Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You ByWP Engine

Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting.

Start getting more from your site today!

Rainmaker.FM

The Digital Commerce and Content Marketing Podcast Network

  • Home
  • Shows
  • Hosts
  • About
  • Home
  • Shows
  • Hosts
  • About
  • Member Area
  • Log In
Menu
  • Log In
  • Free Training
7-Figure Small with Brian Clark
Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing
Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing
Hack the Entrepreneur
Members Only
Rainmaker.FM Elsewhere
Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites
StudioPress FM
Technology Translated
The Digital Entrepreneur
The Missing Link
The Showrunner
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
Youpreneur with Chris Ducker
Zero to Book
Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing
hosted by Darrell Vesterfelt and Tim Stoddart

Sally Hogshead and the Art of Fascination

  • Social:
  • Link:
  • Embed:
https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/copyblogger-019.mp3
Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes
Previous Episode:Behind the Scenes at the Rainmaker Digital Company Meeting! More Episodes Next Episode:Trump, Apple, and Facebook Advertising: Content Marketing News for May, 2016

All Episodes:

March 30, 2020

The Advantage of Email Marketing, Featuring Nathan Barry of ConvertKit

March 15, 2020

How to Write Content That Resonates

March 9, 2020

How to Conquer Your Fear of Selling, with Leah Neaderthal

March 2, 2020

How to Build Remarkable Products to Grow Your Business, with Ramit Sethi

February 17, 2020

What You Should Talk about on Your Podcast, with Tara McMullin

February 9, 2020

How to Win at Search in 2020

February 3, 2020

How to Turn Pro as a Freelance Writer

January 27, 2020

Marketing Segmentation and Personalization with Brennan Dunn of RightMessage

January 20, 2020

Podcasting Still Matters, with Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income

January 13, 2020

The New Look Copyblogger in 2020

January 8, 2020

New Year, New Copyblogger

October 23, 2019

The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur with John Jantsch

October 2, 2019

Consistency Will Take You Further

September 25, 2019

The Past, Present, and Future of Online Learning

September 16, 2019

How to Get More of the Right Things Done

September 9, 2019

Why the Future Is Still Email

September 3, 2019

What’s Next for
Copyblogger Media?

August 26, 2019

How Smart, Nimble Companies Are Using Webinars Today

August 19, 2019

The Clarity Method: A Conversation with Tim Brownson

August 12, 2019

Digital Business Trends and the Latest on the Rainmaker Platform

August 5, 2019

4 ‘Naive’ Business Principles for Enduring Success

July 8, 2019

How to Write an Epic Blog Post, Part 3: Polishing and Promotion

July 1, 2019

How to Write an Epic Blog Post, Part 2: Getting It Written

June 24, 2019

How to Write an Epic Blog Post, Part 1: Thinking and Research

June 17, 2019

3 Almost Magical Headline Ingredients for More Traffic, Engagement, and Shares

June 10, 2019

Lessons Any Business Can Learn from an Impressive Influencer Marketing Fail

June 3, 2019

13 Ways of Looking at a Headline

May 27, 2019

The 7 ‘Bad’ Habits of Incredibly Successful People

May 20, 2019

Writers: How to Move from Making a Living to Driving Revenue

May 13, 2019

Choose the Right Frame to Boost the Power of Your Content

May 6, 2019

How Copywriting Teacher Belinda Weaver Reenergized Her Email List for Massive Engagement

April 29, 2019

3 Reasons Why Really Good Writers Sometimes Can’t Find Great Clients

April 22, 2019

3 Slightly Embarrassing Emotions that Drive Effective Copywriting

April 15, 2019

Get 10 Content Marketing Boosters in 20 Minutes

April 8, 2019

Becoming the ‘Chief Empathy Officer’ of Your Copy and Content

April 1, 2019

One of the Most Important Marketing Decisions You’ll Ever Make

March 18, 2019

What Nobody Wants to Hear about Content Marketing

March 11, 2019

Getting Your Big, Scary Projects Finished: A Conversation about Growing Gills

March 4, 2019

When Is It Time to Bring in a Professional Copywriter?

February 25, 2019

Using Content to Systematically Move Prospects Toward a Purchase

February 18, 2019

Understanding the Lifecycles of Your Website, with Pamela Wilson

February 11, 2019

5 Ways to Manage a Stress-Induced Creative Slump

February 4, 2019

3 Ways Strategic Content Can Drive Measurable Business Outcomes

January 28, 2019

The Social Media Platform Every Content Creator Should Be Using in 2019 (Nope, It’s Not Facebook)

January 21, 2019

Real Talk about Generating High-Quality Content

January 14, 2019

A Conversation with Paul Jarvis about Staying a ‘Company of One’

October 29, 2018

The 3 Plus 1 Foundational Elements of Effective Persuasion

October 22, 2018

5 Essential Copywriting Techniques from Copyblogger

October 15, 2018

5 Ways to Recover Your Professional and Creative Confidence

October 8, 2018

5 Stinky Sardine Secrets to Make Your Content More Fascinating

September 24, 2018

The Mindset ‘Hack’ that Frees Your Creativity and Makes You Happier

September 18, 2018

How to Kill Your Sales and Mess up Your Business: Lessons from a Used Car Salesman

September 4, 2018

The 7 Things Writers Need to Make a (Good) Living

August 27, 2018

Are You Making These Social Media Marketing Mistakes?

August 20, 2018

Fix These 7 About Page Mistakes for More Traffic and (Possibly) Better SEO

August 13, 2018

7 Ways to Boost Your Creativity

August 6, 2018

A 10-Step ‘Checklist’ for Your Content Marketing Site

July 30, 2018

The 3 Keys to Publishing Strong Content … Even If You Aren’t a ‘Great’ Writer (Yet)

July 23, 2018

Fix These 3 Points of Failure to Get Better Results for Your Content

July 16, 2018

Big Changes at ConvertKit: A Discussion with Founder Nathan Barry

July 9, 2018

3 Skills to Master to Become a Marketing Badass this Year

June 18, 2018

The Quiet Power of Conversational Copy

June 11, 2018

5 Rules of Thumb to Relieve SEO-Induced Stress

June 4, 2018

How to Use the GDPR to Make Your Business Stronger than Ever

May 14, 2018

‘Good Karma’ Selling that Works: A Conversation with Tim Paige

April 30, 2018

How to Get More Comfortable (and Effective) at Selling

April 23, 2018

Privacy and Permission in the Wake of Cambridge Analytica

April 16, 2018

Seth Godin and How to Create Change

April 9, 2018

Email? Chatbots? Social? How Are We Supposed to Reach People?

March 26, 2018

The Double-Edged Sword that Can Make (or Break) Your Content

March 19, 2018

Make More Progress by Getting (Gently) Out of Your Comfort Zone

March 12, 2018

Are You Doing Content Marketing Wrong?

March 5, 2018

Storytelling for Modern Content Marketing (Part 2 of 2)

February 26, 2018

Storytelling for Modern Content Marketing (Part 1 of 2)

February 19, 2018

10 Quality Factors Search Engines Need to See on Your Site

February 12, 2018

A Simple Content Strategy to Make Your Site Massively More Useful

February 5, 2018

How to Avoid a Heartbreaking Business Failure

January 29, 2018

Hey Writers: Let’s Get You Paid What You’re Worth

January 15, 2018

5 Keys to Making Your Content More Shareable

December 18, 2017

3 Observations on Trends (but not Predictions) for 2018

December 11, 2017

3 Tips Now to Build a Strong Foundation in 2018

December 4, 2017

The 3 Success Factors that Help Writers Earn a Great Living

November 27, 2017

How to Recognize a Great Content Idea

November 20, 2017

How to Cultivate a More Meaningful Gratitude Practice

November 13, 2017

Advice for Poets, Advice for Killers

October 30, 2017

Face Your Business Fears on Halloween Week

October 23, 2017

How to Make Smarter Decisions about Your Website

October 2, 2017

A Series of Unfortunate Content Events

September 18, 2017

The Evolution of a Successful Copywriter

August 28, 2017

7 Ways to Improve Your Marketing by Harnessing the Power of Evil

August 14, 2017

Smart Questions from our Brilliant Audience

August 7, 2017

Does the Web Have Enough Patience for Your In-Depth Content?

July 31, 2017

How to Write (Much Better) Blog Comments

July 17, 2017

Which Works Better: Positive or Negative Content?

July 10, 2017

How to Attract the Exact Customers You Want

July 3, 2017

How to Create Stability and Success as an Artist

June 19, 2017

Two Powerful Resources for Life-Changing Growth

June 12, 2017

How to Turn All that Marketing Advice into Action

June 5, 2017

How to Develop a Compelling Marketing Idea in 4 Steps

May 30, 2017

Getting Over the Fear of Selling

May 22, 2017

Talking Community and Digital Business with Tara Gentile

May 15, 2017

Plagiarism, Self-Deception, Bad Sandwiches, and Other Interesting Disasters

May 1, 2017

Professional Writers: Find Out How to Get Certified by Copyblogger

April 17, 2017

The Painful Core Lesson Taught by 3 Astonishing Big-Brand Fails

April 3, 2017

5 Mindset Habits that Actually Work

March 27, 2017

On Grammar, Usage, and Not Being a Great Big Jerk

March 20, 2017

Creative Strategies for Content Writers

March 13, 2017

A New Ultra-Easy Resource for Creating Excellent WordPress Sites

February 20, 2017

Thriving Freelancers and Clients from Hell

February 13, 2017

Politics, Content Marketing, and the 2017 Super Bowl Ads

February 6, 2017

Copyblogger Book Club: Winning the Story Wars

January 23, 2017

3 Content Marketing Strategy Fails (and How to Fix Them)

January 9, 2017

The 2017 Content Excellence Challenge: Your January Assignments

December 19, 2016

Bad Writing Advice: The ‘Post Truth’ Episode

December 12, 2016

Get Ready Now for a Creative and Productive 2017

December 5, 2016

The 4 Pillars Every Online Business Is Built On

November 28, 2016

Orbit Media’s Latest Survey of 1000 Bloggers

November 14, 2016

Have You Already Missed the Podcasting Gold Rush?

November 7, 2016

Getting More Traffic, Links, and Shares to Your Content

October 31, 2016

5 Quick Wins for Content Marketers

October 24, 2016

Announcing: An Intriguing New Tool for Collaborative Content

October 17, 2016

A New Book to Make Content Marketing Easier

October 10, 2016

Behind the Scenes at Copyblogger: Our New Email Approach

October 3, 2016

The ‘Obligatory’ Structure of Effective Content

September 26, 2016

7 Powerful Content Strategies Borrowed from Advertising Masters

September 15, 2016

How to Handle Demographic and Psychographic Segmentation (without Looking Like an Idiot)

September 8, 2016

Ethics, Professionalism, and Good Manners for Content Marketers

September 1, 2016

3 Questions that Can Haunt Creative Professionals

August 25, 2016

How to Give and Get Exceptional Testimonials, Part Two

August 18, 2016

How to Give and Get Exceptional Testimonials, Part One

August 11, 2016

Are You Leaving Money on the Table with Weak Headlines?

August 4, 2016

Content Marketing for Nonprofits

July 28, 2016

The One-Two Punch that Creates the Most Successful Copywriters

July 21, 2016

Pokémon Go: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

July 14, 2016

5 Suggestions When You’re Writing About Controversy

July 7, 2016

Announcing: A Breakthrough Educational Collaboration between Copyblogger and U.C. Davis

June 30, 2016

How to Break Past the #1 Conversion Killer

June 23, 2016

The New Age of Marketing Automation: Powerful, Simple, Cost-Effective

June 16, 2016

How to Make a (Really Good) Living as a Freelance Writer

June 9, 2016

Self-Publishing, Side Hustles, and Doing It All: A Conversation with Linda Formichelli

June 2, 2016

A Process for Content Marketing Success

May 26, 2016

Content Marketing Best Practices: Getting Email Opt-Ins

May 19, 2016

Behind the Scenes: Adventures in Advertising

May 12, 2016

Trump, Apple, and Facebook Advertising: Content Marketing News for May, 2016

May 5, 2016

Sally Hogshead and the Art of Fascination

April 28, 2016

Behind the Scenes at the Rainmaker Digital Company Meeting!

April 14, 2016

Social Media News, Social Media Constants

April 7, 2016

Strategies for B2B Podcasting, with Clark Buckner

March 31, 2016

Content Marketing Success Stories: Fitness Powerhouse Examine.com

March 24, 2016

Behind the Scenes: An Inside Look at the Rainmaker FM Redesign

March 17, 2016

Our Latest Advice and Resources for Digital Business Owners

March 10, 2016

Should Content Publishers Adopt Google’s New AMP?

March 3, 2016

7 Ways to Get Smarter with Social Media Listening

February 25, 2016

Content Marketing Shout-Out: Orbit Media and Andy Crestodina

February 18, 2016

The Tactic You Should Steal from Copyblogger

February 11, 2016

Content Marketing News for February, 2016

February 4, 2016

Email Marketing: The Misunderstood Powerhouse

January 28, 2016

The Secret Weapon Behind Great Websites: The Role of the Content Editor

January 21, 2016

Behind the Scenes: The Relaunch and Re-Imagining of Copyblogger.com

January 14, 2016

Trends and Predictions for Digital Commerce: A Conversation with Brian Clark

January 7, 2016

2016 Content Marketing Resolutions

December 28, 2015

The End of The Lede, The Beginning of Copyblogger FM

November 10, 2015

Constraints Can Be Blessings (Plus 2 Other Essential Lessons Jerod Re-Learned This Week)

November 3, 2015

Long or Short? The Content Length Question Answered, Once and For All

October 27, 2015

The Simple Publishing Hack That Gives Old Content New Life (Plus 3 More Tips)

October 20, 2015

The Surprising Truth about Earning a Profit from Your Content

October 13, 2015

How to Move Your Audience From Infatuation to Love

October 6, 2015

3 Things Your Audience Wants You to Know about Useful Content

September 29, 2015

Revisiting Authenticity: What It Is, What It’s Not, and Why It Matters

September 22, 2015

Publishing Lessons from Dave Pell, the Most Fascinating Email Newsletter Writer in the Business

September 15, 2015

Why Content Creators Should Kiss Their Programmers

September 8, 2015

Finally — A Podcast about the Superiority of Written Content

September 1, 2015

Hot Seat: Grilling Jerod on Using Audio Content to Seed a Content Arsenal

August 25, 2015

How to Optimize Your Headlines for Content Discovery with Vinegar (Before You Die of Cholera)

August 18, 2015

5 Stories That Explain Jerod Morris (Plus One Massive Marketing Lesson)

August 11, 2015

Lede Potpourri: A Big Idea, Talking About Demian Behind His Back, and Lessons from #PM15

August 4, 2015

How to Attend an Industry Conference Like a Boss

July 28, 2015

Getting the Most Out of a Conference When You’re There to Promote, Part 1

July 21, 2015

How Much Does the Modern Content Marketer Need to Know About SEO?

July 14, 2015

Are Podcasters Digitally Sharecropping Without Realizing It?

July 7, 2015

Celebrating Our 101st Episode (with a Special Guest Interviewer)

June 30, 2015

Why The Phrase ‘Leaders Are Readers’ Should Die

June 23, 2015

Why You Should Think Outside the Box About Online Courses

June 16, 2015

The Proper (and Safe) Way to Republish Old Articles

June 9, 2015

How to Grow an Audience on LinkedIn by Repurposing Content

June 2, 2015

Key Takeaways from Three-and-a-Half Hours with Henry Rollins

May 27, 2015

Rapid-Fire Takeaways from Authority Rainmaker

May 19, 2015

The Proper Way to Grow an Audience on Medium

May 12, 2015

The Introvert’s Guide to Launching a Successful Podcast

May 5, 2015

The One Quality All Popular Podcasts Share

April 28, 2015

Proof That Grit Is the Only Way to Reach Your Potential

April 21, 2015

Do We Celebrate Failure Too Much?

April 14, 2015

Choose Yourself Part 2: James Altucher Fights Back

April 7, 2015

Should We Fear Content Shock? (Or Could It Actually Be a Good Thing?)

March 31, 2015

Should You Really ‘Walk in the Direction of Your Fear’?

March 24, 2015

Is ‘Choose Yourself’ Good Advice … or New-Age Phooey?

March 17, 2015

Is Authority Earned or Bestowed?

March 3, 2015

Dan Pink on How to Succeed in the New Era of Selling

February 24, 2015

Here’s How to Answer the Most Important Question in Life (and Make a Living from It)

February 17, 2015

Sally Hogshead on How You Can Unlock Your Natural Ability to Fascinate

February 10, 2015

How to Learn from Your Successes

January 27, 2015

How to Learn From Your Mistakes

January 13, 2015

Lessons Learned from Conducting Two Monster Audience Surveys

December 16, 2014

Adaptive Content: A Trend to Pay Attention to in 2015

December 2, 2014

The Most Important Lessons You Should Have Learned in 2014

November 18, 2014

How We Built Our Careers Online (And What You Can Learn From It)

November 4, 2014

Interview with Brian Clark: How Customer Experience Maps Help You Develop a Smarter Content Strategy

October 21, 2014

How Empathy Maps Help You Speak Directly to the Hearts of Your Audience

October 7, 2014

How to Ignite a Feeling in Your Audience

September 23, 2014

Are You Overlooking This Cornerstone of a Smart Content Strategy?

June 26, 2014

How to Curate Knowledge, Turn it Into Wisdom, and Build Your Audience

June 19, 2014

How Successful Writers Curate Ideas

June 13, 2014

The 5 W’s of Link Curation

June 6, 2014

Why You Should Curate Content (And How to Do It Right)

May 30, 2014

How Freaks and Misfits Can Succeed in Business: A Conversation with Chris Brogan

May 23, 2014

The 2 Reasons People Don’t Click on Your Buttons … And How to Overcome Them

May 16, 2014

Chase Customers, Not Clicks

May 9, 2014

How to Be Authentic

May 2, 2014

How to Close With Style

April 25, 2014

The Best of Seth Godin on Copyblogger

April 17, 2014

How to Choose Arresting Images for Your Blog Posts (And Why You Should)

April 11, 2014

Removing Blog Comments: The View So Far

April 4, 2014

How to Use Internal Cliffhangers

March 28, 2014

Hangout Hot Seat with Brian Clark

March 21, 2014

How to Tell a Seductive Story

March 14, 2014

How to Create Exquisite Subheads

March 7, 2014

How to Write Killer Bullet Points

February 28, 2014

How to Write Damn Good Sentences

February 21, 2014

How to Use Persuasive Words

February 14, 2014

Michael Stelzner on Capturing Emails and Committing to Quality

February 7, 2014

How to Nail Your Opening

January 24, 2014

How to Write a Magnetic Headline (in Under 15 Minutes)

May 18, 2012

Seth Godin on When You Should Start Marketing Your Product, Service, or Idea

May 11, 2012

How to Attract an Audience by Integrating Content, Social, and Search

March 30, 2012

Why You Should Build an Audience Before You Build a Business

March 16, 2012

How Chris Brogan Built His Content Platform

March 9, 2012

Jay Baer on How to Turn Interested Prospects into Lifelong Customers

March 2, 2012

A 30-Minute Copywriting Course from a Master of the Craft

February 24, 2012

The Path to a Legendary Copywriting Career

February 17, 2012

5 Tips for Affiliate Marketing Beginners

February 10, 2012

Why Not Sell Physical Stuff With Digital Media?

February 3, 2012

Whether You Call it Blogging or Not, Online Content Still Rules

January 27, 2012

Answers to the 3 Biggest Email Marketing Questions We Get

January 20, 2012

How to Newsjack Your Way to Free Media Exposure with David Meerman Scott

January 13, 2012

Steven Pressfield and the War of Work

November 18, 2011

The Strategy Behind the Copyblogger Redesign

November 11, 2011

7 Ways to Create an Email Marketing "Snowball Effect"

November 4, 2011

Warning: If You're Not a Privacy Nut, You're Losing Sales

October 28, 2011

The 3 Kinds of Writing That Builds a Business

October 21, 2011

The Art of Seductive Writing: A Conversation with Robert Greene

October 7, 2011

Why Content Marketing Doesn't Suck

September 30, 2011

Are You Weird Enough to Succeed at Content Marketing?

September 23, 2011

What Works With SEO Right Now and Why No One Does What You Want

September 16, 2011

Are You Flushing Your Marketing Down the Social Media Toilet?

September 11, 2011

Seth Godin on Blogging, Business Books, and Creating Content that Matters

September 2, 2011

The Return of Copyblogger Radio …

June 10, 2011

Answered: Your Most Burning Content Marketing Questions

June 3, 2011

How to Get All the Clients and Customers You Can Handle

May 20, 2011

Is Content Marketing Worth the Work?

May 13, 2011

How to Write Nearly Undeletable Emails

May 6, 2011

Is the Online Gold Rush Over?

April 22, 2011

The Art of Enchanting Online Marketing with Guy Kawasaki

April 15, 2011

The Market for Something to Believe in is Infinite: An Interview with Hugh MacLeod

April 8, 2011

How to Constantly Create Compelling Content

March 25, 2011

The Content Marketing Question You Need to Answer … Now

March 18, 2011

Good SEO is Simple. Really.

March 4, 2011

Did Social Media Kill the Marketing Star?

February 25, 2011

How to Write (and Execute) a Simple but Powerful Business Plan

February 17, 2011

How to Kick Groupon to the Curb and Become a Local Hero

February 3, 2011

Convert … Or Die

January 27, 2011

Attention: Is Your Headline Getting Any?

January 20, 2011

How to Craft Landing Pages that Work

January 13, 2011

Why Every Smart Business is in the Media Business

January 5, 2011

2011 Content Marketing Predictions

December 15, 2010

Tim Ferriss on How to Reinvent Yourself with Blog Marketing

December 8, 2010

The 6 Elements of an Influential Web Experience

December 1, 2010

Your Staggeringly Unfair Marketing Advantage

November 17, 2010

How to Get Some Action

November 10, 2010

The Foundation of All Marketing that Works

November 3, 2010

Introducing Copyblogger Radio

May 5, 2016

Sally Hogshead and the Art of Fascination

The Queen of Fascination shares a new crop of insights with us …

Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You ByWP Engine

Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting.

Start getting more from your site today!

Those of you who came to our 2015 live event probably remember Sally Hogshead’s memorable and valuable talk … that kicked off with her taking two shots of Jägermeister before 9:00 AM.

Our team still talks about Sally’s mantra,

Different is Better than Better

In this 23-minute episode, Sally and I talk about:

  • What “different is better than better” really means for content creators
  • A new “fast pass” tool Sally has created to find your content’s most compelling advantage (free for now)
  • How to manage the increasingly fragmented “goldfish” attention spans of the 21st century
  • The three hurdles we need to manage as content creators
  • Giving your audience the tools to be fascinating themselves
  • How to use a culture of experimentation to keep the creative fires burning

Listen to Copyblogger FM: Content Marketing, Copywriting, Freelance Writing, and Social Media Marketing below ...

Sally Hogshead and the Art of FascinationSonia Simone
  • Social:
  • Link:
  • Embed:
https://rainmaker.fm/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/copyblogger-019.mp3
Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

  • Brian Clark’s quick interview with Sally about finding your winning difference
  • Sally’s new Brand Fascination Profile tool (this is free for now, I recommend you snag it quickly)
  • Sally’s primary site, HowToFascinate.com
  • Get links to Sally’s books (including the updated Fascination) here: Sally Hogshead books
  • We’d love to see you at this year’s live event! Get all the details here: Digital Commerce Summit
  • Ask me a question or follow me on Twitter @soniasimone!

The Transcript

Sally Hogshead and the Art of Fascination

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM is brought to you by the Digital Commerce Institute. Do you want to build the business of your dreams without squandering time and money? Stumbling around to find the right path? Or making unnecessary mistakes? The market is ready and waiting for you, but that doesn’t mean it’s gotten any easier. Digital Commerce Institute is here to change that. Go to Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce and get the training, education, and community you need to start building your digital business the right way.

Sonia Simone: Well hey there, I am so glad to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM 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 like to hang out with folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger Blog. If you want any link that we have, you can swing on over to Copyblogger.FM, and the magic of the Internet will take you to the show notes and all of the archived episodes. On some of them, we’ll go ahead and spell them out for you, but we always have lots of resources and digital material for you.

I’m very happy that we were able to get Sally Hogshead to come join us today. Sally was a keynote for us last year at our live event, and I really think everybody who saw it agreed that she walked the walk, especially when she opened her talk at something in the neighborhood of 8:30 in the morning by taking two shots of Jägermeister, so that was memorable. It was remarkable, it woke everybody up, and she went on to really engage, educate, and fascinate us. I think we’ve all seen keynotes that are a little bit samey same, but this was really a remarkable performance and a remarkable experience.

She’s the author of Fascinate, which has been revised and updated, and she has also created some tools that we’re going to let you know about on this podcast. Welcome, Sally. It’s so lovely to have you here.

Sally Hogshead: You know what? I have been looking forward to our conversation, Sonia. I’m thrilled to be able to talk with you. I’ve got to tell you, I have a huge crush on the whole Copyblogger/Rainmaker audience, and it’s totally my peeps, so I want to give away some cool cheat sheet-type stuff in our conversation today.

Sonia Simone: Yes, yes, awesome. I love that. I want to jump in by congratulating you. I know you have a new edition of the book, and I also know that it’s really been considerably expanded and updated. Do you want to let us know what’s up with the new release?

Sally Hogshead: Sure. I originally started researching the science of fascination in 2006, and that book came out in 2010, which was the single worst time to release a high-concept business book. Nobody wanted to do anything but keep their jobs in 2010. In marketing, it’s like the first thing that gets cut is the marketing or content budget, and so I went on to write How the World Sees You. After that became a New York Times bestseller, the publisher came back to me and said, “Hey, let’s go back and take the same system, all this research with almost one million people, let’s take that and revisit the original version of Fascinate.”

In my mind, I was thinking, “Oh, cool. I’m just going to do a little find and replace in my Word document, and the whole thing’s going to be done.” You know how it goes, you start deconstructing a piece of content, and suddenly the whole thing unravels like the sweater pulling the thread.

Sonia Simone: Oh, yeah.

Sally Hogshead: It was a massive, massive overhaul, because the truth is, when I originally wrote Fascinate, I was basing it on my experience as a creative director for a decade inside of advertising agencies and brands, but I didn’t really have the algorithm yet, I didn’t have the hack. And so I’m incredibly proud of this new edition, because it’s got over 100 new case studies, it’s 68 percent new content, and it’s more the how-to book that I always wanted to write, but just didn’t have the studies yet to back it up.

Sonia Simone: That’s so cool. I would venture to say that for a great majority of keynotes, maybe I feel very excited by the speaker’s expertise, and then an hour later, I have no idea what they just said. I really think people who saw you talk last year really came away with what was for me your key point, and I talked about it with our team: being different is better than better. I thought maybe you could unpack that for the folks who didn’t get that chance to see you live.

Sally Hogshead: Yes. We spend a lot of time with our clients and even ourselves when we’re writing blogs, we’re writing ads, or even writing an email to our team. We try to focus on being better. The problem is that better works if you have a bigger budget. In other words, if you have the biggest budget in your category, then you can focus on being better. You don’t have to worry about being different because you can put more messages out, you can have a bigger media budget. And so you want to focus on that competitive stance of being better.

The problem is that if you don’t have the biggest budget and you’re not the most famous, then being better is really hard and really expensive. What’s better than being better is being different. When we’re working with clients and customers with our own readers, imagine that you have a choice. You can either focus on being better but then risk that nobody will notice or care, or you can focus on being different by identifying something that you’re already doing right and then doing it on purpose.

I’ll give you an example: it doesn’t matter if I write the best book if nobody reads it. In the same way, it doesn’t matter if an auto manufacturer creates the best cars if nobody buys them. Nowhere is this more true than with content. If you have the best idea but nobody cares, then you may as well have never come up with the idea in the first place. That’s why, over the course of the last decade, with taking a look at what the most fascinating brands and people and ideas are, how they consume our attention, we found ways to strategically and systematically identify what makes them different.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, I mean, you have so many fascinating stories on this and so many examples. Is there sort of a thumbnail one that you could give us? Just of somebody that had something so memorable, so different, that they really stood out and were able to build success on that?

Sally Hogshead: Yeah, you know what? I always like taking examples from people who don’t have a bigger budget because it’s easy to be fascinating if you can just buy your way into people’s consciousness.

My husband and I have a beach house in a sleepy little surf town named New Smyrna Beach. It’s about an hour south of Daytona. There’s a strip where they have restaurants and bars, and a lot of them have much bigger budgets than this one that we love named Gnarly’s Surf Shack.

It’s at the base of a bridge, and it has a huge competitive disadvantage because this bridge is a drawbridge that goes up and down for sailboats as they’re coming through, and there’s no way to predict when a sailboat is going to be coming through. So you’re sitting there having your fish tacos and ‘ding, ding, ding, ding.’ Suddenly, your whole meal’s disrupted by this drawbridge and the cars backing up.

Well what Gnarly’s did to gain a competitive advantage is they priced beers at 25 cents when the drawbridge goes up. As soon as people hear ‘ding, ding, ding, ding,’ everybody runs to the bar because they know that they’re going to get their beer for 25 cents for the next five to seven minutes. And it’s become a huge draw for Gnarly’s because they took this competitive disadvantage, which is a just crap piece of real estate, and they turned it into their key differentiating point.

Here’s the deal. For all of us, within our brands, within our personal brand, within our content, within the ideas that we’re creating, there’s always something that looks like a flaw. But if you can flip it around, it can actually become a massive competitive advantage. I mean, I grew up with the last name Hogshead…you want to talk about brand disadvantage? In the book, what we found is that great messages have two parts to them. We call this the anthem, and it’s the anthem exercise in part three of the book.

The first thing that great concepts have is they identify how the brand is different. In other words, once you identify how something is different than others in its category, you can have a superior competitive position because you’re not going head-to-head based on things like ad budget.

Part one is how the brand is different, and the second is what the brand does best. In other words, the brand’s key area of performance. As an example, my husband and I just bought a Tesla. How the brand is different is that it’s breakthrough. What the brand does best is technology.

When I say to you, “I’m creating content for a brand that has breakthrough technology,” it becomes much easier for everybody on the team to align around that, almost like a creative brief, like a North Star. So everybody can say, “Okay, we can write content in different formats, different forms of media, but as long as we are communicating breakthrough technology, then we can all stay aligned and not talk things to death.”

Another example would be Southwest Airlines. How the brand is different is that it’s friendly. What the brand does best is practicality. Everything that Southwest does is aligned around friendly practicality, from the way they hire their flight attendants to the peanut packaging and the way they market on their website. So in identifying how a brand or a person or idea is different, that’s how to create marketing content around it without having to overthink and rehash and getting confused and getting stuck.

Sonia Simone: Yep, I always wonder this when I see what you do and read your work. Do you believe that anybody can be fascinating? I mean, are there some people who are just never going to be fascinating?

Sally Hogshead: Not everybody has the drawbridge with the ‘ding, ding, ding, ding’ tug pass. The answer is yes, different brands fascinate in different ways. The ones that fail to fascinate are going to be the ones that have to compete on the basis of price. Competing on the basis of price is just a fast downward spiral into obsolescence and irrelevance. Because if you’re not breaking through from distraction and commoditization, then that’s going to be a big problem. Brands can still be trusted, they can still be consistent, they can still be stable and comfortable and reliable and be fascinating.

An example is Tiffany & Company. They sell a lot of low-end stuff for the $100, $200 price point. But really, the brand needs to keep its stature as selling $50,000, $100,000 pieces in order for it to maintain its prestige over time. They released a bracelet several years ago that was at such a low price point that all the high school girls were wearing it, and it was starting to become a fad. Tiffany made a really controversial move among its shareholders, and it got a lot of backlash for doing this. They created scarcity among those pieces so the prices would go up so that they wouldn’t become a fad that would then go out of style.
Because what goes up comes down, and they knew that when those teenage girls that had bought an $80 silver bracelet were at a point in their life when they would want an engagement ring, if the brand wasn’t aspirational, then the brand would lose trust. That’s an example of how a brand has to stay true to its principles, what I call its advantages. The language that the brand speaks in order for it to have a strong place in the market over time.

Sonia Simone: Well, I do know you have a new brand fascination profile, and I was just curious, what’s that about and what’s the deal with that?

Sally Hogshead: You know, I’m so excited to have you mention that because it’s sort of like my new baby. When I worked in advertising, I worked with a lot of really big brands like Nike and MINI Cooper and Target, and I saw that most brands, even if they’re small- to medium-sized businesses, have to make an uncomfortable choice.

And that choice is either they can hire somebody else to do their marketing, oftentimes at a bigger budget than they can realistically afford — they have to hire an ad agency or a high-end marketing expert — or they have to do it themselves and risk damaging their brand, getting frustrated, and ultimately losing money. And that just doesn’t make sense.

Every other category is commoditized. I don’t have to call a travel agent if I want to book a flight. And so I wanted to find a way to give anybody kind of a backdoor shortcut, like the fast pass at Disney World where you could just kind of jump right to the front of the line, building upon my experience working with brands.

I created an algorithm, and when you go to BrandFascination.com, you can take this assessment. And in about three minutes, you can get an outcome, which is what your brand’s most compelling advantage is. It runs on the same platform as my Fascination Advantage assessment. Which by the way, we had 5,000 people from Copyblogger take that assessment.

Sonia Simone: Wow.

Sally Hogshead: Yeah, so step one is to take the assessment at BrandFascination.com and find out what your brand’s primary advantage is, almost like a focus group, in three minutes. And then when you go to the book, I give examples of the words that you should be using to communicate that advantage. Once you have the words, it becomes a lot easier to create content. Because even if you don’t use my words, I’m giving you a copywriting secret. It helps everybody align on what that strategic brief should be.

Sonia Simone: I know I’ve definitely heard you talk about this idea of the goldfish attention span. We’re in such a hyper-fragmented attention space right now, and it’s getting worse. Every year you think it can’t get worse, and it gets worse.

Sally Hogshead: Right, yes.

Sonia Simone: And you know, content creators, bloggers, podcasters, YouTube creators are fighting with so much noise, and we’re fighting so much clutter. We’re trying to stand out. I know you have some thoughts on how to survive. Some people call it ‘content shock,’ where there’s just such a volume of content, and there you are. Maybe you’re even a super small business owner or a freelance copywriter, and you’re trying to swim in all this noise. What are your suggestions?

Sally Hogshead: There are three challenges that we all face with our content and really, anytime we communicate: distraction, competition, and commoditization. When I first started studying for Fascinate, I found this word, this concept of fascination in an old scientific journal. And I remember reading this clear as day. It said, “The word ‘fascinate’ is one of the oldest words in written language, and it goes back to ancient Latin. The word originally was fascinare. Fascinare means to bewitch or hold captive so that your listener is powerless to resist.”

I thought, “Now that’s cool, that’s dark and cool.” I began studying it, and I found that this concept of fascination holds true around time across the globe. Constantinople, the European Renaissance, even the Salem Witch Trials were not about witchcraft, they were all about fascination. We stopped focusing on how to bewitch or hold captive our listeners when we got into the 20th century with marketing. We thought that by slamming people with content that was not fascinating, we could simply dull their senses and dumb them down into submission.

Let me give you a couple of fast facts that I learned that give an example of how content can be fascinating, even in a world with the attention span of a goldfish. One of the pieces of research that we found was that women will spend more to be fascinating than they spend on food and clothes combined.

Let me break that down, because I think this is really key for people who are developing content. We asked women, “How much would you be willing to spend in dollar amounts to be the most fascinating person in the room?” They were willing to spend 15 percent of their take-home income to be the most fascinating person in the room, which is more than they spend on food and clothes combined.

The takeaway is, in a distracted and competitive environment, find out how to make people feel fascinating. In other words, don’t just try to fascinate your reader, give your reader tools to become more fascinating to others. Because that’s where the ROI is going to be for them. Another thing that we learned is that fascinating brands can charge up to 400 percent more for the same product. There’s a real dollar value amount in helping your clients make their brand more fascinating, and for you to make your own brand more fascinating.

Originally, when I started studying fascination, I thought it was simply just going to be about holding people’s attention. But we really saw that there’s a strong correlation of dollar amounts.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, exactly. Because I always say attention is not business. You can get attention in all kinds of ways that do not translate into anybody actually making a purchase from you.

Sally Hogshead: Yeah, in and of itself, if nobody takes action, then in fact … in a lot of ways, if you’re not delivering value in return, you’re actually making your reader or customer feel cheated because you’ve asked them for their attention span. Which we’ve just established, is only nine seconds, which means that’s the most precious nonrenewable resource, but you’re not giving them any value in return.

Sonia Simone: Before we wrap up, and I want to let people know where they can find you and all that good stuff. But something that I find really fascinating about your methodology is that it just seems to spark really interesting, creative processes. Our Copyblogger audience is all about content, and I think we have lots of different types of content creators, but almost all of us share this challenge with keeping the creative fires burning.

The challenge to generate the ideas day in and day out, the creative sparks that become memorable, remarkable, fascinating content every day and over the long haul. You’re a creative, longtime copywriter, you’re a creative business owner, what do you tell people who are looking for ways to keep the creative magic alive?

Sally Hogshead: We do a lot of experiments among our team, and I find that the curiosity of finding out what’s going to happen over the course of one of these experiments keeps me emotionally very engaged, but also opens up a lot of possibilities for us to continue to evolve. An example was, originally when I created the Fascination Advantage assessment, it was free, and it never occurred to me to charge for it. And then I learned the content model of, “Hey, you can actually make money for stuff you write? How cool is that?”

It was through that process of testing price points and finding ways to give it away as a freemium. We did an experiment for three months named Project Fascination, in which we gave people codes they could pay the assessment with. They got 100 free assessments that would normally be $47, and they could pay it forward for free. Then we just watched organically what happened without putting any media dollars behind it.

We had 120,000 people take the assessment within three months because we gave them tools to share. We showed them how to donate it to a church or give it to a school or share it on Twitter, and the way we did that was by giving them an advocate’s kit.

This is something that I think is, first of all, an example of how an experiment can become richer and more dimensional as it goes. But it’s also an example of how the more you build your content and do people a service so that they love your content, and then give them as many ways as possible to share it out and pay it forward, it comes back to you over and over again. If you try to keep your content like it’s this fragile doll up on the shelf where it gets dusty like your grandmother’s China doll, then it just rots.

The more that our content can be living and breathing and red-blooded and out in the world and spreading a message, the more inspired that we as content creators become, because we’re seeing the difference that our message is actually making out there.

Sonia Simone: Very cool, I like that a lot. I know you’re a busy lady, you’ve got a book to launch here. I would love to just let people know where can they find you. The brand fascination profile is at BrandFascination.com, but I know you have a couple of other places that they can connect with you as well.

Sally Hogshead: Sure. Well, first of all, I want to say, as a content creator, it’s very, very important to me that this is useful for people in a very practical way. I invite you to come and plagiarize as much as you want. Take the adjectives that I give to describe your brand and then apply it and see how it works. All I ask is let me know how it’s going. I’d love to hear success stories. My main website is HowToFascinate.com. I love when people talk to me on Twitter. I’m @SallyHogshead.

Of course, the book is now available on Amazon. They were sold out in two hours but they have ample in stock.

Sonia Simone: I saw that, yeah, that’s crazy.

Sally Hogshead: I know. How awesome. It’s actually awesome news and weirdly bad news at the same time. I couldn’t quite decide. They had to overnight 2,200 books. The book is Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist. I love hearing from people about case studies that we could be featuring. So if you have a fascinating story of how you’ve applied it, let us know because we can share that content out. And you can do that by emailing us at hello@howtofascinate.com.

Sonia Simone: Awesome. Really cool. Well, as I mentioned, Sally was a wonderful and a very memorable part of our event last year. This year’s event takes place in October. Once again, we’re in Denver, Colorado. We would love to see you there. At Rainmaker.FM/DigitalCommerce, you can find out more about it, and there’s still a pretty good early bird deal on, so I would love to see you there.

I think that that’s going to wrap it up for now. And Sally, I just want to thank you. Your approach to things is just so fun and, I mean, you really walk the walk, you really speak from who you are, and you speak with such a distinct voice. I just always love talking to you.

Sally Hogshead: Thank you. You know, I love being able to feature you in my keynote, too. I love that your archetype is the maverick leader, which is the same as my husband’s, so I knew before I’d even met you we’d get along famously.

Sonia Simone: That’s right. We had a bond. All right. Super thank you so much, Sally. Thank you guys for your time and for your attention, and I’ll catch you next week. Take care, everybody.

Sally Hogshead: Bye, everybody.

Never Miss New Shows and Episodes on Rainmaker.FM

Get the best of the Rainmaker.FM network in a single weekly email, along with two weeks
of free training that will change the way you think about online marketing ...

Free Registration

You might also like...

The Missing Link

How to Effectively Publish on LinkedIn, Part 1

Listen to episode
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience

The Bright Future of Audiobooks with Tina Dietz: Part One

Listen to episode

How to Add Images to Your Book with a Professional Illustrator

Listen to episode
Site Success: Tips for Building Better WordPress Websites

[58] 3Q for Local SEO Done Right

Listen to episode
Technology Translated

Learning How to Rock Twitter, with Amber Osborne

Listen to episode
The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience

5 Things Only Serious Writers Do: Part Two

Listen to episode

Comments

  1. Hashim Warren says

    May 9, 2016 at 5:37 PM

    The biggest takeaway I got from Sally’s book is that my customer wants to become more fascinating.

    That’s a huge shift in the way most peope market. Most ads scream “This company is fascinating!”

    A better ad would say “Buy me and become more fascinating “

    Reply
    • Sonia Simone says

      May 9, 2016 at 7:11 PM

      Kathy Sierra was brilliant on that — she had a great talk about making your users more badass, instead of talking about how badass your product is.

      She was amazing, I wish so much that she hadn’t been pushed out of public life.

      Reply
  2. Maday says

    March 15, 2017 at 1:26 PM

    Great episode! I just listened to Sally Hogshead at Jordan Harbinger’s interview on the The Art of Charm podcast. Really inspired me personally.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You ByWP Engine

Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting.

Start getting more from your site today!

Copyright © 2023 Rainmaker Digital, LLC. Powered by the Rainmaker Platform.

Privacy Policy  ·  Refund Policy  ·  Cookie Policy  ·  Terms of Service  ·  Contact