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- Creator Spotlight: David Tao of The Ripped Report
Creator Spotlight: David Tao of The Ripped Report
Talking with the founder of the largest independent strength training company in the world
David Tao has always been passionate about fitness. Alongside his earlier career as a journalist writing about business with companies like Fortune and Forbes, he became a cross-fit convert and even co-owned a cross-fit gym. He utilized his fitness expertise by becoming a fitness content consultant, working with startups, fortune 500 companies, and everything in between.
He and his co-founder Kenny Kline have worked on a number of brands but are currently focused solely on BarBend. BarBend was launched seven years ago and has grown quickly through organic, SEO-focused growth. Today, they are the largest independent strength training company in the world. With millions of organic traffic reaching their website every month, BarBend launched 'The Ripped Report' to serve the community of bodybuilders that were visiting BarBend.com and requesting more coverage on the sport of building and toning muscle.
Having established BarBend as the publication of record to the strength training community, David sees 'The Ripped Report' as the first of many specialized newsletters that serve niche interests in the strength community. We spoke with David about being the ESPN of strength training and why beehiiv is their long term newsletter platform solution.
Founders: David Tao the CEO and Kenny Kline the President of Barbend
Top posts to check out:
Tell me about 'The Ripped Report'
‘The Ripped Report’ is specifically focused on bodybuilding news, athletes, and training. Barbend, launched in 2016, is the world’s largest independent strength training and strength sports media company. For the first five years of Barbend, we weren’t covering body building. Our audience started asking for it so we built ''The Ripped Report' from the ground up to cater to this community.
Our readership for ‘The Ripped Report’ are mostly people already embedded in body building or are fans of the sport. For ‘BarBend', it's much broader and focuses on strength and strength training in all its forms. It’s for anyone who is interested in making strength a part of a healthier lifestyle and want tips for getting more out of their training.
We’re trying to do infotainment- we want to inform and entertain. We’re trying to give information in a strategic way while also bringing elements of humor into it as well. We take our role as the primary source of information for this community seriously, so we need to be pretty objective. Humor is always secondary to reporting accurately.
Newsletters are a way for us to interact with our audience in a different way. We're communicating with our audience through their inboxes. There’s a difference between audience and community for us. We want to do both with our newsletters. Community is a group of folks interacting with each other, the audience is just consuming your content. We have a ton of media partnerships and we’re at events, we want to create opportunities for our community to interact.
We’re an ad supported website. If people come to our site, we can grow. If they’re clicking through our newsletter, it helps our engagement. We’re trying to get eyes on the site, it’s how we monetize, it’s important for us as a business.
How does beehiiv fit into that?
beehiiv’s CMS is super intuitive, building the content is super super intuitive. We host our sites on Wordpress. It’s been really easy to train a team member on using beehiiv if they’ve already used Wordpress. beehiiv is very analytics focused, they’re trying to make it accessible and intuitive and they've done a great job at that. There are a ton of features that are really really cool and they’re constantly rolling out new ones.
One we really appreciate is A/B testing, which is when you test out more than one subject line to see which performs best on segments of your subscriber base. You can send one subject line to a segment and a different subject line to another segment and see which performs better to send out to the larger audience. At the end of the day, it’s is a pleasure to use and lets us focus our time on content. I’m really excited to see what beehiiv is going to be in a year. I think it’s going to perform above all platforms by the end of the year.
How do you frame polling in a way that engages readers and provides useful feedback?
We regularly integrate polls in the newsletters to learn more about our readers. We’ve asked what our readers what they want more of and where they get their information besides the newsletter, is it social media (and if so, which one), another news outlet, etc.
We recently asked what kind of rewards readers would be the most interested in which we plan to incorporate as a referral incentive down the line. These questions keep us informed about our audience and create more opportunities for engagement. Sometimes we just poll fun questions, like the all time best bodybuilding match-ups throughout history. We’ll occasionally incorporate fantasy sports. We want to keep it light, so we don’t do informational polls back-to-back without including fun ones for balance.
2022 Goals
To grow ‘The Ripped Report’ 3x from current readership while creating more bespoke content for our subscribers, who we then want to convert to readers of BarBend.com (and vice versa).
Advice for other writers
Polls and integrated feedback have been huge for us, both in understanding how our audience interacts with content and in getting them to stay engaged.
Favorite beehiiv feature
I feel like we're really only scratching the surface of what the beehiiv team will eventually roll out. We love how well analytics are integrated into the dashboard. Integrating things like audience feedback and polls has already been huge for our engagement! As beehiiv’s ecosystem and features grow, we're excited to see what the team rolls out and to use those features to our advantage.
I’ve used MailChimp, Sailthru, and Drip. beehiiv is by far the best experience and it’s only going to get better from here. We found our long term platform solution, it’s really exciting and it’s one less thing I have to worry about.
Advice for anyone considering a switch to beehiiv
beehiiv’s analytics and data inferences that help drive engagement and readership are the name of the game.
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