Jon Morrow
Despite being in a wheelchair and not being able to move anything but his face, Jon Morrow has used content marketing to generate over 200 million page views and over $50 million in revenue for sites like Copy Logger, KISSmetrics, and Smart Blogger. Today, he is the CEO of SmartBlogger.com.
One of the hardest feelings in the world is feeling like you can do big things, that you can change the world in big ways, but you’re too small to do it. And everyone feels that way sometimes.
When you’re an entrepreneur you might have a product that you’re passionate about, that you believe will really help people, or a service. And you don’t feel like you can get it in front of the right people. There’s just too much noise out there.
Or maybe you’re writing content, and you are publishing it, and you know that it’s good content but you can’t figure out how to get anyone to pay attention to it. Or maybe your business has traction, and you feel like you’re ready to scale, and you just can’t figure out how to get in front of investors, or in front of the people that you wanna hire to help you grow.
All of that, what it’s about, is one word. Noise. That’s one of the biggest problems that we deal with in business and in life, in today’s world. It’s just changed so much, just over the last 50 years, that now there’s so much noise everywhere you go.
The noise is on your phone, the noise is on your computer, the noise is all around us all the time.
So how do you break through that noise, and how do you get people to hear your message and to also pay attention and give you their genuine attention?
So here’s what’s going on today, just to give a little bit of context. If you’ve been wondering why you can’t break through the noise, here are some of the reasons why:
According to Facebook, there are 5 billion pieces of content shared daily. That’s what’s going on just on Facebook. Google says there are more than 30 trillion indexed pages. Okay, Marketing mag says that the content marketing industry will reach $300 billion in size by next year, and what that means
is there are other companies spending $300 billion to get the attention of people.
If you’re small, if you’re just starting out and you’re trying to get traffic, that’s what you’re up against. Biz Journal says people are now seeing 4,000 ads per day. 4,000 ads. So if you’re trying to get your ads noticed, that’s what you’re up against. And according to the University of California at Irvine, people are interrupted like every 3 minutes and 5 seconds. Most of that is on their cell phones.
That’s what we’re competing against as businesses, as business people,
as entrepreneurs. And here’s what I think happens to most entrepreneurs – you feel like you have something important to say and you just can’t reach people. And I think that’s wrong.
I think that if you have a product or service or message that will genuinely help people, that will genuinely make their lives better, but you’re separated from those people by nothing but the wall of noise, I don’t think that’s right.
So what I wanna do is talk to you today about how to break through the noise, because that’s something that I’ve become kind of an expert on. Not only in work, but also in my personal life.
So as you can see I’m in a wheelchair, I was born with a condition called spinal muscular atrophy, it’s a type of muscular dystrophy. What that means is ever since birth, I’ve been getting weaker. I’m unable to move from the neck down, even though I have complete sensation.
People like me are usually shoved off in the corner somewhere. They’re usually sitting in nursing homes or watching Jerry Springer episodes, just pumped full of morphine and waiting to die. If they are living, they’re usually not paid much attention to in schools, in workplaces, and I had to find a way to break through that.
One of the big reasons why is my mother, there’s a photo of her right there. She’s an incredible mom, and she’s also sitting right up here in the front.
There’s nothing more powerful in the world than a mother’s love. Nothing more powerful than that in the world. It’s a solemn and extremely powerful responsibility that you guys have, and my mother really pulled through for me.
She not only helped me go to school, not only helped me live a somewhat normal life, but she also taught me that I could get noticed. I mean even back to elementary school, it’s frustrating when you know the answer and you can’t raise your hand.
So I was sitting in class one day and wanted to raise my hand on a question that no one else knew the answer to. A friend of mine reached over and grabbed my hand, and raised it up in the air for me and I was able to answer the question.
I’ve learned that sometimes we need other people to help us. So that’s what I’d like to do for you guys today. Because even after growing up and learning to live with my disability, I’ve been able to also have an incredible career. I was able to help run blogs like Copyblogger and Kissmetrics. By the way if you’re wondering, I have a microphone up next to my lips that I can talk to the computer using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. And I also have a mouse that I can operate with my lips. And using that setup, I’ve been able to reach over 200 million people with my work.
So I ran the marketing for Copyblogger and Kissmetrics, and now I’m the CEO of Smart Blogger. Just working from home on the computer, I’ve built it up to a 7-figure business, with 11 virtual employees all over the world. What I want to emphasize, though, is in business, regardless of whether you’re an entrepreneur or you’re working for someone else’s business, what’s valuable to me isn’t the 200 million visitors, it’s not the 50 million dollars of revenue, what’s valuable to me are statements like this one: “I started to read your post while standing in the department store customer service line. By the time I reached the head of the line I was practically blubbering, and could barely exchange my item.”
What are really meaningful are little comments like this one. I mean it’s written poorly, has a lot of grammatical mistakes, but I’ve gotten a lot of these types of comments. “I planned 2 suicide today. Because I feel that I’m in the rock bottom. But I saw my friend share this on twitter, I read it and it made me cry, and now I’m just telling myself how lucky I am.”
To hear that from someone about your work, regardless of what you’re doing, to hear that you changed their life in a meaningful way, that’s why we’re all here. The money is a result of that.
The amount of money you make is directly proportional to the change
that you’re creating in other people’s lives. Maybe you didn’t stop them from committing suicide. Maybe all you did was sell them something that made them a better parent or a better marketer, a better entrepreneur, a better father. Whatever it is. But the more people’s lives you change, that’s where the money comes from.
Because as I changed other people’s lives, what happened was my life changed. When I was younger, I used to be limited
to $800/month of income when I was on Medicaid. I found myself living in Mazatlan, Mexico, that was my balcony that I lived on for 3½ years.
After 3½ years there, I finally built up the income that I needed to come back
to the US. And so I went to Miami. And that’s where I lived, for 2½ years.
And now I’m in Austin, Texas, and this is a little shot I snapped on the cell phone before I left. I live there on the golf course. And I’ve been able to travel all over the world and live an incredible life.
No one like me has ever existed. There’s never been someone who couldn’t move anything on their body and yet using their voice, they’ve been able to build a business and affect people’s lives. And that’s a big function of the technology we have available today. I’ve learned some things about getting people’s attention, and I’m going to share three things with you that I’ve learned.
The first one I want to talk about is how to get attention and how to get people to give you a chance. And I’m going to give you some very concrete, actionable tips here.
So if you want get people’s attention, here is some of the important things to focus on. Because this is the first step, right?
First thing you need to do is spend at least 20% of your allotted time just on the title of whatever you’re working on. Whether it’s on YouTube, or whether it’s an article, or whether it’s a podcast episode. Whatever the total production time is, spend 20% of that just on the title or headline. Same thing with an ad.
So when I’m writing an article, it’s not uncommon for me to spend 10-20 hours on an article from start to finish, so that means I’ll spend 2-4 hours working just on the headline of that article. For a lot of people, that sounds strange. It sounds weird, but that’s how you get attention. That headline, if you don’t do a good job on that, you’ll never get people to give you a chance.
That’s the job of a title, by the way. It’s to make people give you a chance, and go to the rest of your content. To click the ad, whatever it is.
My boss at Copyblogger told me the way to get good at this. He said, “Jon you should study the headlines on the covers of magazines.” The people that were in magazines, they live and die based on the quality of those headlines. If you think about it, when you’re standing in the checkout line and there are magazines beside you, what do you look at to decide whether or not you’re going to put that magazine in your cart? The headlines.
So I found myself in Barnes and Noble because I was still broke at the time, and I couldn’t afford to buy the magazines. So I actually had the caregiver that was with me sneak off to the side and rip off the covers of the magazines, and we ended up taking home this big pile of magazine covers.
And over time, I started to collect these magazine covers, to where I had a pile of over 500 magazine covers underneath my bed. And I would go through these magazine covers and look at the headlines. Nowadays, fortunately, it’s a bit easier. You don’t have to break the law.
I actually did get caught one time, Barnes and Noble employee came
over and saw me ripping off magazine covers, and he just turned around and walked the other direction. I mean, I guess it’s like, what do you say to someone doing that?
Now we have Google Images, where you can type in the name of a magazine, and you’ll get a bunch of covers, and you can see the headlines. Just to give you an idea: 63 Secrets to Love That Lasts – you could create a headline out of that, that would work for a lot of things.
63 Secrets to Getting Traffic That Lasts, 63 Secrets to Building a Business That Lasts, 63 Secrets to a Marriage That Lasts, whatever it is. Look at the cover of magazines whenever you’re trying to figure out what content to produce.
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but there’s a rumor amongst content people that the person who writes these headlines for Cosmopolitan gets paid over a million dollars a year. They’re the highest paid person in the magazine industry. Because it’s that important, alright.
So if you’re going to study anyone, studying someone who gets paid a million dollars a year just to write those headlines on the cover of that magazine, it’s probably a good idea. It’s not the only magazine you should study, but it’s a good one to learn from. In my opinion, it’s still a better source than anything online.
So, next lesson. This sounds so basic, but this one is so important, I’ve seen even really smart people not understand this one. Some topics are popular, and others aren’t.
A lot of times, I’ll have businesses come to me and say, “I make screws in a manufacturing process. How can I write content that will get lots of shares?” You can’t. It’s not a popular topic.
There are lots of things that are not popular topics, and the way to determine if your content, if your ideas and if your topics are popular is to use a tool like Ahrefs, BuzzSumo, and there’s a bunch of different tools that do this type of thing. Moz is another one.
They’re all in competition, they sorta go back and forth on who’s the best one, but the idea is that you can type in a blog in your space, so if you know a website in your space that publishes content, you can plug it into one of these tools, and it’ll show you their most shared content.
You can also type in words into these tools. You could type in “drill bits” or whatever and it would show you the most popular content on drill bits. Now I almost guarantee you there’s not a lot of very popular content on drill bits. Just because it’s not something people talk about. On the other hand, there are lots of popular articles on things like dealing with grief, or anything else that you might discuss on Facebook.
So this is a simple test that you can use to determine if it’s worth producing content or not. And you should ask yourself, “Would my friends and family share this on Facebook?” If you wouldn’t share it with your friends and family, on Facebook, why should anyone else?
And there’s certain topics that we talk about:
- Self-improvement
- Parenting
- Gadgets
- Technology
- News
All of those types of topics are the things that people talk about. And if you’re
not writing about one of those topics, you have to find the intersection.
So I write about blogging, but I’ve still managed to get millions of people
to read my articles because I talk about the results of blogging. So one of my headlines is “How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise, and Get Paid to Change the World.”
That one went viral, and it got shared, like over a million visitors, just in the first few months. It didn’t say anything about blogging in the headline. But that was a part of the story, because that’s how I did it – I started blogging. So you can connect your topic to one of those or multiple of those popular topics because everyone would like to quit their job, move to paradise, and get paid to change the world, right? So that’s what you do.
The next one is respect. So how do you get people to take you seriously? Contrary to popular belief, it’s not all about who you know. It’s about who respects you. You can be well-liked, but not respected, and that is not valuable.
A lot of people think that networking and building a huge network of power players is about being a good schmoozer, being able to go to parties. I never do any of that. I don’t go to any parties, the last time I spoke at a conference was five years ago. For the most part, I stay at home and I work. That’s what I do.
And I’ve built an enormous network of people, despite never going anywhere. And the way that I did it is by doing things that people respect, and gaining the respect of powerful people. Never met them in person, but still many of them will do anything that I ask them to do because they respect me and what I’m up to. That’s a huge lesson, by the way.
Okay, so how do you get respect? This is another big one. It’s very simple, but it’s not about steps. It’s about skills.
So a lot of people ask the question, “How do I build an online business?” “How do I write an ad that converts?” “What are the steps?” So here’s the thing about those questions. You’d love to get a step-by-step roadmap, but even if someone gave that to you, you would not be successful.
The reason why? Success in anything is not about following the steps. Success in anything is about building the skills, and that takes time, it takes practice. So if you want to focus on anything, especially in the beginning, focus on the skills that you’re building.
The more skills you can master, the better off you’ll be and the more money you’ll make, the more respect you’ll have. So here’s just a list of what I think are 10 of the most valuable skills right now:
- Copywriting
- Graphic Design
- Programming
- Content Creation
- Content Promotion
- Marketing Automation
- Public Speaking
- Ad Management
- Social Media Management
- Project Management
I know people with skills in these areas that make $100,000 a year. I know people that make probably a million dollars a year, in each of these skills. And these aren’t the only 10, but it’s just an example.
Now the more of these you master, the more respect you’ll get. The people that are the most respected are not the ones who know the most, they’re not the ones who are the most likable, they’re the ones with the most incredible skills.
If you can say that you’re one of the best in the world at something, and everyone knows it, it becomes just a fact. It’s just a fact that I’m one of the best content creators in the world, probably a member of the top 10. You can ask anybody out there in the world, and they will say, “Jon is one of the best”.
Alright, that’s how you get respect. Over the years, I’ve become top 1% in all of those skills. So the more you know, the better you’ll do.
Alright, so here’s the next one. Asking for help doesn’t make anyone respect you less. In my opinion, most people aren’t nearly aggressive enough in asking for help. Almost no one. Over the years, our company had 26,000 students now go through our courses, and I’ve had three that have emailed me for help so many times that I told them to knock it off. Those three are some of my most successful students. You need to be relentless and completely unashamed about asking for things from powerful people. And if you’re wondering how to do it, here’s a formula for a pitch.
Small Request
So if I were going to write a pitch for speaking at T&C and giving this speech, here’s what I’d say: “Got 30 seconds to get your approval on this?” What am I doing there? Saying it’s not a big request. A lot of influential people get big requests all the time. And here you’re saying, “I’m asking for 30 seconds to get your approval. All you have to do is say yes or no.”
What I Believe
Okay, so it’s easy. It’s fast. The next thing is what I believe. Why is it important to say what you believe? Because if the other person believes the same thing, then they will be inclined to help you. So I believe the hardest part of being an entrepreneur is breaking through all the noise to get noticed. It’s scary, it’s hard, and nobody really tells you how to do it.
So if I were going to pitch this, to whoever, a digital marketer, Russ or Ryan or Jenna or whoever. If they believed what I’m saying here, they would already be inclined to agree and to help me.
Describe the Change You Want to Create & How
You need to describe the change that you wanna create. And then say how you’re going to do it. I would give a talk about
how I worked through the noise and reached 200 million people from my wheelchair. Not just stories, but I’ll also give actionable advice on how to do it.
If I were going to pitch this speech, that’s how I’d do it. And you can use this type of structure for anything, whenever you want to do whatever. It doesn’t matter what it is. You can write a pitch, a very simple pitch like this whenever you want to ask for help. And if you’re pitching the right people, they will help you, even if you were just getting started.
So the third and final one is surprise. This is how you get people to remember you. So once you’ve grabbed their attention, you’ve earned their respect, this is how you get people to remember you. For me when I’m working on any new project, any new piece of content, I want people to remember it for years, decades, until the day they die. I wanna create something that they’re lying there on their death bed and instead of talking to their kids, they’re thinking about me, and what I did. That’s my mindset when I’m doing something.
The way that you do that is by creating surprise, regardless of what type of content you’re creating, whether it’s video, articles, podcasts or whatever. One of the big questions you should be asking yourself is “How is this surprising?” Every piece of content you create should surprise people because otherwise they won’t remember it and they won’t talk about it. So here’s how you do that.
First big tip. Again, this is so, so simple. Don’t tell people what to do. Tell them what to do differently. Differently. The way that you do that is by writing down what they expect you to do, and writing down the surprising thing to do. You can also write down what they’re doing now, and what they should be doing in the future.
So for example, let’s say you wanted to lose weight. What would someone tell you to do? Eat right, consume less calories, work out, avoid sugar – all of those things. So, if you’re going to write an article about how to lose weight, don’t tell people any of those things. None of those should be included in your list. Just a very simple example, it doesn’t matter what you’re talking about.
Because if you do, people tune you out. And they go away, they don’t remember you. On the other hand, if you told people, “You don’t need to eat better, you just need to sleep more,” which, as it turns out, actually has something to do with the amount of willpower you have. So people who sleep more actually have a much easier time losing weight. Most people don’t know that, they never thought about that, they’ve never heard that before. But they would probably remember it. Chances are you’ll remember now I just told you.
There are all kinds of examples like that, so think about the things that they’ve never heard before. What are the things they could be doing differently that no one has told them? Whatever that is, that will immediately make you much more memorable.
Another example is don’t talk, do. So, like I said earlier, I haven’t given talks in any conferences, any big conferences, (only a few for friends) in five years.
Is it because I never get invited? No. It’s because I’m busy doing stuff, rather than talking about it. But if you’ll notice, even here at this conference, at T&C, this fabulous marketing conference, what are the most interesting presentations? Usually, they’re the ones by people who have done something incredible. And now they’re teaching you how to do it.
The world is full of people with opinions. Facebook. Just go on Facebook. Look at the number of people talking about things in your life. But how many people that talk about where they’d like to go or what they’d like to do for a living ever take action and do those things?
By becoming a do-er, you immediately become more interesting to everyone
in the world. And here’s some examples.
Tim Ferriss – this is the way that he broke out. This is before he got famous. “From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 weeks” – that sounds impossible, right? What can you talk about that you could do? What could you do that would sound impossible, but you could do it?
You can do this for anything, by the way. I mean let’s talk about Facebook ads. One of the things that are very popular at Traffic & Conversion Summit. “How I Gained 200,000 Subscribers at Only 42 Cents Per Opt-in” sounds impossible, right? If you wrote that article, anyone interested in Facebook
would want to read it. Because it sounds impossible, and you did something impossible.
It doesn’t even have to be all that desirable to be interesting. So here’s another example that went viral on Cosmopolitan: “I Stopped Having Sex for a Year and Here’s What I Learned.” Now chances are you don’t want to actually do this yourself, right? You have no desire to repeat the experiment. But, you want to know because it sounds impossible. Why would you do that? What did you learn?
Now, compare that to “The Surprising Benefits of Not Having Sex”. Which headline is more interesting? The person that did something and can report the results, or the person that’s just talking about it? It’s a big difference between those two.
And then my most popular article, “7 Life Lessons From a Guy Who Can’t Move Anything But His Face”. I published this one, and it talks about how I can’t move, but how I built these amazing businesses, I’ve traveled all over the world, I’ve worked with all of these people, it sounds impossible for that to happen. So when I tell the story of what happened, it goes viral. This got like 74,000 shares in two weeks on Facebook.
I didn’t spend any money on it. The extent of my promotion was going on Facebook, where I’m admittedly friends with quite a few powerful people, and I said, “I just published this – could you share it?” That was all I did. It went viral, it got 300,000 visitors in two weeks, and it was a brand new brand. This was the first article on the site. It’s surprising because of what I did. Not because of what I think.
So become a do-er. Do something amazing, do something that sounds impossible, and all of us can do that. It’s not just me. We all have the power to change the world, it doesn’t matter how small you feel, it doesn’t matter how powerful you are, if a guy in a wheelchair sitting in front of his computer with a microphone and a lip-operated mouse can reach 200 million people, imagine what you can do with your business. And with your life, and with what you have.
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