NTTG_24_Matthew Rawle

Matt: So owned media is really important in terms of, it helps to level the playing field and give you a way, non algorithmically, to market yourself. If I just go on LinkedIn and I make a post, I cannot predict how it’s going to perform. I don’t own LinkedIn. I don’t own the results on LinkedIn.

I’m throwing the dice out and I’m hoping that there is a good result, but I cannot control that result. The same thing would be true of Twitter, saying, Hey, you didn’t post this at the right day or the right time, or it didn’t get enough traction in the first 15 minutes or what have you. So I think a lot of folks could benefit from not looking at their marketing through a borrowed platform first approach.

With an owned media channel, with my own platform, I control that result. I learn from it. I move on. There’s a lot of utility and value, because you’re building your own audience. You’re consistently messaging to them about the things that matter to them the most, and you’re building that relationship over time so that when they eventually have that problem, they will remember that you’ve already been so helpful and they will come to you.

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works.

If you’ve ever felt like your voice is getting buried by the algorithm, or like your best content disappears into the social media void, this is a great show. Uh, joining me today is Matthew Rawle, a longtime content strategist and the founder of a consultancy dedicated to helping B2B consultants and creators build owned media channels, think newsletters, podcasts, and platforms that you control. Not big tech platforms that change the rules on a whim. So if you’re tired of chasing algorithms, wanna build something that lasts. This episode is just for you, so let’s get into it.

Matt, thank you so much for joining today. This is gonna be really interesting.

Matt: Absolute pleasure. Thank you, Joel, so much for having me.

Joel: So I wanna start off like I do with most of my conversations here when I bring a guest nerd on, which is really to share the nerd origin story. How did you get into the stuff that you do, some of your passions, and how does that cross over into what we’re gonna talk about today?

Matt: Well, thank you very much for the interesting question. I am a lifelong video gamer. Back in 1992 or 1993, farther back when I can remember. I was very young, maybe two or three years old. I was sitting on my father’s lap. He was a, an electrical engineer. I was sitting in his lap at his computer in a very crowded room in our, in, in our house, and we would play Wheel of Fortune and we would play Jeopardy, you know, those old floppy disk game show games. And I always had a lot of fun. And so that kind of blossomed my affinity for video games. And I was a pretty big gamer all throughout the intervening period. I had also taken a bit of an interest in writing and reading as you know, you want to be well-rounded. 

When Alan Wake came out in 2010, it’s one of my favorite video games. It opens with a very specific monologue… 

Matt: …and not only was I hooked, it made me want to become a writer or try to be a writer because I had these kind of two passions.

And I just thought I, I’d read some Stephen King at this point. I just thought that was so cool, and exploring that concept, exploring that mystery. Helping people understand, yes, give them all the detail in the world, but making sure that they are left with something that they can use, that really appealed to me.

And so a couple years later I had the opportunity to get into copywriting, which I did for quite some time. My previous career before I pivoted earlier this year was as a copywriter and a content marketer.

But when it came down to brass tacks, what did I notice? I saw that there were a lot of really bright B2B consultants running good businesses with really high quality clients that really have difficulty or they struggle to market themselves.

I heard from many people over the last five years, 10 years of my career, the feast and famine cycle. That every consultant, every business deals with can be fairly brutal. This kind of arises when there’s no clients, but then in my experience, it’s because folks weren’t really adequately doing enough to market themselves consistently over time. When they ran out of clients, there’d be this mad rush to get more clients. When they were working with clients, they’d be too focused, they’d be too busy on delivering for those clients. So marketing themselves, promoting their services kind of fell by the wayside. And so I felt that based on my content background, that there was an opportunity to help these folks with this one specific problem.

I wanna avoid the feas and family cycle. I wanna help them grow credibility and authority in their niche. A lot of these businesses are successful, but they could easily be more successful. I want them to be more successful. And so that led to my current offer, which is I help B2B consultants build owned-media channels, newsletters and podcasts, so that they can build pipeline and continually grow authority and trust with their best customers.

Joel: And that’s so crucial. You know, as a, As a, a soloist and a consultant myself, it is very difficult when your head’s down and you’re doing the thing to think about marketing the thing or talking about what you’re doing. 

I’ve spent the past year basically heads down working on my book and, you know, and I look up and I’m like, like the pipeline is empty because I haven’t been consistent.

And I think consistency is really what we’re talking about. Being very clear on just a couple points. Always be always going out there and sharing the same story. But you have a very interesting approach to it, which is, like you said, it’s that owned media. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between channels and for those of, for those who are listening, who aren’t marketers, who don’t know why it’s so crucial to have an owned platform.

And then we’ll dispel some of the myths about what actually owning your own platform is about.

Matt: Sure. So I’ll back it up. I guess the modern conception of digital marketing started back in, let’s say the mid two thousands or thereabouts social media was on the rise. There was MySpace. Facebook was starting to take off, and it really informed how a lot of marketers today, a lot of people today, saw the effectiveness of digital marketing. It’s all. Or it had been like, how many likes does your content get? How many retweets can you get? The very performance heavy metrics. And not that I am a downer or a damper on performance marketing, but I don’t think that’s the full picture. 

When we look at things solely through the lens of performance marketing, we’re missing like all of the improvements that we ourselves are making as marketers or as business people, because just think about the different things, the different improvements that you can make. Say I did a newsletter and it completely bombed and no one read it, and I’m like, well, this is horrible, but it’s not actually horrible because I learned something really important. That material is not resonating with my audience or that the idea could be like halfway there and maybe it just needs to be developed a little bit more, given a little bit of different framing.

I learned that there are so many different approaches that I could take. It’s not about having a single resource that’s gonna blossom and bloom and be everything. It’s all about planting trees along the way and those trees with enough time and enough water and enough sunlight that will sprout into so many potential revenue opportunities that just focusing on one big thing what would miss.

An example I wrote about recently is think about how movies come out and then if they underperform, they go to streaming three or four weeks later. That is risk mitigation. Companies are trying to mitigate the risk, and that is important, but it is not the be all end all because when you see marketing as a product, you’re missing, you know, its artistic value and the fact that it actually, you know, people believed in it enough for it to exist. And there’s something really beautiful about the. The human factor

Joel: Right.

Matt: There are so many things you can’t measure with performance marketing. You can’t measure customer trust. You can’t measure the strength of your relationships. You can’t measure, you know, if someone gets a newsletter for you for six months and no interactions, and then you launch a new offer and they’re gonna buy day one, you can’t measure that.

There’s no predictor of that. So owned media is really important in terms of, it helps to level the playing field and give you a way, non algorithmically, to market yourself. Because if I just go on LinkedIn and I make a post, I cannot predict how it’s going to perform. I don’t own LinkedIn. I don’t own the results on LinkedIn.

The same thing would be true of Twitter. The same thing would be true of Facebook. It’s I’m throwing the dice out and I’m hoping that there is a good result, but I cannot control that result with an owned media channel, with my own platform, I do the best job that I can If something falls over, yes, I control that result. I learn from it. I move on. As opposed to Twitter saying, Hey, you didn’t post this at the right day or the right time, or it didn’t get enough traction in the first 15 minutes or what have you. So I think a lot of folks could benefit from not looking through at their marketing through a social media first or a a borrowed platform. First approach. I think that there’s a lot of utility and value in an owned media channel because you’re. Building your own audience. You’re consistently messaging to them about the things that matter to them the most, and you’re building that relationship over time so that when they eventually have that problem, if they do, they will remember that you’ve already been so helpful and they will come to you.

Joel: I think the challenge is we’re so used to instant gratification. We’re so used to, to instant, right. And it takes time to warm up something like an, like an owned media. 

Full disclosure. I’ve got a newsletter and I probably send something out every month or six weeks.

Right. I’m very erratic and sporadic at it. And that’s just on me. I’m the one doing it right, but I’m doing all the other things producing this podcast. You know, I thought, oh, I’m gonna do it once a week. And then it got to the point where it was like Thursday night, I’m scrambling to put together the episode for Monday.

So, you know. I’ve made a concerted decision to sort of like space out the episodes a little bit more and find out what works. But what’s surprising to me is by being consistent and, you know, I’m now 20 some odd episodes in I’m starting to see the results. Even when I’m not posting a brand new episode, people are still listening.

And so that’s something that you all, you can’t get from social media because it’s such a, a time bound, real time, instant gratification. You know, I don’t know if someone has seen a post of mine that, that just happened to show up in their feed from three weeks ago. ’cause I’m not keeping my eye on it, but by having something, a library of content, blogging is still out there.

People are still blogging. The content that you create can be discovered far after the time that you put it up. 

But that also brings up a challenge, which is many people, many consultants, many experts are trying to chase the message of the day. When you take a step back and look holistically across all the content, which is what I do with my clients, you find out that they’re inconsistent in the message, they’re pivoting, they’re ambulance chasing.

“This month we are this type of product. Last month we were really focused on that. This month we’re selling to healthcare. Last month, three months ago, we were selling to residential associations.” And that really can confuse your audience. So what advice or approach do you take when you’re building, when you’re helping a client build that owned media channel?

About the consistency strategy.

Matt: I think you bring up a really good point about people trying to chase what they think matters in the moment. Something I often say, not necessarily with my clients, but something I’ve just developed in saying because it’s true, is marketing is not effective when done in desperation.

Joel: Ooh.

Matt: There is nothing you can do right now that’s going to drive traffic or conversions right now unless it’s like a super painful thing that, you know already a lot of people are struggling with.

And then in terms of being consistent so that you’re not confusing your audience. That is why I really work with my clients to make sure from the jump that there is an addressable market for the content that they want to produce. 

Niche down. If a IT firm, for example, has a bunch of different services that they offer and they’re trying to market themselves, well, you’re not gonna get everyone interested in all of their services all at the same time. You’re gonna have to niche in your content. 

This doesn’t mean. Ignoring or neglecting your other services, but people are coming to you for one specific thing. Have the courage or the the confidence to niche down to address that one specific problem and drive it as far as you can. 

Now the problem can be fairly large. For example, I have a friend who does a newsletter on marketing strategy. Marketing strategy is a huge topic, but he’s on five plus years of newsletter outta that one topic. I do a newsletter about owned media channels. Again, it’s not a, it’s not a narrow topic, but there’s a lot of potential that can come out of it, but it’s all revolving around a core problem or a core issue.

So you’re not gonna have a subscriber who’s gonna want to read about proper cable architecture one week, and then how to run your servers the next week, and then how to do stuff in Google Analytics the next week. That’s very unlikely.

So my advice would be to make sure that you’re niching down with your channels as much as you can, and also make sure that there is an appetite for the kind of content you want to produce, because after 20, 30 plus years of the internet there, a lot of the low hanging fruit has been done to death. And when I say low hanging fruit, I mean the obvious problems, the obvious questions. 

I early in my career wrote a lot of stuff about B2B marketing that, you know, it was just, it was something I wrote and it had my viewpoint not to take away from it, but it wasn’t painful enough to the audience, it didn’t really address anything because I didn’t understand where they were coming from. I didn’t understand the customer, I didn’t understand the problem. 

And as we move now in 2025 towards more, I hear we need a lot more product marketers understand the product, understand the challenges your customer are facing, understand what your product can do for them, and the solution that you offer really well. And that’s how you get ahead. The days of, I put together this blog and it had so many keywords, so it’s gonna rank into Google, are long gone. 

So when I talk about consistency, I say you need to really niche down and hone in, but you also need to make sure that you have enough material and also that you’re planning far enough in advance that when it comes time to write, record, whatever you have the time, put aside, you know exactly what you’re gonna tackle and you just have the time to, to get it done. Because a lot of folks, believe it or not, run into the exact same problem you articulated where time just catches up with you. It’s inevitable. You have to take a week off here or something comes up the next week or what have you. 

To have a backlog of material and to continually work at. Adding more to that backlog is the best thing you can do for an immediate channel, because yes, there’s gonna be some seasonality or there’s gonna be a topic that comes up that you desperately want to address, but a lot of what you work on should be fairly evergreen or mostly always relevant. You might want to cherry pick some ideas of the day here and there, but if you’re doing ambulance chasing, if you’re pivoting wildly from one topic or idea to the other every month or every week, you’re not gonna get very far because people aren’t gonna know what your specialty is. They’re not gonna know how to position you in their minds and in the market.

Joel: Yes and having the, that library that people can go to, because, the idea is you mention something on social media and it drives them to subscribe. It drives them to the blog. It drives them to listen to the podcast. And if it’s well done, if it’s well produced, they’re gonna look at the stuff that you’ve done previous to that most recently, and they’re gonna, they’re gonna try to contextualize “Well, that was a great one thing that Matt said, but let me go see what else he’s talking about. Oh, if I look at the past four articles or the past four, four issues of the newsletter, I’m seeing a theme and now I know that Matt is The Owned Media guy,” as opposed to, like you said earlier, you’ve got an IT company. It’s well, do they do cabling? Are they doing backend support? Are they are they security? Are they cloud? I don’t even know. They had a great idea once, but it, everything else, they are not relevant to me. That idea may have been but it, that sets up a challenge in my mind that.

You do need to, like you said, find out what the audience is interested, where the appetite is, and you do sometimes have to find that on borrowed channels. You cast your net out, you cast your line out on some of these borrowed channels like LinkedIn you know, and the socials maybe earned channel.

You get on somebody else’s podcast and you know, you. Do your best to represent yourself. 

What strategies and tactics do you have when you’re on those non-owned channels to attract people? How do you move people over? ’cause it’s, ’cause some of those channels are trying very hard to keep people from leaving their platform they’re built and incentivized to, to keep people on there. I know that at one point you know, on LinkedIn, if you included a link back to your channel you would be penalized by the algorithm. So it seems like that’s getting more difficult. 

Matt: I think just acknowledging that is, in fact the case is very important and very powerful because you’re absolutely right. A lot of channels make most to all of their revenue on ads being served. And so they want users to stay on their platforms as long as possible. They have no incentive to really improve their platforms for the casual user because they’re making money hand over fist. LinkedIn’s owned by Microsoft, it has no incentive to improve. Facebook’s bringing in, I don’t even know how much money at this point, and I actually had an experience the other day where I looked at someone’s feed and it was just. AI video after AI video with no updates from anyone they were following or anything that was really relevant to them.

It was just AI video after AI video. It is hard. It’s very hard because in the moment you have to realize that you much like posting on there. You have no control over who sees you or the context in which you’re seen. 

You said this earlier, it’s very ephemeral. It’s very of the moment. If you don’t get a post that’s seen in the first 30 minutes or however long, there’s a good chance it’s just gonna. Sit there in the archives and no one ever searches the archives, or you know, maybe occasionally someone will like a post two or three weeks later just because it showed up on their feed. It is a slog and it is a challenge, and I don’t really think that there’s a good answer or a helpful answer that I could give because, the only answer I can give is it takes time and consistent effort. Now, I’m not saying that if you have an owned media channel channel, it should be all you post about and you should shout about it from the heavens. 

You need to add value to the channel that you’re on, but if you add enough value. And you keep reminding people, “Hey, if you want more of this kind of stuff, go here. Or you can sign up for my newsletter. You can download, subscribe to my podcast. You can listen every week.”

Eventually the right person or some of the right people are gonna be attracted to that. Also, it’s a lot of just building relationships, right? So you go on, folks in your ICPs posts, you comment you build the relationship with them so that eventually, you know, maybe they decide they want to subscribe or they want to download your podcast and have a listen. 

There is no concrete way we can send signals, but whether those signals are actually responded to is something that’s utterly out of our control. We can just do the best that we can.

Joel: I am just busting in here really briefly to make a gigantic, huge announcement. I’m so excited if you’re listening to this during release week, my book Be a Nerd that Talks Good is just about a week away from being released. You can pre-order it right now.

If we’re talking about owned media, this is like the ultimate owned media. It’s a lot of work to publish a book, but once it’s out there, it’s out there. And so I would love it if you guys would check it out. I would love it if you would go to nerd that talks good.com/book. There’s a link, you can buy it on every single platform.

Um, and then more importantly, review it and contact me. joel@messagespecs.com and tell me what you think.

You know, the, the whole purpose of this podcast is to help you, the very smart person, learn how to talk good. Right? Stop being the smartest person nobody understands. Go and pick up the book, it’s called Be a Nerd That Talks Good. Back to this conversation with Matt.

Do you have any memorable projects or working with a client? You don’t have to name names, but where, um. they were hesitant and resistant to setting up owned because they didn’t think that they were gonna be able to draw people over. And you know, that, that persistence paid off. ’cause I think that is the, that is one of the challenges that, that we face as consultants on the outside is we’ve done this so, so many times and we’ve seen that it works.

But it’s evangelizing a little bit to that client. And I say, you just gotta, you’ve gotta. Trust me and stick with it. Where have you seen that pay off?

Matt: There was actually a recent client of mine who we’re just about to launch, and he had said to me, “you know, I’ve never gotten this far.” 

So that was interesting. They had tried to market their business before. They had tried to do certain things before, but it was the act of, you know, having the support, being able to have an external resource to say, “here is where you need to go, here is what you need to do. Here are, here’s where I can add the value. Here is where your weaknesses are. And we can shore those up.” And then just to have someone to help them along.

 So I think the biggest problem is people get trapped in terms of things they’ve tried before, haven’t paid off for them, because they didn’t have the ability to give them the time or effort that they deserved. When you set up to write a newsletter or create a podcast or have some kind of own media channel, it’s a lot of work.

It’s a huge commitment upfront. It gets easier over time.

But where people fall off is. Okay, so I’ve written a 1500 words blog post. I wanna put it out as a newsletter, or I’ve recorded two really good interviews. I wanna put them out as a podcast. And so they launch them and then they see the results and they’re probably fairly minimal let’s be realistic.

Because no, not everyone has a huge platform. And then they’re like, I put in all that effort for that. And then they get really demotivated and it’s a hard pill to swallow to see, you know, something that you put so much time and effort into barely move the needle, but. People kind of frame these things incorrectly because it’s not just doing the one or the two.

The value is in the 10 and the 20 and the 30 and the consistent effort over time. And so when people get trapped, when people get stuck, they view it through the lens of, okay, so I put a lot of effort “into this and it didn’t pay off the like I wanted.” And that can be fine as well. But don’t abandon ship before you’re really sure it’s not going to pay off.

Joel: Yeah it definitely is a muscle that you build and like you say, it gets easier. I was one of the first couple thousand people podcasting back in the very, very early days, you know, and that was before it was even a thing. And so, you know, there weren’t huge audiences. And as the audiences got huger, I fell out of it just because my, my big hook was complaining about my job and I got a new job, so I didn’t have anything to complain about.

And I saw the technology become easier, but the market become more saturated and more, more difficult to get in. And I always, that’s why I started this podcast was I was like I’ve done that. I could probably do it again. I had enough experience and I’m enough of a nerd and a geek about audio and things like that, that I had cobbled together a little bits, but you know. 

The getting started was, getting started or getting restarted was the hardest part. Having someone along the way who can take a little bit of the burden off, or, “Hey, you don’t have to do all the research over this because we’ve already got this figured out.

We’ve already got this process.” They can almost, you know, you can almost leapfrog them over that initial hump. 

Can you share a little bit about. Just tactically, what do you recommend? Where do you recommend someone to start? 

I use HubSpot. That’s my mailing platform. ’cause I’ve used it for clients before. It’s not for everybody. You know, everybody would run over, like if they’re doing a newsletter to, to sub stack or now we’re using Ghost. And what would you recommend someone start with.

Matt: I will preface this by saying I use Ghost and I love it a lot, however. Because Ghost has a an associated fee, you need to pay their subscription or you need to find some way to host it yourself. It might not be ideal for people that are just looking to dip their toes and start out. A platform that I have recently grown to really love is Buttondown and not a lot of people know about them. They are a independent company and all they’re focused on is doing really great email newsletters.

Joel: The challenge, and this has just sort of been my observation with a Substack, was Substack was one of these, you know, utilitarian, they provided a service they were hosting and they started to try to turn more into a social platform. You know, you’re creating your little group of group of subscribers and you’re like, well, if you like this, we’re gonna automatically feed you that. And it started to get a lot of noise. It’s very algorithmic. And set aside some of the business and policy practices that, that they’ve got, do you feel Substack turned from an owned channel into a little bit of a social, into a bit, little bit of a borrowed channel?

Because as their practices sort of pushed people away from it. A lot of people abandoned substack and then all of a sudden I’ve lost, I thought I owned this audience. Now I’ve lost it. Because they don’t wanna be associated with Substack. So, maybe it’s more the question is the white label versus I am on a Substack.

Matt: That’s a good question, and I think it’s something that we also encountered before with with Medium.

 I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using the platform that makes you the most comfortable, but I do tend to agree with you. I mean, even from the outset. So, Substack had the hearts and the comments and it was very community engagement. There’s a value to that because that is their business model in terms of they want to support paid creators. Beehiv is the same way, but not every newsletter inherently needs to be paid. Some of us just run them for our businesses. We’re not trying to have the newsletter or the podcast be our business.

And so I can kind of see the utility in that case where the extra functionality is, can be useful. But also something to keep in mind is that these are very large, typically venture capital funded companies, and so they need to have a very steady roadmap of product improvements and service improvements.

And that can sometimes just mean adding things that might push some folks away as they move more towards their ideal customer base, which in this case would be the paid newsletter subscribers. I once used Substack. I thought it was an excellent product. I moved away from Substack. A lot of folks, as you indicated, moved away from Substack because it becomes, I’m not gonna say difficult, but a lot of the extra features. It makes it hard to justify using them because if you’re just running a businesses that are, you’re not gonna readily have a need for comments or likes or shares or hearts. You’re just trying to. Have a thing and it be online, and then you send it to your subscribers and that’s the exchange.

That’s the entire part of it. And I think as we move forward, we’re gonna see, unfortunately, more companies tempted to add additional features because they need to continually generate revenue. And that’s just business.

But it doesn’t mean that the core experience or what brought you to the dance, so to speak. 

I’ll use an example. Look at Intuit, MailChimp. MailChimp, you know, 25 years in business, one of the best email platforms. Still a very good email platform, but over time it’s just been bogged down with so many different features, so many different additions that it’s really difficult now for the beginner user or the average user to come in and say, okay, I know exactly what I need to know. I know exactly how this works. There’s just a lot of distractions over here and Substack, Beehiv, they’re good platforms inherently. The technology is good and they’re fun to use and they’re very streamlined and simple, but there’s a lot of distractions that aren’t intended for folks that aren’t running their newsletters as their businesses.

Joel: Yeah, I guess that is the crux of it, and that’s the deciding factor is are you trying to monetize the subscription or are you trying to reach customers and reach advocates and convert them to value elsewhere? 

You had a, a LinkedIn post this morning that I think was just amazing. I’m not gonna read the whole thing, but you’re talking about economic uncertainty and investing in the business. And that shouldn’t mean you do less marketing and you closed it with this. You said, “because the uncertainty won’t last, but the relationships you build will.”

and I just thought that was incredible.

If you think about your channel as the relationship, not as the sales channel your sales channels can be elsewhere on your website, et cetera. It really humanizes, you know, what we do. It’s the, it’s realizing that’s a human relationship and there are people on the other end.

I guess that leads the question and maybe there isn’t an answer for this. How human do you typically advise your clients or maybe what type of businesses should be business voice and when should it be human driven? That, that personal voice, or how do you discover that?

Matt: That’s a really good question, and I think the decider or the indicator comes down to if there’s one employee who’s writing your newsletter, it should be in their voice. If you have a team of contributors, then it should be in whatever the brand voice is.

It all comes down to how many cooks are in the kitchen. We kind of reach a stage where the individual voice is seen as having a lot more power, a lot more credibility, a lot more authority, a lot more utility, a lot more usefulness, and just, you know, being more authentic and being more relatable. 

So I know that I always write in my voice and my voice is like kind of, sometimes I wrote just long paragraphs about interesting things that I think are interesting to me. And sometimes I use maybe fancier words than I should, but that’s my writing voice. And it’s been my writing voice for 20 years, so I’m not overly keen to, to change it because that’s the experience of working with me, and that’s just how I communicate. 

I think the more folks can put themselves into their marketing, the more chances there are to connect, because when a prospect comes to read your newsletter or your podcast, they know that they’ll be working with you. And yes, they may be working with the company, but odds are they’ll still be working with you. And so I think just using your own voice helps to build that relationship. Helps to build that credibility and that trust right off the bat because at the end of the day it is you. 

Joel: Let’s geek out for a second. This is Nerds That Talk Good after all. And I think we’re both hardcore nerds. Do you see us pivoting more towards the self-host if a company can stand up and run their own services?

Hosting on WordPress is still hosting. You’re using that platform, but if you’re hosted on like wordpress.org similar to the conversation we had earlier with Substack, you’re kind of on their platform and at their whims. There’s a big move towards the federated internet and a lot of self-hosted stuff, and it’s becoming a lot easier.

Ghost for example as you alluded to earlier can self-host. Do you see that as an option to liberating a little bit more and truly owning platforms. And where do you see that going?

Matt: I think the reason wordpress.org exists, or Substack exists as per their own platforms in terms of having people’s content on them, is that it’s just a lower barrier to entry. And there, there might have been a time where that was true. You know, ” I have a plumbing business that I know nothing about technology. I just wanna get a website up there cheaply or efficiently”. But as time has passed and people have gotten more technologically savvy, I mean, there’s nothing that should be overly arcane about hosting on your own server or paying a company for web space and having to FTP all your assets up there.

I would like to believe that we are gonna start to move away from everything based around platforms because as I said earlier, a lot of these companies are making money hand-over-fist, and for users that have problems, there’s no real reason for those companies to address those problems. 

So I do believe that we are gonna start seeing people look at self-hosting as more of an option.

 Mastodon is federated. It’s not as popular as it once was, but there are still a lot of users on there. As we move forward, I think that people are going to start to wonder like, what is it like to not be under the thumb of Facebook, of Twitter? And quite frankly, these companies have been around for 15 to 20 years, but just because they’re in now doesn’t mean they’re always going to be around. So eventually there’s gonna have to be some alternative or people like in the web of the nineties and the two thousands to the wild west. But that was some of the best internet there has been, where people didn’t just go to 10 websites and that was the entirety of their online presence, I would like to believe because I really liked just like going onto StumbleUpon and finding a really cool website and that was a great experience and just learning and being open to visiting other websites, seeing things that other people working on, being on different platforms, but just like it’s on Reddit now, or I gotta go to LinkedIn, or it’s on Facebook, or it’s on Twitter, or it’s on Instagram. So I, in my heart of hearts, really want that to be the case, and I think we’re gonna start to see that, but it’s probably not gonna be at the scale that I would like it to be.

Joel: Yeah it may be it may be a realm for a while that’s relegated to the nerds and like you said, like I’m on BlueSky and Mastodon, and they both have, I have similar circles of people across both. But I feel more freer to share on Mastodon than BlueSky, even though, you know, it’s the anti Twitter corporate alternative. 

 I love the thinking of the internet of the nineties and the, even the early two thousands and how free that was. And how people self-hosted and how we owned our own stuff to get back what we’re talking about. This might be kicking the hornet’s nest a little bit.

But there’s this move towards the AI driven stuff and we alluded to it earlier. What are your concerns about. AI supplanting or getting in the middle of the people owning their content. ’cause we’ve seen this with the zero click results and things like that.

Matt: In the context of zero quick, there’s always going to be utility for people to have own media because those results need to come from somewhere, right? Those results are fed into Google, and whether it’s like the number one ranking page or somewhere further down, the AI-generated result, it needs to come from somewhere, right? I know that there’s a lot of concern in the SEO bubble about, oh, what’s the impact going to be? But at the end of the day, people are still going to need to. See information from websites, Google itself is not supplying the information. So I think that there is a little bit there to kind of mitigate some of those concerns because yes, it is changing, but websites are always gonna be necessary. Content is always gonna be necessary, and internet without websites and internet without content is kind of just like flying in the face of what it has been or what it has grown to be in the last 30, 40 years. Nothing is going to change dramatically. It’s just another vector that they’re trying out.

Joel: Yeah.

Matt: But I think that there’s always utility because your website still exists on the internet. You can still link to people on your website, on the internet. You can still make posts from your website onto the internet. It matters in the context of a search engine. But then also I don’t know if you follow the works of Ed Zitron at all, who is a pretty brilliant tech writer and he owns a PR firm, but he has done a lot of articles about how Google has, since 2019, in the pursuit of more ad revenue and the pursuit of more search results kind of degraded their own product. And so I think it’s really worth keeping in mind that Google’s still trying to figure it out. 

Like these changes, they may not stick. And so we’re all just living in a very fluid moment in time and to bring it all back to owned media, that is where you can take advantage, because everyone’s in a very similar state and people are looking for solutions and people are looking for things that solve their concerns or their problems. And so we can very deliberately plat our flag and say, we’re here to help. And yeah, we might get fewer clicks to our website because it doesn’t rank as well all of a sudden. But we’re still here, we’re still helping. We’re still putting marketing material out there, we’re still planting all those trees, and we need to have the confidence in ourselves and in our businesses that those trees are going to grow.

Joel: That’s great. Yeah. I love bringing it back to that, which is you can still be in control of what you can be in control of. 

Who are some of the other communicators or authors that, that you admire either of the past or contemporaries that you look to for for information and inspiration?

Matt: That’s a very loaded question because there are so many I could jump to. Off the top of my head, Cal Newport. Slow Productivity was a fantastic book. I’m also a really big fan of Oliver Burkeman. 4,000 Weeks was phenomenal.

Insofar as craft and marketing. I would have to say that the best book I’ve ever read was Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan and Edward Boches. This is, I think, the fourth edition. It is a tome that’s all about. How to be a copywriter, how to do good copywriting, how to do good marketing writing. And it’s not a small book, but it is packed with real examples from Luke Sullivan, who was one of history’s best copywriters. And so this book has been a massive inspiration to me throughout my career. And I think more people should check it out because it seems to be very much a hidden gem.

Joel: I’ll definitely include that in the show notes, in the the homework and extra credit section. 

Just sort of wrapping up. Where do you get your current inspiration from? Are you still gaming heavily?

Are you reading what is the thing that, when you need to take a step back and recharge, where do you get your energy from?

Matt: I am still gaming, probably not as much as I should or would like to. I’m sitting on 20, 25 plus video games that I’ve paid for and never played. And this same with reading. I’ve a short amount of books that I’ve just bought and never read. It’s called tsundoku, where things you buy things and then they just pile up because you intend to read them.

You like being around them, you just never get to them. I’m trying to deliberately address that more this year in terms of inspiration. It’s just, you know, having great conversations like this meeting interesting new people being able to help. People have told me that I’m helpful to a fault. I just genuinely helping people because I see people out there that I know have real marketing challenges that, you know, own media channels or launching newsletter or having a podcast can help. And I’m just champing at the bit because, I like people, I have confidence in people, I have faith in people and I know that there are a lot of folks out there that are challenged in either the current economic climate or just in general with getting more or the most out of the marketing.

And the more relationships I can build, the more conversations I can have, the more interesting people I can meet, the more inspiration I have because everyone is just so interesting and so fascinating, and what to do is so unique and so compelling to me that I want to know more. I want to learn more, and I want to know where I can help the most.

Joel: That’s, that is I think something that we share. So, wrapping up, where can people learn more? How can people engage with you? Obviously I’ll include the LinkedIn and I’ll include your newsletter. But what is the best way of getting in touch with you and how do you, how can you help people?

Matt: If you go on my website, matthewrawle.com, there is a process page that outlines exactly what I do. If you’re interested in that, you can either reach out to me directly or you can sign up for my newsletter. I’ve written I think almost 20 pieces now about owned media channels, just giving some opinions and perspectives and advice about how to overcome things like spending too much time on writing your subject lines or risk aversion or performance marketing or, why you should own your channels or how to get your ideas out there.

Because at the end of the day, a lot of people doing a lot of content, it’s not a content problem, it’s a visibility problem. So I would say the website and LinkedIn are probably the two channels through which I can be reached most directly.

Joel: Awesome. Matt, this has just been just so great. I’m excited. Uh, digging through your archives already.

 It’s helping me and inspiring me to get out there and actually write some emails. Because I’m I’m a slacker that way, but thank you so much for joining.

Matt: Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed this conversation. 

Joel: if you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a message therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.