When selling your brand, you need to be heard in order to get your marketing out there. The market has been saturated with different channels and stuff on the internet which does not make getting widely heard easier for any sellers. Tracy enlightens us on some techniques on how to get people to notice you and get attracted to you. She shares how you can bring the “it factor” so that despite the many innovations out there, you will have your own brand value.

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How Do Successful Podcasters Stand Out and Influence Others Through Brandcasting

I’m honored to be invited to speak to you because I’ve met many of you before at Magnify Your Wealth. I had been so impressed with how far along many of your businesses are, the models in which guys use. Aaron called me and said, “I’d like you to do something different than you normally do.” I said, “At least you’re in luck that I’ve been thinking about doing something different.” I’ve been preparing this new talk for a new sphere of influence or a center of influence that I’m going to be speaking into which is the content marketing world.

 

 

Some of you may not be numbers people but I know some of you are so I brought some numbers for you. It is hard to be heard. If you’re wondering why it’s hard to get your marketing out there, why it’s not working, and why a lot of these things are hard, it is because there are 80 million YouTube channels. There’s a billion and a half or some crazy number of YouTube videos downloaded every single day. There are 40 million Facebook pages. That number is a year old so it’s doubled up by now at least. There are 30 million Twitter users. Of course, half of them maybe bots but we’re not sure. There are 800 million Instagram users. Social conversion, meaning if you put out an ad based on pay, not just your normal posting, it’s only 1.3%. That means you got to reach a whole lot more people to have an effective group that you might be pulling in, course enrollees, whatever you might be doing. Google conversion is 13% and that hasn’t changed. It is more powerful. Some interesting things we’ll be talking about also is that podcast conversion is 37%. It’s that trust factor that we’re going to talk about.

 

 

Selling is the market I know. I know selling mostly in the big box but I also know Amazon. It is harder to sell and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a hard good, soft good, service, course, book, or whatever it is, it is hard. Here are the statistics for Amazon. There are 562 million products on Amazon and 5 million Amazon sellers. 140,000 of those sellers make $100,000 per year or more. That’s sad but I know only 2% of patents make money. Think about this. How many patents has Apple filed? Tons and that’s not skewing that number. There are so many unsuccessful products in the world. Tom and I have over the years dialed it down but we found that it translates into services tremendously well as well.

Our first podcast was called WTFFF?!, which if you don’t know what that stands for, then you’re not geeky enough to listen to our show. It’s an invitation and we did it on purpose to make sure that they were at least enough in the know that we didn’t have to dumb it down so much that we couldn’t talk a little bit of tech but it’s not a tech-focused show. It’s more of a show on how the technology can be used rather than what the technology is although we go into that too. Feed Your Brand is our podcast for podcasters. The New Trust Economy comes out and that’s with a new cohost hump. It’s the first time Tom and I aren’t cohosting together. I’m hosting with a woman named Monika Proffitt so it’s profit and hazard and it’s all about blockchain. Product Launch Hazzards is my podcast for product people, inventors and Amazon sellers. I don’t record very many. There’s a whole group of twenty experts who do most of the work for me and they record, they connect and we’ve built collaborative marketing.

I write for Inc. Magazine, and Tom and I were featured in Harvard Business Review for going viral before social media existed. It’s also a way at which we fought IDEO and Palm Computing, one of the largest industrial design firms in the world. Palm Computing; handheld computers. What makes us more successful? What is it that we do that we bring to the table that is so different? We bring this it factor. We bring this “me only,” we call it. We want to put you into competitive proof “me only” territory. How can we do that? In the product world, we do a lot with patenting but we also do it a lot with what we call proprietary processes, technology, innovation, whatever that might be. There’s a lot of innovation there but it’s always your thing. It’s what makes people attracted to you. What makes you special? What is unique about you? This is your brand value if you’ve heard that in the branding world. That it factor, I’m calling that here because it depends on your business and depends on what you’re trying to market.

The It Factor

 

 

The “it factor” is the key thing. We never forget that. That’s the number one thing we start with because if you don’t have that, it’s going to be a price play. It’s going to be a positioning play. It’s going to be, “How many dollars can I throw at my marketing? How many people do I know? Am I more influential than other people already so am I starting at a better phase?” Whether you’re writing a book, that book has to have a unique position so that it factor is the most critical and important thing we start with. It might be wrong. That’s okay. It might be a hypothesis. “I think this is the ‘it thing.’” We’ll confirm it because we have to make sure that the dogs will eat the dog food. That’s how we confirm that it was good. Our formula was great. Our taste is good but that’s the whole key because dogs don’t buy dog food. Who buys dog food? People do, their loving humans. We have to make sure not only do the dogs love it, but the humans will buy it.

 

 

Our conversion that we care about is, “Will somebody plunk down a dollar for what I have to bring to the table? Will they convert on that? Will they engage with me? Will they be active about it?” What we care about is the “it factor” at the end of the day. The sooner we can test that and find out whether that’s true, the better off we are. We want to make sure that the market and those people are reachable. They’re measurable and there is some competition. The reason I say that is because I get inventors and service people say, “I’m the only person in the world who’s doing that.” I know it’s not true and I know the investors in the world are rolling your eyes. It’s like blue ocean territory. That is so rare. I have yet to see it. You want to make sure there’s some competition because if it is truly the case that it’s blue ocean, you will never succeed at that unless you have tons of money to pour into it.

 

 

Does size matter of the market? When we had our stylus pens for handheld computers which is how we sold it, how we went viral was, “Do we detect a bit of pen envy because our stylus is better?” Influencers have a large following. We want a loyal and active following because the only thing we can do when we have a million listeners, a million viewers, a million fans, is to get more. The attrition rate goes way up and the activity goes way down. The bigger our audience gets, the worse engagement gets. The only thing we can do is get bigger but we can dial it in deeper and get a loyal and active following in any niche. It may grow to a large size and that’s fantastic but we want to make sure that it’s loyal and active because from day one we can do something with that. That’s our number two thing. We want to build that following in that right way. Remember, this is your victory garden. This is your hypothesis. This is an experiment so it’s okay for it to be wrong because we didn’t spend a ton of money and we’re not going to spend a ton of money doing this. We’re trying out to see if the “it factor” resonates with the followers we can attract or the followers we think we want to attract. We’re bringing them together to see if we get a beautiful strawberry crop. It’s an experiment and that’s okay.

 

 

We need to be comfortable in that world because that’s how we turn. You’ve heard the terms fail fast, fail frequent, all of those things. That’s what we’re going to try to do. My goal with all of my clients has been to make sure that we don’t get them spending their entire budget before we know whether the dogs will eat the dog food and the people will buy them for them. We want to know that as soon as possible and I prefer to know it before I’ve ever built the product. That’s key here. What is the OPA plan? Other people’s money, other people’s authority, other people’s audience. We’re using a play on what’s going on in their estate worth.

 

 

Other people’s audience plan is what we’re going for here. A great way to test out whether or not our audience is a match for our message is to find somebody else’s audience and go talk to them. Go guest on their show, go write a blog post on their site, do a social media live stream with them. Do something where you’re engaging with their audience to find out. Have we spent any money? Probably not. If you do have to spend money, then I suggest not going into the audience. It’s better to test it. John Lee Dumas, he charges $5,000 for a spot on a show. The engagement is so low that it’s not worth the $5,000 at the end of the day unless his audience is your audience. You’d have to know that ahead of time. You can find all kinds of ways to go reach somebody’s audience just to confirm whether or not your idea has resonance.

Guesting Or Interview Strategy

 

 

Does anyone speak back to you? Is the host engaged? Are they endorsing it? There are so many ways we can check with that audience. What we also want to do is to leverage that early on. I call that the guesting strategy or the interview strategy. How do I do that? I use my Inc. column all the time to get to famous people. This was an unsuccessful thing. This person failed to share the articles but that happens all the time. The bigger they are, sometimes the worst they are at sharing their message to their audience. You want to play in that middle ground of they need you a little bit too but you can use your authority power as a host. This is what we do with our podcasters and our video casters. We teach them to use the power of being the host to attract people who have audiences that you want to show up on your feed. You want them to come to you. You want the right group of them to transfer to you. That’s one of the things that we work on with other people’s audiences. We didn’t have to spend a lot of money at that point to go send traffic, bring in leads, or put out ads on Google or Facebook or wherever. We don’t have to do that. We just merely go start guesting and then start inviting into our show. We can just invite them into a live stream show. We don’t have to have a formal podcast. We don’t have to have a formal videocast. None of that has to be formal at that point.

We’re inviting them in for publicity to expose them to our audience even if it might be limited. Most often they say yes. I’ve been writing my column and the story of how I got my column is that we started the podcast WTFFF?! I was invited to give a speech at a Makers Conference in LA. The LA Bureau Chief Editor for Inc. saw me there and I gave this talk on makers making a profit, which was an unusual topic. He said, “We want this nitty-gritty advice. We’re starting a new section in the magazine called Innovation. Would you come and write a column on product design?” I said, “I’ll write a column. It’s called By Design but I don’t just want to write about product design. Can I write about marketing? Can I write about branding? Can I write about all these things? Can I write about women?” They said, “Yes,” so I had full free reign as long as it’s innovation-focused to write about anything and I want and to choose who I write about. I write six articles a month so that’s a lot of people and I use an interview for every single one. You can imagine how many people I’ve been able to touch. If I asked you and said, “Would you like to be interviewed for Inc. Magazine?” Who says no? It never happened. I’ve had a few that said, “I can’t do it this month, but can I do it next month?” I’ve never had a no. There’s a lot of power in that authority and we could use it to our advantage.

 

 

This is something that I’ve heard on talk. It’s like, “When Oprah interviews people, is she more powerful or is John Travolta more powerful?” Who’s more powerful? Oprah, because she’s more influential in her circle, in her fans. She’s the center of that influence. He is not. He’s invited in. The host becomes the center of that influence and it starts to grow out from there. That’s what we’re looking for. Another way that we have is a technical thing and there’s a whole podcast show about it on Feed Your Brand if you’re interested. We call it Ego Bait.

I mentioned that John Travolta’s PR team wanted me to interview him even though essentially I’m a blogger. I write an online column. They wanted less video and more written content because it’s more powerful to Google. They wanted this but then they failed to put it on their website. There’s no link back to me. There’s no link back to my article. The benefit didn’t happen. I found this happening again and again. The bigger the person was or the less technically savvy they were but maybe the great speaker that they were, it was problematic. I invented this thing. I call it Ego Bait™. My friend Ken Courtright talks about Ego Bait™ but it’s not the same but I named it after that because I liked the name. It can be one or two things.

This is Tonya Rineer her podcast called Profit Party. Her guest is named Christie and she says, “When you can share a story that is rich and igniting different senses, it uses different parts of the brain.” It’s a great quote. It’s a great something that that quest said on your show and so she’s highlighting that guest and how smart they are. When she shares it out on their social media, do you think Christie puts it on hers? We go one step further. We send them a follow-up email and say, “Your show with Tonya is published. Here are all the links for how to share it. Here’s an embed code you can give to your web developer. If you don’t know how to do it, just give them that.” We’ve put in everything they need to be able to share out the right graphic and the right link and do everything.

The bigger the audience, the worse engagement gets. Click To Tweet

Another way we do it also is that sometimes it’s just Tonya’s show. She doesn’t have a guest and we also put out a quote that she says. It makes her look good and when she shares that, lots of people re-post that like you found it in one of those quote websites or something like that. It starts to become one of those. It ends up on Pinterest all the time. Your fans start pinning it and share it on Instagram. It becomes useful in branding for her company as well. We call it Ego Bait™ because they can’t help but not share it. That’s another way that we’re leveraging other people’s authority and other people’s audience because we are making sure that they share it with their audience. We’ve removed all technical barriers and we’ve made it easy for them.

 

 

Now that we found out that our “it factor” is working, that our audience is the right audience we want to attract, we have to serve that audience. We’re not pushing messages at them. We’re not selling them anything yet. We are simply serving them. We’re serving them a whole lot of balls here. We’re going to serve them a lot of great content because the more we serve, the more we will eventually get back to us. “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in you.” When you were telling that story about how you were asking for advice versus saying, “I’ve got something to sell you,” more people return your calls and more things happen for you. This is that same model and the same idea. You’re interested in other people.

 

 

Inviting them to be on your show, I can tell you that we sell more podcasts production services. We sell more of our consulting, more of our courses, more of those things to people we invite on our show faster because we build a higher trust level with them. We’ve just given them amazing publicity than we do out of the other way and it’s never intended. We get off the phone and it’s just like, “Thank you so much. Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get this follow-up email from our team. It will be produced in seven days.” All of that and they go, “How do you do that? I’ve been struggling with my show.” The next thing you know, we’re in a sales call. That’s how that occurs. It is organic and natural and it was never an intended consequence. It just happens that way. That is one of those things.

 

 

If they aren’t interested, the one thing that they do is they go back and rave to friends “I had the most professional interview with someone and they were amazing. When they sent me this, I got this cool email with all these links in it. You have a podcast show. You should go, I’m going to refer you to them.” Now that we’ve got our it factor, our audience and we’ve got dialed in on how we’re going to leverage this other people’s audience thing, we’re serving them great content, of course. We’re serving them stuff they want to hear. We need to be everywhere and that’s where you all go, “Tracy, I can’t do one more thing. I’m overwhelmed, I’m at my wit’s end.” I hear it from all of you and when I say, “You got to be on social, you’ve got to blog, you’ve got to video, you’ve got to podcast.” That’s a lot of work but I can’t stand to do that much work.

 

 

This is where conversations like the one Aaron and I had. We were producing five shows a week, twenty a month on our 3D Print Podcast and we weren’t making a single dime off of it. There was no money exchanged. We hadn’t taken sponsors yet. When I first met Aaron, none of that had happened. We were doing a lot of services and it wasn’t our core business. The people who are coming to us were never going to be one of our clients. It wasn’t a match. It was our victory garden that failed. It was our strawberry experiment that failed. We realized we shouldn’t have a business in 3D printing but we should have a business in 3D printing information because it’s more valuable. That’s what we found. It was a successful failure.

 

 

When we do that though, what we had discovered that having to be everywhere was critically important but it was also a lot of work. We streamline that and that’s one of the things that I want to talk about with you. How do we streamline some of these things so we’re not doing more, we’re doing less? The thing we’re doing is more effective and they’re helping us do all the other things. We don’t have to write blogs, separate from our video, separate from our podcast audios. We don’t have to do everything in its own silo and treat it as a separate thing. We do one thing and we either syndicate it or we have it repurposed and reused.

Technical Things

I’m going to talk about a few technical things because I know I’ve got some techies in the group. I want to make sure I touch on some things that are critically important for you to know why some of your marketing is not working or why things have started falling apart. We’ve seen it a lot in the Amazon selling world. We’ve seen it a lot in passive income websites. Those are websites that don’t own anything. They just start selling other people’s stuff of it through ads on their sites. One of the most important things that are going on is voice recognition because of Alexa, especially because of Google Home because Google controls the keys to every castle right now.

Their power is that they own YouTube so you’ve got videos covered. They just started Google podcast and you don’t have to do any work to get listed in there. If you already have a podcast, they found you and they listed you. They send their stuff through your websites and they do it so you don’t have to do anything to get listed on Google except make sure that you have great content and stuff. They’re going list you and rank you and do all of that and you have to do nothing in that process. Google makes it easy. Alexa makes it a little harder. We got to make sure we are listed in her right directory and that you say, “Alexa, can you play the Feed Your Brand podcast on TuneIn?” I not only have to get my listeners to say it exactly the right way so it’s harder there but Google makes it easy.

Voice recognition has been coming for a while and the algorithms have shifted over time to recognize voice pattern better than a written pattern. There are a couple of reasons for it. One is that they are moving to something called real personas and real personas mean I want to make sure this isn’t a fake site. I want to make sure this isn’t a bot, this isn’t something fake. I want to make sure there’s a real person behind it and a voice pattern is a good sign of that. If I’ve got audio and video on my site and there’s a real person answering emails or returning comments, then I got a better site than another one that I might have which might be spammy and that pisses my clients. That pisses the Google clients off when they go through and you type in something and all you get to the first ten are all junk, all push selling, all not real information. People will stop trusting Google and they can’t have that because they’re all about the experience.

 

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The second part of it is relevance. Relevance is something that Google cares about. If I’m a writer, I’d like to read. I’m a reader. Tom likes to watch videos and Sean might like to listen to podcasts. We’ve got all of these different media that we prefer to consume. If I type into Google how to build wealth and I’m a podcast listener, Aaron’s podcast might show up because it might be a common word. If he didn’t have a video and I’m a video watcher, maybe I’m not going to get him at all. I might get somebody else altogether. If you’re producing content and you’re not putting it in all the media, then you’re missing the boat. Do you need it to be specifically done for video? No. It can be the same content from video to audio to blog exactly the same. You don’t have to do it differently because they’re typing in a specific keyword. They’re looking for that content. Do you want to have some pro-looking videos? Definitely. I got to have my hair done which is why I chose to podcast first and not to videocast. Now I don’t care and if you see me on my live stream, it might be up in a ponytail. That’s what we want to be. We want to be relevant.

 

 

This is one other thing I want you to realize. There are only 500,000 podcasts worldwide but there’s only about 200,000 to 250,000 of them that are active. That’s a small pond to play in within the world of the internet. We were just talking about relevancy but one in five Google searches is new every single day meaning Google’s never seen it before. When we were speaking about 3D printing, there were terms no one ever heard of. What’s the build plate? What’s layer height? All different things that they never heard before. When we were talking about it, it was giving a place to go. Google was giving us more and more authority faster and faster. I want to give you some numbers so you have a good idea of it. What happened was we started the podcast in April. By October 31st we were featured in Forbes for having the fastest growing podcast. We had grown 25,000 listeners in four and a half months.

We thought that was small. It’s not 100,000 listeners at that time that John Lee Dumas was doing and he ended up over a million. We thought it was small, but we knew we had an active community who’s binge listening to us. At that point, we hit 100 podcast episodes, had over 100 and they were binge listening. They will say, “I just listen to all your episodes.” I thought it was crazy because I did not know people would be binge-watching Netflix. I didn’t get that. I was like, “Can someone listen to me for 100 episodes in a weekend? That sounds crazy.”

Who’s Valuable

What I found out is not only do they binge listen but they’re podfasters and they put it on double speed. If one in five searches is new, Google has to decide who’s valuable. When we were putting out content five days a week on the main topic and they knew that it was related to that, they send people our way left and right. We had just launched a brand-new website called 3D Start Point. What we didn’t know at that time was that they were already starting to send our website the traffic and it was in what they call the Google Sandbox. When you have a brand-new website, they don’t know how to rank it yet. They don’t know whether or not you deserve ranking or you are just fly by night. You just showed up out of nowhere. They take a little time. They track your site and they watch it and then when they decide, “This is putting out valuable information.” They’ll pull it out of the Sandbox and they give you a ranking number.

By January 2nd or 3rd, we were out of the Google Sandbox already and no one had realized it because they never checked it. It doesn’t happen that fast normally. We got this phone call from the people who manage our site and they said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m so sorry. I know you told me I should write 40 blogs but I got busy so I took our podcast and I had them transcribed and dropped into the website.” They were like, “This is brilliant. Do more of it.” We’re like, “Okay.” We kept doing and doing it. What happened was our site started growing. We hit 1.7 million out of the billion websites at that time which is amazing because magazine like Inc. is under one million. That’s pretty close for a brand-new site so we were excited about that.

What we want is to be where the search happens and that’s the key. People were searching for something and they were searching for it on YouTube. They were searching for it on Google and we were getting credit for both because we had videos that would show how the machines work. 3D printing is visual. You can’t go without a video. We didn’t do every episode but we had video. We called them video companions. When we’re on the podcast we would say, “Don’t forget to go see the time lapse video for this product we just made.” We would send them there and they would go there so they were searching both on YouTube and on Google for these terms and for us and Google recognizes that. More importantly, we want to be when the search happens.

That’s a problem with the live stream. If I put it out because it’s convenient for me at lunchtime and everybody’s busy, my best LinkedIn active followers are on at 7:00 PM on Sunday. I missed them. If I posted it, maybe they catch it and maybe they don’t. The same thing happens on Facebook. I may have missed them so I want to be when they want it. I always want to be there and I want to be when they want it. I’ve got to make sure that I’m repurposing that content and putting it someplace so that when they’re looking for it, they can find me. Especially if you’re diving into pain points, you’re in health and wellness, or anything like that. They’re searching when they’re stressed at 2:00 or 3:00 AM.

Repurpose, Reuse and Reshare

 

 

Let’s talk a little bit about repurpose, reuse and reshare. I hinted at that. It’s a content strategy. We’re going to start from audio or video. If you’re not comfortable on audio and video, don’t do what makes you uncomfortable because we want you to be authentically you. Start from the place that you’re most comfortable with. I guarantee you, you will get worn down over time and you will start doing videos. It just is going to happen and then we want to brandcast. We coined this term that’s why our company is called Brandcaster. We coined this term called Brandcasting instead of podcasting because it’s a video, it’s a blog, it’s all of those things. Our key is making sure that we are growing our website because what we don’t care about is iTunes. What we don’t care about is YouTube. What we care about is that those fans and those followers come back to us where we have our courses, where we have our books for sale, where we have our products, and where we are. There’s more likelihood for direct engagement and for those fans to now become our audience and not other people’s.

 

 

Other people’s audience might also be YouTube’s, it might be iTunes’. We need to have blog posts because that’s how SEO is ranked. It’s all ranked on that. It doesn’t matter how great the SEO on your website is. If you’re not adding new content to it, you’re not helping your site grow. New content is a very important part of that. I’m a writer. I write six articles a month. I can barely get those done. The content that hits the first page in Google is more than 600 and 800 words. It’s usually 3,000-plus words but in twenty minutes, I can speak almost 6,000. Most people can do it in about 30 to 40 minutes. That outranks anyone’s content any day of the week. Why don’t we make our blog posts transcriptions? Google likes it. Do people like to read that? Most people, no. If you put your audio and your video up at the top of the post, they just stop there. They don’t read them. They go, “That’s too long.” They just listen.

There's a lot of innovation, but there's always your thing that makes people attracted to you. Click To Tweet

What are they doing? They’re sitting on your website. It’s called the stickiness factor. They’re sitting on your website, listening, watching. They didn’t go to YouTube. They stayed on you. Now when the little pop up comes in, “Would you like to subscribe?” They think, “I’m subscribing to the video. I’m subscribing to the podcast.” They’re subscribing to your email list. They’ll still get it, but they’re subscribing to you and not somebody else. They’re subscribing to you. That’s what we want.

You need to have a YouTube channel because Google owns YouTube. You’ve got to have a channel. Whatever videos you do even if you do them on Facebook and live stream, you drop them onto YouTube. You get them tagged and you get them ranking. It’s not because people will find you in the billions of videos watched every day on YouTube because when they type it into Google, you want that video to show up so you care about that. We want to do interview some Ego Bait™ because we want other people to refer to our website. In technical terms, it’s called a backlink. Backlinks are getting delisted and removed from people’s sites left and right because there are a whole bunch of problems in the authenticity of those backlinks if they are bought and they’re problematic.

In fact, we have a site a web company came in and redid their site and added overnight all these crazy backlinks. Their site that had been ranking consistently and had gotten organic traffic and organic keyword growth went right into the basement. Those old school techniques can hurt you. What we’re doing here by the interviews in the Ego Bait™ is natural. You interviewed this person. It’s an authentic backlink to an article in which their name is featured. Google’s never going to de-rank that. It’s legitimate. Those are important because they’re powering your website. You want to have social pages because having social interaction and having people come from Facebook into your website and things like that are powerful for your website traffic and website growth as well.

You want to make sure that’s happening. I don’t care about my followship level. I don’t watch the numbers on it. I watched the engagement of it. Are people communicating with me? I do not have a ton of fans. I may have 5,000 followers on LinkedIn. It’s my most active channel. Out of those 5,000, I can much have anyone and ask them, “Do you want to be on my show or do you know someone?” They would act so I know the activity level is high. That’s what we care about on our social pages over time because they get a lot to manage.

I don’t care about my Twitter. I have to have a Twitter because Inc. requires it but I only get trolled on Twitter. Every time I write an article about women diversity or anything like that or AI and sometimes about blockchain, they all harass me. I have to get them to shut down and it’s fun. I’m like, “Why would I post in that?” I put a bot on my site so every time a podcast is posted, it just sends a tweet and that’s the extent of my Twitter. I’m alive, I’m posting, but I don’t care. You can do that. You have an address but you don’t have to care about every single one of these channels. If it’s not valuable to you, you don’t want to be like, “I don’t exist anymore to someone who only cares about Twitter.” It’s very obvious to them where you interact. It says it right in my Twitter description, “If you want to talk to me, go to LinkedIn or Facebook.” I’m pretty honest about it.

We have auto email follow-up. This is the follow-up I talked about with our interview guests but you want to also have that happening whenever you post something. In iTunes, it’s convenient because if somebody subscribed to you and a new podcast is posted or you’re subscribed to a YouTube channel and a new video gets listed, they get pinged. They get notified. If they’re subscribed to you on your website, you’ve got to make sure that you’re letting them know each week that you’ve gotten new content for them as well. You do have to have this auto follow-up set up for yourself. That’s important and most importantly, we want to syndicate everywhere.

Our podcast just got iHeart all set up for everybody. It just came through. There is Spotify. Pandora is coming. Of course, TuneIn which is the one that Alexa listens to. There’s Google Podcasts, Google Play, iTunes and Stitcher. Those are the major ones and then there are half a dozen smaller ones like Player FM and some other things like that. We syndicate out to all those things from one piece of content. You’d never do anything. It just feeds out there because it’s just a directory. Those places are directories. I don’t know if you realize that but iTunes doesn’t download your podcast. It doesn’t contain there. It’s contained wherever you have your files hosted. Don’t host them on your website. Eventually, the bigger the audience, you’ll crash your site so don’t that.

 

 

We want to do that. If that’s where they are, we want to be where they are, when they are and when they’re searching. We want to be there in the location where they care about and it doesn’t make us do more work. It’s syndicated. We want to accomplish all of those things. Those will help us do less work because we’re still starting from that audio or video. This is how we organically grow the center of influence. It’s a spiral. It’s organic. This is why I chose this. This is a nautilus shell and it’s also Fibonacci. There’s a reason for that. This section right in through here, they’re like cells. Imagine if Aaron’s at the center of that and this is Bill Kelly out here because he’s got a bigger following. He’s building up cell by cell his influence and it’s growing but it’s centering around him and all heading back into him by who he’s gathering together and who is inviting in.

You are all coming in through one of those cells because who interests you the most? It might be Bill Kelly that interests you. You come in through that. You come in through those things and then you circle back in down to Aaron. This is where our center of influence grows and grows but it’s growing organically. It’s growing on its own and that’s what we have to remember. We just started at spinning. We just started moving and we make progress each time we invite someone, we put out content, we’re adding to it but it has a little bit of a life of its own. What I’m inviting you to look at is what I call organic growth. It can get you a lot more.

I get invited to conferences. I got to interview Steve Wozniak. I got invited to a blockchain conference. I now have a blockchain podcasts because of it and it’s partially Steve Wozniak’s fault. These things happen. I got invited. I didn’t pay for the conference. I got to go because I’m an Inc. columnist. I got my Inc. column from the podcast. I have not put out a book yet. I’m not a best-selling author. I have no book yet. The other thing that you want to do is you want to free some time for some things. You want to make some time for other things that you want to do. I look at that as how have I managed to free up my time to do more of those things.

One of those things that I wanted to do was have more time to network with my community and grow my alliance space to be stronger. If I am inviting them in to come to me and say, “Let’s have an interview this week.” I’ve got an hour set aside where I am doing that but it’s not just me spending time on the phone connecting with people or whatever that is. I’m delivering value to them in terms of publicity. I’m building my content at the same time and I’m networking. I’ve given myself a very powerful hour that I’m operating under. These are some of the things you want to do.

Speaking Engagements

The other thing is do not underestimate the power. I have never had to pitch a speaking engagement except for in a new area. I just did my first speech internationally in Hong Kong and I was paid to speak there. I got that because someone invited me because I interviewed him on a podcast. He invited me to speak at an event and then someone else saw me there and invited me to speak in Hong Kong and paid me. That’s how it has always happened to me. I do not have to work that hard at it. They’re always the right audience so I never worry when I go to speak somewhere if this is going to be worth my time because I already connected with this person. I know enough about them. I know enough about what they’re doing to be sure this is a good invitation for me. Am I using my time well? If it gives me what I want which is serving my business at the end of the day, all I have to do is do the thing that I love to do best which is connect with people and serve. My whole business is built around that.

Aaron and Michelle mentioned this as well. We want business models we can follow. Plans we can utilize; blueprints. I am the how-to girl. If you want to know how to do something, I’ve read about it and figured it out and if I don’t know, I will research it for you. What I want to know when I research things is not how one person does it. This is something my dad taught me. When you want to know about a culture, you read ten books, you watch videos. This is how we learn how to podcast and how you learned that all the models that everyone else was teaching was BS. They were leaving out the most important thing so you would not end up creating a good enough podcast to compete against them. The most important factor they left out at that time was if you didn’t podcast five days a week, you couldn’t get high ranking on iTunes.

Think about it this way. If I put out a podcast and I launched with 25 shows in the can from day one and you find me, how many shows got downloaded on that day one? 25, because you found me and it automatically downloaded all of them unless your settings are set differently. Maybe five would be the max. It depends on each person but for the most part, you’ll get 25 shows all at once because it’s brand new. No one’s ever seen them before. If somebody else launches a podcast and they only launch one show, I beat them 25 to 1 and I’m outranking them. If I do that consistently for eight weeks that you might get into New and Notable and I produce a show a day, I’m beating them out all the time. That’s what they didn’t tell you. That’s a lot of work. What they also didn’t tell you is that New and Notable is not worth anything. We never made it. Who would put a show of 3D printing on the New and Notable list?

What they didn’t tell you is that while numbers matter, there’s a person in control of it at the end of the day so if they don’t like your show, it won’t make it. It’s like the New York Times bestseller list. It’s a little snotty. This is what we discovered. They weren’t telling you these things. What I try to look for are models that work again and again across an industry niche or across the thing you want to accomplish whether it’s selling a course. That’s what I pulled for you some of the best examples that I’ve seen but I know that these models work because they’re working again and again. Tom and I have the Hazzard rules of hiring when we hire experts. We don’t buy from someone who hasn’t done it in our core category. We learned this the hard way trying to get products manufactured and sometimes when they say, “It’s no problem. It’s injection molded, it will be fine.” If they never made a pen before, they can screw it up and you can lose your entire inventory. That’s one of our rules.

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They need to have been there and done that again and again. These are models that work like that. I mentioned 3D printing but this is the part that I want you to hear about this story. When we started this podcast, we had no list because we were what you called ghost designers. You never saw us, you saw Martha Stewart. You never saw us, you saw Bayside Furnishings and Costco. You never saw us or our brand, you saw our clients and what our clients share with you. Martha Stewart’s not going to admit she didn’t design this office chair. It’s not going to happen. She’s taking credit for it. She’s not going to refer me either. This is the dangerous part of being a ghost designer. It was bad so we said in this new 3D print world where anyone can print anything, the person who designed it is going to be valuable. That means we need to put ourselves out there and start branding ourselves. We not only needed something where we can find out if there was a viable market for it, but we needed one where it was going to give us publicity and exposure at the same time. That’s what we did.

Establish Expertise

 

 

You can establish expertise that you don’t have. Many people do it. They say, “I’m on an exploration. I’m going to explore.” Have you heard of Bulletproof Coffee by Dave Asprey? David didn’t invent Bulletproof Coffee. He was on a journey to get healthy and he brought people along with him. They started in a blog and then he turned it into a podcast and along the way he hit into this Bulletproof Coffee model and it’s what took off. It makes them a ton of money. He was there not as an expert in health and wellness from the beginning. He became a biohacker over time. That’s something you can do. If you’ve got a new area you’re exploring, that’s okay. If you also have an area which you are an absolute expert, we have a guy who’s expert in deer hunting with bows, it’s a decent thing. He just went to a conference and got 70 interviews in one week or something crazy like that. It’s a big thing.

This is the interesting part. Aaron was talking about know, like and trust. He and I built this higher trust level because I felt that I already knew him but here’s the thing. You’re new to something or when you’re in an area and no one’s ever heard of you except your little local hunting community. That’s where Bruce built Whitetail Rendezvous. It was like all his buddies in the local neighborhood, everybody knew him in town but they didn’t know him outside of that. How is he going to get that and be able to leverage this great knowledge that he has? He’s truly an expert in it.

He said, “I’ve got to go to someplace people trust.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust YouTube that much but I trust iTunes well. I trust Amazon books well because I know how to look whether or not that’s a bestseller or it’s worth reading or not. That’s because I’m an avid reader. Everyone has their own trusted source. We learned this early on in our shopping business. Creating a direct sales model is a whole lot more expensive. You’ve got to drive people to a website they’d never been to. While it’s a lot easier now, back when we first did in the 1998 and built a website, people were afraid to put their credit card in. Where can I go that I already trust? If they trust iTunes, if they trust YouTube and they trust some other place for these listings, they don’t know that iTunes doesn’t care and lets everybody listed. They don’t know that.

Start From A Place Of Trust

They say, “It’s on iTunes. It must be good. It’s on Amazon. It must be a real product. It must be okay and there are no bad reviews.” That’s how they do it. We go to someplace we trust first. We’re reversing this. Instead of know, like, and trust, we start from a place of trust when we don’t know anything about a market or when we’re out there searching for something new. We consume a bunch of your content. We read your book, we watch your videos, we listen to your podcast and we start to like you. That was the case with Aaron. I started to like his stories. I liked the goat stories. I don’t have any experience with goats but I was like, “That’s cute and sweet and I like it.”

 

 

After that, I was like, “I want to know this guy.” There he appeared in front of me and I was like, “Now I have an opportunity to not only know him but have him be my mentor.” That is where we start taking action and we seek out and those are the people you want. You just qualified them without doing anything extra. That’s what we want. We want to move from trust to like to know. In the case of Whitetail Rendezvous, he’s doing something interesting. He had these podcasts for a while but now that he’s gotten so much publicity, he’s starting to interview the people who make bows and the people who make hunting gear and the people who make all of these things. He’s inviting them to not only be on a show but sponsor them and resell their products and he’s now a consolidated expert and he’s about to teach a course on whitetail hunting. He’s the center of influence. He’s grown that for himself and now he’s going to monetize it essentially. He’s taking that know factor at the next level.

Great Investor Stories

 

 

I have my good friend, John Livesay. He has The Successful Pitch Podcast. It’s a podcast with a little bit different twist to it. That’s why I want to present this one model to you. He teaches people how to pitch to investors like how to tell a story while you’re out there pitching and he’s great at it. He has taught Coca-Cola and big architecture firms. He has taught their sales team how to switch their model of selling to being story-based. He’s good at this and his podcast has gotten them all those opportunities. He wanted to be the bestselling author because he wanted to amp up his speaking career and get paid to go all over the world. He was like, “What do I write about?” The more he did a show, the show was an interesting configuration because he wants startups to listen to him. What value can he bring to startups? “Let me interview investors and find out what they want to hear.” Now the startups want to hear it, now they’re also afraid that they don’t know how to do it so they hire him but now he has these great investor stories. They would make a great book. His newest book is coming, Getting To Yes: How To Go From Invisible To Irresistible With Your Ideal Clients. The first book was about having a successful pitch and it was about all these investors stories but this is still taking those same stories but he’s now taking it and applying it across different industries.

It’s not just startups pitching to investors, it’s you pitching to your clients. He’s gone further with this but in it, he has summary chapters and then he has his stories. He has re-edited transcriptions so they’re not so rough but they’re the heart of the interview that he does. This is what I did. I told you I’m on my fourth year of writing my column six a month. That’s a lot of articles. Each one has an interview. Some of them are amazing like Wozniak. I’ve got Kevin Harrington and I’ve got a whole bunch of people that inventors and product launchers care about. I decided to use these articles because now I have an Ego Bait™ book. Everyone whose article I put in this book is likely to buy a copy if not a few more. We have a seven-step product launching process. Prove it, plan it, price it and there are a whole bunch of things. I did a summary podcast in Product Launch Hazzards for each one of those seven steps. You can listen to them if you’re interested. The seven P’s I call them. I used them as my opening chapter. I picked six stories and then I picked one or two of interviews that were powerful.

 

 

I chose Brian Smith of Ugg because you can’t get a better story of how hard it is to keep a business running year after year and grow a billion-dollar brand. I brought out the excerpts from that actual interview that we never made into the article so there’s bonus content as well. That’s my book. I finished the whole structure of it and it’s in the final edit but I finished the whole structure of it in six weeks because all the content was already there. You can do the same thing. You can plan it or you can just mine it later which is what John Livesay did and what I did. You can build what people want. This is the thing. A lot of you build these courses, these books, do these things and you don’t know if people want to buy it. It’s our cat stories.

We know of it but what if I floated a podcast out about it and people were like, “This was great. I want to hear more about this.” In December, I put out a year-end content strategy live stream. It’s a three-part live stream that I did. It’s at three-part webinar if you want to call it that as well and we’re now taking that and turning it into a mini course. Am I going to sell the course? No, I’m going to give it away for free because for me that’s the value and that’s what we do but it’s still a lead generator. Anytime anyone downloads that, they’re giving me their email address so it still works for us whether you do it free or paid. I created a course that I know is valuable because at Christmas time, I ended up with 400 people each week watching it either live or on replay. The email open rate was up over 40% at the holidays. I now also know that my list is good if I’ve got the right content for them. I’ve tested that and I’m sure of that. This is what we want to use our podcast to test this out. I don’t have a lot of statistics on other people’s courses but we have about ten or fifteen podcasts somewhere in there that is selling a course in their podcasts.

 

 

Scott Carson became our client because of a Magnify You Wealth event. He sat down and he’s like, “I know I want to do this.” He has four different shows now so he does something interesting which is a great model that I recommend to people. When he does a whole webinar weekend or he does a boot camp, he’ll take all of the content of that. He’ll put it into his regular Note Closers Show so that all the existing subscribers watch it, listen to it, and have it and then he spins it off into its own little entity. We have Note Camp Season One, Note Night in America, which is every Monday night. He found there was value in it and then he spun them off into their own little thing.

If you’re an advanced note closer, you don’t have to listen to the residual one-on-one stuff that comes up and the things that he reiterates. You go straight into the Note Night in America where he’s going to be talking about the more advanced stuff. Once you have a large enough audience, you can sub-list it and that’s one of the things that I liked that he did. Also one of the things is that Scott had a powerful list. He had 200,000 people on his email list. He was already doing a great job of marketing but he was starting to see was the decline in an attrition rate over because the only emails he was sending out were like, “Here’s the next Note Night in America. Here are the next course and the next boot camp.” Almost every email was push marketing. It was ads. He instead put it out into a video so he got 250,000 in a year. This is a year statistics so he probably had another six months. In his videocast, he’s been listened to or watch for just under 250,000 times and it doubled his audience at ten months. The most important part is now the attrition rate on his listenership wasn’t at 10% anymore. His list was growing by more. It had a direct conversion into bodies and to seats at his events whether they’re virtual seats or not. He keeps doing more. He’s finding it so valuable for him.

 

 

Dr. Diane Hamilton, she’s got a radio show. What was interesting is she had the show already. She took all those old episodes, brought them to our site, syndicated them and made blog posts from them. What I want you to hear about Blog Talk Radio, even on terrestrial radio, the problem is that the radio station has tons of different shows. To find her show, you have to go to the radio station’s website and figure out where it shows. Then of course you’ve got all their dumb ads in there that you’ve got to listen to that are not relevant to you. When you draw them back to your site, now her true fans want to come here because they want to find her show.

If you are not paying to be on Blog Talk Radio, chances are you don’t have rights to your content. There is a loophole we found in a few contracts where you have right to the words that were said but you can’t use the audio recording so we can still blog it. The other point that we want to make is whether you’ve done 100 videos, 200 radio shows, whatever you’ve done, that content is brand new to Google and to your site and it’s valuable. You already did it so why not reuse it? That’s one of the things. She found instant value to that. What we have to remember is that while it may be old to us, we have moved on and we’re talking about something new to someone who’s newly discovering whatever it is.

Popular Mechanics

 

 

Here’s one that I love and this a model of what I was mentioning to you about what we do with Product Launch Hazzards. This is the Most Useful Podcast Ever. This is Popular Mechanics. We have quite a few magazine shows, Esquire, O Magazine, Book Club, Coca-Cola. There are a couple of corporations and publications. How they’re using a podcast is interesting. This is happening to a couple of PR firms and we’re working on some strategies with them for utilizing it in the same model of business. Let’s say I need to move out of my business day-to-day and I need to brand my team. We can use the same model that Popular Mechanics is using by having each one of the editors for the different sections of their magazine come together. It’s a lot less work for your team. They do ten to fifteen minutes each but it’s on each section and now they’re all those editors who are being branded.

Popular Mechanics is now personalizing their broad company and you can do it the other way. If you’re the head of a PR firm and everybody just wants you, it becomes hard to separate yourself. It’s hard to separate yourself as a doctor, but if you’ve got great other doctors working in your practice and you want to make sure people get to know them, this might be a strategy to do that. I’m starting to step away completely from my design business. We only took six projects even though I was still speaking everywhere. I was like, “What am I going to do with the value?” Because I had already committed to it before we decided that we were going to step away from that business and concentrate completely on Brandcasters. What I did was I invited twenty of my referral partners in to each record one episode a month. They only have to record for 30 minutes and then I still do four episodes a month. I do four interviews with various people out in the industry that I think are interesting people I meet. I interviewed Nadia, you can hear her show in Product Launch Hazzards. I bring four interesting people into the mix and that’s my ad for the month.

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We do 24 episodes a month. In some months, the experts are not so good at recording so maybe we get fifteen. It’s still a lot of content but each expert in each genre has their information. We have lawyers who talk about intellectual property and we have Amazon experts who talk about listings or talk about product management. Every one of those is now becoming a lot easier. Over the course of the year, I set it up so now people are starting to refer themselves to the experts without even going through me. I’ve managed to build this team. Now we’re doing something different in which we’re treating it like collaborative marketing. Every expert who’s decided to keep going and participate into this is contributing $500 toward an ad budget. That’s cheap but we’re pooling it together and it’s going to be somewhere between $5,000 and $7,500 in ad spend so we can attract the right audience into our podcast listenership or videos and all of that.

We’ve got leads generating for everyone going through a qualifier quiz and getting direct referred out to the areas of expertise they need it. Those people will get an automatic email. Those experts will get an automatic email saying, “They expressed interest that they’re having difficulty and they’re looking for intellectual property.” They might be looking to form a corporation or an LLC and I’ll send them to Aaron. All of those things will just naturally happen from the form itself. We don’t do any referral work anymore. The only people that I take in or requests for speaking engagements or other things, which I will be turning down most of them this year but that’s a choice. These are models you can use to help move out of the day-to-day of your business, brand your teams and move forward into making sure that you’re building a company.

Growing Subscribers

 

 

Growing subscribers. Raj Jana is one of our clients on the product side of the business but he started a podcast after he had got a decent sales base already. He does these grinders for people who are Zen about their coffee. They care about the quality of the beans. They care about how they grind them. They grind them manually. They don’t use machines because that would be just not okay and doing all of that. He has The Stay Grounded podcast. An interesting way that he uses it is he uses it to sell subscription coffee. Each month there’s a different coffee that’s coming from a different farm around the world and they talk to the grower and they get the grower story. Not only are you in the subscription plan, maybe you go from month-to-month or you just joined in because you care about Peruvian coffee and that sounded cool. You stay because of these stories and you know the source you’re hearing from them directly and when you received that subscription box in the mail, you know everything about it. It’s been working well for him and it’s still growing and boosting the sales of the product which has been nothing but have trolls on their listing and knockoff products. They’ve had a lot of trouble with it.

What we invented in it is inside of it, not on the outside so it’s hard to see. It makes it a better grind but it’s hard to see it on the outside. All of them look the same even though his quality is better. We have a new design, he just hasn’t launched yet because he’s been dealing with a lot, but that’s how he’s using his podcasts. He’s using it to nurture and grow the subscription base which is growing more direct sales of his products at the end of the day. I know that when I talked to him, he’d done about a million subscriptions. It’s what he had told me that. He was doing well for what it was. He was selling out every single month in the amount he was bringing in. A lot of these Amazon sellers are lucky if they have 1% to 10% profitability on it. I would have suspected in the startup year, it’s not that profitable. It will grow to be but it’s not yet. He already had been interesting because of how he marketed it and he did such a good job with branding. He had over a 200,000-person list before he started the podcast. I suspect he’s at least tripled it because that’s usually what happens. Also, he was on Daymond John’s podcast. He was on his show and his videocast as well so it got a Daymond John boost.

We met Dr. Pecca here in San Clemente in Rancho Santa Margarita. He was an intern and he was doing something interesting. He was buying out a chiropractic practice in a very specific area. This is Blair Chiropractic. It’s very specific but he was interning out here with our chiropractor, Dr. Liz Hoefer, who has a show called Is Your Head On Straight, which is a cool name for a show and she’s lots of fun. Dr. Pecca was worried about how he was going to join this practice by this practice out in New Jersey for a retiring chiropractor. He was worried about how is he going to get touched base, how is he going to make sure that he keeps all the patients that are there and yet still fills up station load. He’s got all these student loans and the loans from buying the practice. That’s a heavy load.

We were starting up Liz Hoefer’s podcast at that time and he was listening in because he was in the office. All of us are in being treated so it would take an hour with all the kids and everything. He was listening in on this and finally, he said to us, “Do you think that starting a podcast before I buy this practice or before I come into my first day of practice is a good idea?” We said, “You’ve got some time on your hands. When you get back to Jersey before you assume the practice, let’s see what we can do with you.” We were not 100% confident it was going to work localized, but we were confident that he would be good at it and that it would be a decent show. That’s we ’re confident about.

 

 

We worked with him on it and he launched right before his practice opened. New patients would come in and they’d say, “This is Dr. Kevin Pecca. He’s taking over my practice.” He would be able to say, “You can find out more about my story and about me at Expect Miracles Podcast.” It’s on his website, which would be the new website that was taking over so that would go out in the mailings all the time. He was getting the ability to connect with patients even though they hadn’t come to the office yet or they had come in but they’re still being treated by the doctor retiring. It helped him. He would have patients who would come in and they do this X-ray thing. It’s the first console and it’s pricey and everything. They would be like, “I don’t know. That seems a lot of money.” He would say, “You had a hockey injury. You’re looking to improve your golf game, why don’t you listen to episode number seven and check this one out?” Invariably they would go, they would listen to the podcast and then they would call back and sign up for the appointment. It builds a tremendous amount of trust, like and know factor.

The other thing that we found that we didn’t know is going to work out well for him, the whole blog posts and all those things. Remember how I talked about relevance? Relevance also applies to local proximity. If I’m looking for a chiropractor but I don’t type in San Diego, it’s going to serve me up Orange County because that’s where I live in and that’s my proximity setting. It’s going to assume I want one when I get home. If you live in New Jersey, it’s just automatically going to assume New Jersey. When anyone was typing in information about chiropractic or about things that they might want to learn about, they were getting served up his content because they were in the local proximity. He was outranking all the other local doctors who had been there longer because his content was new. His content was valuable. This is just one way that some of our professionals use it and it works in a whole lot better way. Does he care about his numbers? No, he cares about the patients at the end of the day. He doesn’t care about how many listeners he has and he does it on his day off. He spends one hour on his day off and he records and usually, he’s connecting with a patient connecting, connecting with a fellow chiropractor. He’s having a good time. It’s fun for him.

It’s very valuable. We do that very frequently. It’s very easy to do. The sound is an issue, so you have to get the right kind of microphone and locate yourself in space because on trade show floors, it can be noisy. You can locate yourself out in the hallway or do something else. That’s exactly how I did. I did 25 interviews at the conference in which I got to interview Steve Wozniak. Luckily, he was backstage, so the sound is good back there but the others sometimes they were good and sometimes they’re wrong. Sometimes people would be walking by while your recording. You just have to be aware of it that your audience has to be not too sensitive to that. For the most part, they’re forgiving.

For our team, when we edit shows, we work hard to make the sound as good as it can be, but there’s only a limit to so much you can do. Test it out, make sure you’ve got a good mic. To the handheld, it’s a lot more directed. The sound is okay, it’s not great, but it works better than all the extra equipment for me. Tom and I have invented a new microphone that has a recording feature in it so you can use it and record directly into it. We’re working on that one. They’re forgiving about the videos. Most of us have watched videos with the sound that we’re barely hearing anyway. It can be forgiving in that world as well.

Those were some of the models. If you have a model that you haven’t heard here that you’re interested, please come talk to us. Tom and I have 150 podcasters on our platform. I’m not here to sell you anything. This is not why I’m here, but I want to make sure that you know that we have this because I’ve been accused of failing to tell you that we’ve got this for you and we got you covered. Our system is done-for-you system. All you do is to record and we do everything else including that blog post and putting it on your website for you. That’s there for you. You don’t have to learn this tech. Please don’t be overwhelmed by it. It’s done in seven days. It’s all taken care of you. We have 40 employees worldwide. We have deep knowledge in SEO, deep knowledge in web and handling your websites. All of that can be taken care of you. If you don’t even have a website and you need to start with my hypothesis, talk to us as well. We do two-week websites. I say that because so many people spend way too much money and months later they just get nothing for it. We try to remove that for our clients.

Measurements And Metrics

The other thing that we have is measurements and metrics. We host our podcast for most of our podcasters. If they want to stay on Libsyn or SoundCloud or wherever they are, they can but we have a lot more value. We built in a hosting platform that has both websites because that’s what matters. Website metrics and your podcast metrics side by side so you can see the organic growth of your website at the same time you’re seeing your listenership. There’s a whole reporting structure. There’s a whole bunch of that built into our site as well but we went one step further. When I told you our podcast had 25,000 listeners back after it had four and a half months or something like that, what happened from there is that somebody came to us and said, “We’re MakerBot. We’re the largest printer manufacturer in the US and we’d like to advertise on the show. We hear this podcast advertising thing could be good.” We said, “Okay.” It took us a few months to negotiate.

We put in an advertisement and as we were putting the advertisement, I said, “We have all these listeners per month but remember, I had 100 episodes.” The listeners are listening to all different episodes, not the most recent one. At that time, we were giving them something like 1,200 to 1,500 listens per show and we only put in four shows for the month. I was like, “That’s not a lot of listens. It’s not a lot of value to them. That seems wasted. Why can’t we put this across all our shows?” The answer came back, “Because that’s a lot of editing to put an ad into all the shows.” I said, “That’s not acceptable. What if I have a Christmas ad and I want to take it out? I don’t want people having to listen to it in July.”

We started thinking about ways and I challenged the team and Tom. The team came up with a way in which we can add mix across our entire catalog and then a day later, a month later, take it out. You can sell now your ads on a monthly basis, but more importantly, you can promo for your book launch, the courses, the price you have. If you change the name, the URL or anything, it’s gone. Only do this one thing if you’re going to do it and that is to make sure to send people back to your main website, no subpages, none of those things. If you’re going to do them, do them in an ad only so you can remove them later.

We want people to only remember one thing. We want them to remember your website anyway. That’s the best practice. When I invite people to my show, I don’t let them tell their URL. I tell them to go to the blog post Product Launch Hazzards or FeedYourBrand.co. Get any one of those places and go to the blog post. Remember, you’re doing them a favor. They’re driving, they’re jogging at the gym. You don’t want them hurting themselves trying to remember this. Here are the key measurements we want to track. This is the order of value to you as well as you grow your show.

 

 

Organic Web Traffic

Organic web traffic. How many unique visitors am I getting to my site a month and is that growing? We want it to be growing. We want it to grow faster of course, faster might mean I have to do more episodes though, so keep that in mind. You’ll find a pace and as long as it’s consistently growing, you’re doing something right. Organic keywords. I don’t want to just rank on wealth building. How many people are building wealth? That would be way too many people to be competing guests. I want to do wealth building and real estate. I want to do passive income wealth building. I want all of the terms that might be valuable to me to come through and become my organic keywords. Get it served to me.

Relevance is something that Google cares about. Click To Tweet

The great thing about speaking 6,000 words is that while you may think your main keyword is all about wealth building and real estate, I’m going to say it in multiple ways. Those sub-words and subkey phrases are going to come through as well. You’re going to get value for them. I want engagement. I want people to find me on social media and message me and say, “I loved your podcast.” I want them to message me on Facebook. I want them to send me emails on my website, make comments and all of those things. I want the engagement to start growing. I’m going to tell you when you launch your show, if you’ve launched it for the first time, no one will talk to you for about 25 episodes. There is somewhat of phenomena where they’re not sure if they like you yet until they consume enough.

When you hit a tipping point of 100, that’s when you find it more consistent. They communicate back with you. We want a qualified list growth. I don’t care how big my list is, I care how active and loyal that list is. I care that I have a qualified list at the end of the day because my list opens my emails. My list wants to hear from me and that’s what we care about at the end of the day. Views, listens, and people reading my blogs, that’s what I want at the end of the day. Stickiness, them sitting on my website is a value. Them, watching my video adds value. It adds to your Google ranking. That’s a value. Having these longtail blog posts for those that are readers and those who care, that’s valuable to you. More importantly, those longtail blog posts are there for Google and they care about that. Growing your center of influence. If you want to find out more about podcasting and marketing via videocasting and podcasting, FeedYourBrand.co is the podcast website and Podetize.com/Inquiry. That’s where you can get Tom if you want to talk to him more.

The question was, “When we do our transcription, do we use a human or machine?” We do both, but that’s only because we can do both. We have a 40-person team and it’s labor intensive. We use the machine as the first round just to get it out. If you’re going to have it done yourself and it’s only you who is doing the work, pay the extra small amount of money to have the human transcription done because the machine one is crap a lot of times. You’ll still only get about 85% to 90% of the way with the human transcription from a service agency because they don’t know your marketplace. They don’t know your keywords and they don’t know what matters to you. We have SKU, stock keeping unit, but it always comes out skew. They don’t know your industry and they’re going to make that mistake again and again and especially if you’ve got technical terms or medical terms or any of those things. There’s no way for them to be mind-readers. They won’t look it up. Our team will look it up. Our team does a triple transcription process. The machine does the first and then we have multiple transcribers who look words up, put links in, does all of those things. Still, there’s about 2% only you know, especially when you have a new show. You still have to review this stuff especially if your interview subject is very important. You want to take a look at the post and make sure that they didn’t say something stupid because it happens.

Our team will only put down what you said and if you said it backward, even though you meant it correctly, they can’t fix that. They’re not mind readers. They don’t know that that’s wrong so you have to still read through it and take a look at it. For the most part, I have to tell you I’m a writer and I should care about it, but I’m busy and I don’t care. Nadia calls and says, “There’s a little mistake here.” It was an important one and you pointed it out. I don’t think I would have caught that mistake because it was something about PH. I was like, “I don’t know that stuff.” We said it that way. We said it wrong in the show. When you say something and you correct yourself, when you see it in the written word, it doesn’t always look right. It’s the pause that mattered. You reiterated it so it says it, and then a correction comes after but we didn’t negate the first part of it. These are reasons you have to review.

If you’re not doing some of these, you don’t have to do it and maybe in your world, it doesn’t matter. We’ve been talking about what would be a good podcast for Laughlin Associates. We’ve been thinking how can we elevate Laughlin in a way? Most people, if they are not meeting us somewhere, they don’t know who we are. If you say LegalZoom, pretty much everybody knows who that is because they’ve done a huge amount of marketing. The question is, what can we do that would be interesting for a Laughlin podcast? It doesn’t matter that we’re 47 years old, we’ve had hundreds of thousands of clients. We have a big client base now that we’re active out there that we do a lot of speaking. Only a tiny number of people are at the places where we are compared to everybody out there that owns a business.

Somebody asked me, “I don’t know anything about podcasting. I would never listen to a podcast. What is the podcast?” They’re dismissing it out of hand. They said, “I read the New York Times.” Here’s the deal. When I was a kid, we had five channels on TV. ABC, CBS, NBC, we had public television and we had the local channel unless you went to UHF and you wanted to dial it in and watch Japanese cartoons. Television was five channels. I’m right at that area where I remember FM being new. Almost all the big stations were AM stations. You just got what you got. We got excited for the TV guide to come out because we are going to know what the fall lineup was. They’re telling us, “This is what you get.” We go on to Netflix or Amazon Prime or something and this is endless choices.

For years we had the nightly news, we have the local news, eventually we had cable infotainment news. I mean that seriously. Cable news, I don’t care who you love, it’s money making. The ABC, CBS and NBC, whether or not you like them, they are part of the original FCC rules. It said there had to be somebody that wasn’t driven by money to make the news whether or not it’s true that way. The point is we have all this goofy stuff we get now. We had endless stuff. Then it got even deeper. YouTube came out and all of a sudden you can get a video on anything. Anything you want to know, you can find it. That’s what podcasts are too. You can get incredibly niche information about exactly what you want to hear. If you can be even interesting, you don’t have to be great.

Edutaining

We call it edutaining. That’s my term that I keep using at it. You want to educate and you want to be entertaining enough that people aren’t going, “I’m falling asleep listening to this person.” Energy and passion for it work enough. You don’t have to be the most well-spoken person.

If you’re doing something that you got a little interesting spin or you’re doing something that is incredibly common and you need to stand out, be the go-to individual that people look for. If you’re a local dentist and all you want to do is get more people in your chairs, in your local dentist office, maybe a podcast isn’t the best thing. Maybe you want to be targeted Google and ads, but if you want to be a dentist that is getting invited to do some lecturing, teaching other dentists how to do stuff. You’re trying to figure out how do I open the second or third location? How do I stand out as an authority? All of a sudden you could get on and do a podcast.

Because of the fact that you’re doing it and nobody else is, you’re now the expert. If you just don’t say a lot of wrong things, the other dentists are like, “The guy might have a good podcast but he or she doesn’t know what he knows. I don’t want to work with them because they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a good thing they’re on the podcast and not in somebody’s mouth.” The point is you can quickly lift yourself up above the crowd. The reason I wanted Tracy to talk about this was that they can drop names like Popular Mechanics, O Magazine, Book Club, Esquire. These are big brands. You’ve got these people that are doing stuff but to the big world, people don’t know me.

I would say 90% of our podcasters are like that.

Diane Hamilton, but she’s been doing it for a long time. She’s got a lot of people come on, she’s successful. It’s like Tracy said. If I say, “Can I interview for Inc.?” You’re going to say yes. When you bring people onto your podcast, not only are you are elevating yourself because you have a show. You also get to meet people that might be difficult for you to meet otherwise because they’ll come to be a guest. You gave a ton of great, “Here’s what we can do and here’s why we do these things in this order.” I don’t know if everybody wants to get more press, get featured more, but I’ll tell you. The more you are featured, the more likely you are to get the bigger jobs, get the relationships, get the invitations, get whatever because people will check you out. All of you before you engage with something or some product, do a quick Google search, “What is this saying? What is this? Do I care about this?”

What we have to realize is how our next generation is also searching for it. My girls will go, “Alexa, what’s this?” That’s where it’s coming to and that what’s starting to happen in our homes and in other places. We have to start thinking about where that next generation is coming up and coming to. It is not true that only Millennials listen to podcasts. That is not true at all, but they are much higher consumers of podcasts than they are of radio. We have to think about that. While our generation may still do radio and all of that as well as podcasts, they exclusively do it. It’s like they don’t have cable.

If you're producing content and you're not putting it in all the media, then you're missing the boat. Click To Tweet

I’m going to ask this question and I hope we’re not belaboring this. This is very important. If you’re getting bored with this, I understand that maybe you are but hopefully at least a couple of you will go, “I see why you’re beating this drum so loud.” How many of you have a SiriusXM that you’re subscribed to in your automobile? That surprises me. That is a surprise to me because I can’t stand to listen to regular radio anymore. The reason Audible has hundreds of thousands of books or however many you got. You can pick exactly what you want to listen to. SiriusXM, if I want to listen to only Elvis Presley or only Frank Sinatra. I love Billy Joel so I get to hear Billy Joel when he gets about how he wrote the songs. You could do the same thing with Tom Petty or with Jimmy Buffett or whatever. You get exactly what you want and then if you go to their app, you can narrow it down even more. I only want songs from this era. I only want songs from the ‘70s.

My point is people are getting more and more used to curating only the things they want to hear. They’re not looking for an outside third-party voice of authority to tell them what is true and untrue. People want to make their own choices. If you want to stand out, you have to be available. One of the ways to be available is through blogging, podcasting, YouTube videos, Facebook live videos. There are all these different things. For about a year, we were diligent about it and then we just got busy and we said, “Let’s not do it.” People would walk up to me at events and say “I know you don’t know me, but I enjoy the Facebook Live you and your wife do.” I’m like, “Really? Somebody is watching that thing?”

It’s because it’s very fun to watch Michelle and Aaron interact. This is what many people did tell us. If you’re considering doing a cohost, people like to watch it and see what’s going to happen. They’re just waiting for Tom and I to battle over, disagreeing about 3D printing. They were. That was an element of that and they used to comment on it.

The reason I bring this up here at Inner Circle is one, these guys are part of my Inner Circle. They’re the ones who were not only friends, but they produce the show. We’ve become much better friends because of all the work stuff and speaking stuff. Our lives become more entangle and stickier.

Social Proof And Testimonials

There’s one thing that I mentioned to someone at our table and I think I should say this one again for you. Maybe you aren’t looking for doing a podcast or doing these interviews or anything, but maybe you’re looking for adding social proof to your site. Maybe you’re looking to add a lot of testimonials and I don’t know about you, but isn’t it hard to get testimonials? It’s incredibly hard. I hacked it in and it works. Aaron, would you like to be interviewed by Laura Hazzard who’s my research assistant? She’s going to do a quick interview and talk to you about your show, about why you podcast and what your show’s all about. We’re going to give you publicity for your show. It’s going to take 30 minutes and then you get on and he books his time. Twenty minutes of it is all about Aaron. At the end of the twenty minutes, Laura says, “Aaron, do you mind if I just ask you a few market research questions to help Tom and Tracy improve their company?” We have a few market research questions about our services and about things that we’re thinking about. Would that be of interest in that thing? He’ll say, “Yes, no, whatever.”

 A couple of them might be perfectly planted to say, “Aaron’s not doing web development services and we now have this monthly maintenance service. Would you be interested in it?” We might ask if he heard about it. He says, “No, I haven’t heard about it but I like to hear about it. Can you have somebody contact me?” She makes a note sales and we’ll call him. The other part of it though is at the end, what do you think about the Podetize platform and the Brandcaster services? Aaron will now have just been served for twenty minutes and given publicity that he knows he’s going to receive and it’s not going to be a podcast. This is going to be an article. We took an interview but we’re going to turn it into an actual article. Remember he checked the box saying he was allowing us to record him and use all the information that we captured. He now says something amazing about us and we have a video testimonial. We can use the video, audio and/or written format. I didn’t have to ask him to do it for me and I didn’t have to invite him in. He’s clear that he’s going to say something about it. It’s not like we hid that this may be used as a testimonial. We’re clear about that so it’s not subterfuge, but it was convenient.

The fact is that if I’m paying you every episode, there’s money going out. I both want it to be better for me and I want to aggrandize you because it makes it look like I made a smart choice.

We put out those blog posts and articles. We put them out every week. We put them in our newsletter, we send them to people who aren’t podcasters but now they get a profile on him. We’re helping to expose this show and why he’s podcasting and sharing all of that information. We’re hoping you show too. How many other RSS servers out there or how many other podcast services do that for you? It’s helping grow our business. These are ways in which you can use techniques like this and use recording even if you’re not making a show out of it.

Thank you again. Here’s what I’m excited about podcasting. I’ve just made the commitment that in 2019, I’m going to dramatically increase the effort of making it on the podcast because I believe that everything that I can do, that’s the thing that’s most likely to get a higher profile.

Michelle too has a show. It’s called Dear Michelle. She’s way behind getting to launch.

I’m excited about it. I just wanted to make sure you knew that it feels to me that the fastest way to grow your brand is through making a podcast. Ideally doing it in front of a camera so you have video and the podcast and then using that thing which might be ten to fifteen minutes long. Build out lots of content for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and just plus content marketing out. Make sure that you’re tagging it right. All the things you know how to do. It’s important. I felt like it was my obligation. I thought based on all the opportunities that I get, in order to not have to be on the road as much as you do to get in front of more people and to be recognized by a larger audience as an expert. I can’t think of a better thing to do than that.

Aaron Young and Laughlin USA were the hosts of the event. If anyone wants to join the Inner Circle, then we highly recommend that you check out an upcoming Magnify Your Wealth event.

Important Links

• Magnify Your Wealth
• Aaron Scott Young
• WTFFF?!
• Feed Your Brand
• The New Trust Economy
• Monika Proffitt
• Product Launch Hazzards
• Tracy Hazzard’s column on Inc. Magazine
• Ego Bait – Feed Your Brand episode
• Profit Party
• 3D Start Point
• Whitetail Rendezvous
• The Successful Pitch Podcast
• Ugg
• Note Closers Show
• Note Night in America
• Dr. Diane Hamilton
• Popular Mechanics
• Nadia Fleury – Product Launch Hazzard previous episode
• The Stay Grounded
• Is Your Head On Straight
• Expect Miracles Podcast
• FeedYourBrand.co
• Podetize.com/Inquiry
• Laughlin Associates
• LegalZoom
• Laura Hazzard
• Dear Michelle

 

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