Jimmy Daly's community-led content strategy

[00:00:00] The Power of Community in Content Marketing

[00:00:00] Ramli John: Tapping into a community is one way to level up your content.
[00:00:03] Ramli John: Jimmy Daley, founder of Superpath and former vp of Growth at animals, knows this firsthand.
[00:00:08] Ramli John: With one of the largest community of content marketers, he taps into community members to help fuel Superpath's content.
[00:00:15] Ramli John: I'm part of that community.
[00:00:16] Ramli John: Just love it.
[00:00:17] Ramli John: Today, he shares his community led content strategy.
[00:00:20] Ramli John: In this marketing Powerups episode, you learn, first of all, why community is a content market.
[00:00:25] Ramli John: Power ups.
[00:00:25] Ramli John: Second, how to create user generated content with community members.
[00:00:29] Ramli John: Third, how to build a community from scratch.
[00:00:32] Ramli John: And number four, a career power up that's helped accelerate Jimmy's career.
[00:00:36] Ramli John: By the way, I've created a free power ups cheat sheet to help you apply Jimmy's community led content strategy to your business.
[00:00:42] Ramli John: You can get it for free@marketingpowerups.com or find that link in the show notes and description below.

[00:00:48] The Power of Community in Marketing with Jimmy Daly

[00:00:48] Ramli John: Are you ready?
[00:00:49] Jimmy Daly: Let's go.
[00:00:50] Ramli John: Marketing power ups.
[00:00:53] Ramli John: Ready, go.
[00:00:57] Ramli John: Here's your host.
[00:00:59] Ramli John: Rambly John mentioned that community is your marketing power up that you want to talk about.
[00:01:06] Ramli John: You're founder and CEO of one of the biggest online communities for content marketers.
[00:01:11] Ramli John: Would you say that Superpath?
[00:01:13] Ramli John: I don't know of any, probably, yeah, 15,000 people.
[00:01:18] Jimmy Daly: There's a lot of folks in there.
[00:01:19] Jimmy Daly: Yeah, there's a lot of folks in there.
[00:01:20] Jimmy Daly: I think it depends how you define community.
[00:01:22] Jimmy Daly: To me, community in a business sense is like there is a tool that facilitates conversations.
[00:01:29] Jimmy Daly: And we have 15,000 people who have accounts.
[00:01:32] Jimmy Daly: You know what I mean?
[00:01:33] Jimmy Daly: I think some people use the term a little bit more loosely.
[00:01:36] Jimmy Daly: I have heard folks describe a newsletter as a community.
[00:01:40] Ramli John: I don't know that I would.
[00:01:41] Jimmy Daly: I mean, there's elements of it, for sure, but I feel like without peer to peer conversation, it doesn't really check the box for me.
[00:01:49] Jimmy Daly: So I think, I don't know, maybe there's a larger one.
[00:01:51] Jimmy Daly: But if there is, I'm not aware of it.
[00:01:54] Jimmy Daly: Although there's a bunch of challenges with it being large, too.
[00:01:57] Jimmy Daly: Maybe we can talk about that.
[00:01:58] Ramli John: Yeah, for sure.
[00:01:59] Ramli John: I think we face the same.
[00:02:00] Ramli John: When I was working at product led with West Bush, we reached like 10,000 and there's definitely challenges there.
[00:02:07] Ramli John: I mean, we'll get into that.

[00:02:08] How Community Powers Up Content

[00:02:08] Ramli John: But I love, we already started chatting about why you see community as a power up to specifically content, and you share some examples.
[00:02:17] Ramli John: I'm curious what those are and how community can potentially power up content and everything else around marketing.
[00:02:25] Jimmy Daly: Yeah, for sure.
[00:02:26] Jimmy Daly: I think that, gosh, there's a lot here.
[00:02:29] Ramli John: There's so much.
[00:02:30] Jimmy Daly: Yeah, I can talk about it in the way that we think of the community to content connection.
[00:02:37] Jimmy Daly: I think it could look a little bit different for other businesses.
[00:02:40] Jimmy Daly: But a community is an incredibly rich source of very honest conversation between peers.
[00:02:50] Jimmy Daly: And if you can't find content ideas in that, you're never going to find them.
[00:02:56] Jimmy Daly: We have published a lot of content over the last couple of years.
[00:02:59] Jimmy Daly: All of it is rooted in things that we have discovered in the community.
[00:03:03] Jimmy Daly: So we basically don't ever do keyword research.
[00:03:06] Jimmy Daly: There's kind of no need to because we have 15,000 of our kind of target personas telling us sort of indirectly what they want to learn about.
[00:03:15] Jimmy Daly: And I feel that's just like the best possible source of ideation for us.
[00:03:21] Jimmy Daly: Another thing is that the conversations people have, kind of depending on how you look at it, it's essentially user generated content.
[00:03:32] Jimmy Daly: There's a balance to be had there because these people are not having conversations to provide you with content.
[00:03:36] Jimmy Daly: That's not the purpose of it.
[00:03:37] Jimmy Daly: But there are times when we'll get permission from someone and turn a question or a post that they put up in response to a question and turn that into content.
[00:03:48] Jimmy Daly: We do that actually quite a bit.
[00:03:51] Jimmy Daly: And then we've also tried to facilitate the creation of user generated content by giving people simple ways to give back to the community.
[00:03:59] Jimmy Daly: I think our most popular version of that is a thing we came up with called the 100K Club.
[00:04:06] Jimmy Daly: And the idea is that once you hit six figures as a content marketer, you can contribute some knowledge about your own career journey back to the rest of the community.
[00:04:16] Jimmy Daly: And we do it in an anonymous way.
[00:04:18] Jimmy Daly: So if you don't want your name attached to it, that's okay.
[00:04:21] Jimmy Daly: And basically we ask everybody.
[00:04:22] Jimmy Daly: It's kind of like there's a series that I was inspired by called, it's called my morning routine.
[00:04:28] Jimmy Daly: And it's basically like a bunch of people answering the same couple of questions, and you learn about their morning routine.
[00:04:33] Jimmy Daly: We do that with career milestones.
[00:04:36] Jimmy Daly: So we'll ask everyone the same questions.
[00:04:37] Jimmy Daly: We make a chart that plots out their salary from the time they started in content marketing till the time they hit six figures.
[00:04:44] Jimmy Daly: And then we share those back to the community.
[00:04:47] Jimmy Daly: And it's really cool because sometimes you see people really, the reason that readers love it is because there's information in there that you can't get anywhere else.
[00:04:57] Jimmy Daly: So it might be like, oh, we had one recent vp of content making 240k.
[00:05:03] Ramli John: Dang.
[00:05:03] Jimmy Daly: And a lot of people were interested in that one, but sometimes you get one that's like freelance writer making one hundred and twenty k or one hundred and sixty k.
[00:05:12] Jimmy Daly: And to learn about how that person got to this point in their career is really interesting.
[00:05:18] Jimmy Daly: But there's something important there, which is we try to create this very safe environment for people to share that information.
[00:05:23] Jimmy Daly: That's kind of a golden rule of community, is that if it's not a safe, supportive environment where people will never be exploited or poked fun at or trolled or whatever, that it becomes quite a bit more valuable to them.
[00:05:37] Jimmy Daly: And that is true for the content too.
[00:05:39] Jimmy Daly: Like, if you're going to ask people to contribute content in any way, it has to be done in a way that they feel super comfortable with.
[00:05:45] Jimmy Daly: In this case, anonymity is what enables that for other types of content.
[00:05:49] Jimmy Daly: Maybe that's different, but that's one thing I've learned, is that people are so willing to give back, but you have to create a framework for them to do it within and then make it very comfortable.
[00:06:02] Ramli John: I remember seeing that 100k content series.
[00:06:05] Ramli John: It's like, this is genius, because inherent to it is this before and after snapshot where you see that journey and people who are reading it are like, how do I get to that 240,000 vp of content and kind of reverse engineer the journey, the career journey this person has?
[00:06:26] Ramli John: They might not have something similar, but maybe they can take away something like that.
[00:06:29] Ramli John: And that's why it's such a good, actionable, aspirational, inspirational all wrapped up into one piece of content.
[00:06:38] Ramli John: Exactly.
[00:06:39] Ramli John: You're probably finding that feedback from other folks who are part of that.

[00:06:43] Exploring Career Paths in Content Marketing: A Conversation with Jimmy Daly

[00:06:43] Jimmy Daly: Definitely part of this for content marketers specifically, is that the career path is not set in stone.
[00:06:49] Jimmy Daly: Right.
[00:06:51] Jimmy Daly: Something I have noticed.
[00:06:53] Jimmy Daly: I'm generalizing, but a lot of content marketers are young.
[00:06:56] Jimmy Daly: The people who create content primarily, and again, I'm generalizing, but primarily are fairly young.
[00:07:01] Jimmy Daly: And I think a lot of them become disenchanted with the career path when they start seeing what their options look like to grow within this industry.
[00:07:08] Jimmy Daly: And then they start thinking about like, while product marketers make more money than content, it seems like there's more upward mobility.
[00:07:14] Jimmy Daly: Or maybe freelancing is better for me if I want to continue honing the craft of writing versus being kind of pushed into a management role that I don't really want.
[00:07:24] Jimmy Daly: Or they start thinking about social, or start thinking about email marketing, kind of some related field.
[00:07:32] Jimmy Daly: Part of the reason we wanted to do this is just to give people some clarity.
[00:07:36] Jimmy Daly: Not every career path is the same, but if you look at a vp of content and you can see all the roles they've had and the salary they made at each one.
[00:07:43] Jimmy Daly: It just kind of like shines some light on a potential path that you could also pursue as well.
[00:07:51] Ramli John: I totally see that.
[00:07:52] Ramli John: I love how you put it, that it's giving potential options to the person where you might be peeking into.
[00:08:00] Ramli John: You mentioned like a morning routine.
[00:08:01] Ramli John: But another one, I love binging YouTube series when I've been binging is like a day in a life of blank.
[00:08:07] Ramli John: Like a day in a life of a neurosurgeon or a day in a life of a nurse.
[00:08:12] Ramli John: I would never want to be a surgeon.
[00:08:13] Ramli John: Okay, well, it's a day in the life of a police officer, but it's interesting to see that path.
[00:08:20] Ramli John: And you're peeking into the potential and possibilities through this and you're talking about exploring here.
[00:08:27] Jimmy Daly: Yeah, it's cool.
[00:08:28] Jimmy Daly: We've tried to replicate this and with some success, but I feel like we really hit on something with the 100K club because it's the number.
[00:08:37] Jimmy Daly: Like people want to know salaries, you can't find it.
[00:08:39] Jimmy Daly: But there are other, some other things we've done.
[00:08:41] Jimmy Daly: We've tried to create other kind of formulaic style content where you can ask the same questions but get different output each time.
[00:08:47] Jimmy Daly: So, like another one we did, we've done a few of these is like my 1st 90 days on the job.
[00:08:53] Ramli John: That's cool.
[00:08:53] Jimmy Daly: Someone has to get the new job.
[00:08:55] Jimmy Daly: And then three months later we say, okay, answer these questions to explain like, what did you do in the first 90 days?
[00:09:01] Jimmy Daly: How did you get acquainted with the product?
[00:09:05] Jimmy Daly: What did the strategy look like?
[00:09:06] Jimmy Daly: Or whatever you can kind of imagine.
[00:09:07] Jimmy Daly: And so I think that we'll probably do more of these things, but it does require some testing to figure out what gets people excited enough to contribute.
[00:09:15] Jimmy Daly: And then also, what do people really want to read about?

[00:09:17] Legitimizing the Field of Content Marketing

[00:09:17] Ramli John: I think the other thing that's interesting about that, you mentioned 100k itself.
[00:09:22] Ramli John: I'm also generalizing here, but I feel like a lot of content folks, especially early on, are not paid very well because they're writers who's like, oh, this is pay them like, I don't know, per article or per word or below fifty k.
[00:09:36] Ramli John: And that one hundred k number itself is something I would say maybe a lot of people aspire to, especially not in Silicon Valley, where if you're not making 100k, you're probably not eating well.
[00:09:52] Jimmy Daly: Totally.
[00:09:53] Ramli John: But everywhere else, one hundred k is like that.
[00:09:56] Ramli John: Here's my goal.
[00:09:56] Ramli John: Get over 100k in my career.
[00:09:59] Jimmy Daly: Totally.
[00:10:00] Jimmy Daly: It's interesting you say that because you're so right.
[00:10:03] Jimmy Daly: Like in other fields that just graduated college, you're going to make more than that.
[00:10:10] Jimmy Daly: I think one of the things I hope to do with Superpath is legitimize the field of content marketing more so than it already is.
[00:10:17] Jimmy Daly: I mean I feel like it went from a couple people blogging to now basically every SaaS company has a content team.
[00:10:23] Jimmy Daly: So that is legitimization for sure.
[00:10:26] Jimmy Daly: But I feel like we need essentially a professional organization to advocate for people and that's part of what I want superpath to be doing more of.
[00:10:38] Jimmy Daly: Developers have this, designers have this.
[00:10:41] Jimmy Daly: And so it's easy for me to look around and see what resources does your average software engineer have access to that a content marketer doesn't.
[00:10:49] Jimmy Daly: Or same with a designer or product marketer, or people ops or any number of other fields that most SaaS companies would employ.
[00:10:57] Jimmy Daly: And a lot of it is like you have to give people the platform to speak and to share stuff so that you can kind of create some order from the chaos.

[00:11:08] The Power of Building Community for Content Marketing with Jimmy Daly

[00:11:08] Ramli John: I think the other thing about the legitimate piece is around salary discussion.
[00:11:12] Ramli John: I feel like by you opening this up and I think you did a report once with salary baselines and I actually use it to a couple of years.
[00:11:22] Ramli John: Yeah, I used it to negotiate my salary.
[00:11:25] Ramli John: It's like okay, this is what I'm aiming for based on this because this is actually my first official content role under my name at AppQs because I've been in director of training, I've done growth marketer but it was very helpful.
[00:11:42] Ramli John: And I feel like that 100k cub plus that reports that you're doing, you're enabling content marketers to give them the data points to essentially ask for more.
[00:11:57] Ramli John: Don't sell yourself short essentially because it's potentially what other people are making for sure.
[00:12:04] Ramli John: Is that a fair of thing?
[00:12:05] Jimmy Daly: Definitely.
[00:12:06] Jimmy Daly: No, I think that's right on, because you're so right that most people come into the content marketing world not making very much money and they may be frustrated when they see like well if I make fifty k and I get a 10% raise every year, this is not the path I want to be on.
[00:12:21] Jimmy Daly: But then if you could find that we do a salary survey, we've done it four years in a row, we publish it every January.
[00:12:29] Jimmy Daly: The average salary that we found this year was 95k.
[00:12:33] Jimmy Daly: That's pretty good.
[00:12:34] Jimmy Daly: But there's outliers on both ends.
[00:12:37] Jimmy Daly: There's some people making more than 300k.
[00:12:39] Jimmy Daly: There's other people making 30k, but you can get a sense of all that.
[00:12:43] Jimmy Daly: And then we also break it down by the years of experience, by job title and a few other things.
[00:12:48] Jimmy Daly: And again, it just gives people some understanding of like if I kind of pursue this for three to five years, I'll sort of put myself in this category and those people are making one hundred and twenty k or something like that.
[00:13:05] Jimmy Daly: And so just transparency, you know what I mean?
[00:13:07] Jimmy Daly: It's hard to find.
[00:13:09] Jimmy Daly: Salary data is just hard to find anyways.
[00:13:11] Jimmy Daly: And everything I've seen on Glassdoor, and indeed I don't feel like lines up with what I know people make just in talking to a lot of content marketers.
[00:13:20] Jimmy Daly: So yeah, we try to give people a lot of data and I've actually had companies email me.
[00:13:25] Jimmy Daly: I've gotten like hate mail from people hiring content marketers being like, I hate your salary survey because everybody wants a raise now.
[00:13:37] Ramli John: That's so funny.
[00:13:38] Ramli John: You actually got hate mail.
[00:13:41] Ramli John: I would frame that as badge of honor to just be like, I'm creating something useful enough that the people who are giving out salaries hate my guts because I'm actually helping out your people, your content marketers who are actually being able to ask for more because of this.
[00:14:01] Jimmy Daly: For sure.
[00:14:01] Jimmy Daly: Yeah.
[00:14:02] Jimmy Daly: I mean, in some cases there is tension there because Superpath is the content marketer's advocate.
[00:14:09] Jimmy Daly: That's what I want.
[00:14:10] Jimmy Daly: We advocate for the individuals, but we make money from the businesses and so that creates some tension from time to time.
[00:14:18] Jimmy Daly: So in that case it was like a customer of ours, they know, paying us money to help them.
[00:14:23] Jimmy Daly: But I was like, hey, look, I'm going to stay true to because the whole business runs off of a community that's the foundation of it.
[00:14:33] Jimmy Daly: And if that is not treated with respect and taken very seriously, then everything else falls apart that's built on top of it.
[00:14:41] Jimmy Daly: So we're going to keep doing it.
[00:14:43] Jimmy Daly: You know what I mean?
[00:14:43] Jimmy Daly: If you don't pay market rates, then you're going to have to figure that out.
[00:14:48] Ramli John: I love how so you're talking about this power for community.
[00:14:51] Ramli John: It's all like creating user generated content.
[00:14:54] Ramli John: Other places you've talked about also helping around distribution, how it can help you.
[00:15:00] Ramli John: We've created this 100k content series or other pieces of content and you already got this community you built it for.
[00:15:10] Ramli John: And they risk the situation of them not resonating with so they're more likely to share it with folks.
[00:15:17] Jimmy Daly: Would you say that?
[00:15:19] Jimmy Daly: Probably.
[00:15:20] Jimmy Daly: I think that community has been less effective at distribution than I thought, actually interesting.
[00:15:25] Jimmy Daly: I think when I think of like 15,000 people in a slack group, I think of as a marketer, a content marketer.
[00:15:31] Jimmy Daly: One of the things I think is, oh, I bet we could get a lot of traffic on the site from those folks.
[00:15:35] Jimmy Daly: That's not really true.
[00:15:36] Jimmy Daly: Wow.
[00:15:38] Jimmy Daly: I think it's the medium.
[00:15:40] Jimmy Daly: We send a newsletter to the same group of people.
[00:15:43] Jimmy Daly: I think it's partially an issue of the medium.
[00:15:46] Jimmy Daly: Right.
[00:15:46] Jimmy Daly: Like, people don't join a slack group to get content and click on stuff.
[00:15:50] Jimmy Daly: They join to talk to people and learn things through conversation.
[00:15:55] Jimmy Daly: Right.
[00:15:55] Jimmy Daly: You can learn from a blog post, but it's not really what they're there for.
[00:15:58] Jimmy Daly: Whereas in the newsletter, we send a newsletter to the same group of people.
[00:16:02] Jimmy Daly: Essentially, if you put a blog post in there, a lot of people click it.
[00:16:05] Jimmy Daly: I found that to be interesting.
[00:16:06] Jimmy Daly: I just expected that when I looked in Google Analytics, the community would be a driver of quite a bit more traffic than it is.
[00:16:15] Jimmy Daly: But the more valuable thing is not the data, it's the feedback you can get from people.
[00:16:20] Ramli John: Right?
[00:16:21] Jimmy Daly: You learn a lot.
[00:16:22] Jimmy Daly: Even if we publish something and we just explicitly ask for feedback, like, I'll get a couple of people saying, here's what I thought and here's how you might do it differently next time.
[00:16:32] Jimmy Daly: And that's gold.
[00:16:34] Jimmy Daly: That's super valuable.
[00:16:35] Ramli John: Yeah.
[00:16:36] Ramli John: Because you can make the content better and you can figure out what the next steps are.
[00:16:41] Ramli John: I think that's the user generated and the feedback is really the value of a community to the content is exactly what I'm hearing here.
[00:16:50] Jimmy Daly: Totally.
[00:16:51] Jimmy Daly: And also I'm talking a lot about user generated content, which is sort of just one way to go about this, but publishing user generated content is the best way to publish more user generated content.
[00:17:02] Jimmy Daly: Like every time we publish 100K club, another person or two reaches out and says, I want to contribute as well, which is great.
[00:17:10] Jimmy Daly: And that kind of keeps that pipeline full.

[00:17:12] Building and Nurturing a Content Community with Jimmy Daly of Superpath

[00:17:12] Ramli John: You mentioned something earlier that kind of ties here where I feel like community also helps create that space.
[00:17:22] Ramli John: You mentioned space for people to share that 100K journey.
[00:17:27] Ramli John: Versus like, if you didn't have community, sure, you might be able to get a few folks to share it, but there isn't that relationship already for them to trust.
[00:17:35] Ramli John: Maybe you or superpath enough to say, hey, here's how much I made at this point versus now you have this community who is like, yeah, I'd love to share, and they're actually raising up their hands and they want to share their journey next, versus if you didn't have a community.
[00:17:52] Jimmy Daly: Totally.
[00:17:53] Jimmy Daly: Yeah, no, that's totally true.
[00:17:56] Jimmy Daly: Oftentimes when we test stuff like this, because I mentioned user generated content in particular, some of it doesn't work.
[00:18:02] Jimmy Daly: We've tried things that just don't work at all and they never caught on.
[00:18:05] Jimmy Daly: I tried this one thing for a while called, like, I forget it was called, like, it was called the five minute webinar.
[00:18:12] Ramli John: Five minute webinar, yeah.
[00:18:14] Jimmy Daly: And the thing I wanted people to do was record a loom video for five minutes and explain something.
[00:18:18] Jimmy Daly: Explain something cool.
[00:18:19] Jimmy Daly: You've learned about content marketing.
[00:18:20] Jimmy Daly: It just didn't catch on at all.
[00:18:22] Jimmy Daly: I thought it'd be really cool, but it didn't work at all.
[00:18:24] Jimmy Daly: So with one like this, we have to seed it with a couple hundred cake clubs before anybody, like you said, trusts it enough to then want to contribute themselves.
[00:18:35] Jimmy Daly: So there's a group of power users in the slack community that I rely on quite a bit for stuff like this.
[00:18:45] Jimmy Daly: And I'll say like, hey, we're going to try something new.
[00:18:46] Jimmy Daly: Are you up for it?
[00:18:47] Jimmy Daly: I'll send you a hoodie or, you know what I mean?
[00:18:49] Jimmy Daly: I'll send you a superpath t shirt.
[00:18:52] Jimmy Daly: We've given away a lot of audiobook credits and just little things that we try to do for people just to thank them, because small business, I love to pay everybody great rates for contributions like this, but reality is we just can't.
[00:19:06] Jimmy Daly: So I try to show appreciation as much as I can in other ways.
[00:19:10] Ramli John: You mentioned you've tried out stuff that hasn't really worked.
[00:19:14] Ramli John: What are some, I guess, lessons, if you could restart?
[00:19:18] Ramli John: One of the things you mentioned earlier before is how the community should be run, like connecting it to who the community is for.
[00:19:25] Ramli John: Is there something around that that you wish you knew earlier when you were starting out the superpath community versus now?
[00:19:33] Jimmy Daly: Yeah, that's interesting.
[00:19:34] Jimmy Daly: I feel like you're really actually tapping into something quite timely.
[00:19:39] Jimmy Daly: The black community has grown far larger than I ever thought it would, but it's grown in a way that I didn't expect it to grow either.
[00:19:45] Jimmy Daly: And what I mean by that is we built this community for in house b, two B SaaS, content marketers, and there's a lot of those folks in there, but it's also attracted a ton of freelancers.
[00:19:57] Jimmy Daly: And I sort of noticed this trend and I was like, okay, cool.
[00:20:01] Jimmy Daly: We have a channel for freelancers.
[00:20:02] Jimmy Daly: People post freelance gigs.
[00:20:04] Jimmy Daly: The freelancers want the gigs.
[00:20:05] Jimmy Daly: I kind of get it.
[00:20:06] Jimmy Daly: So we've catered to that a little bit, but I can't fully service both of those personas.
[00:20:12] Jimmy Daly: And so anyway, this sort of put us at a little bit of a crossroads in a sense of like, we have 15,000 people in this free slack community.
[00:20:22] Jimmy Daly: We get five to 600 new people every month, which is wonderful, but engagement is actually dropping, which I'm super surprised by.
[00:20:30] Jimmy Daly: I just expected engagement to continue going up, but what's happened is the experience has become watered down and I can't keep up with it with that many people and the management and the moderation piece.
[00:20:42] Jimmy Daly: And also, like, you want to run good events, you want to publish good content, it's so difficult to keep up with all of those things.
[00:20:50] Jimmy Daly: I have been asking myself a lot recently, like, how would I have done this differently?
[00:20:54] Jimmy Daly: And I kind of keep coming back to the answer of, like, I didn't know this was going to happen.
[00:20:58] Jimmy Daly: It's like hard to look back and think about it differently.
[00:21:03] Jimmy Daly: We're in the process of moving to a paid model for the community, which is a huge change for us.
[00:21:10] Jimmy Daly: But in some sense it's like us, it's a superpath.
[00:21:12] Jimmy Daly: Going back to our roots as like a small, somewhat exclusive community for in house content marketers.
[00:21:19] Jimmy Daly: We're still going to try to do some things for freelancers, actually, our freelance channel we're going to keep free.
[00:21:22] Jimmy Daly: So anyone who wants to join it can join it.
[00:21:25] Jimmy Daly: The paid stuff is going to be like, you want to talk B two B SaaS content strategy?
[00:21:30] Jimmy Daly: This is a place for it.
[00:21:31] Jimmy Daly: You want to talk about how to manage a content team?
[00:21:32] Jimmy Daly: This is a place for it, that kind of thing.
[00:21:34] Jimmy Daly: But I have been wrestling with this a lot because it's raised all these questions of like, who is the community really for?
[00:21:41] Jimmy Daly: Is it for that Persona that I had in mind a couple of years ago when I started this thing?
[00:21:47] Jimmy Daly: What does the growth tell me about who actually wants to be here?
[00:21:52] Jimmy Daly: Should that send us off in a new direction?
[00:21:57] Jimmy Daly: I'm gaining some clarity on this as we think about this move to a paid, which, like I said, back to the roots, back to serving that core Persona.
[00:22:07] Jimmy Daly: But I've also spun my wheels quite a bit trying to make everybody happy.
[00:22:11] Jimmy Daly: And I just like, I'm kind of coming to the conclusion that I can't do it.
[00:22:15] Jimmy Daly: Not effectively anyways.
[00:22:17] Ramli John: That makes sense.
[00:22:18] Ramli John: I mean, I'm part of the superpath community and I wouldn't mind paying to be part of a smaller group of communities.
[00:22:27] Ramli John: The problem I have with being part of a large community is like, I get nervous because, oh my goodness, 50,000 people will see this.
[00:22:34] Ramli John: I think there's some psychology behind larger groups.
[00:22:38] Ramli John: I think there's a tipping point where people don't engage as much because I guess it's more like I'm nervous.
[00:22:46] Ramli John: Like you're at a big party and should I say something?
[00:22:50] Ramli John: Should I not?
[00:22:51] Jimmy Daly: I don't know.
[00:22:52] Ramli John: I don't know.
[00:22:52] Jimmy Daly: No, you're totally right.
[00:22:54] Jimmy Daly: You're totally right.
[00:22:55] Jimmy Daly: And I think that's part of the challenge we've seen with engagement dropping, is that it's become kind of intimidating.

[00:23:03] The Benefits of a Paid Community for Superpath

[00:23:03] Jimmy Daly: Another thing that's happened, kind of related to that is the initial group that we started with, which probably for the first year or two was fairly senior content marketers.
[00:23:13] Jimmy Daly: And as the group has grown, the average user is more junior.
[00:23:19] Jimmy Daly: So it kind of went from the first batch of people as like vps and heads of content.
[00:23:24] Jimmy Daly: Now you might get someone who is just trying to get into the content industry for the first time and they'll post questions in a channel and say whatever the question is.
[00:23:35] Jimmy Daly: It's like a fairly basic question for a senior content marketer, but I think it turns off the senior content.
[00:23:42] Jimmy Daly: In some cases those people want to jump in and help, but they also then feel like it's not a place for them to ask a question.
[00:23:48] Jimmy Daly: And that's a whole nother thing I've been wrestling with.
[00:23:53] Jimmy Daly: Ultimately, my conclusion there is like content marketing 101 is well documented.
[00:23:59] Jimmy Daly: There's lots of great stuff out there on it.
[00:24:01] Jimmy Daly: Some communities, lots of content has been published, obviously, but for the senior people, there's very little.
[00:24:06] Jimmy Daly: And the best thing that I think we can do for them is give them a place to converse amongst peers and feel comfortable asking questions that they probably just wouldn't feel comfortable asking in a much larger environment.
[00:24:19] Ramli John: That totally makes sense.
[00:24:20] Ramli John: I see that totally happening.
[00:24:22] Ramli John: So that being connected and the other super interesting benefit to a paid community for Superpath is that now you can kind of weigh the feedback you get because the people who are paying probably have, I'm not sure this is hypothesis, probably have like a stronger valuable opinion than somebody who might not be, especially if you're targeting more senior folks in that community rather than, I guess you cut down the noise is what I'm trying to say.
[00:24:59] Jimmy Daly: Yeah, definitely.
[00:24:59] Jimmy Daly: And it's a different mindset.
[00:25:04] Jimmy Daly: If you're there paying money, you expect your opinion to be heard.
[00:25:08] Jimmy Daly: And honestly, I do my best to listen.
[00:25:11] Jimmy Daly: We ran a survey actually a couple of weeks ago and I let people know I'm thinking of moving to paid.
[00:25:19] Jimmy Daly: Would you pay?
[00:25:20] Jimmy Daly: Would you pay $15 or $20 a month for this community.
[00:25:23] Jimmy Daly: And we got a ton of responses and I read through every single one.
[00:25:27] Jimmy Daly: I genuinely care what people think.
[00:25:30] Jimmy Daly: I found that folks who did not want to pay had very legitimate reasons for not wanting to pay.
[00:25:36] Jimmy Daly: And it's not always like, I don't want to pay you $20.
[00:25:39] Jimmy Daly: There's other reasons that they don't want to pay.
[00:25:41] Jimmy Daly: Interesting.
[00:25:42] Jimmy Daly: They want it to be accessible to everyone.
[00:25:44] Jimmy Daly: They don't want it to be exclusively for people who can afford it.
[00:25:48] Jimmy Daly: They feel like the community world is sort of like the.
[00:25:56] Jimmy Daly: Sort of like the unbundling of cable.
[00:25:58] Jimmy Daly: It's like you got to pay for a couple of different memberships to get information in different area.
[00:26:06] Jimmy Daly: I totally appreciate that.
[00:26:07] Jimmy Daly: I think it's really interesting.
[00:26:09] Jimmy Daly: I think of the folks who said they were willing to pay, the reasons they stated for it were kind of in line with what we've talked about, smaller, more exclusive, deeper, or kind of higher level type conversations.
[00:26:20] Jimmy Daly: And that just gets me more excited.
[00:26:23] Jimmy Daly: At the end of the day, I want to facilitate that and participate in those more than I do.
[00:26:29] Jimmy Daly: Kind of, however you want to call it, sort of like more junior level stuff or try to cater to too many people.
[00:26:36] Jimmy Daly: I just don't think I can do it effectively, and I think I'll probably run out of steam on it too.
[00:26:40] Ramli John: Yeah, that's true.
[00:26:41] Ramli John: It totally makes sense.
[00:26:42] Ramli John: As well as I think you've invested a lot of your time and your resources.
[00:26:50] Ramli John: And I think focusing on this paid community could be an interesting.
[00:26:53] Ramli John: So then you can do more cool stuff like mastermind groups or more interesting events or socials.
[00:27:02] Ramli John: So I think that's super exciting to the next generation, the next evolution of a superfast, essentially, for sure.
[00:27:10] Jimmy Daly: It also creates a funding mechanism for us to invest kind of reinvest in the community, which is going to be really important.
[00:27:16] Jimmy Daly: I think we've sold ads within the community, which is a whole nother thing.
[00:27:21] Ramli John: Interesting.
[00:27:23] Jimmy Daly: It's been okay, but it's been just okay.
[00:27:28] Jimmy Daly: I would say it's one of those experiments that I'm like, man, it just didn't really pan out like I thought it would.
[00:27:33] Jimmy Daly: And I think it's possible we work with very limited number of partners in terms of advertising within the group, but it would be very limited, very targeted.
[00:27:44] Jimmy Daly: This will allow us to just do so much more for the community.
[00:27:47] Jimmy Daly: That's awesome.

[00:27:48] Jimmy Daly on the power of content marketing and personal branding

[00:27:48] Ramli John: Well, I want to shift gears and talk about career power ups and really figure out what helped you in your career.
[00:27:56] Ramli John: You've had more than a decade of experience, stints as editor in chief at Quickbooks, vp of growth at animals, and now you, co founder and CEO here at Superpath.
[00:28:06] Ramli John: Curious.
[00:28:07] Ramli John: What's a superpower or a power up that's helped you accelerate your career?
[00:28:14] Jimmy Daly: Yeah, the number one thing, I feel like my career was on, like, a fairly steady trajectory for a long time.
[00:28:22] Jimmy Daly: And then there was a leap.
[00:28:24] Jimmy Daly: And actually, interestingly, in looking at the 100K Club series, we make a chart for each person's salary progression, and there's always a leap.
[00:28:34] Jimmy Daly: And we ask.
[00:28:35] Jimmy Daly: One of the questions we ask is, what's the biggest salary jump you've ever made, either through a raise, promotion, or a job switch.
[00:28:42] Jimmy Daly: And the number is usually a big one.
[00:28:45] Jimmy Daly: It's not like I got a 10% raise.
[00:28:47] Jimmy Daly: It's like I got like a $50,000 raise.
[00:28:50] Jimmy Daly: And the jump that I experienced was joining animals the second time I worked there in 2018, and we launched a blog.
[00:28:56] Jimmy Daly: And now my job was launch the blog and start building this growth engine for animals, which had to date relied primarily on referrals and word of mouth.
[00:29:05] Jimmy Daly: And that was working, but you can't count on it forever and ever.
[00:29:09] Jimmy Daly: So we wanted to build a proper growth engine.
[00:29:11] Jimmy Daly: And the beautiful thing about content marketing is that your work is public.
[00:29:16] Jimmy Daly: And so I wrote, over two years, I wrote maybe 50 blog posts for the Animals blog.
[00:29:22] Jimmy Daly: And the blog got fairly popular and helped us bring in a lot of leads and closed a lot of deals.
[00:29:28] Jimmy Daly: But my name was on all the blog posts.
[00:29:33] Jimmy Daly: That was great for me.
[00:29:35] Jimmy Daly: It helped my career so much.
[00:29:38] Jimmy Daly: And so the next thing I did was leave to go create Superpath.
[00:29:43] Jimmy Daly: But during that time, a lot of those folks, they followed me on Twitter, or I had a personal newsletter, and they signed up for the personal newsletter, and there was this kind of like, trickle down of a lot of publishing in a prominent place on a subject matter I knew super well.
[00:29:58] Jimmy Daly: And then as I made this transition to Superpath, a lot of those folks became the early members of Superpath.
[00:30:06] Jimmy Daly: And that was a huge deal.
[00:30:08] Jimmy Daly: That was also a job where I had my biggest salary jump, I had my biggest responsibility jump.
[00:30:14] Jimmy Daly: I kind of found myself in unchartered waters the most, trying to learn how to do things I had never done before.
[00:30:21] Jimmy Daly: So there was kind of a lot wrapped up in there.

[00:30:24] The Power of Publishing Content with Deep Subject Matter Expertise

[00:30:24] Jimmy Daly: I think the power up, the career power up piece, though, is for content marketers specifically, publishing a lot of stuff with deep subject matter expertise in a very public way over a long period of time is a huge power up.
[00:30:39] Jimmy Daly: Other industries or other fields.
[00:30:41] Jimmy Daly: I mean, don't have this sort of public track record of all the work that you've done, but in content, you can have that.
[00:30:49] Jimmy Daly: Your name and face can be on all of your work.
[00:30:50] Jimmy Daly: And I think that's a really cool thing.
[00:30:53] Ramli John: That's totally cool.
[00:30:54] Ramli John: Yeah.
[00:30:55] Ramli John: Publishing quite a bit.
[00:30:57] Ramli John: I feel like there's another one that's tied up to what you mentioned around.
[00:31:03] Ramli John: You mentioned you were out of your element, but that really helped you kind of grow the most.
[00:31:10] Ramli John: It seems like there's another power up that I heard there where I guess you took the risk to step away from your comfort zone to actually embrace this new role that you might not have experienced before.
[00:31:23] Jimmy Daly: Absolutely.
[00:31:23] Jimmy Daly: That's absolutely right.
[00:31:24] Jimmy Daly: And a lot of what I was doing there was sales, which I had never done before.
[00:31:27] Jimmy Daly: But it's a small business.
[00:31:30] Jimmy Daly: People are chipping in, trying to help everything get done.
[00:31:33] Jimmy Daly: And kind of what happened was sort of writing these thought leadership style articles on the blog.
[00:31:38] Jimmy Daly: And then when folks would reach out to inquire about services, they want to know about this type of strategy that I talked about, you know what I mean?
[00:31:46] Jimmy Daly: And so an example would be like, we wrote a blog post about multiproduct strategy.
[00:31:51] Jimmy Daly: So if you're a SaaS company, you have multiple products.
[00:31:54] Jimmy Daly: How do you approach content strategy?
[00:31:56] Jimmy Daly: Well, we had a bunch of multiproduct SaaS companies reach out and they wanted to talk about it.
[00:32:00] Jimmy Daly: And so I would jump on those calls and we would talk through it.
[00:32:03] Jimmy Daly: And then I became the sales guy sort of accidentally, and I was quite hesitant about it at first because I felt like I've sort of spent ten years building all my skills in content marketing, and now I'm like beginner salesperson.
[00:32:18] Jimmy Daly: I don't know anything.
[00:32:21] Jimmy Daly: If I spend time doing this, am I going to kind of lose my edge on the content side, or is this going to take me down some other track?
[00:32:27] Jimmy Daly: I don't want to go down.
[00:32:28] Jimmy Daly: But it turned out it was awesome because I got to talk so much to the people that we were trying to reach with our blog posts.
[00:32:38] Jimmy Daly: And then I heard all kinds of things in these calls that I was like, oh, this is rich material.
[00:32:44] Jimmy Daly: And that gave us tons of new ideas for blog posts as well.
[00:32:47] Jimmy Daly: And it just kind of became this nice little growth circle where it's like, listen to what people say on calls, do some research, write about it, that gets more calls booked.
[00:33:00] Jimmy Daly: Talk to those people, you know what I mean?
[00:33:02] Jimmy Daly: And that worked extremely well.
[00:33:04] Jimmy Daly: And for me was like, the thing I learned wasn't I wouldn't say I became an expert salesperson, but I learned how to listen very closely to customers, which is, like, a core content marketing skill.
[00:33:14] Ramli John: I feel like what you just mentioned is now what you're doing at scale at Superpath.
[00:33:19] Ramli John: Yeah, kind of exactly right there.
[00:33:23] Ramli John: Like, you're actually listening feedback.
[00:33:24] Ramli John: And was that the genesis of superpath?
[00:33:28] Ramli John: I'm curious what that aha moment.
[00:33:32] Ramli John: We're like, you know what, me talking to these people.
[00:33:34] Ramli John: What if we did this at scale in the.
[00:33:38] Jimmy Daly: So it's so interesting you say that.
[00:33:40] Jimmy Daly: I've never thought about it that way, but it kind of makes perfect sense.
[00:33:44] Jimmy Daly: I mean, I started the slack group while I still worked at animals, and it was just like a side thing.
[00:33:49] Jimmy Daly: I had no intentions to ever do anything serious with it.
[00:33:52] Jimmy Daly: I just wanted a place to talk to peers, and so I made the slack group.
[00:33:57] Jimmy Daly: And I guess that's so interesting.
[00:33:58] Jimmy Daly: Yeah, because I guess in some ways, it's like I got the same satisfaction out of those conversations that I did from sales calls, which are just, they're like a little more high pressure, a little more formal, whereas this was very informal and casual.
[00:34:11] Jimmy Daly: Yeah.
[00:34:12] Jimmy Daly: I don't know.
[00:34:12] Jimmy Daly: Maybe there's something, like, subconscious there that I've never really thought about that I think you tapped into.
[00:34:16] Jimmy Daly: It's interesting.

[00:34:17] The Impact of Content Authority on Sales Calls

[00:34:17] Ramli John: I think the other thing that's interesting here is around you wrote a bunch of content that is know people are looking up to.
[00:34:26] Ramli John: And when you jumped on the call, were people starstruck?
[00:34:30] Ramli John: Like, here's Jimmy Daley, who wrote this.
[00:34:33] Ramli John: And probably because of that, your close rate for the deals on calls were probably higher than if you weren't on it.
[00:34:42] Ramli John: Is that like, a fair assumption?
[00:34:45] Jimmy Daly: Honestly, I don't know.
[00:34:47] Jimmy Daly: I'm not really sure.
[00:34:48] Jimmy Daly: I mean, the thing that I always tried to do with the sales calls was treat them like free consulting.
[00:34:52] Jimmy Daly: You know what I mean?
[00:34:53] Jimmy Daly: I approached the call like, hey, look, all I do all day is talk to people who run content programs at SaaS companies.
[00:34:59] Jimmy Daly: Tell me about your problems.
[00:35:00] Jimmy Daly: I'll pull from all of my experience and knowledge of these other customers and try to get you some answers.
[00:35:05] Jimmy Daly: And I feel like we really tried to lean heavily on the collective experience and knowledge of the company, because you have account managers, you have writers, you have editors, all of them are interacting with customers.
[00:35:17] Jimmy Daly: There's just so much knowledge to be gained from all of that.
[00:35:20] Jimmy Daly: And we really tried to collect all of that stuff so that if I'm going to get on a sales call, I can pull from as much of that as I possibly can, versus just winging it or trying to rely only on my own kind of narrow lane of expertise.
[00:35:36] Jimmy Daly: But I do believe it helps when the person reads a blog post by a person and then they get on a call and they talk to that same person.
[00:35:47] Jimmy Daly: I mean, I don't have any data on that, but it helps.

[00:35:51] Embrace the Challenges: Advice for Younger Marketers

[00:35:51] Ramli John: Well, thank you for sharing that, I guess one final question.
[00:35:54] Ramli John: In terms of giving an advice, but instead of to the listener, but to a younger version of you, what would be, like, one or two pieces of advice that if you can send back in time to a younger Jimmy who might be starting out in marketing, would find that very helpful if that Jimmy actually listened and followed that advice?
[00:36:14] Jimmy Daly: Yeah, that's such a good question.
[00:36:17] Jimmy Daly: I think one thing I've thought about quite a bit recently is that at every different stage of my career, I expected it to get easier.
[00:36:28] Jimmy Daly: You know what I mean?
[00:36:29] Jimmy Daly: I expected I would get better at marketing and then things would be easier.
[00:36:33] Jimmy Daly: They would sort of slow down a little bit.
[00:36:35] Jimmy Daly: I remember a long time ago reading this article in Sports Illustrated about Joe Montana, San Francisco, 49 ers quarterback.
[00:36:43] Jimmy Daly: And I remember him describing some reporter asked him, like, you're not the fastest guy on the field.
[00:36:49] Jimmy Daly: You don't have the strongest arm.
[00:36:52] Jimmy Daly: What is it about you that has got you four Super bowl rings?
[00:36:57] Jimmy Daly: And he said that he sees the field in slow motion.
[00:37:00] Jimmy Daly: And I thought that was so fascinating.
[00:37:02] Jimmy Daly: He was playing the game on easy mode while everyone else was playing it on hard mode.
[00:37:06] Jimmy Daly: And I think I expected that as I got better at marketing, that things would slow down and become easier.
[00:37:11] Jimmy Daly: And that's just never happened.
[00:37:13] Jimmy Daly: Because with each new stage comes a new challenge, and it's usually something you haven't done before, or it's happening at a scale you haven't dealt with before, or there's more people involved, or for whatever reason, it's different.
[00:37:25] Jimmy Daly: You know what I mean?
[00:37:26] Jimmy Daly: So I think that when I was 25 and then 28 and then 30, I sort of always felt like I was on the cusp of reaching this level of expertise where stuff would just flow a little more easily.
[00:37:36] Jimmy Daly: And that's just not the case.
[00:37:40] Jimmy Daly: Superpath has really proven that to be wrong.
[00:37:43] Jimmy Daly: It's just like it's always something new that I haven't done that's harder than the last thing.
[00:37:47] Jimmy Daly: And I feel like maybe the thing I would have told myself is it's not going to get easier.
[00:37:51] Jimmy Daly: And that's okay.
[00:37:53] Jimmy Daly: That's part of the journey, is like, just embrace the challenges.
[00:37:57] Jimmy Daly: You'll get smarter and wiser won't get easier, but you'll be better at it.
[00:38:02] Jimmy Daly: And other things, there will be other benefits.
[00:38:05] Jimmy Daly: The better you are at it, the more you get to focus on what you like to do or the more money that you make or the more flexibility you have in your schedule or kind of these other things that are really become super important.
[00:38:16] Jimmy Daly: Like you don't really actually want it to be easy, you want autonomy and flexibility and control and money and whatever other the things are.
[00:38:24] Jimmy Daly: So I think that, I think about that a lot, a lot now.
[00:38:28] Jimmy Daly: And I think my younger self probably would have benefited from that knowledge.
[00:38:32] Jimmy Daly: That's so good.
[00:38:32] Ramli John: I feel like that's something that a lot of people need to hear, especially early on.
[00:38:37] Ramli John: I guess maybe it was just me where I'm trying to rush myself to get to that point where everything becomes easy and that undue pressure causes more pressure on top of everything else.
[00:38:51] Jimmy Daly: Totally.
[00:38:52] Jimmy Daly: That's so true that yeah, you feel like, why isn't this easier?
[00:38:56] Jimmy Daly: Or why isn't that, should I work.
[00:38:57] Ramli John: Harder to make it easier or should I work more hours or do this or that?
[00:39:01] Ramli John: And yeah, that causes more problems.
[00:39:04] Jimmy Daly: Totally.
[00:39:05] Jimmy Daly: Interestingly, tying this back to the 100K club, a lot of folks talk about hitting moments of frustration and then breakthroughs.
[00:39:11] Jimmy Daly: And I think that's probably important too, because when you're in that mode of like I'm almost there, I'm almost there.
[00:39:16] Jimmy Daly: You actually might be, but the breakthrough probably isn't that anything's easier, but it could be a career breakthrough, a new role, a better company to work at, better benefits, more money, or whatever.

[00:39:25] Unlocking the Power of Content Marketing with Jimmy Daly

[00:39:25] Ramli John: If you enjoyed this episode, you'd love the marketing Powerups newsletter.
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[00:40:01] Ramli John: Thanks to Mary Sullivan for creating the artwork and design.
[00:40:03] Ramli John: And thank you to Fisal Kigol for editing the intro video.
[00:40:07] Ramli John: And of course, thank you for listening.
[00:40:09] Ramli John: That's all for now.
[00:40:10] Ramli John: Have a powered update marketing power ups until the next episode.