10 May Unemployable with Brian Clark— Rainmaker.fm

Brian Clark and I became friends shortly after he first launched Copyblogger as a one-person blog in 2006. Both of us were very early adapters to marketing online and we were all learning from each other as we tried new ideas. We got to meet in person finally at SXSWi and I always looked forward to connecting there over the years. If we sound like old friends in this interview, that’s because we are.

Although I honed my writing skills as a poet, Brian’s early articles on copywriting were some of the most valuable lessons I ever used to turn poetry into effective copy.

The interview is titled The Economics of Artistic Integrity. Click the link to listen to the interview and check out more of the interviews Brian has done on rainmaker.fm. Here’s his description of the episode:

Whenever we get a heavy snow in Boulder and I share a photo of my buried patio, you’ll see an ornate, flame-carved fire pit in the shot (filled with snow, naturally). It’s a custom design crafted out of recycled propane tanks by artist John T. Unger.

As someone else who took to blogging in the early days, John and I have known each other for quite awhile. He originally started out as a poet, and created his first fire bowl simply because he thought it was a cool idea.

Soon, however, John’s work was featured on mega-blog Boing Boing, and then picked up by mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and NPR. Quite suddenly, John was in serious business.

You’ll hear why he protects his designs from manufacturers who steal them, even as he refuses to become a scalable “manufacturer” himself, choosing to craft each bowl by hand. It’s all about the perpetual side hustle – getting paid to do something that funds the next interesting project.