65 | Behind the Scenes at HerbRally with Mason Hutchinson

Camille (00:00)
Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I am a registered herbalist and licensed nutritionist. In this podcast, I share little tips and tidbits that might be helpful for other practitioners. I am on an interviewing role this summer. I'm bringing you today my latest interview with Mason Hodgson. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Mason and also encourage you to listen to this episode if you are in the process of building your practice or building any herb or nutrition or essentially any business. Because for me, one of the takeaways of this interview has to do with how you start small, how you come from a place of service, and how things can build and evolve over time. I think it's a really fascinating journey. I think you'll get a lot from listening to Mason share about how HerbRally has become what it is today, and some other behind the scenes tips and tricks and interesting little things about what's going on at HerbRally. So let me tell you about Mason. Mason Hudson is the founder of HerbRally. It's a podcast and website that promotes herbalism education and events.

Camille (01:07)
And you all, they have a really great YouTube channel. Sign up for their newsletter, their YouTube channel, their podcast. Just tons of great information there. Mason has completed herbalism apprenticeships at the Columbine School of Botanical Studies and the Arctus School of Herbal and Botanical Studies. Mason is a husband, proud father, avid chess, basketball, and ping pong player, spring water gatherer, and enthusiast in the art of frugal nutrition. So without any further babbling on my end, let's go to the interview.

Camille (01:41)
All right. I am so excited to be here with Mason. Mason, thanks for agreeing to come on. I had been thinking about interviewing you for a while and I was like, Oh, he must be really busy.

Mason (01:53)
I always have time for you, Camille.

Camille (01:55)
Awesome. Well, what I was thinking a theme for our interview would really be a behind the scenes at HerbRally because I know you have such a robust platform and I think a lot of people, especially when they're starting out, probably feel like, Oh, he must have some special sauce, or There must be something behind it. One of my things is we all just put one foot in front of the other and wind up where we are. I think it could be really helpful to hear more about how you got here and what's going on that we might not see from the outside.

Mason (02:29)
It's really neat that you say that HerbRally is a robust platform because you're right, it did start incredibly small. We basically just started listing events and that's all we were. We were the herbal communities event platform. That's how I saw. Then over time I was like, Oh, it'd be cool to add monographs. Then next thing you know, we're doing a podcast and stuff like that. So yeah, it just continuously grew. It hit me the other day. I think LinkedIn may have reminded me, but I started HerbRally in 2015. So it's over eight years old now, which is mind blowing to me.

Camille (02:59)
Oh, congratulations. That's exciting.

Camille (03:02)
So maybe we.

Camille (03:02)
Could start out and share what inspired you to actually create HerbRally or The Schoolhouse. I know you have the schoolhouse, which is a newer component, but if you'd love to talk about either one of those, that'd be great.

Mason (03:15)
Yeah, let's start with HerbRally, and maybe we'll get into schoolhouse later. But basically, I was the events coordinator for Mountain Rose Herbs for 11 years or maybe a decade or so. Several years back, I decided... I was looking for a spot on the internet that listed herbalism events, and there were a bunch of websites that listed some of the main conferences. I want to say maybe American Herbalist Guild will list their events, and I would piecemeal together to find out where the different events were happening and whatnot. But I thought it'd be cool on the internet to have one place where you could go and find herbalism events in your neck of the woods, as we like to say. I just decided to purchase a Squarespace website and just start listing them as a benefit for my job at Mountain Rose Herbs. But also, I really adore the herbal community and I just wanted to know what was going on from the big herbal conferences, but also down to your smaller lectures at the local library or the small little plant walks happening in some random town and stuff like that. So it was really just a resource I created for myself and I figured a lot of other people would be interested as well.

Camille (04:25)
Yeah, and they are. It's really cool. And so how did it evolve from there? So you started out with events, you got the website, you just did it. Well, first of all, did you compile them yourself? Did you reach out to people to say, Hey, submit your event? What was the process there? And then also, could you tell us how things evolved from that point?

Mason (04:46)
Yeah, a little bit of both. I signed up to a lot of different herbalist newsletters. So anytime a newsletter came in where it listed their event, I would just... And I still do this to this day. I see this event happening, and then I list it on the website. And we organized by both all events and then events by state. Technically, we have an international events page as well, which isn't as robust. But yeah, so I sign up to a lot of newsletters. Anytime I found out about something, I list it. We also do list... We have an event submission form as well. That became more and more popular over the years. People to this day still submit events through that same form. But yeah, basically, I also have a Google Doc where I have tons of different herbalist websites with their events page and a link to it. When I have off time or whatever, I go through that list and I look at what's happening on their calendars and I add the events that way as well. It's all manual. It's all done by me. I have had help in the past, but most of the time it's been mostly me adding these events.

Camille (05:52)
Wow. I just want to highlight for people who are listening, the service component component of this, you saw a need, you thought it would be cool to do it, and you did it. And I'm guessing, we haven't gotten to this yet, but I'm guessing that doing that got you all these connections and integrations with different people doing cool stuff that has allowed you to keep going with this work.

Mason (06:18)
It's been very helpful, especially for the relationship building component. People are thrilled that there's a place online that lists their events. And I remember working an event for Mountain Rose Herbs when I was in Portland at the... I want to say it was the traditional roots conference. And someone came up to me at the Mountain Rose Herbs table and they're like, Hey, Mason, they knew me from HerbRally. And they said, Oh, we're here because we saw this event list on HerbRally. And it just made me so happy knowing that people were actually using it for its intended purpose.

Camille (06:47)
Yeah, I love that. I love that. Great. I use the event submission form. I submit things on there. It's definitely worth checking out for people who've got stuff going on. Tell us what happened from there. How did things evolve from the event listing feature?

Mason (07:05)
Yeah. Oh, I do want to point out, too, we actually list virtual events now. Since the whole COVID situation, I kept getting that request, why don't you list online events? So we started doing that as well. So that's another component that you could check out herbrally.com/distance. I'm sorry. Yeah, distance. So we listed events and then we also started listing herbalism schools all over the US, which we also break down by state. So if you go to HerbRally.com/schools, you could hopefully find an herb school in your area. So we added that component. Then we started adding monographs. I was really into the idea of having HerbRally be a home for these lengthy, well written monographs with stories and experience integrated into them. That's because I like monographs where they're sometimes just super basic, where it just lists the range and the Latin name and the medicinal uses and whatnot. But I really wanted the monographs to also include story components from that particular herbalist. Those are the ones that I found enjoyable to read. And we do have some more basic ones on HerbRally, but a lot of them, you'll notice if you go there, they're super long.

Mason (08:18)
I want to say we have a 21 page calendula monograph on our website. So yeah, I really like the lengthy ones with stories integrated as well.

Camille (08:29)
Yeah.

Mason (08:29)
Go for it.

Camille (08:31)
How did you get people to write those? What's the deal there? Did you see somebody who had a great monograph and say, Hey, can we publish that? Or how did that.

Mason (08:39)
Process happen? Yeah. I want to say the original monographs that we had, I paid some of my herbalist friends so much money per word. That's how we got it rolling. I was essentially investing this money into this website. I wasn't really sure it was going to be a business per se at the time, but to to me, it felt worth it to do that. We have had other monographs submitted by Herbalist where they just hooked us up. And I think for them, they viewed it as, say, an awareness or marketing situation for them to bring awareness to their school or whatnot. But yeah, I want to say a lot of the original monographs were paid by me straight out of pocket just to have them write it. Yeah.

Camille (09:22)
So this is all happening while you are still working at Mountain Rose. It's like a side project that you're just funding on your own. So you're paying for the hosting and there's no monetization at this point. Is that right?

Mason (09:34)
No. I was just interviewed on herbal radio with Mountain Rose Herbs, and a similar question was asked and I was like, I probably didn't make money for maybe the first three or four years. Maybe a tiny amount here and there through affiliate sales and whatnot. But yeah, it was self funded for the first few years and it was barely even really a business.

Camille (09:55)
Yeah. Okay. All right. So you started getting the monographs on there. And then how did things evolve from that point?

Mason (10:02)
I want to say the podcast was next. And I actually did something similar, to be honest. I was paying for people to teach lessons on the podcast, but then a lot of the times people would submit audio, say, from an herb conference in order to promote next year's herb conference or something like that. But yeah, a lot of it was me reaching out to herbalists that I knew that they had projects that they wanted to promote. And then they would just sit down and record some audio lesson. And then they would include that particular project that they wanted to promote as well. So yeah, it started out, I want to say, as maybe about an episode a week, maybe sometimes more. But yeah, I was very consistent with it. And all I would do for a lot of these was I would sit down and record an intro and then plug that particular herbalist.

Camille (10:56)
Got it.

Mason (10:57)
All right.

Camille (10:59)
Cool. And then is this about the time that you started putting more time and effort into HerbRally? Or at what point did you decide to step away from Mountain Rose and then really put all your eggs in? I don't know if all your eggs are in this basket, but put more eggs in this basket.

Mason (11:17)
Really all my eggs were in this basket. But the way I look at it is I always tell people to set a ten year goal. If anyone's ever asking me for, say, marketing or business advice or something like that, I always just say set an extremely long term goal. And that's what I did. I said, I would like HerbRally to be the way that we make our living after 10 years. And we were able to quit our jobs at Mountain Rose Herbs. Me and Amanda. Amanda is now the co owner of HerbRally as well. She's also my wife. But we both quit Mountain Rose Herbs pretty much roughly the same time because HerbRally was providing enough income for us to be able to do that. Wait, what was the.

Camille (11:58)
Original question? Oh, Well, you basically answered it. So how did you get to the point where it was making money? Because so far up to now, it's been like, oh, you're paying. So how did you start to get money coming in the other direction?

Mason (12:12)
Yeah. So all along the way, I'm picking up different business ideas for HerbRally, how we actually could make a living off of this. And I want to say the first thing that we started really doing was affiliate sales, which was essentially us promoting different herbal education products. Then we would get, say, a cut of that. And I remember one time we were explaining this to Amanda's dad, and he's like, Oh, so like a pyramid scheme? And I'm like, It's not really a pyramid scheme. It's really t's just like, you're taking a commission for that particular sale of that product. So I feel like ethically good about it because we're promoting the products from people that we know, if that makes sense.

Camille (12:59)
Yeah. I don't think it becomes a pyramid scheme unless you're recruiting people who are then going to recruit more people. You have to keep going to be a pyramid.

Mason (13:06)
I just really hope to this day he doesn't think we're just running a pyramid scheme over here at HerbRally.

Camille (13:14)
Definitely. Definitely not. Yeah. Okay. At this point, is that how things are going or how are you making your money at HerbRally? Is it still going?

Mason (13:27)
Yeah. I'd say a lot of is affiliate. We're also accept advertising dollars. So for the first, yeah, again, like, maybe six or seven years of running this thing, we've always listed herbalism events for free. We still list herbalism events for free, but we decided that maybe people might want extra exposure for their events. So we added these different tiered options for people to promote their events. And that's actually been really helpful for us. So we have a decent size newsletter, so then we're able to put extra exposure on these types of events. So yeah, we get advertising dollars, affiliate sales, and then we also, as you were mentioning earlier, our HerbRally Schoolhouse, we also have an option for folks. If they like what we're doing at HerbRally, they could become a member. And basically what that entails is a private member area where there's exclusive content. And that's our way of saying thank you to our members. But really, the way I look at HerbRally Schoolhouse is for people that appreciate HerbRally as a service, that they're able to just provide $10 a month for us. And that helps us keep the lights on here.

Mason (14:38)
And yeah, we have roughly 210 members, something like that.

Camille (14:41)
That's awesome. Yeah. Cool. All right. And how do you curate the content? I've been so curious about this ever since I got connected with your work. So how do you find all these cool people and all the different things that you've got that you that you promote on the podcast? And then the website, how do you manage that?

Mason (15:05)
Yeah. So also, another thing that we've added recently is we've always had the podcast, but we just started something called the Herbalist Hour, which Camille Freeman was on. And a lot of times as far as who we get on that show is random. It's like I get, say, an email from you or a newsletter from you or something like that. I'm like, Oh, shoot. I should have Camille on the show. That'd be great. And then I just email you or whoever, and then we get something in the books. As far as schoolhouse content, it depends on where we're at in the world at that particular moment. We're back in Wisconsin now, so we want to go record some more herbal, energetic classes with our friend Kyle Denton over at Tippecanoe Herbs. It's really just inspiration. Maybe there should be more intention behind it. But yeah, it's really just who is inspiring me in that current moment, who do I know in the area, and that thing.

Camille (16:04)
I love that you said that because I think so many people would maybe look at HerbRally from the outside and think, Oh, because you see, there's all these classes. You got to have a content plan and the content has to be leading somewhere and blah, blah, blah. I just haven't found that to be true for myself. It sounds like for you, you're also just going with the flow, doing what is in front of you and what seems like it's of value and service. Here we are. Yeah.

Mason (16:31)
And if we go over some more tools of the trade later on, I could tell you we do have somewhat of a plan. But I agree with you wholeheartedly. Being too rigid with something, I feel like inhibits speed read. And I'm interested in... And yeah, I like the organic approach. I like what's inspiring me in that moment, who's inspiring me and whatnot. And I have the fortune to know so many great herbalists. The content, there's never going to be a shortage of classes that we could put out and whatnot.

Camille (17:05)
Yeah, totally. Oh, I love that. So my next question is, how do you market or promote HerbRally? And if you could share what's been successful or the most successful thing you've done, that might be super helpful for people listening.

Mason (17:21)
Totally. I was chatting with Amanda about this before we jumped on the call, and she took this question as like, how do we market ourselves? And she used the word authenticity, so I do want to highlight that. One thing that we do here at HerbRally is we're trying to be ourselves as much as possible. We'll curse in the podcast sometimes because I do that in daily life. A lot of herbalism podcast will have, say, more folk type music for their intro song, but I like hip hop music, so we created this hip hop song and whatnot. I really liked Amanda's approach to that question because I did want to highlight I really like the HerbRally's borderline and extension of both of our personalities. Her art gets to shine through the website and my personality gets to shine, I guess, through hosting the podcast and whatnot. I really like that approach. But as far as more practical stuff, I know you have an episode about this on In the Clinic about email collection and having, say, freebies and whatnot. I will say we do use that. The email newsletter is huge for us. And so what we do is we offer is a 13 herbal freebies in exchange for your newsletter or your email subscription.

Mason (18:37)
I will say this, I say that very upfront. I'm like, we're going to give you these 13 freebies in exchange for your email address. That's been very helpful to growing our newsletter to around 14,000, over 14,000 subscribers now. Otherwise, I want to say, yeah, just the constant, consistent content production, basically. W e have been releasing literally seven YouTube videos per week. We've been publishing podcast episodes five days per week. I think that's really helped grow our audience and just the general good feels and community overall.

Camille (19:19)
Yeah. Tell me about the newsletter. How often do you send that out?

Mason (19:23)
So on our sign up page, I say one to four times per week. I think it's important if you are going to collect peoples' email addresses, you should tell them what they can expect. I say four times per week. That's definitely at the high end. But there probably has been weeks in the history of a rally where we have put out four per week. I want to say on average, it's probably around two times per week. But usually what is in our newsletter is event updates, what's new as far as content wise here at HerbRally, and just basically what's going on in the herbal community, essentially. That's what we're trying to do.

Camille (20:03)
Yeah, they're super helpful. I get them and I read them. Really? Yeah. I don't always read newsletters, but I do read yours. That's awesome. So you're doing seven YouTube videos, five podcasts, one or more newsletters. I think you're also on various social places. So how is all of this happening? Do you have help? Are you doing this? What's going on behind the scenes to make all this happen?

Mason (20:30)
I want to say maybe around year three, I did hire my friend Sarah, and she helped out a lot. And then for a little bit, I hired my sister in law. But yeah, in HerbRally's existence, it's mostly been me. Then the past couple of years, since Amanda came on, we both, essentially, it's the two of us. No outside help other than people contributing their monographs or podcast episodes and whatnot like But all the admin, all the videography and stuff like that, that's Amanda and I.

Camille (21:05)
Wow. Just to get into the nitty gritty, because I know we're both people that are interested in the back end of things. Sure. Do you have a schedule where you're like, okay, Monday mornings I do editing, Tuesdays I do podcast? Do you have something like that, or are you just waking up every day and seeing what's on the table? How do you go through this?

Mason (21:29)
I want to say in the biz world, they call that batching. We do. Honestly, we should probably do more of it. And later on, we might talk about, say, some of the challenges of a HerbRally. I would say prioritization could be a challenge for us, for sure. But our main tool that we use now is Asana. For years, we were on a project management software called Reich, but we use Asana now. Either way, I highly recommend for anybody listening, use some project management software because it's essentially a glorified checklist. But then you're able to assign who's in charge of that, the date it's due. You're able to shuffle it around, of course. But it's so useful for us. The nitty gritty behind the scenes is we are constantly keeping up on our emails and keeping up on our Asana checklist. That's basically how we get everything done. But to answer your question, we don't really batch stuff per se. Sometimes we do will if we have to be hyper on it. But yeah, it's all about the project management software for us.

Camille (22:37)
Got it. Okay. And do you have work hours? Are you like, Okay, 3 o'clock today, I'm done, I'm off, or are you... I know it seems like you're in your home and when that's happening, it can be really hard to separate and to be like, Okay, now it's my free time. How do you do with that or do you do that? Yeah.

Mason (23:00)
Tell us your tricks. Amanda has been enforcing weekends, so we're not allowed to work on weekends anymore. Although I probably still have been bad about that. On occasion, I'll sneak off and do something. But we're trying to keep it sacred. So we're trying to say Monday through Friday. I don't schedule podcast interviews on Saturday or Sunday anymore if I could help it. But yeah, I would say we are trying to keep essentially a nine to five Monday through Friday.

Camille (23:32)
Got it. So hard. It's so hard when you work at home.

Mason (23:38)
Yeah, it is. And it's easy to just walk over and do the dishes, which isn't really helpful for getting your actual HerbRally work done.

Camille (23:49)
Yeah, totally. Okay, cool. And what's been the hardest part of doing all of this? Because this is a lot this is a whole lot for one or even two people to be managing.

Mason (24:03)
Yeah, I would say one of the challenges is definitely the work life balance. When me and Amanda are just hanging out and trying to have a good time and I start talking about work, that's definitely challenging. And for me, I view it as, I don't know, I find it entertaining, but I know that we all need to shut our brains off and actually get restorative, go do some fun things that are helpful for our general wellbeing. And so I'm really trying to turn things off because I'll even find myself listening to certain educational podcast, which almost could be deemed as work as well, when I need to just... Some people in the urban community might find it weird or interesting, but I'm like a basketball fan. I like the NBA. I've liked it since I was a kid. And so I have all these story lines in my head. And I got rid of all of that part of my personality for probably a decade. And it was because I thought it was childish and stupid. But I brought that back into my life because I realized having these pointless things is actually beneficial. Why would I deny myself that childlike sense of...

Mason (25:19)
I just love the NBA for whatever reason, but I'm allowing myself to have that again. So yeah, I'd say work life balance. Honestly, I want to also mention... Do you have any feedback on that?

Camille (25:32)
Sorry. Oh, no, I love that you said that because I think there is some pressure. You don't always see people sharing stuff like that, and I love it. I grew up in Kentucky and college basketball there is like.

Mason (25:43)
Life it.

Camille (25:45)
Totally. I get it.

Mason (25:48)
Yeah. So another challenge I want to say is the financial component. When Amanda and I were employed by Mountain Rose Herb's, we were getting steady paychecks every couple of weeks. And that was, it was so nice. You didn't really have to worry as much about paying your bills and whatnot. But I feel like since quitting and doing HerbRally full-time, there's that worry and pressure that you're not doing enough. I want to keep doing this. I love working on a HerbRally, but sometimes there's the pressure of like, Holy shit, hopefully we make enough money to survive.

Camille (26:30)
Yeah, I hear that. And I think especially with what you were talking about before, sometimes there's the feeling that, Oh, I could work more and potentially make some more money, or I could rest or do other things for my own personal or mental health. But sometimes there is the feeling of, Well, yeah, there are times when working more does mean that you make more money. And so it's really hard to to be like, Okay, all right. Absolutely. I so hear that.

Mason (27:04)
I guess one other thing I wanted to touch on was prioritization. I may have talked about this earlier with the project management software stuff, but sometimes I find me and Amanda get really excited about this shiny new project and it's really like, oh, we really want to do this. So we start working on it. We start putting a ton of energy and effort into it, and then we realize we're neglecting, say, the accounting side or something something that we really actually have to do, pay our taxes and whatnot. And we need to just shut down the excitement for this new project and actually get the other important stuff done. I would say that's a challenge. Ch for me at least. Maybe not Amanda as much.

Camille (27:48)
Yeah. Oh, I so hear that. And sometimes it's the same thing of, well, I could do this fun new project, and it is also going to eat into the time that I thought I was going to rest or do something else. Yeah, I hear that. It's like, Oh, these are the things that are actually bringing in money and paying my paycheck and need to keep the wheels on the bus. So I need to do things.

Camille (28:14)
Yeah, I get it.

Camille (28:15)
I totally get it. I have at least a 1,000 ideas of what I could do if I only had 48 hours in a day.

Mason (28:23)
Exactly. Would that be nice.

Camille (28:25)
Two.

Mason (28:26)
More.

Camille (28:27)
So you shared a little bit about how HerbRally got where it is, and you hinted at there is some big picture plan. Can you give us a sneak peek into either the big picture plan or some future things that are coming up down the road for you or HerbRally or both?

Mason (28:47)
Yeah. If I alluded to some big picture plan earlier, I was unaware of that. So no, it's fine. Our goal is just to keep growing the platform at a steady pace in order to fund the lifestyle that we want. I want to be clear, I feel very, very, very grateful for the position I'm in. When I was younger, I could have never imagined myself here where I'm at now. I can't even believe that this is what I get to do. It's so cool to look back and see where I came from, how far I've come, and I have so much to be thankful for. I just want to I just want to keep doing what we're doing here at HerbRally, growing the platform. I will say we do have a plan for, which maybe is what I was suggesting earlier, but we are going to come out with some book series eventually, which is really fun because, again, it's going to get to combine, I want to say, the two best aspects of what Amanda and I provide, my relationship to the herbal community and her ability to create beautiful art. Without going too far into the details of what the book is actually going to be, which, Camille, I want you to be in it.

Mason (29:59)
We got link up in person at some point. I would say we're really excited about the book series. But other than that, I'm the most excited for the Herbalist Hour right now, the new podcast series. I was so scared to do that. I was like, One of the things I was telling myself was like, It's not even going to be that fun to do. Now that I'm interviewing people, I'm like, Oh, this is my favorite part of what I do at HerbRally. I would just say just steadily grow the platform at a reasonable, balanced pace.

Camille (30:35)
Yeah. Oh, I love that. Just to put in a plug for the Herbalist Hour interviews, they are super fun. I love listening to them and I always feel like I learn some things about just myself and my practice, but also the people on it, it's really cool. Thank you for saying that. I super appreciate them. That's awesome. I think the plan that maybe you had alluded to was perhaps more like a marketing, like the method behind this. And so I did, if it's okay, I want to ask one unscripted question which is about, from the marketing or promotional perspective, do you have teachers or books? Or how have you... Is this just things you're picking up along the way? What resources are you drawing on in terms of how you think about your own marketing and promotion?

Mason (31:27)
Yeah. So a lot of it was in formed by... Technically, I worked 11 years at Mountain Rose Herbs, and that was in the marketing department. So all while working in there, I became hyper obsessive of reading various or listening to podcasts in the marketing sphere, which a lot of the people in the herbal community would probably be repulsed by. So I could give some suggestions. But currently, what I'm really enjoying is learning about YouTubers and that whole world because there's a whole world dedicated to, they call them the creator economy. One of the two people I really like listening to, their names are Colin and Samir, and they have a whole podcast and platform dedicated to the creator economy. I recommend them. They're just a couple of sweet guys and they have a lot of great inside tips. I also listen to Nick Nimmin Live. He's also a fun YouTube type content creator. I'll otherwise, yeah, I know you use AppSumo sometimes and I'll listen to the creator of AppSumo sometimes, his podcast, Noah Kagan. I've learned a lot of different marketing tips and tricks, if you will, from him. Again, some people might be repulsed by his bravado and cursing and bro nature, but I feel like find the type of marketing person that resonates with you.

Mason (32:57)
There's a lot of great people out there to check out. I know a lot of people like what, say, maybe Amy Porterfield or something like that, but you probably have some really good resources and suggestions as well. But I do think it's important to educate yourself on this because, again, I don't know, maybe herbalists a lot of times under appreciate the value of marketing and business and whatnot, but it's also super important because that's how you make your livelihood and it doesn't have to be sleazy. I guess that's my rant. Yeah.

Camille (33:30)
Well, I think it ties into what you said before about authenticity. Some of it is about showing up frequently and being yourself. I think those and then paying attention to what happens, those are some of the key things. But I agree. I think that you aren't just born knowing how to market. And so you have to learn somewhere. And if you don't put some thought into it, you wind up learning from people who are sleazy. So it's like, well, it might might as well look around and see who's doing it in a way that you resonate with or appreciate or at least take the good things, piece it together from the different resources that are available.

Mason (34:10)
Absolutely. I think what I find is the best form of marketing really is just giving as much as you can to your audience. Honestly, that was one of the perks of self funding HerbRally the whole time I worked at Mountain Rose Herbs because I never really wanted or asked anything from anybody. I was just trying to give as much as I could to the herbal community and I had a paycheck coming in on the side, so it was easy for me to do that. But yeah, I think if you give your audience as much as you can, things will hopefully work out.

Camille (34:42)
Yeah. Well, and I think it's really clear from being in your ecosystem that you're still doing that and you're getting paid, which I'm sure everybody loves for you. But it's like that whole spirit of service goes a really long way and just being like, what do you want to... What do people need? What could they use? What would be helpful right now?

Mason (35:05)
Yeah. It's the perfect cross section of what people find helpful and love. And at the same time, it's what I find helpful and what I love. I love doing this. That's why we have the energy to continuously put out all this content because every new video we publish, I'm like, yeah, this is so great. We're building the library of what we're offering to the world. So I love it.

Camille (35:27)
Yeah. That's amazing. Well, so our last question, could you share a little bit about how people can get involved with HerbRally, whether it's, like you already mentioned, joining the schoolhouse or writing a monograph or maybe doing events? How can people take part in what's happening here?

Mason (35:45)
Yeah, all of the above. I mean, if you want to know what's happening in the herbal community, you could join the newsletter. Also, I'd say subscribe to the YouTube channel. I know you and I talked about this on our interview, and you also have an episode dedicated to it. But if you watch a video and you enjoy it, one way to get noticed or to participate in the community is to actually comment. Just say hi or some a take away you may have had, but that's not required. I'm just saying if you want to participate in the community, the HerbRally community, that's one way to do it. Join the newsletter. We also do have a Facebook group which you could join. There's a lot of people in there just participating by sharing their events that they're up to. Sometimes people will ask to join general herbalism questions. But the main reason for the HerbRally group is to share events and stuff like that. But yeah, otherwise, the HerbRally Schoolhouse is another way if you want to ramp up your support or participation in the HerbRally ecosystem.

Camille (36:44)
Yeah. And I will just highlight what you just said about liking a video or commenting on something that you appreciated, writing back to a newsletter and saying, Hey, this really helped me. Just ties into that comment you made earlier about somebody coming up to you at a conference and saying, I'm here because of you.

Mason (37:02)
Totally.

Camille (37:02)
It goes such a long way to making someone's day to just... If you really enjoyed something, to just let them know that it made a difference. It's not like a SEO boosting, like we're trying to ask you this because it's going to advance our influence. It's like, no, it makes it all worth it when you're creating something and somebody gets something out of it. It's really awesome. And I think people feel like, Oh, it's so big. You've got 14,000 people on this newsletter. It's not going to make a difference if I write and say, I loved this, but it really does.

Mason (37:39)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I'm telling you, anytime we get a comment, positive comments, negative comments, I'm learning to deal with. In fact, I look forward to them now. It helps build thicker skin for me. But yeah, the positive comments go a long way. And yeah, like you said, when those people came up to me at that table, I still talk about it to this day. I brought it up several podcasts now, so I love it.

Camille (38:07)
Yeah, it makes all the difference. You can make somebody's day in just 30 seconds by doing something like that.

Mason (38:13)
Totally.

Camille (38:15)
Anyway, Mason, thank you so much, first of all, for coming on this podcast. But second of all, for all the work that's gone into HerbRally. I think I had a sense for it, but talking to you, I have an even better appreciation for everything that's gone into it and all the time and love and dedication that it's taken to get it here. And it's such a service to the herbal community. I'm so glad that you're doing it.

Mason (38:37)
Thank you, Camille. You made my day. I really appreciate you saying that. And yeah, thanks for having me on your show. And yeah, thanks to you all for listening.

Camille (38:46)
All right, everybody, go check out Herb Raleigh if you don't already know about it. And I'll talk to you soon.

Mason (38:50)
Sounds good. Thanks.

Camille (38:58)
Thanks for listening to In the Clinic with Camille. Hey, did you know that I write a weekly practitioner note for herbalists and nutritionists? If you would like to get that in your inbox, you can sign up at camillefreeman.com/newsletter. I'd love to have you join us there.