At the end of the day, our goal for our podcasts is to spread our knowledge and insights for others to benefit. The digital age has made it possible for us to do that and reach many people across. However, with so many platforms coming out, it can be overwhelming to find which ones should we put our content on. Here, we tackle podcast distribution platforms for maximum exposure as well as reach. We also touch on SEO, monetizing traffic, and sponsors.

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The subject I wanted to address is about podcast distribution platforms because there’s a lot more of them that have come out or are becoming more popular lately. All of you that are working with us, we make sure you’re on all of the major podcast distribution platforms. Obviously for a long time that’s just been iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play and TuneIn. Those were the main four. We have added iHeartMedia and Spotify. All of you should be on that who are working with us and I’m quite sure you are. There was a long time Spotify was not taking new people. It didn’t matter where you were hosted, whether it was on Libsyn or Podbean or us. Even though Libsyn, you could check a box and say, “I want to be on Spotify,” it wasn’t working. Spotify shut down new submissions for a long time because they were going through a lot of restructuring in the company and re-doing their systems. Those systems got finalized and now everybody’s on Spotify and you can get on Spotify rather easily. Once you submit a show, you’re on within 30 minutes. It’s a very popular platform. There are a couple more that we’ve been putting everyone on as we’re finding a lot more people want to listen to podcasts.

One of them is Player.FM, which is an obscure platform, but apparently a lot of people do like to listen there. Blubrry itself, whether you ever used PowerPress on your website or not, or use them as your media host or not. Blubrry actually, surprisingly, has a lot of podcast listeners who listen directly through their platform and anybody can list their podcast in that directory. We’ve been doing that as well. There are nine different platforms that we’re putting everyone on when they launch a new show. Any of you that have had a show for a long time, whenever we adopt a new platform, we put everybody on it because it gives you more exposure, more reach and hopefully more place for your podcast. That was one of the main things I wanted to mention, it’s just some updates about that. We had some very interesting questions come up about YouTube. Mitch, I don’t think you’re using YouTube that much, but we have a lot of people that are either recording their podcasts as a video or they have other videos that we’re putting out. We had a lot of questions about YouTube. One of them, somebody had heard at an event or through a colleague that if you have videos on your YouTube channel that have less than 100 views on them, that they really hurt your SEO.

That was the term, the actual term that was said. Hurt your SEO. We hadn’t heard that before. I started to investigate this. First of all, I don’t know whether the person that’s said that meant SEO of your videos within YouTube or if they somehow meant SEO of your website. I doubt that was the case. I reached out to an expert. He’s a guest we had on Feed Your Brand. He’s from a company. He started a company called AdSkills. John Belcher, that’s his name. He is a Google and YouTube expert. He told me he had not heard that before. I reached out to a few people and I cannot find any evidence to support that having videos with less than 100 views on your YouTube channel somehow hurts your SEO, your YouTube channel or your visibility on YouTube. It’s logical that if you’ve got a lot of videos and you have some with a lot of plays and some with fewer plays, maybe there is an algorithm that averages those things. I’m sure videos with fewer replays are not going to help you tremendously, but are they going to really penalize you? I don’t know. We don’t have any evidence yet to support that. We’re continuing to look at that.

Any of you that are interested in that information, keep reading. We’ll continue to look at that and bringing more information as time goes on. I forgot to mention at the top of this. Tracy is traveling. She had been in Hong Kong, gave a speech in Hong Kong at a conference of Amazon sellers and then came back briefly and then she’s off in Salt Lake City and unable to participate. If you’re wondering where Tracy is, that’s where she is. Let’s see. The other thing I want to mention, because we’ve had some questions lately, some people, especially newer customers are asking about your blog posts and some people wondering, “Why is there an awkward grammar in some of these posts?”

I just want to make it really clear, especially for so many new people, that the foundation of the blog post we create is definitely based on what was said in your podcast. It gets cleaned up, quality checked, proofread, it goes through for different people who are working on it, reviewing it and quality-checking it. While we’re going to remove things that are unnecessary and repetitive, we’re not going to change what was said and turn it from common spoken grammar to perfect written grammar as if you were a prolific author and you would never write perhaps some ways that you or your guest might say it.

Some people wonder why isn’t the grammar perfect. It’s for Google that we make sure that it is more of the spoken word. We don’t really change what was said. Sometimes if somebody says something where they meant to say one thing instead of another, if we can tell that, we will correct it and fix it, but in general, we’re not going to make it perfectly written grammar because Google knows that it came from human speech when they analyze it and they give it a higher weight. That helps all of you for your SEO rankings in Google search and ultimately your traffic to your website from search. I know some of you know that and I apologize for being a little repetitive, but I thought for some of the new people that would help a little bit in terms of an explanation. Now that I have finished some of the things that I wanted to make sure to I communicate, I want to invite Mitch to come on. Mitch, did you have anything you wanted to discuss?

There’s a woman who’s been soliciting me for something called Binge Networks. I don’t know if you know what that is or who that is. I’ve heard of it.

Scott knows something about it too. Scott, something about Binge Networks, what might you be able to share?

More platforms mean more exposure and more reach. Click To Tweet

I met the lady regarding Binge Networks. She was a vendor over at New Media Summit here in Austin. What they’re doing is they’ve got agreements with all the smart TV networks. We got about 28,000 downloads from Binge Networks alone. What they do is, since I use video in my web episode, we just upload our videos straight to their network and then they go and they create my own channel. If you don’t have video, that’s okay. What they do is they create five or six static images for you and then they’ll create a video with a static image so that it shows on iHeart, across all smart channels like Roku.

I did decide to give them a try. I’m wondering where I could see traffic from Binge Network. It’s not showing up on Libsyn as far as I could tell.

It’s not a podcast. It’s a video. It’s like another realm of YouTube or Vimeo. It’s another way that it’s a video. It’s not a podcast like Libsyn, Spotify or anything like that. It’s not increasing your iTunes downloads. It’s increasing your traffic as people are watching the videos on their smart TVs and the smart channels that they have listed as partners.

How do you know that you got 26,000 downloads?

What they have done is not every channel that they are tied into gives them a report of how many people clicked on, only some of them do, but what they’ve done is they sent me an analytics report every month and it’s a button I can click on any time to see how many views are across their networks.

Scott, you have to upload your video to them, everybody that you want to put in there from an RSS feed or what?

No. I use Repurpose.io. They have it into Repurpose. When I do a video on Facebook Live, Repurpose pulls it up and I can just hit one button to upload it to YouTube. I can do the same thing now by hitting one button and then filling in my title and stuff and then uploads it to Binge Networks. It’s not a lot of extra work.

I did the same thing as you did. I’m new. I would love to see some form of stats. I can’t find it on the site. The point is if you’re saying that it works, it was only like $100 a month or less.

 

It was like $700 for the whole year or something like that if you had the discount with them. There are 28,000 downloads since we started. We got our first videos up there. They send me a link, I can click on that link and look at it. It’s a couple of days behind. It’s always running a couple of days behind. If you reach out to Bonnie or Danielle I think is the lady that’s the onboarding agent and stuff like that, they’ll create a link, send it to you that you can click on and take a look at it.

This was a good topic, Tom, because you’re talking about channels.

Distribution channels and getting on more of them to get more exposure for sure.

If I were to get in the even half of what Scott is getting, it would swamp all of my numbers dramatically. In other words, it would be more just from that. I’m still a new podcast. I think of myself as a new podcast or still, and I’m getting approximately 10,000 downloads/visits on a per show basis.

Across our downloads, we’re average 900 downloads an episode and we’re doing it almost daily. If you’re getting 10,000 views an episode, that’s phenomenal. I think that’s great.

It’s in that range, so some are less, some are more. The other strategy that I have embraced because of Tom is I push a lot of traffic to my show pages on my website. On my website, probably half of my visitors add particular episode coming directly to the show page and not going to the audio link on iTunes or Libsyn or any of the other platforms. My goal is to try and get as many people as I can into the show one way or the other through the website. Now the next question I have for both of you guys, because you’re more experienced at this, is now that I’m getting this number of downloads and visits, how do I monetize the traffic? I’ve never cared to monetize the traffic because I do such a good job of monetizing my guests. If I wanted to have a sponsor or monetize the traffic, is this enough, number one? Number two, what would you suggest?

I do think that’s enough traffic to monetize certainly your website. I’m pulling your site stats. I want to see how many unique visitors you have a month to the website, which will also tell me a lot.

Mitch, how are you monetizing your guests?

The name of my show is Your First Thousand Clients and so what I’m getting are people who are already successful business people on my show. My premier consulting service is to offer certification. I build certification programs for my clients and hence, my new book called Power Tribes, which is how to build monetizable powerful certification programs for any business. When I bring someone on the show, I know that they have at least a thousand clients, which tells me that they are in a position to potentially want to create an army of salespeople from free that pays the money every month to grow their company. We have that conversation generally before we start the interview because it’s like a captive audience at that point. I share with them what I’m doing, I find out more about their business. I ask if they’re interested and if they say, “We’re not ready for that yet,” I down sell them a standard coaching package which is $10,000. I’ve covered my expenses twenty times over for doing this podcast just with the clients I’ve received from my guests.

Do you have vendors that you use on a regular basis for your certification programs? Do you use ClickFunnels or anything like that on a regular basis or any software that you’re using on a regular basis for it?

That’s a good idea because they use learning management systems and we’ve just now been pushing Thinkific as our learning management system, but we don’t really care about funnels. That doesn’t mean anything for certification. A key element of the program is CRM. We have been recommending Zoho frankly because Zoho is probably the most powerful CRM system for the price that I know of. We put all of our clients into Zoho because it works so well. I could bring in Zoho consultants cheaply for $3,000 and build out the entire back end. It’s worth it for the client. It’s worth it for me.

That would be the first person I go to because I will do an online boot camp. We have Darin Adams, who’s a speaker from Infusionsoft CRM tool. He comes on, speaks and he sells Infusionsoft, offers a special and I get a commission off of it. That’d be one. I’m not sure Zoho has something like that as well for you.

It’s a really good way that you can make money, it’s with tools that you’re using that because the people that are your clients or your listeners, they already trust you. If you say this is the best product for the money, they’re going to believe you and they’re likely to try it. You’ve got to make sure that if they’re going to try it from you recommending it on your show, you’re going to directly benefit. You’re going to get a commission. That’s the best way to monetize. The more things you can do like that, that would be fantastic.

We’ve added a whole different extra page to our website. We call it Trusted Vendors, which is affiliates and stuff like that. Steve Olsher, he’s got the New Media Summit and I put a link on there. I’ve asked Tom for Podetize. When I was flipping through Facebook, I saw Alexander Zoom posts. I was like, “They’re promoting Zoom, just like I do. This is for real webinar.”

Would you call those on-page sponsors or on show sponsors?

I call them on-page sponsors. I reached out to four of our biggest vendors that we are really big in referrals. They’re paying $1,000 a month and then they also get one show each month out of 25 or 30 episodes.

 

That’s the other thing you can do besides the commission aspect, if they are going to pay to play and a lot will to get an episode specific about their something about their software. You could break it down and do it month after month because these CRMs are really complex. You can narrow down a subject. “This week we’re going to talk about capturing leads into our software and the tools we have to help you do that,” “We’re going to talk about the templates you can set up for outbound email correspondence,” or whatever it is. There’s got to be 50 different subjects that they can pick the top three or four for the next few months and they get a whole episode about it. That provides your audience value, but you also directly make money on it. It’s like an infomercial but it will have more personalized integrity. It won’t feel so salesy.

Give me a feel for what I could potentially charge someone for a package. The package would be a 60 or 90-second spot in the show itself and a page or a position on each show page with a link and a clickable link to some form of a buy offer.

Personally, when I do something like this, when I have a sponsor and doing something like this with, they’ll pay to be on the website, on the pages and in a commercial and the episodes. I would not charge less than $1,000 a month for that. Some sponsors I’ve even gone as high as $3,000 a month. It depends on how big your audience is and how focused and likely the return is. Initially, they might want to go lower until they see some conversion and then they may go higher. The one thing I wanted to mention as a distinction, in the episode where they’re being interviewed, like where I was suggesting a narrow topic about the software, I don’t put the commercial in that episode. You’re already talking about the whole episode. There’s no need to run a commercial on that episode. It’s a piece of advice there.

I have all my vendors, they’re paying $1,000 a month and we’re filming or being recorded for 30 to 45-second spots, not just for their services, but as they have special events. I used Quest IRA, they’re a sponsor of mine. They have a big expo. We’ll have special links to that in a special ad just for that. That will start mixing. I make sure that they give a special discount code for my listeners, but I also get an affiliate split off the ticket sales as well as we’re sponsoring for them. If they go to Quest Expo and use Podcast to sign up, that gives them 50% off their tickets. It’s now $199. I’m getting a split of that $199 as well.

I don’t know what kind of events there are sort of that you attend that are in your field of business consulting, but I know you said you’re pretty tight with Steve Olsher. If that’s appropriate for your audience, you could also lead gen for them the same way Scott is.

One thing I told Tom to do, I thought was brilliant, is to reach out to everybody including you and Mitch who is hosting there and do an ad for Podetize that runs through our episodes to help refer people to him that we all get five free episodes when we sign up. I thought it was a good idea.

I’m down on that. No problem.

There are lots of things. In 2019, we’re going to do a lot more marketing and we’re showing up at more trade shows. We’re going to be trafficking conversion with Scott. We’re going to be at Podfest. We’ve got a big presence there. We’re going to definitely be asking to put some ads out on as many different podcasts as we can and doing some more things on social media too. We’re doing a lot more video ourselves now too, especially with the Podcast Peeps. We’ve done it. It’s a new podcast mastermind that we started every other Wednesday evening and it’s just a collaborative, trying to help push everybody forward discussing whatever everybody’s greatest challenges or interests are. We’re doing that free through the end of the year, but then we’re going to monetize that in the new year.

If you were to sell a ticket, then you should earn an affiliate commission for that. Click To Tweet

As a thought, I don’t even know many of these podcast events that come up. I’m not really in the podcast community. I don’t think of myself as being in the podcasting community. I just think of myself as a person who has a show. If you were to sell me a ticket, then you should earn an affiliate commission on their ticket. Since I don’t know about any of these shows, you should be pushing that out to me or maybe even all of your clients because we’re going about in our own little silo building our business.

Podfest is probably the best one to go to. You’ve been to the New Media Summit, so you know what that’s about. Podfest is a very collaborative environment and while there are keynote speeches and there are breakouts, definitely the spirit of the whole thing is about everybody getting to know everybody else who’s at that event. It was one of the best events I attended in 2017 honestly, and that’s why I’m so excited to go back and be a sponsor. We’re a gold sponsor this year. We’re going to wear the badge sponsor, so Podetize is going to be on every badge and we have a booth and I got more out of that too. Scott and I are speaking there. I will have our new product by then, our new microphone. We have a microphone that records to an SD card that you don’t have to attach to a computer or anything to record yourself. If you do attach to a computer, even though Zoom will record, it plugs in and it will record your guests coming through the computer into the mic and the SD card and it will record you through the mic.

That also ends up becoming the input going out to your computer, but it’s a backup recording. I’ve often had people that have trouble with, however they record or their guest audio didn’t record or their audio didn’t record that was supposed to record in the cloud. At a minimum, it’s a backup recording if you’re in a hotel room, you’re just going to record a solo cast or you’re going to interview somebody in person. You have to have these, each of you to record. Anyway, we developed that mic. I’m getting the first prototype from the factory, full working one. We’re going to start production and so that’ll be a whole another revenue stream.

The reason I thought that as you’re talking about monetizing products. I know you were talking about software and service products. Sure, that’s one thing, but physical products are another way. If there are any that are appropriate or a good fit for your clients or potentially your market of listeners, there are many companies that will drop ship, meaning you can take orders on your website with a simple WordPress plugin. We use WooCommerce on our website for people to purchase our hosting or services. You can have a plugin that handles the skews and if you sell products over your website, that information can transmit directly to the manufacturer.

They ship it, you never touch it. Essentially what you’ve done, you’re collecting the money and you pay them the wholesale cost and you pocket the profit, but you never had to handle anything. That is a big way. Our friends, the Courtrights in Income Store, they are doing that right now on the top one third, the top 300 of their sites. They’ve got a new partner to monetize all those sites with physical products that are drop shipped. The difference is an affiliate commission on something can be single digits, middle single digits. When you’re doing physical products that are drop shipped, it can be 30%. The economics are different. I’m doing something extreme where I’m developing a product that’s going to be branded and my company is selling it. You don’t have to go to that extreme.

I did something too. I reached out in March after trafficking conversion. We were there, and I offered up a monthly membership to my students and listeners for $97 a month and I had 102 people sign up for it at $97 a month where I send out, I do an extra webinar once or twice a month, every other Wednesday night, that they only get access to. We drop them out monthly swag where it’s a shirt or a hat. We always do a book or two. One of the things I do, Mitch, is I have guests and I have books. I ask them to send me 100 copies of their books and then we send that out to my crew members. We like social media. They’re sharing that person’s book across their social media handles, they’re excited to get the swag bags whether it’s a t-shirt for the podcast this time around or a hat. I just ordered 100 backpacks that are all going to be drop shipped straight from the factory. That’s going to cost me less than a $1,700. I’m ordering 100, drop shipping 60 and keeping 40 for an event.

This has been great for me, so thank you very much.

You’re welcome, Mitch. Thanks for joining us.

 

See you later.

You just want to send me the list of all the platforms. It will be an easier thing. You’ve probably got a list of your spreadsheet or something.

I don’t know if Alexandra has a spreadsheet, but we did. That’s increased. Everybody’s on Player.FM They are also on Blubrry. We decided to put everybody on because that is increasing. They have a lot of listeners through them. It doesn’t matter if you’re hosted with them. Anybody can list their podcasts there. What else did we start doing?

Here’s an idea. Why don’t you take and create an infographic with Podetize? My podcast is hosted by Podetize, and you just put all the images of where everywhere it’s going, and then send it to everybody who hosts with you. That’s a great marketing piece. I’d post across Instagram and save me from creating one.

We have a couple of graphic designers full-time on staff with Podetize and they were a little short on work. I’m going to fill them up with that one. The other one is interestingly, we learned that Google Podcasts and Google Play are on different directories. I know you think it’s all Google and we had everybody listed on Google Play before the Google Podcast app came out, but Google Podcasts has turned out to be a little bit different. Everybody’s got to submit their show there too. We take care of it for all of you that are with us. It’s interesting. Google Podcast is searching the entire internet for any RSS feed and they can tell if it’s a podcast and they’re automatically out to get to their directory. That’s part of their goal, to be the king of podcasts.

In the infographic, the artwork for every show in the middle and then the places that you’re sharing it, and then that’s customized marketing piece.

That is sweet. I love it. That’s a good suggestion. We’ll have to do that. That’ll promote us all.

Important Links:

• Player.FM
• Blubrry
• AdSkills
• John Belcher – Feed Your Brand past episode
• Binge Networks
• Repurpose.io
• Your First Thousand Clients
• Power Tribes
• Thinkific
• Zoho
• Darin Adams
• New Media Summit
• Podfest
• Podcast Peeps
• Income Store