For Rob Brooks, the “RIDE LIFE” is all the more worth living if he can share episodes from his journeys, long after he’s parked his motorcycle. He believes chronicling the highs and lows of his adventures can inform and inspire riders as well as the “moto-curious.” His goal is to build a digital following and community for the motorcycle riding world.
Rob has written two books about his two passions: life on a motorcycle and life in the ministry, publishing “Road Dirt: The Musings & Ramblings of a Biker Preacher” and “Road Dirt 2: More Musings from the Ride Life”, both available on Amazon. But he also wanted to create a more prolific platform for his creative outlet, so he launched Road Dirt Motorcycle Media LLC and created a website, RoadDirt.TV.
“We cover all aspects of the world of motorcycle riding, with news, reviews, and how-tos, but mostly, we focus on telling great stories from what we call #RIDELIFE – the joys and experiences of motorcycle riding!”
His web address carries a double, triple, entendre, as his site’s mission is to share the inside “dirt” on the world of motorcycle riding. It also refers to the “road dirt” bikes and bikers accumulate as they ride through all types of terrain. They also cover both road and dirt motorcycling. Hence, the creative name.
Here, Brooks takes us down the road of his entrepreneurial journey as the founder of Road Dirt Motorcycle Media.
I'm the founder and senior editor of Road Dirt Motorcycle Media LLC. I'm also a two-time published book author, former rock radio disc jockey, licensed and ordained minister, and I help manage an international orphanage foundation, 127 Legacy.
I wrote my first book in 2013. It actually came to me after writing for several motorcycle magazines over the years, and I decided to compile a lot of those writings and mix it with several personal journals. It resulted in a book called Road Dirt: the Musings and Ramblings of a Biker Preacher because I was involved in ministry as well. I continued to write and my columns were usually titled “Road Dirt,” but began to see the print industry was dying. This past year I wrote a book sequel, “Road Dirt 2”, as so much has transpired in my life since the first book.
By 2018 print magazines were rapidly folding, and a friend of mine suggested, “Well, you're practically your own brand already. Why don't you just launch into the digital space?”
Some fellow writer and photographer friends from around the country who covered this space helped me launch Road Dirt Motorcycle Media. Road Dirt is an online, multi-platform motorcycle lifestyle publication, launched in January 2019. We tell stories about the motorcycling life, we review motorcycles and riding gear, cover motorcycle racing, and share great news in the motorcycling space. Our digital outlet became sort of like a refuge for numerous print writers when print went under.
The cost of launching, then leveraging resources to grow our audience over the past five years.
In late 2018 I hired a web designer and tried to get the “dotcom” version, but someone had registered the domain and was looking to sell it for about $6,000, which we declined.
We basically circumvented the issue and bought .TV with several others, preferring to use the .TV as our primary extension due to its modern vibe and versatility with our growing YouTube and social media presence.
You're not getting any younger. Go for it, even if you feel ill-equipped and inexperienced. Grow with it. The designer suggested .TV because we’d be incorporating a lot of video and imagery.
We don’t consider Road Dirt a “blog” because to me, it’s more than that. It’s a digital magazine, with more than a dozen writers and photographers from across the country contributing to it. We’re really a community and we’ve met at press launches, big rallies and motorcycle events. We launched officially January 1, 2019, so we're into our sixth year now, and going strong.
Motorcycling is declining in America. From the 1960s to the 1990s, motorcycles were just a part of American culture. Many of us grew up with someone in our family who rode and had bikes in our garages, be it a Yamaha YZ80 or Honda Trail. Sadly, the NTSA reports a 67% decline in motorcycle registrations in recent decades.
So the Millennials and Gen-Zers won’t really understand what motorcycle culture is all about. We’re trying to capture that zeitgeist so it’s more than just typical reviews, specs and details on bikes. It’s more about storytelling. What's it like to ride on a motorcycle in the northern Cascades of Oregon and Washington? Or, what's it like to ride the Blue Ridge Parkway in autumn when the leaves are falling? We try to be storytellers more than anything else. Because I think storytelling is what engages people in our sport, our pastime, our passion. And it's what attracts the younger generations, when they want to get wrapped up in a good story. It’s storytelling for the next generation.
Our goal is 100K+ readers on our RoadDirt.tv site every month, and an engaged Road Dirt community in the U.S. and across the world. We’ll get there, one ride and one story at a time.