Email Launch Campaigns, Modern Affiliate Marketing, and Choosing the Right Community Chat

Hey folks and welcome to another episode of the Creator Toolbox. This is the show all about the nuts and bolts behind your creator business. I'm Colin Gray from the podcast host dot com. Join me Jacob, as always. How you getting on, Jacob? Hello, Colin. I'm good. Good to be back. Good, good. Looking nice and purple. You've got that, that background D in though. I think that is about as close to al to purple

as I'm getting. I've tried. I've got it written on the back of the light, the number that I have to get to it on. On some masking tape. So. Oh, nice. Where did you find, where did you find a colored LED in Chiang Mai? Where's the, where's the local lighting store there? You maybe kid, but there is actually a lighting store and I didn't expect her

to be. I was fully expecting to have to go AliExpress or something like that or get something when I was in Bangkok, but there is actually a lighting store in, in one of the shopping malls and it's literally just lighting, which is perfect. Wild. So ideal. Good stuff. Well, what we got today? Today we've got a we discussion from yourself around your experience with using First Promoter for our affiliate program. Eh. And a wee bit more as well. Are you going to dig into other

things as well related to that? Yeah, I want to. I want to tie back

to our conversation a couple of episodes ago about affiliate programs because I've got some more information that I want to share. Okay, perfect. Yeah. And I'm going to dig into community conversation actually. So we've talked a bit about community platforms in the past, but I've been think more deeply about how we actually have people in our community talk to each other, which I think is one of the most. I don't

know, I found it actually quite tricky. So I'll talk you through my thought processes there and all the different tools I've tried out because I've tried out way too many. So I'll talk to you about that as well. But I also first want to dig into the launch of our Academy actually, or Academy 2.0 I should say. Yeah, this is. I don't know. Have I talked about this on here before? We need like an

AI. I've talked about this. We need an AI chat to be able to chat to our previous selves to ask what have we talked about in the past. I think we've touched on it. Yeah, you spoke about working on it, but that was before you launched. Definitely. Yeah,

I think that's Right. And so I've been kind of. I've been partly working on rejigging our paid community, our Podcraft Academy, which is essentially a community that teaches people how to run a successful podcast. It's primarily, or it used to be primarily, three blueprints, which are like really extensive courses, launch growth, monetization, loads of other little courses

as well. So like some of IT gear, some software, some of it presentation skills, some more standard type of courses, then checklists, worksheets, templates, all that kind of stuff. And community support as well, of course. But it was missing the action in a lot of ways. So I think I talked about that a wee bit the last time around. So anyway, launched it last week

really to sell it actually. And yeah, I found the experience. I've not done a proper launch like this in quite a while, like actually making a big effort to sell something over a small period of time. So it's been a funny experience. It's mostly primarily email, all writing an email, but I've sent it to our. We've got a main newsletter which is 28,000 people. We've got our Alitu users, many of whom have opted into hearing about other stuff we do.

So I've sent it to both groups, customized a little bit and it was interesting actually, just kind of putting it all together and figuring out how to do it. And you had mentioned something to me before or as I was creating that around, including a bit more engagement as well, like video and hopefully doing a. Maybe even doing a live video event

or something at the end of it. And in the end, yeah, in the end I decided not to go with that because of time zones and because of a few issues around that, because I couldn't quite. I couldn't quite figure out a really good thing to do at the end actually, other than just a celebration and the training wasn't really suited. Anyway, long story short, I decided to include videos in each email as well to try and do that and a little thumbnail of each video inside the emails which I felt broke

up. Did you think that worked okay, the layout of the emails in the end? Yeah, I really liked it because they're not the first one that I sent you a comment about on Slack that, that it could have been really, really long. This is the thing with email and especially when you're selling something, when you're launching something, like there's quite a lot to communicate and I think that a lot of email marketing people fall into the trap of the

over relying on like the sentence per Line thing. Do you know what I'm talking about. In an email, where everything's a line break? Yeah. Which is fine, except the email is just like blown out the bottom of your screen. You're never going to get to the end of it. But no, I liked it because it could have been a really long email, it could have been really dense, but you broke it up with a nice bit of format and there was some good kind of hierarchy there with

some headings. There was the video in there that broke up visually. The thing about the video, obviously, is it's not going to play in the email, but it does have your face on it and that makes a big difference, I think. And it's got big Playbot on it, making it look like video so they click through to it. So I liked it. Yeah, that was the hope. That's great. That's great. That came across. That was the hope. It was to mix in a bit of a person, a human,

with the text and show who was behind it. Because I think selling this community, a big part of it is the people behind it. And certainly that's not just me, it's me writing these emails. So it is me in the videos here, but it's you, it's Matthew, it's Lindsay, it's Allegra, it's all the people that help run the community. So I've made a big effort to talk about that in them. So, yeah,

that's good. I've done that for every email. So it ended up being a teaser on the Friday, which was like, I sometimes think these are a bit cheesy, but I wrote it in my own kind of style, which I think worked okay, which was, something's coming on Monday. I've been working on this for bloody ages. Way too long. Way longer than I should have. Finally, I'm going to ship out the door. And that did get a better response. I got a few replies to that, which is really nice,

actually. So, obviously struck a bit of a chord. And then when it came out on Monday, it was daily emails from then. So Monday was the launch day. It was like, here's everything that's in it and here's the reasons why I've put it together. Here's the ethos behind it, the fact that it's action rather than just education, it's tools that help that action rather than just information.

And then the following days, I've had day two, I described one of the features, which was our accountability tool, and did a video demonstrating that. Day three, I described One of the new features, which is our four minute feedback, because I think that's one of the most valuable things that we've added in as well and described that. And in day four, I've gone for FAQs.

So today going out will be a set of questions which answer all the standard stuff and also include a couple of questions I actually got by email as well. Yeah. And Friday, I haven't decided. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure we're going to do a Friday. Exactly. Well, I was going to ask like, this is a lot. This is a big, A big, A big, A big launch. How much prep did you do? Because for me, I would maybe just write them two days in advance. Yeah, I had planned to do nearly all of it in

advance. And I sketched out the structure of the emails. I sketched out the structure of the, of the campaign. Way ahead. I got a bit of a help with that actually. So I used AI to the structure of the emails, like, so if I want to do a launch, what's a recommended structure? 5 days, 10 days, blah, blah, blah. It suggested a teaser and then the five days. And I was like, okay, that sounds good. Right now, the emails.

And so I got, I got past a blank page with that and I adjusted quite a lot and I ended up rewriting the actual text of nearly every email by, by like nearly every word. But it was great actually to have a suggestion for the structure for it. So I did sort of follow a lot of the. The concepts in each email, like, you know, introduction, problem, explanation, blah, blah, blah. You know, it was good to have that little outline, actually.

But I ended up rewriting the whole thing. Do you think you would have ended up in the same place had you started with a blank page? Like did using the AI to get rid of the blank page and get that structure, like, did that actually change the end result? Because you've done this stuff before, you didn't actually need the AI? No, I don't think. I don't think

so. Yeah, I got to something very similar in the end anyway, but it's just, I don't know, I find it really useful in situations like that for the first 10 minutes of a project when, you know, when you feel quite overwhelmed with something, you're like, all right, I've done this before, but it's quite big. Right, where do I start? Right, what do I do? What needs to go in the emails, what's the things? And you start writing it out and you cross off some Stuff and you add in some stuff and oh,

I forgot that. And so it got me past that. And as soon as you have a structure there, you're like, oh, but I don't want that, I want this instead. And you change it. And that's one of the things I find most useful with. It's like somebody to bounce those ideas off that gets you through that overwhelming from 0 to 1 at the very start of any project. So that's. That's how I used it, certainly. Yeah, but the prep question. Yeah, I. I had that and then I started writing emails and I edited the first

three. So I edited Friday, Monday, Tuesday, and I scheduled them and then the next day, that was the Friday. I think that was like the Wednesday, Thursday. And then the Friday as that teaser email was going to. I recorded the first two first. No, I must have recorded the first three videos because I then included the teaser video in just before it went out and popped it into the Monday

Tuesday. So I was ready for the first two days. So I knew when I came out on Monday, I would have to do the Wednesday video and the Wednesday email as well. And from there, that was as much as I can do. I'm a terrible, like, non. Prepare too far ahead. Like, I just can't motivate myself to, like, do the whole thing like that. Yeah. So I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do all the videos. I moved on to something else. I did some different work instead. Just for variety. But in the end.

Yeah, go on, you go. Sorry, I was just gonna say, did you change any of the emails based on the engagement from the ones that you'd sent if you were kind of only a couple of emails ahead? Like, did anything change as you were. As you were doing it? Yeah, that was the thing. That was actually the. So my, My lack of prep paid off in the end because. Good. Yeah, for sure. The. The FAQs one has obviously changed a bit because questions have come in and I've included some

of those. And Friday, actually, I'm going to really tailor to the questions. The kind of, the concerns, the, you know, the pushback. That's what you always get when you sell a product. You get people writing in and saying things like, oh, but have you got this or have you got that? Or why are you doing it this way? I'd like you to do it that way. So there's all these things that you get in terms of customer pushback that you're like, all right,

so I can. I can tackle those concerns. And so that's why that's what I'm going to do. That's a job for me later today, is to write that for tomorrow and create the video for us as well. So, yeah, I like the fact. I like the way I've done it. It could go wrong, as in, like fires could start and I might not have time to actually do the thing on Friday or something could happen. But I mean, if something bad enough happens that I can't do the email on Friday anyway,

then we're probably in a bit of trouble and something. I'm sure Monday will be fine. So, yeah, that was kind of a rundown of how put it together, certainly. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's really cool. That's really cool. Big job. It's kind of how I approach it as well. I don't like to plan out a full thing like that in advance. I like to change it as I go, you know, because you will get questions and you will get that bit of feedback. So, yeah, I approve. This is

my way of working. Good, good, cool. Yeah, I can even. I can share a bit about how it went as well, if you're interested. Will I stick some numbers on screen? Yeah, that'd be cool. Yeah, go for it. So here's the. Actually, maybe another interesting point is the fact that I put it together in a sequence as opposed to broadcasts, partly because I wanted one of the things that I think we use ConvertKit for our email and one of the things I think ConvertKit struggles with a

bit is organizing the emails. I kind of wish you could filter the main feed of broadcasts because we have three or four different lists, we have different purposes, all that kind of stuff. I kind of wish you could have different timelines, I suppose, and I didn't want to clutter up the whole timeline with maybe,

what was it, 612 emails. And also I kind of wanted the reports in one place so I can look at the reports and convertkit and see actually the stats for every email in the sequence, see how the open rate has gone without having to look at all the other emails that we've sent out this week. I can look at the click rate and also it's really easy to unsubscribe people from a sequence with an action. So I have a link in every email whereby it's like, if you're not interested in the academy,

click here and you won't get anything more about it. So I like to do that just because it always makes me cringe a bit. Sending out six Emails six days in a row. So I like to give people an escape hatch, otherwise they might just unsubscribe from the whole list. And we have certainly got some unsubscribers from the whole list but you can see that actually the unsubs from the general ones. So 20 odd thousand sales, we had 70 unsubscribers on Monday, 64 on Tuesday, 40 on Wednesday.

So very few people unsubscribing from the whole thing. Yeah, 1, 3, 2 on the first day. So I suppose the people that were going to be annoyed about it, a lot of them unsubscribed on the first day. But even 132 on 29,000 people, that's not bad. It's not bad. Especially when it's a sales thing,

you know. Yeah, like when you get so tied up in knots about trying to sell something to this list we've built over years and years and years and well, there's the result, you know, like what, a fraction of a percent? Absolutely. And yeah, open rate of 44% in the first day, which I is better than our average, like our usual is 41, 42, 43. So 44 on that first day was great. Click rate of 1.1 42 on the second day,

40 on the third day, 36 on the fourth. The fourth day obviously it was just last night at 6pm so that'll creep up hopefully as more people open it. Of course. So yeah, the engagement's been really good with it and I've got through a bunch of questions too. So maybe 15, 20 different people got in touch. And again, offer list of 28,000. That doesn't sound very much but in my experience that's actually pretty decent in terms of people actually hitting the reply button and getting in

touch. And it's a high value thing as well. It's not going to be for everyone. That's it. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So. So it's selling at. Yeah, we priced it at. It's an annual thing, so it's priced at 145 per month. 145amonth, which is okay. I mean I think that's actually, I think that's actually really good value for what we're offering because it's going to be really kind of high value, high contact

coaching, the tools we're offering. I think it's great value for what we're offering but we're selling it as an annual sub because I just really want that commitment in this community. So it's 1750 in total. So, yeah, it limits how many people will subscribe. So are you going to make any big final offer in the sequence? The classic final email. This is your last chance. Yeah. So the la. There'll definitely be a bit of that on Friday. There'll be

a bit of last chance. It's closing midnight tonight and the offer we've got is this week only. You get a year free of Al, so that's worth $380 extra. You get my build your own boss course, which is my kind of creator productivity course, which is usually separate, that's worth a few hundred dollars. You get a 30 minute strategy call with one of our team. So me or you or Matthew, that's for the first 20 signups. Because we literally just couldn't manage it if we somehow this.

I mean, it'd be a good problem to have if 500 people signed up. But I kind of wanted to make that a bit more limited just because of the time involved and our full book library as well. So that's the offer. But are you talking about adding someone else, like a new element to it as well? I know, possibly. Yeah, that. That kind of makes sense for me. I don't hate to throw a spanner in the works. Right. But you've. You've been telling them about the same offer for a week.

What's different on the last day? Like, there needs to be a. If they're already thinking about it, let's say, like there's 20 people thinking about. Yes. Right, yeah. What changes on the last day? It needs to be like time or something that they've not yet heard of. Like, what's going to make them pull the trigger then? Do you know what I mean? Good question. Yeah. So one thing I've been thinking about is I'm building a podcast dashboard at the moment.

I don't know if I've talked about this at all yet, actually, but I started putting it together last week. It's something I want to add into the academy over time, essentially being a notion dashboard for how you run your podcast. So it'll be like a content management calendar for you, a guest management calendar, templates for

editing, that kind of stuff. So basically a dashboard for any new podcaster to come in and use it and they can draw it into their own notion and then they can use that toolkit to run their own podcast and the business around it. And I had considered, I've been playing around with it this week and I think I could put together a first version of it that I haven't mentioned at all yet. And I think that could be a really big value add. So that might be

something that. That wouldn't be limited. That wouldn't be just for this week, to be fair, but it would be a new thing that would hopefully be a bit exciting, potentially. Yeah, that's cool. Good idea. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. But no, I'll think about it. I'll think about any other. Any other kind of offer could add in just for this week only. Okay. But, yeah, that's cool. That's the campaign, how it's going so far. So I can update next week on

final results. Might be a total flop and no one signs up whatsoever, but we'll see. We'Ll see, we'll see. It should be good. Yeah, no, I've had a lot of engagement with it, so I'm hopeful we'll get. I mean, with the price of it and the. The fact I want to keep it relatively small and intimate, and I think it will work really nicely as like a community of, say, 100, 150 people, that kind of thing. Yeah. All who are

really quite serious about growing their podcast. They're probably more like a content business as opposed to just podcasting because we know how to run a blog, how to run video channels, all that kind of stuff, so we can do the whole thing. Thing. So, I mean, if I get. I reckon If I get 15, 20 people signing up this week, I'll be delighted. And even if we only get 10 to 15 to start, that'll be such a good little kind of mastermind style group to begin with

that we can then build from. I'd be, yeah, really happy with that. Amazing. Looking forward to seeing the results. Cool. All right.

Okay. So First Promoter. Tell me about it. First Promoter. Yeah, so, I mean, I'm, I'm. I'm deep in affiliate land right now. Have been for probably the. I mean, this cycle actually. So the last two months. This is the end of our cycle now. So part of that has been using our affiliate tool. Our old affiliate tool. I've been rebuilding the program. So to be honest with you, when I first started working on it, I wasn't paying much attention to the tool

anyway because it's not really what I had to focus on. But I had this niggle at the back of my head that First Promoter is feeling a little bit worse for wear these days. It's, you know, there's. There's so many options. And to be honest, my finger was kind of almost hanging on the. On the, on the cancel button because we're going to shut down the old one anyway. It wouldn't have been a problem to move. But actually, the day that I was thinking about it, I noticed something pop up

in the dashboard. First promoter 2.0, which is cool. And I mean, first promoter been around for a long time. How long have we been using First Promoter? Oh, since the beginning. Like our program has been on first promoter since Alitu launched. So 2018. Wow, cool. And that was 19. Yeah. Yeah. And that was. Yeah. How long have they been around before that? Oh, no idea. Haven't a clue. No idea. Yeah, no, I've been around a while, though. They've been around a

while and they always felt like a kind of stalwart of the. Of the affiliate software industry. But yep, so 2.0, it's really cool and it fixes pretty much all the things that were forcing me away. And really interestingly, I got in touch with their support and I asked them because I knew I was going to talk about on the podcast today. And I asked them, what are the things that you guys are most excited about in 2.0? Because for me, it was general UX. It felt faster, it felt easier to

find things that was really good. And it had broadcast emails. The thing that I didn't even notice in broadcast emails, by the way, I. I don't even. I don't know why they weren't in v1.0, but I'm very thankful that you started it. But the thing that I didn't realize wasn't in 1.0, because I hadn't really used it much in any anger. Certainly before I'd started working on the program, I didn't realize that there wasn't any way to associate a discount code in stripe with a

promoter in First Promoter. So it meant that people who are on our affiliate program, who are podcasters or who are making video content primarily, who aren't bloggers primarily, essentially all they have to work with is an affiliate link, which is really useless for a podcaster because they'd have to read out alitu.com?_ FBref equals and then your code. So it just didn't work at all. So I

think that really excluded a lot of the people that were in there. And I kind of took it for granted while I was using the 2.0 beta that this was just part of first promoter. But it turns out it wasn't. And this is one of the things that they raised and they were really, really kind, actually, and put me in touch with the founder of First Promoter, who was, who was kind enough to give me a bit of a quote to build on a conversation that we were having on the pod a couple

of episodes ago. Remember we were talking about affiliate marketing. Where does it go to what stages it's at? Yeah, all that stuff. Yeah, totally. Yep. Yeah. And it kind of felt like we didn't get to a point with it. I think it was mostly a rant and it was like these are all the things that I've been looking at and this is kind of how it's been going. But it was, yeah, it was a really nice opportunity to get a bit of perspective from someone

that's actually like really deep in that industry. So Virgil from First Promoter came back and said that old school commission based affiliate marketing is stronger than ever. Especially now with the rise of AI products. I'm not actually sure exactly what he meant by that. I'll maybe need to go back and double check. And then he said in B2B we don't really see much in the way of pay by post marketing approaches.

So that kind of affiliate type stuff. And in B2C we're seeing a really big shift from traditional referral links to personalized coupon code tracking while keeping the commission based model. That, that just kind of got my brain churning a bit and it made me realize that the bit that I was missing, the really obvious thing, like why is it that affiliate marketing feels different right now, it's in a different place, is evolving, but I'm not exactly sure why or in

what way. And it's. We touched on this. We actually kind of figured it out while we were talking, right? It's. We talked about the move away from blogs as the go to like affiliate marketing type channel. Like if someone's going to start a channel these days, a content channel, it's probably not going to be a blog for most people. It's going to be a podcast or a tick tock or a YouTube channel or

any of these other things. They get a lot of traffic at the moment and affiliate links just aren't compatible with that at all. So anyway, this is a really long winded way to say that I wasn't like completely wrong, but it was actually a lot simpler and a lot more obvious. And it's just that the old way of affiliate programs working with links isn't compatible with the content that is most been made and consumed now. Yeah, makes a lot of sense actually. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So yeah,

what's the solution then? Like how are they how are they working on all the new types of content then? Like what? So have you got a sense of all the new different ways that they're trying to run an affiliate program? Well, they've put focus on two things. They've put focus on the discount code model. So the discount code works in the same way as an affiliate link would. So I can see on this podcast, head over to alitu.com and at the checkout use discount code

creator toolbox and that'll give you 50% off your first month. That is actually a real code by the way, if you want to snag a free, a cheap first month and that will get tracked for our, for a promoter and affiliate of ours in the same way as they're linked. And it's, it's just a, it's a nice, really elegant solution. Right, because a discount code you can easily give away on a podcast and there are, there's, there's newer tools that had that as a focus.

I think that had that built in. But it's just interesting to see a kind of stalwart of the industry like first promoter realize this is the way things are heading, this is the way the wind is blown. You know, it's not, it's not blogs, it's not links, it has to be words, it's spoken. The other thing about a discount code is that it opens up a really easy way for you to partner with people who are networkers, like professional

talkers and meet and greeters, you know what I mean? So that's, that's really interesting. But yeah, so that's part of the focus is getting those discounts, discount codes in there and kind of supporting the new type of content that exists just now where a lot of affiliates are using or making content. And the other thing is, I think, I think they're starting to put a bit more focus on the relationship

and communication aspect. Like I said, it surprised me that they didn't have broadcast emails in there as a, as a standard thing. Ideally I'd love to see one to one emails in there and that would save me from like hopping and jumping all over my inbox all the time.

Yeah, but yeah, it's a good move and they certainly made noises to the effect of being aware that that's the direction that things are going, that it's going to become much more about relationships, much more about communication and not just, you know, giving people a link and saying how about it? Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Do you know, it obviously just hadn't come up the way we were running our previous affiliate program

because I didn't even know it didn't do that. Yeah, frankly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We weren't really doing it that way, so. And it just. Yeah. Or it's a shame. So many of those people are podcasters and we never actually gave them away, but we never thought about it because we were old school blogging affiliate marketers. Right. You know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all links. It's all links you want to get. I mean, even like

the way we kind of got around that. I suppose the way I always thought about linking people to things in audio was always just short links. So we used a lot of short links we had. In fact, I created a shorter URL at one point which was POD Host me. So POD Host me. Anything would redirect to thepodcasthost.com and so we just had podhost me first promoter or pod host me rod microphone or whatever. And that did work okay. But yeah,

it still has to be remembered, doesn't it? It's not quite as. It's not as catchy as coupon codes. Create our toolbox. Yeah. So that's cool. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. One other thing, just before. Move on, I actually got a quick discussion to have with you, but maybe after your second thing, they're adding a new feature which I'm quite excited to keep an eye on because it could be cool. Since we're already using the platform, I think

we definitely will stay with these. With these changes. I'm pretty satisfied. Anyway, they're going to be adding. I'm not sure they've actually announced this publicly, but they're going to add a marketplace, an affiliate marketplace. Not something that other people aren't doing, but. And the thing is, it's all down to the execution. And the thing that's really interesting about First Promoters have been around for so long,

you know, there's a lot of people already know their brand. So if they do start a marketplace and. And they can kind of hit the ground running with it and market it right. I think it could be. It could be really good and ideal for people like us who are already customers. But yeah, if you're looking for a new affiliate management tool, do try first promoter. Do try first promoter. I don't know if you'll by default have 2.0 enabled, but there'll be a little bar in

the top of the screen that you can press to try it out. And it's really Good, that's good. I recommend it. So thanks to Virgil and Louis for helping me out. Great stuff. Okay, cool. And a teaser for a discussion there is that coming after. Okay. Right. So one thing I've been playing with a lot recently is how to increase engagement in our community. So it ties to running the academy and how we actually run conversations in there.

What communities are you. Do you have any communities you're a regular contributor to just now, Jacob.

It's. No, not really. It swings with my interest. I'm not typically loyal to any community. Do you know what I mean? Have you in the past. Yeah, yeah. I have been through stretches. Yeah. Various, like. Well, actually that's not true. I have. There's like a few kind of Discord groups that I'm part of for different types of news, you know. Okay. Not high quality doom scrolling. Yes. Okay. Slightly more personal doom scrolling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Discord, good one.

Yeah. Do you use Reddit much these days? I do use Reddit, yeah, yeah, yeah. And obviously we've got Circle as our community platform for Indie Pod as well. So, I mean, one of the core parts of any community is just how members talk to each other. I think this is the thing I've been struggling with is how to make that really simple. Because my experience is something like Discord or Slack is actually one of the best ways to do it, theoretically, because it's where people

already exist. So you're already on Discord, Jacob. You've already got an account there. You can just add it and it's a new channel to somewhere where you already check in in your daily life. I'm like that with Slack. So, like there's communities in Slack that I've joined that I actually contribute to fairly often because I'm in Slack every day for my work anyway, and I'm used to using it. I like the platform and it just works. So there's this kind of.

There's a tension, there's a problem between going with those platforms and being stuck with their formats versus having something custom, something different, something new that's maybe more tailored to what you do, but actually you need to convince people then to live somewhere else on a regular basis. So. So we started with Facebook for our Indie Pod community, for example. Like it was all in there. Do you remember it there that. Because that was a long time back. Do I do remember it there?

Yeah. Facebook wasn't. I can't remember what happened. But Facebook became a problem. People stopped using Facebook. It was probably. I don't know when was it. What was happening in the world? Why did people lose trust in Facebook at that particular time? I mean it was. Zuckerberg was in court all the time and he was like

accused of. Yeah, he was accused. I mean it was. There was a bunch of stuff over a few years, but yeah, just trusted gradually eroded and I think a lot of people had just got bored with how it hadn't changed much as well. Like it just seemed a bit old fashioned almost while all these brand new platforms were coming up and exciting people. But fact is Facebook's still like the most popular social platform out there. Saw some stats like it still is the most used social platform

on the planet, I believe. But anyway, we were fed up with the kind of, the limitations of it. There's not much organization in a Facebook group. You can't include much in the way of information. It's literally just post after post after post. And so we. That was exactly what I'm talking about. Slack is the same. Slack is very expensive. If you pay for it and if you keep it free for a community purpose, it's very limited. You can only have certain, you can only have certain types of

groups, you can only certain kind of interaction. You can't store any of the old information, which is a big limitation for me. Yeah, for sure. Everything falls off the, off the map like 90 days in. I think it is. Is that what it is anyway? Something like that. And it's, it's such a, that's a deal breaker for me because part of the value of these communities is the sort of knowledge and lore that you build up over time. What's the point in trying to run it for a long

time if you, if you're not able to store it? Totally. Yeah. So we moved. We moved Indie Pod to Circle. And Circle is I think probably about the pinnacle that I've found right now for running a community as a whole. So it includes courses, it includes spaces, it includes spaces for different purposes like posts and card type layouts and you can lay out chats really easily. But also you can create like a space that has just information.

So the courses obviously exist, but also you can just have videos and a list and all this kind of stuff. It's just really flexible and really nice. But even it has limitations like the courses and stuff like that are a bit limited in how they can deliver. So I don't know. I started looking around loads of different platforms. I played with Mighty Networks for a while. Mighty Networks was okay. The chat and it was rubbish.

Yeah, Teachable and Podia I think, are the best for an overwhel, for an overall educational community approach. But the community side of them, the person chat, the people chat. That's not the way to say it. The way you make your community actually talk to each other is rubbish. Like Teachable does have a chat functionality in there. It looks exactly like Circle, except like way less features and quite clunky. They're obviously just copying that. Fair enough.

Like Circle have done it in a really good way. Podia are almost the same as well. Bear in mind caveat there I haven't looked at. It was about four or five months ago I looked at both of them, so don't shout at me too much in the comments. If both of them have improved dramatically since then. But they were just very basic. So we came back to Circle. But yeah, I don't know. The one thing I'm struggling with just now, those are the platforms I've played around with. But you've also got

live video events as well. Like Circle can handle live video, but equally a lot of other places handle them, like Facebook Live, LinkedIn Live, you've got Slack and Discord can do that too. Remember the old school webinar platforms as well. Did you play around with any of the webinar jams, that kind of thing? GoToWebinar and stuff like that? Yeah, totally, yeah, that was the beast in the space.

But they seem to have kind of died away a lot as well because essentially you can just do that just as nicely with Zoom and Google Meet these days. YouTube, Facebook. Yeah, anywhere. Exactly, totally, yeah. And then you had blab. Do you remember Blab as well? Oh, no, I've never heard of that one. Blab was this kind of group chat thing where you just sit. It was really fashionable for just running a massive chat room on,

off the cuff. Like you just say, I'm starting up a blab on Twitter and people would join in the link and you would get like 100 people all join in. And it had this really nice layout for all the photos along the top and stuff. And a lot been copied now. But yeah, it was kind of leader in that space. So, yeah, those are the other elements and. But Circle do that quite nicely now too. But then I do like the discoverability of broadcasting that to YouTube Live as

well, or LinkedIn Live. So that's a struggle too. But. And the final part of the piece is I kind of started to think the more modern way of community chat was instant messaging and then realized that that was basically the first potential way that People would chat as well, like old IRC and stuff, IRC servers, stuff like that. Although I'm sure forums came probably before that. Like old, old school forums as well. Yeah. So I

do like Slack and Discord and Teams for that. But there is the problem of course, that suddenly as soon as you have instant messaging there is a feeling that you should be responding. And instant messaging can feel more empty and more under manned than Async messaging I think as well. I don't know. Is that, does that, is that

fair? It is fair. There's a couple of things that are a problem with instant messaging in the community because we tried it actually we popped an experimental instant Messian room into our indie pod community. And the problem with it is people arrive at all sorts of different times a day.

Right. They might not all have notifications on and if someone goes in there and puts a question or says something and someone doesn't get back to them for like, or just no one replies in there for even like a day or half a day or whatever, like they're not going to come back, you know? Yeah, they need to, there needs to be engagement. But if it's Async, it can just sit there in the timeline. Someone will, you know, engage with it and then that's it, it's fine. But in a chat

it's different. It shouldn't, it shouldn't be different, but it is. I think it's an organization thing as well because someone can post if a question isn't answered in the chat and someone wants to post, wants to put a message in. They might not put a message in if they feel that they're not responding to the previous one. Do you know what I mean? They don't want to answer that guy. They're not interested in what they were saying. They want to say their thing but they're not

going to say it because it would be rude to the last person. So then nobody talks. It's like changing the subject. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And that's where, I mean that's where Slack and Discord do well, Slack particularly because it's got its threads so you can reply to a particular comment. So that's why I think Slack's best for that. But it just falls down in so many other ways. Yeah. So end result, I'm back to Circle.

We can't get away from it because I think Circle have just built this product which is actually really good at a range of things. It's not the best at any particular thing. I Don't. Well, I don't know about that actually. So it's not the best instant messaging for sure. Slack Discord, beat that. By far. It's not the best at courses. I think Teachable is probably the best out there right now for delivering courses and the variety of ways you can run memberships and courses. But its courses

are good, its instant messaging is good. It's not the best at live video events either no doubt like proper webinar platforms like, or even just Google Meet. Like running a proper webinar actually is probably better really in most senses. More flexibility, more power. But the live videos are still good. The real thing that it comes down to is that it can just organize all of this together in a way that everyone can navigate it quite nicely and it has this

forum based chat that just works like a dream. That's the thing it's best for really is the forum based chat. I've been able to organize the rest of it around that in a way that's quite nicely navigable, I think. Yeah, yeah, I, I have a bit of a love affair with Circle to be honest because I, I think they are, I think they're the Alito of the community world. I think the sum of the parts and having everything in there in a way that works and it's simple and it's quite opinionated. Yeah,

it just works. It's that it's, it's, it's much greater than the sum of all the parts. Yeah, I'm a big fan and it has kept things similar to our ethos with Alitu. It has kept things really simple really. Actually it's only slowly added brand new things like when it added courses. It kept it really simple but

still functional and good. Which is I think one thing to learn from in there is with Teachable, like Teachable added a community that was very like Circle but was just so much worse even though theoretically it was quite similar. It was almost a bad, it was almost like a negative. It almost showed what you could have. It was painful to use and it just created, created quite a negative experience and put me off a little bit. So yeah, I don't know, it's funny but yeah, great platform for

all that stuff. Yeah. And I, I think I'm sure they'll improve their instant messaging over time. They're. They'll improve all the, all the elements over time. But yeah, yeah, I think we're going. To remember, yeah, the, the founding team was from Teachable as well. So they've got good kind of like educational pedigree I think. Yeah. And it probably. It may not. May not be a focus, but for sure, I think they will end up with one of the most.

Most competitive education parts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'd be silly for them not to end up there. I. The courses are already good, actually. They've been improving over time, so, yeah, definitely. Cool. So, yeah, that's my rundown of Community communications, I suppose, doing a bunch of research over the last six months or so around it. So, yeah, hope that was helpful. All right, Jacob, you said you had one more discussion, one more question.

Was it One more question? Genuine question. I was actually going to send you this over Slack and I thought save it, might as well. So it'll just be a quick one. But I was editing an episode of Creator Toolbox today, and it's normally not me that does it, but I enjoy it when I do get to do it because it puts me outside my comfort zone because I have to listen to my own voice. So my question is, how often do you listen or watch

your own content? Like, out of a hundred, the last hundred podcast episodes that you've done, how many of them have you actually listened to. In whole, as in 100% of it? Absolutely zero. Really? I've not done that in a long time. Yeah. So this is definitely a bit of partially contextual and partly. I should do it more. Yeah. Because definitely this is something we coach people to do. Like, you need to. You need to. When. Your early days, when you're learning how to do this, you need to

listen to yourself a lot. And it's painful. It is. It's absolutely painful. And so I. The contextual part is that I did that back in the day. Like, I did that a lot in my early days of creating content and creating podcasts and creating videos and stuff like that. And so I kind of stopped because I felt like I'd improved enough there and I started working on other things instead. But the. The other side of it is I should still do it. There's no way you

ever finish improving on that, so I should do it more. I suppose my one caveat is I do edit my own videos fairly often, so I do listen to myself talk a lot. So I still do, like, catch myself on crutch words or little habits or ticks that have started to work their way in, or. So I still. I still definitely don't. I still definitely have ways that I pick up on things that I am doing badly, but it doesn't mean I shouldn't be listening to a full Podcast episode every month or two,

at least. What about you? How are you enjoying that? Oh, it's just. It's hard. I struggle not to skip through the bits where I'm talking. I'm like, yeah, but I'm actually kind of meant to be listening to this. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, it's hard. But it's a good thing. It is a good thing for all the reasons that you just said. Right. It's. You do pick up on, like, certainly like the first. Still now, the first episodes of Creator Toolbox. Listen to them fairly religiously because

I'm Scottish by default. I'm hard to understand. And I just checked in again on this recent episode and I don't know if you can tell, but I'm enunciating a little bit better because there was just parts of it in the last episode that I listened to that just like that. That wasn't. That wasn't individual words. That was a very, very, very long words that should have been many. That's exactly what I do as well. Yeah, absolutely. That's my.

The thing that I often catch myself on is the start of sentences. So when I first start talking, often I start very quickly and then I kind of relax into the sentence. That's definitely a style that I have kind of naturally. And so when I'm recording videos section to section the start of any given section, I'll obviously, I'll often jump in and say, welcome to the video. We're going to do this and this and this and then. Right, okay. So thank you for

getting into this. And so it goes like that cadence. And so I have to catch myself doing it, stop it and then restart. And I'll restart deliberately. Welcome to the video. Just go very slow. Yeah, it's worth doing, though. I think it's a good use of time, especially if it's audio or video, because you can just listen to it. You know, I have done that a few times where I've. We've recorded a pod. I kind of do it.

I'll stick on one that I thought that was a really good episode and I'll put myself out my misery and I'll listen to it walking to work or something. Yeah, that's actually a really good tip. Yeah. Because more often It's. It's almost 90% audio. Like, it's almost 90% your speech, the content of your speech, as opposed to the way you look and all that. You're not going to change much about your facial expression and things like that.

So it's Almost always words. So yeah, fitting it in is sometimes the hard part. But yeah, walking to work or walking to lunch or something like that. Yeah, it can be a really nice way to do it. Yeah, for sure, for sure, for sure. Cool. But yeah, absolutely, definitely recommend it. And maybe even there's something around a cycle of it potentially like spending a month or two listening pretty intently and improving a few different things. Picking out.

I Talked about the 4 minute feedback earlier on. Did I? Yeah, I did. Of course. Did we did the. Yeah. And the fact that you've so much about continual improvement and personal development and just getting better at anything is actually picking a really specific thing to get better at as opposed to just saying, I want to be a better speaker. Well, that doesn't really make mean much. Your 1. There is really a good example there. You want to get better

at separating your words out, enunciating. So that's a really particular part of speech. Other people, it might be becoming less monotone. Maybe it's like starting to focus on changing your, you know, your pitch over sentences. For me, I just said it's around speed, it's around varying that cadence, like going fast and then slow and then fast and slow. And that's part of normal speech. So getting really specific about

it. So spend a month or two listening, improve one particular thing and then take a break from it and just like talk for three months. Because you'll improve and naturally change over that three months anyway, and then come back four months later and say, right, how am I getting on? What can I improve now? And pick another particular part and then work on

that. I think, I think that can work nicely. Yeah, there's something that I did in the beginning actually, and when I was listening to those episodes, I would pick up things and say, right, I want to stop doing that. I want to improve this or, you know, whatever it was. My rule was if it can fit on a post it note, then it's worth working on. If it's more than that, it's too much. You're not going to be able to do it. You're just going to get distracted reading the

note. But like, yeah, a few words in a post note. Just something to remind yourself, this is the thing. I want to work on this episode, you know, so I'll see it at a glance and it'll come back into my memory and yeah, that's how I was doing it. Nice. Okay, thank you. That was good. Good episode. I'll see if you're out there listening, if you found this Useful. We'd love you to check out some of our products. One in particular. I mentioned the Academy earlier on. By all means.

If you want help with creating your content, check out the Academy. It's over@thepodcasthost.com Academy. We've got our coaching, formative feedback, we've got our accountability, we've got our blueprints for launch, growth and monetization. All quite podcast focused, but definitely apply to any content you put out there, whether it's video or podcasting. And the other one is Alitu, of course. Alitu is our podcast maker app. It has call recording, audio editing, it's got audio cleanup and

it's got hosting all built in. So you can find that over@alitu.com that's a L I T U dot com. We'd love to see you there. All right, if you do use AL2. Oh, yeah. Or want

to try AL2, use code Creator Toolbox for 50% off your first month. Creator Toolbox. Nice. Well done. I need to get one of them for the Academy now. Yep. I don't have an affiliate program for the Academy yet. Actually, I used a different one for the original version because First Promoter did not work with Memberful, which we were using for the Academy at the time. That's right. Wonder now that we're just on stripe with circle layers and layers of platforms. First Promoter will probably

work just fine with the Academy. Actually. I wonder, maybe this is a conversation for a future one. But I wonder about. Would you. Because First Promoter can have separate campaigns, so would you have Alitu and the Academy in the same account or is that worth as separate campaigns or is that worth splitting out? I wonder. I would put it in the same one. I put it in the same one because the people who are promoting Alitu are promoting something podcasty. So it's closely related.

I think those promoters could. It's a good high value thing for them to promote and get a good commission on. So I put it in the same one. Cool. Perfect. All right, cool. Thank you for listening, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the show. We shall speak to you next week on another Creator Toolbox. We'll talk to you then. Cheers. Cheers.