TJ47 – Website Launch Strategy: How To Kick Start Your New or Existing Blog with Corbett Barr

Hey there listener! Welcome back to Traffic Jam, this is episode#47 of the podcast show that teaches you how to get traffic and build a profitable audience online. I am your host, as always, James Reynolds, and we’ve got another excellent show lined up for you today.

Just at the top of the show I want to say I quick hi to new listener Brian Horn, to long time listener Steve Hutt and also to Eugene Soh. Thank you to each of you for joining the discussion for these episodes. So rewarding, as always, to hear your positive feedback and to that I salute each one of you.

To you the listener, you can also join in on the discussion for the episodes and for this particular show, you do that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/47, where you can also get a special bonus, a step-by –step checklist that lays out the exact strategies that our guest today has used to launch with huge success two very well-known blogs. Those blogs are Think Traffic, and more recently, Fizzle.co. So we welcome to the show today Corbett Barr who’s a serial entrepreneur who’s had plenty of success and a fair few failures as well. Building audiences for various web projects he’s been a part of. In fact, the website for which he got most fame, Think Traffic, was launched after watching several friends of his struggle to build an audience for their sites. Through his courses and consulting, Corbett has helped students launch or grow more than a thousand blogs and websites over the past five years and he now generates well over 100 thousand visits per month to his own websites. So I thought it would be a great idea to invite Corbett on to the show to share his learnings from launching several websites and to lay out a repeatable framework that you too can use to launch or reignite a blog online.

So that’s exactly what you can expect from this episode and all that remains now is for me to introduce our guest today, Corbett Barr from Fizzle.co.

James: Hey there Corbett! Welcome to Traffic Jam.

Corbett: Hey James, thanks for having me on. Glad we can make it work!

James: Yeah, super stoked we could be here. Now of course you have been doing this whole online thing for a fair amount of time now. When did you first decide you wanted to build an online business?

Corbett: Let’s see, the first was in 2003, so ancient history by now, I have gone through a couple of iterations since then but the style of business which I am building now which is really based around a blog and a podcast, I started that in 2009.

James: Well, I want to ask you some questions around that because you have built two very well established businesses, both Think Traffic and Fizzle which I am sure some of our listeners at least will have heard of. Both of those sites gained a huge amount of popularity pretty fast, what steps would you repeat if or when you are to launch another site in the future?

Corbett: It’s a good question and I am sure that I will launch another site because I have that entrepreneurial addiction to launch a bunch of new things, right? It’s a challenge not to launch actually. That’s my struggle now, to try to stay focused. But in launching fizzle, we had an unfair advantage because we already had a built in audience. So I don’t know that that applies necessarily as well. For Think Traffic, that was a bit newer and I didn’t really have an audience that was focused on building online businesses at the point that I launched that, and the steps that I went through, I really tried to plan out the initial content and I knew that if I was going to come out with new ideas and new brand and really get some initial early traction that I needed to make a big to do about it, I needed to make some noise about it, and then when I brought people in, I needed to have enough substance there. I think a lot of people get the sizzle part of the equation right, they make a lot of noise, they make a lot of attention, but then the stake part, the meat of the matter, isn’t necessarily as good as it should be so I really try to focus on both simultaneously so just specifically that meant that I had my first few weeks of content already written already ready, and I launched where initially I did a big round of posts where I did an interview with 17 different people. I think the interview was called 17 Traffic Tips from some of the World’s Most Popular Bloggers. So I interviewed a lot of people who were popular and at that time that was a good strategy, that was a strategy is kind of worn a little thin now because so many people have done it but so many actually to get a big boost in to my site and I create a post that was very shareable, and then I really encourage people to subscribe and I followed up just with the very best stuff that I could right out of the get to really get people in to creating a post that was very shareable and then I really encourage people to subscribe and I followed up just with the very best stuff that I could right out of the gate to try to get people really interested and to get the buzz flowing.

James: Yeah, so is that what you launched with? That list post that leveraged other experts’ own audiences?

Corbett: Essentially yes, I think I had one other post that was sort of a welcome to Think Traffic which I ran without any fanfare, I just made sure that was on the site in case people wanted to dig in and check other things out.

James: Yeah, so when you launched Fizzle then did you adopt the same strategy? Did you try and pre-populate the site with at least a base level of content when you sort of start to open up the floodgates of traffic and start to drive people there?

Corbett: Fizzle is a little different for us. Really it was more of a product than a content plane initially so we created Fizzle as a membership site, a community and training library for entrepreneurs. And because we already had Think Traffic, what we really did was we really launched Fizzle through a number of different of alpha and beta stages before we opened it up to the public and we did that by telling people on our Think Traffic list about what we were working on and that it was coming and then we would open the doors just to get enough people in to get feedback and we call those people charter members and we gave them a discount basically in exchange for their feedback and so we sort of primed the pump and got people inside before we ever decided to open the doors fully and then later actually, after we launched Fizzle, later we decided to start a blog around Fizzle and then also to start a podcast.

James: Yeah, well it is much different, isn’t it to launch a new site with a baseline and an audience already there than it is trying to do from scratch so I am sure you kind had a slightly unfair advantage over most when you’ve launched Fizzle.

Corbett: You do, although you do go through sort of the same issues in terms of how do I launch this and how best do I make use of the resources that I have? That’s really the question for me and at different stages in your career or depending on how long you’ve been active, you might have an audience already or you might not but the question is always the same, how do I make use of all the resources that I have in the time that I have to gear up for this launch?

James: Yeah, so you’ve of course got a couple of rounds of learning now. What would you not do next time around?

Corbett: What would I not do for a launch next time around? That is a really great question. I think that in general I have gotten more interested in launching as soon as I can, almost to put things out there when they’re still rough because the feedback that you get from people is invaluable and in the beginning what I would do is hunker down and tinker away on something for months, and months and months and sometimes years almost before I launch it to the public only to find out that I was way off in my assumptions what people wanted or what they would find interesting and so now what I would try to do is really to be first of all be transparent as I can possibly can while I am building to let people know that I am working on something, that it is going to be coming out so that I can get their feedback along the way and hopefully get them excited for the launch so that people will show up on launch date and then I really try to put things out almost to where they’re embarrassingly unfinished where there are some things where you say, oh don’t look over there we didn’t have time to clean the bedroom before you guys came over for dinner sort of thing and that has worked out really well because I think that people who get in at those early stages start to feel a sense of ownership of the public along with you, they feel really like they’ve been part of something since the beginning and they are vested in seeing you succeed and so they’re more likely to give you good positive feedback as opposed to just moving on without saying anything.

James: Yeah, totally. When you ask the same questions of others when you first launched Think Traffic I believed so I want to turn the question back to you, what’s your most unconventional traffic strategy?

Corbett: My biggest one is probably don’t quit; make sure that you are around for a very long time. People ask how we’ve built the audience that we’ve built across Think Traffic and Fizzle and whenever I look back on it, there’s all kinds of strategies and tactics and things but they’ve really smoothed out over time and I realized that very few of them were that important. The important thing was that you showed up every day, every week, that you focused on who is my audience, how can I publish something to help them? And to be honest, the reason that we have a big audience is that I showed up every week for – it’s been five and a half years now since I first started a blog and we’ve published maybe a thousand articles now over those five years. And you would have to hard-pressed to publish five thousand blog posts and not have some semblance of an audience. If you choose a problem that peopled are interested in, and you really focus on every week showing up and getting better at helping them with that problem, you’re going to do just fine with a blog or a podcast or anything else. But you really have to show up and you have to focus at getting better week by week, you can’t just show up and do everything and expect the same results. As what Einstein said, what’s the definition of insanity? You really have to show up and try to get better each week. If you’re not getting the results that you want, then you have to shake something up and change and adapt and get better and really that’s all I did for the past five and a half years and now we have multiple of hundreds of thousands of people showing up on our sites every month.

James: Yeah, it is amazing how many times this line of conversation has come up over the course of these interviews – Joe Pulizzi was one of them and we were chatting about just how soon businesses or individuals are to give up on content marketing and put a few posts out and expect a huge surge of traffic and engagement which of course does not happen and they put the project by the wayside. I think there is a huge case in point for persistence and discipline to really get the traction going with that sort of stuff.

Corbett: Yeah without that, nothing – no other traffic strategy is going to work because you’re definitely not going to have some overnight success in the first week so if you are not willing to be dedicated at least for a year or two, you’re not going to see the results that you’re hoping for and really you have to align those expectations before you start.

James: Yeah, absolutely! Well, you of course have got a large community of business owners inside of your Fizzle membership so I am sure you see plenty of case studies and different things going on, what do you see others making in terms of mistakes online when trying to build an audience?

Corbett: Well, the biggest one, we talked before about the stake and the sizzle and I think it is a big mistake to focus on one versus the other in either direction. And the direction that I see people focus on is the content and the substance and not the promotion and relationship. People like to work on their thing and they are too scare to talk to other people, they are afraid to put their stuff out there. They are afraid of rejection or whatever and so they think, I’ll just build it and eventually people will show up. I’ll just keep my head down and keep doing my thing. And I have seen this on all kinds of disciplines, not just blogging or podcasting but it also works in the same way for musicians or artists or whatever. It is really easy just to focus on your craft and not to do the promotion part of it and really you need to do some of both and so for the people that I see this whole content marketing strategy work for, they are the people that are really spending equal amounts on content as well as the promotion. And the promotion really to me all starts with creating a relationship with other people online who have access to audiences that might be a good fit for you and what you are doing. Basically, your job is to figure out where other people are already hanging out online and how you can get in front of them and get them back to your own site and that all starts by creating relationships with other people. I think back to the early days of blogging, for me and the people who I became friends with who are just starting out, just coming up, but I could tell that they had ambition and drive and they had something interesting and they had some early semblance of success. They weren’t rock stars, or A-listers by any means but those people and I, we worked together and we formed little bonds and teams and mastermind groups and things like that and we all came up together and sure enough a lot of those people became big names, people that you would know very well now who just five and a half years ago were just starting out. We were more valuable to each other at those stages because the direct support and accountability and going back for one another than you’ll find if you’ll try to reach out to a bunch of people who seem really just established if you just banged down Seth Godin or Gary Vaynerchuk or whatever, you are not going to get a whole lot of results because those people are really busy and they are approached by hundreds of people every week. You are much better to look out for people who are the rising stars, the kinds of people who you can tell have that special thing, whatever it is, and just to form teams with them, informal teams where you hold each other accountable and you make sure that each of you shows up every week and you’re also there to give that harsh critique once in a while that you’re not going to get from other people because you’re not insiders, you’re not friends to that level.

James: Yeah, so how might we go about identifying those people first and then secondly, do you have any kind of good strategies or perhaps some advice to get the most out of an outreach program to kind of get in touch with these people because I think it can be quite hard, right? Especially if these people are starting to get a bit of a name for themselves. I am sure they are getting approached by others.

Corbett: They are but not as much as you would think, again I am talking about people who are the rising stars, not five years in to it but people that are within their first six months or year of getting any success. Those people aren’t getting approached as much as you would think and so you can stand out with just an email especially when it’s really thoughtful and carefully crafted but before that, what I would do is I would spend a lot of time knowing who’s who in your space. In fact, when I was starting out, I made a point, I was blogging, the site that I was blogging in 2009 was called Free Pursuit and the idea was I was on an 8-month long road trip sabbatical through Mexico and I kept meeting people who weren’t rich or retired but had figured out ways to live in foreign countries every year for months and I started this blog basically to ask myself questions about who these people were, how they were able to do this, and how somebody could make their career work around their life instead of the other way around. And I made a point initially within the first six months or so of blogging to get to know every other person in that space of lifestyle design, location independent or whatever you want to call it. I made it a point to know who every other was on that space and then to reach out to the Top 50 or so and try to know them personally. And the easiest way to do that is to organize some sort of blog community event or a podcast community event within your space, whatever that is, to say hey let us all get together and run a series of posts on X, sort of like the old carnival blog that you used to go on, or what I did was I ran a survey actually, I organized a survey for the audiences that we all shared so that we could get a bunch of really interesting results and beyond that, I encouraged people to name names on their site and to link out freely and talk about other people that they admire. They say, hey I don’t know if you’ve seen what Jane Smith is doing over here but she’s got some really exciting stuff going on. Before you even know Jane, just talk about how great her stuff is and link to her directly, mention her on Twitter and just kind of grease the wheels a little bit and that is a great way to get on someone’s radar and then when you send them an email to say hey, I just wanted to let you know, I am not a stalker, I am just a big fan, I have been following your work for a few months, I think we have a lot in common and I have mentioned you a few times in different articles and I’d love to chat in Skype sometime if you have a minute. That sort of approach can work really well and you don’t have to bummed out if you don’t hear back from any individual person, if you don’t put all your eggs in one basket and make it so that all of your success depends on reaching this one specific person that you have your heart set on, because some people just aren’t going to connect with you for some reason. Maybe you are too busy, maybe your personality doesn’t strike them, or maybe they’re just shy or whatever so don’t expect that all of your success is going to come from one single relationship. I would make a list of 20 or 30 people that you want to get to know and systematically just follow this sort of approach or whatever approach works for you where you try to get on the radar somehow and then reach out to them directly of those 20 or 30 people that you’ve reached out to, you should have at least a 50% response rate and then from there you move on to see which of these people are going to be good friends and just let the relationships happen naturally.

James: Yeah! You’ve also managed to leverage those relationships really well with co-authored content, right? Tell us a little bit about some of those content that you’ve produced.

Corbett: Co-authored content, yeah, so well, initially as I mentioned, some of those early relationships that I created, I had gotten to know Adam Baker from as I called Man vs. Death. We both started blogging on the same month of the same year and we have gotten to know each other just from methods that I am talking about here. We became friends and over the months we just both knew that we both wanted to work on something and it did not happen until we were both in the same place. He was actually here in San Francisco and we went out for dinner and we were talking about wouldn’t it be fun if we worked on a project at some point and we were finally like, why haven’t we done that and I think it was just being able to be in person we were able to hash out the details, made it work, and so we eventually launched a project called the Hustle Project and the idea was basically group accountability, getting a bunch of people to gather on a weekly basis to hold each other accountable, to try to set goals, basically a big mastermind or a group coaching program and that was a really fun project and I think it happened because we were both in person as I said and looking back on it I realized how many critical decisions and relationships have come about because I actually met people in person. Usually I’ve known those people already online and then we attended the conference or whatever it was, got to know them in person, and that just really took things to the next level. So don’t overlook how important those in person relationships are and I really, really strongly advice people to attend conferences, even if they don’t know anybody to begin with, book yourself at a conference that’s coming up, there used to be something called Blog Roll, I think it’s called Media Expo, there’s South by South West, there’s the art of non-conformity conference which is called the Domination Summit, those are all fantastic opportunities to meet people and what you do is to book yourself in to going one of those yourself a few months out and then start to build relationships ahead of time, say maybe reach out to your audience or your readers, say who’s going to be at this conference who’d love to meet up with you, reach out to other bloggers who you hear talking about the conferences online and mention that you’re going to be there as well and meet those people in person and then that can lead to co-authorship opportunities that you are talking about because then you can do all the talking with people online if you want but the bandwidth just isn’t there, meaning the non-verbal cues that you pick up when you actually talk to that person.

James: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that more. I know from my own experience, my business has certainly multiplied when I have kind of got out from behind the desk and got on a plane and traveled to the US or to Australia because you can just deepen those relationships that otherwise are kind of at the surface level so I think that’s valuable advice especially to us online marketers who are kind of sitting behind our computers for hours and days on end sometimes.

Corbett: Exactly!

James: Let me talk to you about standing out, we touch on the topic in terms of standing out to in terms of content partners and things like that. What about standing out online in terms of content? Because content marketing is super involved right now but there’s a huge amount of people that are creating content. What sort of tips have you got for creating something that is really going to stand out above the rest?

Corbett: You have to do something different and that really means thinking creatively for yourself, and this is okay in the beginning. What I see is people basically just copying other people and trying to see what works for them, copying their approach and more than just their approach. Sometimes they are copying just literally ideas for headlines and things like that and it’s just really hard to stand out if you’re doing what everybody else is doing. When you realize that there is actually not that much creativity going on online, that’s when it becomes really easy to stand out. Most people don’t even try to be creative. Most people really don’t have original ideas for themselves, they’re not able to synthesize ideas that they read in books or by watching films or by listening to music or by studying at what’s going on in other industries. Most people aren’t able to synthesize those sorts of things so all they do is they put on the tunnel television blinders and they look at their own industry, their own content format, and they just really over analyze what is going on in their own space and then they end up basically copying, maybe not intentionally, but because they’re so immersed in that world, that’s the only thing that they know and they don’t go anywhere else for inspiration. And when you realize that that’s mostly what’s going on, and that all you have to do is to force yourself to try to be creative, try to build something that you did not see someone else do, but based on something that comes from a different place, a natural place, and maybe like I said, to borrow ideas that you find from other creative pursuits, from what you see being interesting in other spaces entirely. That is a great way to come up with something and then to make it your own. Because all creativity, it’s not something as if it’s brand new. Everything that everyone makes is a combination of things that have been seen elsewhere, in nature or in other industries, but you can combine those things and create something that really does stand out for yourself. But it is a process of trial and error. Again, I mentioned before, you can’t just show up every week, do the exact same thing, and expect different results. What you have to do is try something new, put it out there, and you’re probably going to fall flat a number of times, and you have to be willing to fail, you have to be willing to stomach that you put something out there that did worse than the mediocre results that you have been getting with the copied formats that you have been using. Maybe you’ve put out some stuff that fall really flat but then maybe you’ll put something out and it will work really well eventually. So really to me, if you want to have success with whatever it strategy it is that you are doing, whether it is blogging or podcasting or whatever in terms of content, you have to find some formula that works. For example, not to put down interview shows on podcast, because I really love interviews and obviously we are doing one right now, but when we started our podcast for Fizzle, what we noticed was there was just a glut of interviews out there, there were a lot of different shows that were doing interviews and I like what you are doing James in terms of at least focusing on a particular topic on your interviews but we just saw that there were so many interviews out there, we thought, why not do something different? Why not start a show that is not interview based, that’s more traditional talking head style that you would find in a radio program or something where really it’s just the host most of the time and we saw this being successful in other spaces as well. And we decided to run with that format primarily because it was a differentiating factor for us and I can’t say that we necessarily have a much bigger audience than we would have if we have done interviews, I don’t know because we did not do both, but I can tell you that the Fizzle podcast, the Fizzle show has become a really strong driver of new customers to us because instead of doing interviews, it’s an hour of us talking and if people listen to our show, they really get to know us and our opinions and that makes them great candidates to become customers of our program.

James: Yeah, I think it is one of those challenges, right? With doing an interview- based show because for the most part the focus is on the interviewee as opposed to the host of the show and I am guessing really the host of the show is the one who wants to build his own authority and his own audience rather than always just piggybacking on someone else so it is a battle that is hard fought. I know there are some guys that do it very well. Pat Flynn always manages to get very much a strong piece of him in his own show despite the fact that it’s interview based as well but it’s a hard balance to portray sometimes.

Corbett: Yeah, and you know I have seen some people who don’t just do an interview but they have some sort of segment before or after that they follow. Some format where some people have some big question that they are diving in to and then they bring on the interview guest to talk about that. Other people position themselves as the expert and they have the interview guest on and they sort of go through a little bit of counseling or coaching with them while you’re on the phone and these are the bigger named people that they have on so there’s a whole lot of things but the point is, you have to make yourself stand out. And you have to look around and if you see that, oh, I started a blog and every other blog in our space is running list post about top 10 traffic strategies for xyz and I have a blog that is talking about the same kind of thing, I can’t just run the same kind of post over and over again and expect different results. I need to create something that is unique and powerful in my own way.

James: Yeah. Well let’s finish up with a question because this is the focus of the show as you so rightly said, if you have to kind of roll the chips and put over all of your money on one particular traffic source that has been successful in your own business, what would that be?

Corbett: For me, it would always come back to blogging. I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I gave a talk recently and I wrote a blog post about just my realizing that the most valuable thing that I have ever done in my life has been blogging. I started a blog five and a half years ago while I was just on a trip and I stated one on a whim and it lead to so many opportunities. I run a business now with three other guys who I adore and we have a great time doing it. I am able to live anywhere in the world, and I spend winters in Mexico and often summers in Europe and I just love my business and I don’t have any other investors or anybody else to answer to and all of that happened because I started a blog. And looking back on it, I just realized that all roads, all opportunities that I have had since then, all of the friendships, the speaking opportunities, and everything has come because I started a blog and it’s a really, really powerful thing. And I am not saying that podcasting couldn’t be that thing for you or creating videos, it couldn’t be that thing for you, and it can be obviously. That has worked wonders for a lot of people. So I would really pick the format that you fill the best about. Don’t think the format that you think the most opportunity is lying, because I think we see this over and over again, people think that some format is dead, people think that blogging is dead or e-books are dead or email is dead or whatever, they’ll say the same about podcasting and they probably are now and things come and go in waves but there will always be opportunities for interesting, unique, valuable, powerful, emphatic content and it really doesn’t matter the format it’s in.

James: Well, let’s wrap things there Corbett and leave our listeners with a couple of places to head off and find you on the internet. I am guessing Fizzle.co would be one, where else should we send our listeners off to?

Corbett: Fizzle is the best place. You can find us on iTunes. If you just type Fizzle in the search box there you’ll find our Fizzle show podcast, we have new episodes every week and Fizzle.co is as I said our training library and community for entrepreneurs. It’s really a group of people who are in there fighting the good fight every week, trying to make a little bit of progress towards supporting themselves online by doing something that they actually care about.

James: Fantastic! Well, to you the listener, a link to those resources, Corbett’s social media profiles, and everything else mentioned in today’s show, head on over to TrafficJamCast.com/47. So all that leaves me to do is thank you Corbett for coming over to Traffic Jam, absolute pleasure to be talking to you today and I hope we can do it again sometime soon.

Corbett: Absolutely! Thanks for having me on, James.

So there you have it! That was Corbett Barr from Fizzle.co. Thank you as always, for taking the time out to listen in to the show. To help you get the most from this episode, I’ve put together a step-by-step checklist that shows you the exact process for launching a brand new blog or kick starting your old blog back in to action. This checklist summarizes Corbett Barr’s very best traffic driving strategies. To get your hands on the checklist and start generating much more traffic to your site, you can visit TrafficJamCast.com/47. I also recommend that you subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio, and you can do that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TrafficJamCast.com/Stitcher and that will ensure that you never miss a future episode.

To access all of the bonuses that come with the show including the blog launch checklist, downloadable MP3 and full transcript of the show, go to, as I said, TrafficJamCast.com/47, where of course you can also join the discussion on this episode.

We end this week’s show with a Traffic Jam chosen by our guest Corbett Barr. It’s called Don’t Swallow the Cap and it’s by the band called The National.