Behind the Scenes at the Rainmaker Digital Company Meeting!

The theme behind the scenes at the Rainmaker Digital company meeting this year was: A bias for action. Here are some resources for you to get it all done!

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The team is all back home from our approximately-annual company meeting (some of them a bit soggy from a Denver snowstorm). I thought I’d share some of my takeaways, as well as a few “sneak previews” of cool things we have coming up — and one very time sensitive opportunity.

In this 15-minute episode, I talk about:

  • How to get into our private community of content marketers (very time sensitive)
  • The first announcement of a small-group live workshop in October
  • — more details in the transcript or the episode!

  • Two free resources to keep your head on straight and keep you moving forward

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The Show Notes

  • Time Sensitive: Enrollment Ends 5 PM Eastern Time, April 29 Jump onto the waiting list if you want to join the Authority community of content marketers. (If you miss the deadline, we’ll let you know when it re-opens!)
  • Join us for the live event in October! Digital Commerce Summit
  • Connect with MyCopyblogger to get more details about the live workshops (when we know more) at MyCopyblogger. This one also comes with a nice content marketing library!
  • My other podcast, with more focus on values and mindset, is Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
  • Brian’s personal development newsletter (it’s free) is at Further.net
  • Ask me a question or follow me on Twitter @soniasimone!

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Sonia Simone: So glad to see you again, and welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast.

CopybloggerFM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone, I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital, and I hang out with the folks doing the real work over on the Copyblogger blog.

Note: See the show notes for all the links!

Notes from our company meeting

A lot of you know that our company is a distributed one — in other words, almost all of us work remotely, all over the world. Once or twice a year we get everyone together, and it’s always a really energetic sharing of ideas, insights, thoughts for new products, ideas for how to do everything better, all that good stuff.

One theme that came up again and again was the phrase a bias for action, about going beyond giving our customers tools and education, to helping you build success habits and get more done. Today I’ll share three of those with you …

Authority

First and foremost, this one is time sensitive. You can get into this until 5 PM Pacific, tomorrow, Friday April 29.

Authority is our premium community for content marketers. You can think of it this way: If you’re the kind of person who’s comfortable creating your own content — so you might be a podcaster, a YouTuber, a writer, and you might also be a person who manages those type of folks — Authority is all about getting a lot better at your craft and at the strategy, so you’re creating the right kind of content.

Nearly every week of the year we’ve got something that will help you move toward your goals with that. One of the things I’m really proud of is that we blend education with productivity, a little dash of motivation and support, and then opportunities for Q&A sessions that are really mini coaching sessions.

So every week you get this combination of advice and information — how-to content — combined with some energy to get you to actually do it. We’ve been at this for … I think it’s six years now, since 2010, so over the years we’ve really had a chance to see what helps people move forward.

By the way, when you sign up you also have instant access to the entire library of archived sessions — it’s something crazy like 268 hours, and of course that grows every week. Honestly, if you’ve ever had a content marketing question, we’ve probably covered it in-depth and have a session to help you tackle it.

So, Authority only opens a few times a year. We’re in the middle of an open enrollment period, but only to the Authority waiting list. If you want to get in and you aren’t on the wait list, go get on the wait list and you’ll get an email. Don’t delay, we’re not going to share the URL with the general public this time, Authority is really for people who see themselves as professionals, so we’re not trying to snare the just casual person. But if you hurry you can sneak in.

Live event

We’re also talking about this “bias for action” theme for our live event, that’s in October. If you’ve ever attended live, the energy is ridiculous. Off the charts.

So in the past, Brian Clark has always put the event together as a curriculum, rather than how conferences are usually organized. Most event organizers have a handful of bigger-name people who they rope in, then there’s everyone who has a book out this year who’s trying to promote, and then depending on the size they may fill in with people who want to grow their audiences and ask if they can speak.

That’s all fine, but it’s not how we put our event together. We sit down, and this was a fun and interesting part of the company meeting, and we figure out: What would be useful for you to learn?

Then we work back from that, and organize a curriculum that gets you there. We put everything on a single track so you don’t have two conflicting things you desperately want that are happening at the same time. It’s a really different way to approach a conference, and it shows in the way that people come out of the event incredibly amped up to make serious progress on what they’re working on.

The focus this year is the Digital Commerce Summit, so everything having to do with businesses that are purely digital. In other words, you’re not selling t-shirts — or that’s not the only thing you sell — you have digital products as part or all of your business.

Ebooks, courses, communities, WordPress plugins and themes, and right on to more complex products like SaaS apps.

My personal goal with this conference — I’m doing the closing keynote on day one — is that you get on your flight home already having made progress on what you’re working on, with a clear list of action steps to do next, and the energy and motivation to do them.

Also — this is very preliminary, so we haven’t made an official announcement yet. This year for the first time, we’re going to offer small live workshop as an add-on to the conference. They’re going to be very focused, I think there will be two of them. There will be an additional cost, and Brian Clark and I will be leading the session on content-based business.

Make sure you’re on the list for Digital Commerce Institute so you find out when — because of the nature of these, the number of seats will be limited, so I expect they’ll sell out quickly.

Free stuff!

Two resources for you if you want to take more action, get more stuff done, all that good stuff —

One is my other podcast, Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. That’s more focused on who you are — your habits, your values, that kind of thing. I talk about productivity a lot, because it’s an ongoing need of focus for me. 🙂

The other is Brian Clark’s newsletter Further. It’s about health, wealth, mindset, all that good stuff. Brian has zero tolerance for fluff and woo-woo, so it’s all very pragmatic — and really, what’s more pragmatic than working on making your life better? It’s just smart.

Both of those are free — get to them at PinkHairedMarketer.fm and Further.net.

And on that note, it’s time for me to make an “Ask” — it really helps the show when you give it a review or a star rating on iTunes, so if you’re an iTunes listener and you feel moved to show us some love there, that really helps us. And a big thank you to everyone who has already left us reviews and ratings, it’s so appreciated.

See you next week!
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