provide to the community, not only with the podcast, but also on X. And if folks aren’t following you on X, I strongly encourage them to do so. Thank you for adding so much value to the community over the few years.
Clint Murphy 1:15:12
Thank you, such a fun conversation.
Clint Murphy 1:15:21
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