Air Date: 4/5/21

The Upgrade by Lifehacker

How to Get Better at Marketing, With Seth Godin

Jordan Hey, and welcome to The Upgrade, the podcast from the team at Lifehacker,
where we help you improve your life one week at a time. I'm Jordan Calhoun, editor in
chief of Lifehacker. And joining me today is Lifehacker's Parenting Editor, Meghan Walbert.
Hey, Meghan.

Meghan Hi, Jordan!

Jordan Meghan, so today we're talking about honing our marketing skills.

Meghan We are. We're learning how to better market ourselves and our small businesses
with help from marketing expert Seth Godin.

Seth Godin You need to matter to some people, not be ignored by everyone. And to
matter to some people, if you're an Etsy seller, for example, is not to make the same cake
toppers as every other Etsy seller and hope that somehow you'll luck into winning search.
It's to make the thing that only you can make and to make it for the smallest number of
people that could sustain you.

Jordan Seth is an entrepreneur and best-selling author of 20 books, including The Dip,
Tribes, Permission Marketing, and This is Marketing. He's also host of the Akimbo podcast
and author of his very popular self-titled blog.

Meghan Seth is a revered expert in the world of marketing, having given over 200
speeches and interviews on the topic, including his popular TED talk. So we thought, who
better to speak to on the topic?

Jordan Absolutely. Megan, what's your general grasp of marketing? Do you have a
personal brand that you cherish? That you mold out there in the interwebs?

Meghan You know, Jordan, I tried to create a brand for myself and found that I'm not very
good at it.

Jordan No one is.

Meghan I know. My husband actually works in marketing, so I do have a general grasp of

what that entails just by watching him do his job. But I feel like when it comes to marketing
yourself or marketing your own product or your own brand, like, that's just kind of a
different beast. I don't know. How do you...How do you—what kind of sense do you have
of that?

Jordan I feel there are two types of people when it comes to marketing. It's those people
who feel really comfortable with it and feel good about selling themselves as a brand and
feel good sort of selling whatever it is that they have to sell sort of confidently. And those
people who are like me and maybe like you, who aren't very good at it and aren't very
inclined towards it. I don't ever I mean, as much as I should I probably, I guess, think of
myself as a professional and personal brand, as an individual. I don't. And I suck at it. I
hate doing it. Like on Twitter, if I think like, oh, I need to, you know, promote myself as this
writer or this podcast host or this whatever, I have a book coming out hopefully soon and
like should I have a certain persona that is to sell this book? Like, I guess I should, but like,

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I just want to talk about anime and joke around with my friends. So it's really hard to be
able to balance those two things.

Meghan Well, for me, it's always felt like marketing is so important, especially when you're
trying to sell a book as you're going to be doing. But it can feel like bragging when you're
like, you should read my book because it's so great.

Jordan Yeah, yeah. People who are really comfortable talking about themselves are great
at marketing. And then there are people who I think are very comfortable talking about
themselves or doing self-promotion, and those are people who I bet I mean, I'm guessing
everyone can take Seth's advice and learn a lot from how we could better market
ourselves. But man, especially for people who just aren't sort of naturally gravitating
towards it, there's a lot of advice that we can take to get better at it.

Meghan Oh, absolutely. And I think of, like, you know, someone who's running an Etsy
shop and maybe like their skill, their passion is like making hand-woven baskets and like,
they could be really, really great at that. But like, how do you then develop the skills you
need to get those baskets into the hands of everybody who wants them?

Jordan Exactly. Exactly. We all need to be better influencers and let's find out how we can
do that with Seth.

Meghan Awesome. Let's do it.

Jordan So, Seth, welcome to The Upgrade. Glad to have you.

Seth Godin Good to be here. Thanks for talking to me today.

Jordan All right. So let's start with what I imagine is a simple question for you, but might
be a little bit more complicated for laymen. What is marketing? You know, I think a lot of
people think of a big corporate room of people making big picture decisions, but it can be a
lot smaller than that, right?

Seth Godin So what's accounting? Accounting is anything that touches the accounts. And
that's why you ask an accountant a question. So what is marketing? [00:04:34]Marketing is
everything that touches the market. It's who you hire. It's the stories you tell. It's the
products you make. It's your guarantee. It's the way you answer the phone. It's which real
estate you rent. It's what kind of products you sell. Those are all marketing choices. That's
why you made them. [13.7s]

Meghan Seth, I've heard you talk about how you can't please the masses. You have to
please the what you call the smallest possible audience. Can you kind of explain what you
mean by that and how it relates to, let's say, either a small Etsy shop owner or maybe a
personal trainer who's looking to up his clientele in the area?

Seth Godin So name any successful business you can think of or organization or a
political candidate, I don't care. None of those have succeeded by pleasing everyone. Not
everyone even has Heinz Ketchup or Kraft singles in their fridge. You're not in the Heinz
ketchup business. You know, my books have been some of the best-selling marketing
books of all time, and yet more than ninety-nine percent of the people in the United States
have not bought one of them. And that's plenty for me, because [00:05:35]you need to
matter to some people, not be ignored by everyone. And to matter to some people, if

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you're an Etsy seller for example, is not to make the same cake toppers as every other
Etsy seller and hope that somehow you'll luck into winning search. It's to make the thing
that only you can make and to make it for the smallest number of people that could sustain
you. [21.8s] And an example, my friend Kevin Kelly, who coined the term "a thousand true
fans," just did a Kickstarter this week for a book he's doing that's going to cost three
hundred dollars. It's a beautiful, beautiful book. And he just hit one thousand sales, which
means one thousand people were enough for him to generate over a quarter of a million
dollars in revenue and make his book. And so if he can do that with a thousand people,
you can focus on a tiny number and make a difference.

Jordan So it sounds to me like it's better to grow deeper than broader and trying to just
capture a wide net of people. How do you find that target audience? How do you know
what your thousand people are? Those thousand people that you're describing for your
friend? How do you identify who is going to be that loyal following to your product?

Seth Godin [00:06:44]So everyone's a little lonely. Everyone's a little disconnected.

Everyone yearns for something. Everyone wants to be part of something. Everyone cares
about their status compared to the people they are measuring against. But everyone is not
the same. So when Gina started Lifehacker 15 years ago, she said there's a small number
of people who really care about what's new, what's clever and want to check this site all
the time. And that was enough. So the hard part is developing the empathy to be able to
serve people who aren't you. You shouldn't make it for yourself, but to serve people who
you have the instinct need what you have to offer. And over time, you will discover whether
those people are out there looking for you. The good news is that if you can start with
something that people know they want, it's way easier than persuading people to want
something they're not aware of. [56.0s]

Meghan You know, it's funny that you mention Lifehacker and shortcuts, because we
understand that you actually are not a shortcut life hack type of person. So you're more
about the long cut. Can you kind of explain what that means?

Seth Godin So I've had the same blog for 20 years and it's seven thousand five hundred
posts later and I'm glad I didn't drop everything and switch to MySpace or Facebook or
Twitter or Instagram or Clubhouse because there's a lot of people who like to go first, but
going first gets you a small bit of zing, but then you've got to start over when you go first
again. And what we know is that almost any project you're interested in, the thing that
looks like a shortcut is probably not the best way to get there. The best way to get there is
to find a path that most people can't handle, and that is the path of consistent, persistent
generosity in service of your goal, not how do I hang out with the cool kids today? Because
I know what happened to the cool kids from my high school and they didn't make it for the
long haul.

Jordan I think when we're all thinking about the long haul, one of the things that's most
intimidating about getting started on a new idea is not knowing where to start, where to
begin building that audience. So let's say you started a new business or you're a new
freelancer or you have this thing for whatever reason that you need to market. Where
should you begin? Where should you...Where should your mind go in terms of getting
started and finding that audience or building that audience?

Seth Godin Yeah, these are great questions, by the way. There are two parts to your
question. The first part is, how can I be sure that what I'm going to do is going to work?
How can I focus my energy to make sure I don't fail? And my answer to that question is,

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[00:09:25]you need to fail. You need to shift the work. You need to be showing up in front
of people with an offer saying here I made this, and then seeing what they say in
response. That I did one hundred blog posts, two hundred blog posts before I had more
than ten readers. And if I had waited until I had the first blog post that worked for me, I'd
still be waiting because you only get to the first one after you do the one hundred or two
hundred that aren't quite right. And it is cheaper, much cheaper today to do that than it has
ever been before that when Ford made the Edsel, it cost them a billion dollars to be wrong
about a new model of car, whereas now you can put up a mockup on a YouTube video and
see what the world says. [43.6s] So you go into the world. The second half of your
question is [00:10:14]once we understand the smallest viable audience, we then say this
thing I am making for them, what change do I seek to make? What problem am I solving?
What am I promising when I show up in the world? Because no one cares about you, they
care about themselves. And so the opportunity that you have is to develop this radical
empathy that other people don't know what I know they don't want what I want. They don't
believe what I believe. And that's OK. But for those people who believe this, who want this,
if I show up and say, here it is, will they say, tell me more? [35.2s]

Jordan Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Meghan I'm curious how you think social media fits into all this. We've got YouTube and
Twitter and Facebook and TikTok. And how do you determine, OK, I'm going to try to do
maybe a little bit of a few different sites or I'm going to just really hone in on one particular
social media? What's your thoughts on that?

Seth Godin So, again, I have a couple of thoughts. The first one is if you're using social
media, you are not the customer, you're the product. That the social media companies are
manipulating your emotions to get you to do what will make them money, not what is good
for you. So likes or followers or comments, you can use them if you want, but they're not
there to make you happy. So with that said, what I wrote about 20 years ago in Permission
Marketing is you want to earn the privilege of delivering anticipated personal and relevant
messages to the people who want to get them. And what that means is they would miss
you if you didn't show up. So there's a lot of sites where you can make a commotion in a
short period of time. There is going to be a viral video tomorrow. There's going to be a new
meme tomorrow, but it's probably not going to come from you. And so instead, the goal is
to find a platform where what it takes to do well on that platform matches what you want to
do. And so if you're a photographer, a blog might not be the answer for you. But if you're a
writer, Instagram might not be the answer for you. And so I saw Twitter six weeks after
they launched. I could have been in Twitter early, but then I said, well, two things. One, I'll
have to get good at tweeting, and that's not work I would be proud of. And second, I'll have
to take time away from something I'm already doing. So do I want to have an average blog
and average tweets, or do I want to have no tweets and put all my eggs in that basket and
watch it really carefully? And so I don't think you should pick a platform because there are
influencers on it or because the cool kids are using it. I think you should pick a platform
because the people you seek to serve will be there to respond for the message you need
to send.

Jordan What about using those people who are already savvy on those platforms to sell
your product? And what I mean by that is would you ever spend money on an influencer,
for example? Do you think that would be a good investment? If you're trying to sell your
book, you're trying to sell this product, you're trying to get your name out there. I see so
many ads of people on Instagram, mostly on Instagram, where they'll just pop up trying to

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sell their book or trying to sell their product or they'll do it through an influencer. Is that a
good investment or would that money better be spent elsewhere?

Seth Godin So at some point, marketers spend money and the equation is buy attention,
maybe you'll earn a little trust, which could lead to a transaction and then it can repeat.
And so that's why Procter and Gamble spent more than two billion dollars last year on ads
on the Internet. There's two kinds of ads, ads that just put an idea in our head, brand ads
or direct marketing ads where you are going to measure whether it works or not. So if
you're a direct marketer like Sears Roebuck was a long time ago or like Warby Parker is
today, you can tell that that ad got clicked and made you this much money. This is how
Google makes all their money. [00:14:04]Google makes their money because an
advertiser spends five hundred bucks and makes two thousand dollars in profit. So they do
it again. So if you can do direct marketing for your product and you want it to grow, you
should because it pays for itself in one day and then do it again and do it again and do it
again. And if you can measure that with an influencer, by all means, please do, because it
doesn't cost you anything. But if you're doing brand ads, which are most podcast ads, for
example, people who are listening to a podcast who are running down the street or jogging
or or in the tub aren't going to then go online and buy from you right then because they're
listening to a podcast and they're naked. So that's not direct marketing. That's building a
brand. And you shouldn't do that a little. You should do it a lot. You should commit to it for
the smallest viable audience showing up, showing up, showing up in one place and in that
situation. [51.5s] Yet there are influencers where it's appropriate. But it's also true that
some influencers have completely sold out and no one believes them anymore and no one
trusts them. And so you've got to develop an instinct as to which when you're dealing with.

Meghan What if whatever marketing approach you're taking just isn't paying off, you're not
seeing the results that you're looking for, how do you assess what you're doing wrong?
And then course correct?

Seth Godin So my friend Jay Levinson used to say, "You don't change your logo or your
ads when you're tired of them and you don't change them when your spouse is tired of
them, you're changing when your accountant is tired of them." And the same thing sort of
works in the other direction. You shouldn't give up on your marketing in the moment.
[00:15:59]You should plan before you spend a dollar when you're going to give up. So if I
was building a brand that sold, I don't know, sweatshirts or microphones, I'd say, all right,
I'm going to run these ads for six months and I'm not going to change my plan for six
months. I'm going to show up and show up and show up because people need to see a
message twenty-seven times before they even begin to register with it on the Internet. It's
even more than that because there's so much noise. And so if you're going to spend this
money, it's got to begin with a commitment. You don't want to spend your money on one
ad and then decide. [34.5s]

Jordan I want to switch gears a little bit, because one of the things you had mentioned
earlier about being able to fail and be comfortable failing really parallels a lot with what I
think of when I think of creative work. You know, if you're writing a book, if you're a writer, if
you're an artist, if you're doing something, you have to get used to the rejection. You have
to get used to the failure, and then you have to be able to recover from it. And I listened to
this conversation with you, I think it took place in 2017 where you were basically talking
about Steveen Pressfield's The War of Art. And you were applying that book, which I think
of entirely in terms of creative endeavors and writing and stuff. And you were applying that
to marketing. Can you explain, just recap that for the listeners, what is resistance and how
can that concept of resistance apply to marketing in the same way that it does resistance

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that you might have, creating a creating that product, creating that thing that you're
passionate about?

Seth Godin Yeah, Steve's my hero. If you haven't read this book, you should.
[00:17:32]The War of Art is about the fact that we are evolutionarily designed to short
circuit our best ideas, to not raise our hand, to not be the generous leader we want to be.
Because right before we do that, we freeze. We get this invented writer's block, we hold
back. [17.3s] And, you know, in the podcasting workshop, which I started with my friend
Alex Dipalma, what we found was the hardest part was people posting one minute of their
voice, because in that moment, you feel like you will be seen. Seen permanently because
you've uploaded it and people freak out. They come up with all these reasons why it's not
the right time. Well, art isn't just a painting. Art is anything human that we put into the world
for other people. And that's marketing. Marketing has when it's done right, this artistic
component that says, "I made this look at me." So [00:18:30]we hesitate, we hesitate, I
was just on a call with Prairie View College yesterday and they're like, "I'm graduating
soon. What, how should I go get an internship?" No. Start an eBay store today. If you want
to be a marketer, be a marketer, don't get a marketing internship. Go raise one hundred
thousand dollars for Charity: Water. If you can raise a hundred thousand dollars for
Charity: Water, you can get a job and the act of going into the world and saying, I believe
in this charity. Here's my story. Here's why you should buy this lemonade or send in this
money. [29.3s] The same resistance shows up as when you're sitting down to write a
novel.

Meghan What are some other common mistakes that you think someone who's just
starting off with their marketing tends to do? Like, what are things that you see over and
over again that people are doing wrong?

Seth Godin The biggest thing is that most marketers are short-term, narcissistic,
shortcutting selfish hustlers because we worked so hard to build our thing that other
people's attention and trust doesn't matter, just buy this.

Jordan That was harsh. Talk to these people, Seth, I like it.

Seth Godin It really bothers me. You know, after you write a book called Permission
Marketing, all the spam you get for the rest of your life is a personal affront. It's like, didn't
you read what I said?

Jordan Tell me more.

Seth Godin You know, I know people who have lost their life savings. I know people who
have been hustled into places they don't want to be. And then the marketers who do that
wonder why they feel burnt out. They wonder why their job satisfaction is. They wonder
why it's so hard the next time. So the opportunity is to show up with good intent. That
doesn't mean you make it free. Generous doesn't mean free, generous means you exert
emotional labor on behalf of someone else. And yeah, they're going to pay for it because
when they pay for it, it makes it better for them and for you. You don't want surgery from a
free surgeon. You want surgery from the most expensive surgeon because they got more
at stake. And so do you.

Jordan We're talking about the, earlier at least, we were talking about the parallels
between creative work and marketing. Do you think you have to be passionate about your
product? I think of someone who's creating something, they're going to be generally

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hopefully passionate about the story that they're telling. But I don't think that that
necessarily always applies to business where, you know, you're passionate about this, you
know, it's if it's more of a solution to a problem that you're selling to people very often and
not necessarily this thing that you're passionate about this way to connect with other
people in the human experience. Right. So what are your thoughts on that? Do you need
to be passionate about the thing that you're selling or can you fake it?

Seth Godin [00:21:03]So I could talk about authenticity all day long. I will just tell you a
brief story. Kid on the street was obsessed with the garbage men. And his fourth birthday
party, his parents arranged for the garbage men to come to the house and let him pull the
little lever with garbage, juice coming out and everything. And the look on these guys'
faces, you know, you can say you can't be passionate about collecting the garbage. And I
think that's true. But I think you can be passionate about doing good work and about being
there for people who need you. And what I decided a really long time ago is it's a trap to
insist that you only do work that you are authentically passionate about. And it's a useful
tool to say I will choose to be authentically passionate about the work I do, because if you
make that choice, your whole life gets better. [50.3s]

Meghan Do you think that people who are more passionate about what they do will make
more money? Does the money naturally follow the passion or...

Seth Godin Yeah—.

Meghan What do you think about that?

Seth Godin The people I know who are billionaires are good at making money. They're
not good at being humans. They're not good at being passionate. They're not good at
living a life well-lived. They're simply good at making money. And if that's what you want to
do, I'm the wrong person to give you advice on how to do it. But to become a billionaire,
unless you are super, super, super lucky, it's because you figured out how to play a game
where winning involves making a lot of money.

Jordan Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And the last question I'll ask you here is we get ready to wrap
up is of all the information that you know about marketing, the entire skillset that you have,
if someone were trying to follow in your footsteps and try to have this holistic knowledge of
how they can market themselves effectively, would you recommend that person go to
business school? How much of what, you know, could that person learn on their own at a
library or watching YouTube videos or elsewhere versus the not just the information that
you get from business school, but I guess also maybe the connections and the intangibles,
whatever those might be. Do you think business school in that context is a worthy
investment?

Seth Godin Yeah. So 20 years ago I wrote an article called "The New Order Business
School," and what I said is business school is about the cohort and about the fact that you
got in plenty of data that shows that people who get into business school and don't go do
just as well financially as the people who get into business school and do go. And so this
new order of business school would just be you apply to get in. There's a bunch of parties
and then it's over because you can learn all the actual content of business school better in
other ways. The exception is if you want to go to Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley or
someplace, it insists on a piece of paper from one of the top five famous business schools.
That piece of paper, if that's your goal, pays for itself. But for everybody else. I think
organizing cohorts of learning makes more sense. I started something called the Alt MBA.

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I don't run it anymore, but it still exists. It's doing great. And the Alt MBA puts together one
hundred and twenty people for a month and changes their life because they change their
life. And that's what business school is supposed to do. But it takes too long and costs too
much money.

Jordan Seth, this is great and really, really useful for our listeners. Thanks for joining us.

Seth Godin You guys are terrific. Thank you for letting me rant. Highlight of my day.

Jordan My pleasure. My pleasure. I should have asked more provocative questions just to
let you go off.

Jordan And now it's time for Upgrade of the Week where we talk about that one thing
that's making a big difference in our lives. And I'm going to start with you, Seth, what is
your upgrade this week?

Seth Godin I have two. One's free, one's not. The one that's not—go online and buy a
twenty-dollar LED camera light that you can put near your desk and you will look five times
better on Zoom because we are judging you.

Jordan Oh, beautiful.

Meghan You do look good. I can vouch for this.

Jordan You, I am seeing you in 4K. It is nice.

Seth Godin And the other one which is free—every single day, the first thing you do
before you doom scroll, send someone you know, a thank you note.

Meghan I love that.

Jordan Nice. That is very, very considerate. I appreciate that. Megan, what about you?
What's your upgrade this week?

Meghan OK, mine is not even the upgrade of the week. It's like the Upgrade of the last
three months, which is a weighted blanket. It is...I got it as a gift. And when I first took it out
of the packaging, it's like 15 pounds. So it's heavy. And I'm thinking I don't even know how
I'm going to adjust this thing. I'm going to feel trapped. I'm going to feel claustrophobic. It is
the most soothing thing in the world. And now I'm afraid I'm going to have to take it with
me when I travel because I don't think I'm actually going to go to sleep without it anymore.

Jordan Very nice. Very nice. Now, you are dependent on that weighted blanket.

Meghan I very much am.

Jordan I keep hearing great things about them and I've never had one before. But I do
love the crushing feeling of the lead vest that you get put on you when you get X-rays at
the dentist.

Meghan Yup.

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Jordan Like that. That is my favorite thing in the world, so I would probably love a
weighted blanket.

Meghan You need one. Yeah. You need one. if you like that you'll like this.

Jordan Oh I definitely, definitely like that. X-rays just are pleasant because of it.

Meghan And what about you, Jordan? What's your upgrade?

Seth Godin Jordan's stalling.

Jordan You know. Exactly. So my upgrade is going to be a pet upgrade because I have
my dog who is sleeping right here behind me and she's sleeping in one of three dog beds
that she has. And I am going to be an advocate of having more than one dog bed for your
dog, especially if you have a dog that follows you around everywhere and likes to distract
you while you're trying to work. Sometimes I feel that she's bored in this room or she was
bored in this room because she wasn't comfortable. And I now have a dog bed in every
place that I could possibly be. So if she can lay down and be comfortable, like I say, "go
lay down," and she has a place to lay down, whereas if she didn't have that place, she
would just harass the hell out of me. And it's a great way to just keep her happy and thus
keep me happy. So having more than one dog bed if you have a dog, is a clutch move I
would recommend.

Seth Godin Well, said Jordan, as one dog lover to another.

Jordan Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Jordan And that's our show, The Upgrade is produced by Micaela Heck and mixed by
Brad Fisher.

Meghan Please rate us on Apple Podcasts and give us a review, too. We love to get your
feedback. You can also reach us by calling us at three, four, seven, six eight seven eight
one zero nine and leaving us a voicemail or write to us at Upgrade at Lifehacker dot com.

Jordan You can also find us on Twitter, at Lifehacker, on Instagram, at Lifehacker dot com.
All one word or on Facebook, at Facebook dot com slash Lifehacker. Sign up for
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