Transcription – [Fully Managed] Ryan Robinson Ep. 103 – Podcast Highlights and Transcript

Daniela: Everybody. Welcome to the Fully Managed Podcast. This is a podcast where we discuss marketing and business tips to help assist you in your business journeys. I’m your host, Daniela, and I’m Penji’s partnership coordinator. Today I’m joined with a very special guest, Ryan Robinson. Hi, Ryan. How are you?

Ryan: Hey. So good.

Daniela: How are you doing? Very happy to have you on the show today.

Ryan: Yeah, thank you for having me. I’m pumped to be here.

Getting to Know Ryan

Daniela: For anybody who is not familiar with who you are and what you do, just to kind of break the ice a little bit, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re all about?

Ryan: Hell yeah. I’ve been a blogger for like 15 years, whatever the hell that means. Back in the day, blogging was huge and I’ve basically been creating content online since I was in college. So I’ve been a part of a bunch of different waves of SEO and marketing and I’ve led some content teams. I’ve worked for some of the top startups in the world.

I’ve consulted for Fortune 500 brands on content marketing. And through my blog, I reach about half a million to a million monthly readers. I’ve got an email newsletter where I send kind of my low key stuff to people. I’ve done the podcast, I’ve done YouTube, and these days I’m focused on my software company, Write Blogger. It’s all the tools that I wished I had when I first started as a content creator.

The TikTok Ban and Content Platform Changes

Daniela: So, very interesting. To start off, I wanna ask you this question. I think I’ve been asking people a lot, but I think for content creation, this is really relevant. What is gonna happen you think, in the landscape with TikTok getting banned soon? At the time of recording this, TikTok is supposed to get banned in what, like three days, four days?

Ryan: I think so.

Daniela: January 16th, and I know on the 19th they were supposed to ban it. I’ve been seeing a bunch of stuff about it online. Even if you’re not a person who uses this platform yourself, I think it’s still a really big topic. Since you’ve been in content creation for so long, I’m wondering what your take is on this whole thing and how you think it’s gonna be affecting the landscape of content creation moving forward.

Ryan: One thing I have the benefit of is perspective. So because I’ve been doing this for so long, I get to zoom out and see, oh, this isn’t the first time a platform’s gone away. You look at something like Vine, right? Like Vine was huge for so long, and then overnight like boom, disappeared. And so to me, this is just another version of the same message.

And in five years it’s gonna happen again. In 10 years, it’s gonna happen again. Don’t be platform dependent. Do not have all of your audience, all of your reach, all of your content promotion efforts happening in just one place. That is so risky. And I don’t know what’s gonna happen with TikTok. I have no insider info, but to me, I have always, since the very early days, wanted to spread out my efforts.

And this is the biggest takeaway. Own at least a couple of your channels. And so that’s where having something like a blog still actually does come into play where you get to publish whatever you want and algorithm updates don’t matter as much because you own the publishing platform. And then having an email newsletter is so priceless.

That’s one of the biggest pieces of advice I would give to anyone who’s in marketing, content creation, small business owner, doesn’t even matter. The best time to start an email newsletter is yesterday. And the second best time is always today because you get to own that direct connection with people.

Daniela: I mean, I think what I’ve noticed is just like a lot of people who have grown their audiences primarily on TikTok are really concerned. Also with small businesses who do a lot of marketing efforts through this platform. But I wonder, do you think that this is going to also be changing other platforms, the way that other people interact with platforms in the future?

I’ve seen a lot of people saying like, “Oh, follow me on this other thing.” Do you think this is gonna actually translate to people being able to move their audiences to other platforms? Because they feel like, at least if I’m a viewer, it feels like a lot of work, you know? And I’m not even American, so I don’t live in the US so for me to follow whoever it is that I would be following on this, it would mean that I have to open up another app, if I don’t have that app downloaded, and then go and follow all of these people to keep seeing their stuff.

Ryan: I don’t think many people are gonna do that. Like pull up the list of who they’re following and then side by side, go do it on, you know, Instagram reels or whatever. But I find that the people who really like your content, they’re gonna be the ones that do want to go and track you down on other platforms. But content is a commodity these days. That’s literally just the reality of it.

Isn’t it like a billion minutes or something of content posted maybe daily, online these days? Which is incomprehensible to me. So I think unless you’re doing something truly magical and special, then a lot of people are just gonna kind of sift away into finding other things to do with their time and the ones that do want to build a relationship with you will be able to, but now’s a great time to say, “Hey, follow me on this platform or check out my course, join my email newsletter, follow along with me on platforms that I own,” would be the recommendation.

Blogs vs. Social Media

Daniela: Do you think there’s still an interaction or a demand for things like personal blogs and websites with the rise of social media? Because I feel like when you wanna interact with someone, usually you’re gonna go to their socials first. And you’re looking at like a link tree or maybe something like that where it gives you a person’s links. But it’s usually, you know, my first thought is, let me check out their Instagram, let me go to like, see their TikTok page or whatever, to see what they’re doing before I think of a blog or a website.

Ryan: Yes. If you reach an audience of people under 30, they’re mostly thinking social first, right? That’s just where the relationship building happens. So depending on who your audience is, right? Like if you reach people over 30, I know a lot of people. Speaking of myself here, I know a lot of people who still read blogs, still read email newsletters, wanna subscribe to a YouTube channel, listen to podcasts daily.

So there’s a lot of options out there, and really the answer is so personal that you just need to tune into who your people are and hopefully you’re in your own target market so you can understand your own consumption habits. And then see like, alright, I like doing this and that. Maybe I need to be more present on these platforms and then really just figure out how to reach people in the next chapter of this evolution because social platforms aren’t going anywhere.

There’s always gonna be new platforms and I mean, the whole TikTok ban is just about it not being an American business really. At the end of the day, like the US government just wants to have their types of control. They want to have bigger slices of the revenue, tax revenue and they want to cut off the data pipeline to China, right? So there’s a lot of interesting things going on behind the scenes. They’d be so okay with it if it was an American started business.

Daniela: Yeah, I agree. I think what’s funny, or at least to me, and this might be like a tangent, but I saw that a lot of people were saying that they’re gonna go to Xiaohongshu, which I think you call it Red Note in English, which is like the Chinese version of social media. Like, it’s the same thing, the US government ended up doing nothing to prevent that.

Ryan: Pretty much, and I mean, you look at Instagram reels, it’s literally TikTok inside Instagram. And so, I mean, if you just think about how silly that is for two minutes, like what games are we really playing here?

Daniela: Yeah. I mean, and I feel like, to be fair, I think I see, even if you’re not on TikTok yourself, my mom for example, she’s a woman that’s in her sixties, you know, but she’s always like, “Ah, you guys on your TikToks” and like this and that, and that platform sucks. And I’m just like, those reels that you’re watching on Facebook are literally the same thing.

Like all of these videos, I think I’ve noticed that they’re getting repurposed and just posted everywhere. Like I’ll go on LinkedIn and I’ll get short form videos that I can just tell they were TikToks because of how they look. And then they’re just being reposted on every single platform that you could possibly think of, which is insane.

Ryan: Yeah, there’s no real huge difference here, really. At the end of the day, and I do the same thing, like when I make short form content, I’m making it with all these platforms in mind. I’m not making specific edits for TikTok, specific edits for LinkedIn and then different style for Instagram reels. Maybe some people do that and find it successful, but to me that’s way too much work and I see enough benefits from publishing the same exact thing on all the platforms. And some of them are hits, some of them aren’t. It’s always a numbers game.

Building an Audience: Past vs. Present

Daniela: Yeah. And I think to that, I wonder how it was when you actually started doing this, because I know you’ve been doing it for a long time. Was it easier to grow an audience than it is now, or would you argue that it’s easier now than before? If you actually want to take content creation seriously and do this as a form of living.

Ryan: It is just different. The way you build an audience today is different than it was 15 years ago when I first started. When I first started blogs, writing Medium, these were all way more popular ways to attract an audience, and that worked so well for a really, really long time. But if you are trying to build an audience the old way today, then that’s a real struggle.

Like it’s not impossible, but you have to be so unique in the way that you’re writing and sharing content. If you’re not playing the games that are popular today and paying attention to the way that people want to consume content today, then you’re basically just fighting an uphill battle. So my opinion, this is what I tell everyone, who’s a customer of Write Blogger or reader of my blog, if you’re not taking a video first approach to content creation, you’re leaving most of the value on the table.

Daniela: How do you feel about sites like Pinterest? I talked to some people who were saying that they think Pinterest is a great way to do content creation without showing your face. Because they have like the feature where you’ll post like a picture and then they’ll direct you to a blog, like a direct link. Do you think that this kind of redirection pipeline is successful nowadays?

Ryan: I get traffic from Pinterest. I know a lot of people that create content and get a lot of traffic from Pinterest, but I will tell you, if you are trying to dance around being on camera or being front and center in the content you make, then you’re just trying to find fancier ways to avoid the ways that people actually want to consume your content.

So most people will wanna watch a video of you, especially if they want to build some sort of relationship with you. If you have a business behind the content that you’re making, then they wanna know who you are. They wanna go to your Instagram and scroll through a few videos, get a feel for your style and pick up on your weird quirks and feel like they know your personality, before they make a purchase with you.

And so what I find usually is that when people are trying to seek, a good example is making AI generated videos, right? Like the faceless YouTube channels, faceless short form content. There’s nothing wrong with it as a creative expression. It’s fun, but I don’t think you can build a meaningful business that’s gonna stand the test of time talking years here around something that you’re just trying to dance around, like not being in the camera yourself.

So my advice is to really just tune in to see what you’re avoiding and work with yourself. Bring yourself some loving kindness, some empathy, and recognize that the only person who’s judging your video content really is you. There’s always gonna be haters, but you’re the one that is your own harshest critic.

And I hear people all the time who say, “I hate how I look on camera, or I hate the sound of my voice.” And that’s probably only you ever thinking that. So this is the advice I gave myself. Get over yourself, Ryan, and that’s the advice I’d give to everyone else. Just give it a try. Make some videos, and then sure, if you wanna use Pinterest to promote that content, hell yeah. That’s a good channel still.

Monetizing Content Creation

Daniela: I wonder also, when it comes to content creation stuff, I’ve spoken to people who have tried to do that and maybe they’ve managed to get an audience and maybe they’ve even been able to monetize the channel, right? Like whether it’s like a YouTube channel or a TikTok page or whatever, but they’re still not able to make a living.

But the content requires for them to put a lot of time into it. So I remember I talked to this one friend who was actually growing, he had like 30,000 followers on TikTok, and then he moved to YouTube and he had like 40,000 subscribers, which is pretty good. But he wasn’t monetizing it enough, like he was not making money out of it, enough for him to quit his job and go full time into it.

But also the type of videos that he was making were tech videos. They required a lot of work to be put into it. And he wasn’t in a position where he could hire an editor, because he didn’t have any money. So he was in this weird situation and he asked me like, “What should I do?” And I was like, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

But I think it’s become really common nowadays of people trying to make this content thing their main source of income. But it’s really unstable because you’re dependent on whether you have an audience that’s gonna be listening to you and watching your videos. How do you actually realistically take the steps to do something like this?

Ryan: I love this so much because I meet so many content creators that are in very similar positions, swap in and out some of the details and it’s basically the same situation. So my advice is to look in the mirror real hard and your friend is probably just not making money from the ways that are in their comfort zone today, and it’s not just automatically easily flowing to them, right?

It’s nice when that happens, but that’s just not realistic. You have to work freaking hard to figure out a way with your audience, the people who are showing up. You have to talk to them one-on-one individually, whether it’s in the comments, DMs, emails, hopping on phone calls, whatever. But you have to talk with real people in your audience and understand what their problems are.

Whether you are educating people or entertaining people, it doesn’t really matter. Figure out with them how you can monetize in ways that may not be as easy or as obvious or in your comfort zone. This is honestly the biggest one, like a lot of people who are content creators wanna just have brands that come to them and offer them money to mention them in their videos or do product placements, things like that.

And that happens plenty, but that’s not what a sustainable business is. You could really scale that as a business model, but you’d need to do outreach. You’d need to figure out a sales process. You’d need to put together a pitch deck, figure out what advertisers and sponsors really want. And then actually build plans around all these things.

So that’s the advice that I really tend to give. And then when we get more specific with someone, I can give much more detailed, kind of tailored approach to like, “Oh, you’d be perfect for making courses,” or, “Hey, you should double down on sponsorships,” or maybe you should join an ad network or something.

And that’s what I find, like also having a blog is another platform to diversify your income streams. So you could have blog ads, or even if your blog doesn’t get read by thousands or millions of people, you still have this other platform where in addition to other things you offer sponsors, you also offer them maybe a bundled package that includes a blog post and an email to your subscribers. So diversification here really, like we keep coming back to that as the theme, I guess.

Sponsorships and Trust

Daniela: Yeah. I mean, I think I remember, I guess I’m showing that I’m pretty young, but I remember YouTubers were doing merch before and I haven’t seen people do that much anymore. I guess people are not that interested in buying merch as much as they’re interested in buying like an actual product. I think I see big influencers doing like, “Buy my lipstick,” “Buy my drink.” I’ve seen a lot of electrolyte stuff nowadays. The bigger ones are doing that. And then smaller content creators I think are the ones that are always kind of just on the fence.

And also I wanted to ask about things like sponsorships. I think with content creation, a lot of people are looking to, at some point, get brands to work with them. But I think I’ve noticed that when you are working too much with that, you also lose audience trust. How do you actually balance the selling aspect of something and the trustworthy aspect of something?

I’ve seen influencers sort of pushing ads. And if I’m being honest, I usually skip it. Like I’m not gonna watch a brand ad, if it’s on a YouTube video, I will literally just look at the sponsorship and then move to the next bit. Because I don’t care. And I know that they’re getting paid. And I feel like that’s how a lot of people interact with ads. And if a person is doing ads every video, it kind of annoys me. Because it’s like, I just wanna watch whatever it is that you’re doing and don’t wanna hear you talk about this product that is probably not amazing.

Ryan: I’m with you. I don’t think you should do ads on every single piece of content you make. That does erode some trust. Unless you have just a massive audience and that doesn’t really matter. But most people aren’t in that situation where they even can do that.

But I think if you wanna attract advertisers and sponsors, then giving some free shoutouts is a really great way to start that flywheel going. Then you could reach out to someone in partnerships or sponsorships at these companies and say, “Hey, love your product. I’ve been giving you guys a couple shout outs here on my videos on my channel. Would you like to work together and do something a little more strategic with these sponsorships?”

But on the point of how to make your sponsorships interesting and keep trust with your audience, there’s a couple of creators I follow that do this really, really well, and one of them, love him or hate him, comedian Tim Dillon. On his show, he is like outrageously funny with the ads he makes and I want to listen to the ads because he does custom ad reads for every video or podcast episode that he does.

I don’t always listen to them. Oftentimes I skip them. But sometimes, if I happen to catch it, then I usually get a laugh out of it. So being real, being honest, having fun with your ad reads, not just verbatim reading a script. No one wants to listen to that kind of thing. So making it interesting to you is a really good clue that it might be interesting to some of your audience too, and I don’t know if that leads to increased clicks or signups to your custom URL for the advertiser, but it will keep people a little more interested in your content that has ads in it because they’ll see like, “Oh, you know, Daniela’s having fun with this.” That’s kind of cool.

Maintaining Relevance

Daniela: How do you feel about, I think I’ve also seen this thing happen with content creators that at some point had maybe like one viral video or like four viral videos or whatever, and then that sort of got them out there and then they lose relevance. And this sort of like thing of at some point they were very lucrative and then now they’re not.

And I think with big content creators that have this happen, it’s a little bit less dramatic because maybe they’ll fade into irrelevance, but they’ll still be making money. And they probably made a lot of money while they were relevant. But for someone who was a mid-level, mid-tier content creator, I noticed that happens to a lot of people where the views just plummet. The interest of the audience goes down.

How do you work around that? Because I think it can be really scary if that’s what you’ve been doing for a long time and then all of a sudden it’s not working for you anymore.

Ryan: We come back again, I’d say to diversification, right? So if you’re totally reliant on just your TikTok or Instagram channel, whatever, driving all of your audience engagement, all of your revenue is somehow tied to publishing on those platforms. If you take some swings and have some misses, then you are at risk of fading. Like that’s just the world we live in.

People’s attention spans are so short that people will move on if they lose interest in you or you do something to piss a bunch of people off. Like Mr. Beast is not exactly everyone’s most favorite content creator these days, and he’s gonna be fine. I’m not worried at all about him financially. But from the perspective of how you interact with your audience, it’s really, really smart to recognize when you’re having a growth moment and start diversifying your business right away.

Like it will not be easy. It will take sacrifices. It will take more time and effort than you’re used to putting into your business. But if you can build some fundamental revenue streams that aren’t tied just to your social channels, then you’ll have the ability to really stand the test of time.

And I think that includes figuring out how to interact with other platforms really well. Building up your audience on other platforms. Growing that email list. I still recommend blogging as a way to own the channel of where you can publish a lot of your own content in a feed style approach as well.

And then figuring out stuff like courses or maybe you self-publish a book, like there’s a lot of ways that you can make money in win-win ways with your audience. You just gotta start thinking outside of the box and talking to people is the best way to spark that inspiration and kind of connect the dots as to what types of products or offerings you could bring to the table.

Affiliate Marketing

Daniela: Interesting. Yeah. And I think, do you think affiliate marketing is lucrative for influencers and content creators, or do you think it’s kind of a slippery slope too?

Ryan: It’s for sure both. Like in my experience, I have had months of earning like 60 plus thousand a month from affiliate revenue. And that’s like, it’s a rollercoaster ride. It goes up sometimes, it goes down sometimes, depending on what I’m promoting or what’s getting traffic or what video goes gangbusters and tons of people click through and whatnot.

But I think it is just a diversification game. If affiliate’s one of your channels, that’s great. That goes back to like having a blog too, where you can publish content with text links. But what I’ve seen, generally speaking, tons of exceptions, but generally speaking, affiliate revenue for most people has gotten lower over the past like five years. It’s not a channel that’s growing as much for the individual small to medium sized content creator.

Daniela: I think maybe this, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s just people have gotten smarter too. Like the consumer, the viewer is a lot more aware of stuff like this. Whereas before I think it was like, “I got a code, I got this link.” And now everyone’s a little bit more concerned with everything.

And I think I’ve also noticed that with affiliate stuff and promotional content, creators are being held to a standard where they also have to be ethical about it. Which I think before there was not that much thought process put into what you were supporting. You were just watching a video and then that was that.

Ryan: And I think overall, it’s not a bad thing to be more ethical about what you’re promoting. To be more clear, “Hey, if you sign up for such and such, I get a commission” or “They pay me to promote the product.” Being really clear about what you’re promoting and why? I think if you just explain why, then people will understand it. It’s when you try and slide a mention of a product through that people’s antennas will kind of perk up and be like, “Hmm, this doesn’t feel right.” But if you take 10 seconds, 20 seconds to talk about why you like something, then that goes a long way. Just being real and genuine about it.

Adapting to Internet Changes

Daniela: Yeah, totally. And I wonder how you’ve been able to sort of learn all of this throughout this whole time. Because you started 15 years ago, so what? That was like 2010. That’s so different than what the internet is like today. I mean, so many changes have happened and they happened super quickly, right? Because wasn’t Facebook really big in 2010?

Ryan: Facebook was huge. Like Facebook groups was where everything was happening.

Daniela: I was super young, but I just wonder, how were you able to navigate this whole thing because you started at a time where things were so different and then all of these other platforms started popping up. How do you navigate that and stay up to date with it? Because I feel like it’s hard for anybody to keep up with all of the stuff that’s going on all the time.

Ryan: Mostly by doing the wrong things first and making a lot of mistakes, and then coming around to being in a more experimentation mindset with it. So now whenever a new channel comes out, for the most part there’s exceptions, but whenever a new social media platform gets popular, I view it as a challenge to myself to figure out how to make something for this platform to see if I like it, to see if I enjoy spending some time there and if I enjoy making content in a way that fits the platform.

And I think that mindset really unlocked a huge change for me because if you look at new platforms coming out or old platforms dying, if you look at that like a dinosaur that’s all grumpy and upset that my platform’s going away, that doesn’t really do anything for you. Then you sit in a set of emotions that are negative lack mindset. And that’s not how you problem solve and get yourself into a new, better, more exciting position.

So view each new big change or chapter of the internet as some sort of exciting opportunity. Right now we’re looking at video being way more important than it ever was before. So if you’re not doing video today, you are a little behind. You can always catch up. The best time to start is always today. And then AI, figuring out how that works into your creative process somehow or another is also really important.

The Future with AI

Daniela: Yeah, AI is huge. I think it’s changing everything for everybody in so many ways. I wonder from here to maybe five years or so, how integrated we’re gonna be with AI into our life. Like, are we walking into a world where like Wally, where it’s just robots doing everything for us and we’re just there? I don’t know.

Ryan: It kind of boggles the mind. I honestly have no idea. It’s hard for me to even imagine predicting what five years from now is gonna look like. I think if you look at historically, not that much tends to change in a span of five years. I tend to think that people who imagine a world like Wally or flying cars and AI is doing everything for us, I think that has always been the illusion that people want to believe in or get tempted to buy into throughout history. And then the only real question is like, okay, is this time actually different? I don’t know.

Daniela: I don’t think so. Like I guess I like to think about it, but I always feel like whenever we get closer to this sort of dystopic thing, we reel it in without even noticing.

Ryan: Yep.

Daniela: Like I was saying that to my friend the other day, it was like, do you remember in Covid when everything was shut down? Like everyone’s going home and then all of these other platforms like Zoom and Google Meet are all of a sudden getting bigger because people are trying to connect with each other through the internet.

And I think, yes, there was a major shift after Covid with people being more online than before. But I also feel like people were craving human connection because they were forced to be locked out from it. And I was like, you know, you could argue that that was a time when we got closer to sort of having that Wally life. But then as soon as we did that, people were like, “I need to get outta here.”

Ryan: Yeah, and I think you look at the core lesson we took away from that experience is that we crave human connection. Now will things change in ways they haven’t changed before in the coming years? I don’t know, maybe, but from where I stand, I know very clearly that I don’t want a world in which I don’t see and interact with and touch and hug other people like every day, that’s so important to me.

And I think the same thing can be applied to content creation in the way that video so uniquely expresses who you are, your personality, and your little tiny quirks and whatnot. There’s a day in which perhaps AI generated video can perfectly mimic humanity, but I just don’t see it as a replacement for us on video.

I think AI will have super important roles to play in the video production, editing process, but total and complete replacement of, you know, Daniela as a content creator, not gonna happen because it’s gonna be something different than Daniela and that’s always different. We will crave human connection and I think if AI takes a lot of sort of manual, repetitive, boring tasks off our plate as a society, I think there will be a premium placed on human created, fill in the blank. Artistic and creative expression will be way more popular. People have more time to do it. That’s at least the optimistic view.

Conclusion

Daniela: Yeah, for sure. Now, Ryan, we are almost out of time and it’s been great having you on the show today. But before we finish, I did want to give you the space to tell our viewers and our listeners and followers to go find you wherever they wanna find you. If anything that we spoke about today resonated with them, if you wanna plug anything, the floor is yours.

Ryan: I love it. So ryrob.com is my home base on the internet because I own the platform. But I’m on all the socials as well. Just Ry Robb, R-Y-R-O-B. And if you want to check out Write Blogger, R-I-G-H-T blogger.com. That’s where we have all of our tools for content creators and marketers, small business owners.

Everything from AI article writers to keyword research and planning tools, social media tools, things that’ll basically speed up the marketing you need to do for your business. And we have courses, we have a private community, so you’re not alone in this kind of stuff. You’re with other fellow content creators in a space where I’m interacting with people daily. And yeah, we have a lot of fun through the Write Blogger platform. So that’s the best way to reach me these days.

Daniela: Awesome. Yeah. I will be adding the links to this, to the description of the video so that everybody watching can just go in and access easily. And for everybody listening, go to the video so that you can actually click on the links. Thank you Ryan, for doing this so much. It was great having you today.

Ryan: Thank you for having me.

Daniela: Thank you so much for being here, and everyone else. I will see you on the next episode. Bye-bye.

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