Whether you’re just thinking about starting a podcast or already have one and are looking for ways to increase your show’s earnings, one thing to keep in mind is it boils down to the binge factor. Today’s podcast is a presentation Tracy Hazzard did for the Utah Podcast Summit. Tracy is a former Inc. columnist and the host of four top-rated podcasts, including The Binge Factor. She shares how you can utilize consumer patterns to create highly consumable content to increase your listenership, get people to rave about them, and monetize your shows in a noisy digital world.

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How to Rise to the Top: Find Your Binge Factor to Podcast Success

What I want to talk about though, and I want to close it out for you, is to give you some sense of how you can increase that alternative monetization for your shows, how you can go from start to grow and build as we’ve been talking about. One of those things that I’ve discovered over the few years of doing this is that it comes down to something I call the binge factor. Some people call it the it-factor, the special thing but in podcasting, it’s The Binge Factor. This isn’t my first podcast. The Binge Factor is my new podcast. My first podcast was on 3D printing. It’s geeky. It’s WTFFF, which is the geeky term for 3D printing, Fuse Filament Fabrication. If you didn’t know what it was, you were in the wrong place. I started that with my partner and husband, Tom Hazzard. We started that a few years ago. We have well-over almost 600 episodes on it.

One of the things that we discovered was that we hit on a formula that was working and we did it purposely because we came out of the world of product design and development. We came out of the world where we knew how to get people to buy what we had to sell. We knew how to get them to buy and use something again and again. More importantly, as we tapped into social media, viral marketing and all of these things that came on in the last several years, we realized how to get people to rave about them as well. We tapped into all of these things. We called it the right fit formula, the right fit products, the right things on the right shelf at the right price. All of those things fit together and made something consumable. That’s what we want with our podcast. We want them to be highly consumable.

When we went to launch our show, we took off those great fixtures and we built them in. It turns out that those work for everyone. They work no matter what niche you’re in. They work no matter where you’re trying to go. They are the success factor for our clients. That’s where we’ve come to what we call The Binge Success Factor. We build that in at a strategic place at the very beginning when we’re starting a show, when we’re launching it and we’re thinking about it, or even when we take over a show and we’re figuring out how to make it sting, how to make it grow, how to get more people to listen.

Why should we care? Why do we want binge listeners? I didn’t know what a binge listener was until someone hit 100 episodes. We did 100 episodes of that 3D print podcast in five months because we did it daily. We did it five days a week and we did a ton of content. We hit 100 episodes quickly. Someone messaged us on Twitter and said, “I’ve been bingeing on your show all weekend. I got to Episode Number 50, and I wonder if you’re going to be covering the subject in the next 50. If not, could you record it? By the time I get to it, I have the answer to my question.” It cracked me up. I thought, “People are binge-listening to me. People can listen to me that much.” That seemed crazy to me.

As I thought about it more, I started to dive into the consumption patterns of what is working. That’s the same thing that we did in our product business. We were looking at this consumption pattern. We were looking at the things that were working. Part of it was that everything was designed to be right by that. I’m going to talk about how that looks in a little bit, but we are also tapping into consumable behavior. That’s what I’m going to talk a little bit because consumable behavior leads you from not bingeing on something, but then buying where we go and we trust. That’s the success factor that we want to build in.

It's never too late to pivot. Click To Tweet

What’s your big success factor? If you said, “My podcasting journey is successful because I wanted to create an impact in the world. I wanted to do some social good.” I want you to put a number one. If your goal was to entertain people and put their worries aside and be entertained by what you do, be funny, be serious and lead us through crime story, whatever that is, then pick number two and do entertainment. If your goal is to raise your authority and get more publicity for your business, your brand or for you, then I want you to put number three.

Know, Like and Trust Factor

If your number one thing that you want is to grow your list, get more leads in and grow that audience of what you have, I want you to put number four. If your goal is to make money from the show, “I want to make some hard cash from this,” I want you to put number five. Tom is going to add them up for me and give me a little quick survey. When we are trying to go from starting to growing to building our show, what we’re always looking at is we’re getting people to trust us. We want to go through that know, like and trust factor. Here’s the way that we normally do it. We say, “Trust us. I got you covered. I was featured in the Harvard Business Review. I’ve got all these podcasts. I’m successful. I have a million listeners. I’m a keynote speaker. I founded this company.”

This is how we normally go about doing it. We push out all of our skills and we push out all of these things. Sometimes we go even further and we say, “I’m all muscly and strong. I’ve got a million listeners. I’m making all this money off my show.” “It’s all about to brand me and that’s why you should listen to my show.” That’s not necessarily why people are trusting you. It’s not necessarily how it turns into business. It’s not how it leads to success factors. I know you’re saying “Tracy, Joe made $100 million. Tim Ferriss and Gary Vee, they’re all raking it in.” I want you to think about the time and age when they started their shows. They started their shows and they already had brought audiences. They were already bloggers and authors. They had entertainers. They had fans, followers and lists already when they began.

They started from a better place and a farther along spot than probably you are starting. From there, they also were able to capitalize on that at a time when we were still in what I call me-cycle of business. You know we’re not in a me-cycle of business. You know that we’re in a we-cycle of business. It’s required that we’re out there not being all about me in our brand anymore. We’ve got to move and we’ve got to move into that know, like and trust. We’ve got to get more listeners. We’ve got to go through the funnel and we’ve got to get them to buy, “I don’t like this model either. This model means that I need more listeners. I need more people. I need more up there to try to create buyers.”

We heard a 3% conversion rate on your listeners, your leads, your email list, “I want 37%. I want up over 25% minimum to anything that I do or it’s not worth my time. I could do something else with that.” The problem with a funnel, it doesn’t matter whether we’re going up or down is that we need this broadness at the top of it so we can create a larger amount of people so that we will get the number of buyers and have the success that we need at that place. We have the issue of know, like and trust is in the cycle. We’re coming in at any place. We can come in with trust. We can move into know and like. We can move around it and we can come in in different places.

FYB 93 | The Binge Factor

The Binge Factor: You have to be in all those directories because you need to be where the listeners are.

 

This is why this works. We did 250 products at mass-market retail. A lot of them were at Costco and other places where you buy stuff every single day. The thing is that we trust Costco. We trust the platform where we’re members, where we do business. Costco buyers and consumers trusted that Costco would bring great products and that they would put them on the shelf. When we move into Apple and other places like that, we don’t necessarily trust that they’re great at curating things because they’re not. We trust that I now don’t have to go to some random person who I’ve never heard of before website and put my email address in to get their feet, to be able to take a chase, to take a listen, to understand them.

That’s where we are in the podcasting world. That’s why everybody’s out there saying you got to be in all these directories because we need to be where the listeners are. That syndication process is extremely important. Giving us this broad base of going into the place that they trust so that they’ll find us. They’ll get to know, like, and then trust us. We’ll be creating the cycle like spinning off onto itself and cycling again and again. With that, we go into that trusted channel model. We go into a channel of which people want to view here. They’ve got our show. People want to listen here and now they’ve got the show that they want to listen to.

We’re moving through that process, but why does it work? Why is the binge listener, the binge viewer, the bingeability help us go faster from binge to trust, to buy? I don’t know what you’re watching. You could be bingeing about anything on Netflix or Hulu or wherever you go. We’ve been bingeing Outlander. Here’s what happens. Here’s the consumption pattern of behavior that happens. It doesn’t matter whether you’re consuming content or you’re consuming products. This is how it works. When I go in and I’m watching Outlander week after week, episode after episode, sometimes all in one day or one weekend, what’s happening is I’m getting this view of this beautiful Scottish Highlands that looks so romantic. I want to learn more about these cool stone circles.

The next thing I know Tom’s watching documentaries on Stonehenge. I’m starting to get a little cooped up and I’m starting to Google things like Outlander tours of Scotland and thinking about how cool that would be. Even though it’s 90 degrees here in California, I’m also going out there and going on Amazon to try to buy knitted wool and knit patterns to make the Outlander Cal. You need to make a Sassenach Cal. Looking at all of those things, the consumption pattern is high. Outlander didn’t do a great job of merchandising because none of those things were bought by them. You can do that. You can translate that.

Binge-watching of you and pull that into making sure that they’re buying from you. The three things I’m going to talk to you about, care, integrity and skills we can demonstrate and build faster trust because they’re bingeing on us. While they’re bingeing on us, we have a chance to accelerate their view of how we work, what we do and how we care about them. That is going to be the fastest path to the binge factors and to our success factor. I want to make it clear that it’s never too late to pivot. We first started with Feed Your Brand. It was the show we started a couple of years ago.

Shout outs and mentions are going to get you those raving fans. Click To Tweet

We started a brand-new show every single year because we want to be in it with our clients. We want to understand how hard is it to launch a show. We never paid for anything. We do everything as organically. We use some of the lessons we’re teaching everybody. We’re doing that, but we want to see how hard it is to get organic listeners and how it is to create success in a show. Sometimes we have a different success factor. We test out and we do a different success model. Here in the case of Feed Your Brand, its purpose was for us to nurture the podcaster community that we’d already built. Our fans, our followers, the people who look to us to teach them how-to podcasts, to give them the best lessons learned, our clients to help them keep podcasting, to prevent pod-fading.

That’s what we were there to go give tactics and systems and things that were working. I started to do interviews because I wanted to know more about different types of podcasters. I started to expand it. During the process of doing those interviews, I started to psychoanalyze people. I would listen to their show. I would listen to 5 or 6 in a row. I would talk to them about what I believe their binge factor was. The bingeability that they had created in their show and the reason they were getting growth and success with their listener base. I decided because people were like, “I love that you call it the binge factor.” I was like, “That should be the name of my show.” We shifted the whole brand and everything now. We have a brand-new website.

Show We Care

It is never too late to pivot. I didn’t lose any of my listeners in that process because technically we did it right. In that process of doing it, what we’ve created is a shift in the brand that made this show more bingeable than it was before. We want to create that for ourselves. We want to create that for everything. I’m going to go into the three different things that binge build for you. The number one binge builder is to remember that it is not about you. It is about your audience. It is about them first. If we don’t show we care, then we have issues with getting their attention to begin with.

When they don’t know you from anyone and they are looking at your cover art and your face is all over your cover art, I have no idea if you’re an expert in marketing, if you’re the best life coach out there, your face doesn’t tell me that. What your face might tell me is that you’re not like me. If you’re not like me, then I am not likely to give your show a chance. That’s one of the reasons. Our number one thing that we recommend to our clients is to get their face-off their show and their name off of it. Unless you truly are doing a podcast for your audience that you already have, and that you’re expecting that audience to help you grow.

The other part of it is we want to get less promo about what we do. That shows people that we are in it for them. We want to get shorter. We want to get to the content faster. The number one thing I hear from listeners again and again, is like any intro is too long an intro. We want to keep it short and sweet. The other thing we want to do is we want to make sure we don’t put in promos and advertisements too soon in our process because that generates a disregard for the binge listeners out there. Binge listeners, one of the characteristics is they like to wait until they see 25 episodes in your feed before they give you a shot.

FYB 93 | The Binge Factor

The Binge Factor: When you take care of your guests, you take care of your audience.

 

If in that 25 episodes, you’re selling from your trailer intro episode through everything. You’re constantly selling. You’re making these extra-long introductions with 30 seconds to a minute worth of ads and promo at the beginning about what your stuff is and what your course is. They’re less likely to take on your show and keep going. You’ve lost a potentially great, active listener who’s interested in this because you turn them off. You haven’t earned the right to sell to them yet. Once you hit 25 episodes or 100 episodes, you have earned the right to sell. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t get the right to sell from the beginning.

“They do it on TV shows all the time. Why shouldn’t I have the right to do that?” That’s why we built Podetize because we thought if we can get through that first stage, prove to the audience and those early adopting fans that were in it for them, that they can believe and hear this truly great content. Later when we have relevant ads, promotions and things that are great for those early episodes, why shouldn’t they have ads in them? That’s exactly what we did. We built Podetize. The whole Software as a Service system that mixes those ads and takes them in and takes them out. You can capitalize on it later when you’ve earned it. That keeps those binge listeners. They’ve given you that shot. They’ve gone all the way through. They’re hooked on your show. They’re not going to be turned off because you’ve now added ads. They’re going to be thrilled that you added ads because when you add ads, it means that you’re now going to stick around for them. That’s the time to do that.

The other part of how we show we care is we get curious about our listeners. We ask them questions. We’re engaging with them. We want to find out what they want to know. I know you’ve heard that again and again. Getting curious about your audience is extremely important. We can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get others interested in you. It’s my favorite quote out there. This is from Dale Carnegie, but we also want to do that don’t forget with our guests. We need to get curious about them as well. We don’t need our guests as “We need a guest in and we don’t care.” We need to care about them and be curious about what’s makes them tick and be curious about why that’s relevant to our audience. That care overall is taking care of your audience by taking care of your guests. We want to do both things at the same time.

Serve Consistently

Our number two binge builder is to serve consistently. I know that you’ve heard that a lot, this consistent and constant thing, more content like doing all of that, but here’s why that works. It works because it’s an integrity builder. We went through and we built in all these great features and the great way that we approach our show, that shows that we care for our audience. We need to prove to them that we will do what we say we’re going to do and that we will show up for them again and again. Imagine if you’re a life coach or you’re some consultant and coach out there. You have something very complicated to sell that’s complex to talk about. When I am in there going after week after week showing up for you, then it isn’t this weird? What are you going to do for me? How is this going to work?

I am seeing you show up for me all the time that I’m willing to suspend belief that you can do what you say you’re going to do because you’ve already proved to me that you will do one thing for me. You will come in and be in my ear week after week after week. That in and of itself is a trust builder. We’ve got more content because we earned the right. We’ve gotten through that. We are getting into filling our feed. We’ve got this strength that we’re building here that we’re showing up all along. When we’re filling our feed, when we’re getting that filled, that’s why 25 episodes are a magic number because that’s the number iTunes shows in its scroll so you get to see 25.

Listener value and guest value go hand in hand. Click To Tweet

If we’re also showing the feed, when people type in our topic, because we’ve covered so much of it, we’re showing up for multiple shows for different parts for seasons, for all of these things. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. We’ve got tons of episodes on that in Feed Your Brand and articles and other things out there. If you’re curious about that, I’m happy to answer questions on that. One of the ways to do that is to make sure that I have all these shows, which is another thing. When I can show up and niche down, that’s why I have so many shows. I have a show on blockchain innovation because I was curious about it. It’s something that I’m implementing as a structural basis in my company and I needed to learn more.

I started a podcast called the New Trust Economy. I have a podcast called Product Launch Hazzards. I’ve got that going on and that’s my give back to the Amazon sellers and the inventors of the world so that they can understand how I built the success and how we managed to sell as many products and make as much money for our clients as we did. I don’t sell anything there. I give away that content. We have Feed Your Brand. We have The Binge Factor. We have WTFFF, which we have a sponsor on. A few years later, not that we didn’t take ad dollars and stuff along the way, but we’re about to launch a series with Hewlett Packard. Our feed, when someone finds me and they are looking for me, they see me showing up again and again, across varying topics and into multiple areas.

What that’s doing for me is creating the integrity of I’m going to show up for you. I’m going to be there for you. It helps me get chosen for speeches. It helps me get articles and columns, which is why I wrote a column for Inc. Magazine. All of that happens and all of that came about because I showed up and they could find me online. I wasn’t some hidden person and I wasn’t some startup that they weren’t sure what they were going to get. They could hear and see exactly what they were going to get. That integrity matters there too.

We also want to be everywhere. I know that sounds exhausting and confusing. I get that and I understand the overwhelm of that. That’s why I have a business. That’s why we go from video to audio, to blog, to graphics, to follow up emails for our clients so they don’t have to do that for them. If you’re not in the convenient place that matters for your audience, then you’re not showing up in the world. This is the thing, the 2:00 AM Principle, I call it. The 2:00 AM Principle is that when we’re in pain, when we have a need, when I desperately need because I got thrown into this distance learning thing, to figure out some STEM programs and STEAM programs for my children, I’m going to go out there and search for it. I’m going to go and find some WTFFF episodes, where we talk about STEAM education for girls, STEAM education for kids.

They’re going to be like, “That show has been around for a while. I know they’re going to help me bring in the Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math. I’m going to go there.” The other part about it is when I’m looking at 2:00 in the morning and I’m stressed, I’m starting in the place where I feel the most comfortable or in the place where I know I will get a result. We always get a result from Google. We don’t get null results. 20% of what’s typed into Google every single day, Google has never seen before. One-fifth of what is there, they’ve never seen it before. They have to give that answer because if Google showed up nothing, we’d stopped going to Google. It sends it to a place that it knows it can trust.

FYB 93 | The Binge Factor

The Binge Factor: By creating your graphics in a certain way and choosing what it says, you can get your guests to be smarter about how they share things and participate in the value-creation process.

 

Here’s where we come into what we’ve tapped into. That’s why I’m saying you have to be everywhere, including your website and blog. I’m not going to go into great detail on that, but I’m going to tell you that it has to be an open WordPress website. None of these are constrained by frames. It doesn’t let you add in plugins and do all those things. You want to do that because there’s a significant difference between Wix, Squarespace and many of the other websites out there that are being built for speakers, authors and podcasters because it doesn’t have the same search power.

If we’re not sewing up on search at 2:00 in the morning, then we’re not showing up. We also need to add YouTube to that because Google owns YouTube. If we want to show up on a search, the number one search engine in the world, we have to have Google videos as well. For many of our clients who don’t want to do video, who don’t want to have their hair done like me, then we go into it and we do audiograms. You can do full-length audiograms on YouTube. You still have videos or you can do video supplements and do other things. There’s a whole way to do that. The other thing that I want you to remember and tap into that podcasters have a huge advantage. We are tapped into something that we called verbal SEO, verbal Search Engine Optimization.

That’s because of the Amazon Alexa device. That’s because of, Hey Google. That’s because the algorithms are shifting to using our voice patterning and the way that we ask for things and see things. Here’s a great example. In our household, we have a lot of Alexas around. Alexa controls our lights. They control our grocery lists. They control our musical playlist. My five-year-old couldn’t read, but she could get up to the Alexa. She could take over the music in the house. She could interrupt her sister and she could say, “Alexa, play Who Let the Dogs Out,” and annoy everybody. She could take over that playlist in her way and yet she can’t read yet.

Imagine what that generation is going to be able to do and how they’re going to search. If we’re not in the right place for them, then we’re not in the right place. Here’s the number one thing I want you to do. I’m going to give you this tip right out. You want to take your whole show, create an entire full-length blog, not a transcript, a blog. You can go to TheBingeFactor.com and check out how I do mine. You’ll be able to see what it looks like. You do not want to rewrite this. You do not want to edit it. You do not want to make it short. You do not want to put timestamps in it, and don’t put, “Tracy says, the guest says,” you don’t want that either. We want to do that because that has power.

Show Our Skills

That leads us to our number three binge builder, we’re going to show our skills. We’re not going to tell. We don’t want ratings and reviews. We want raves and shares. We don’t need testimonials. We need shout-outs and mentions. Those are what’s going to get us more. Those are going to get us those raving fans. That moves us into care, integrity and skills are shown. These are the key factors in getting us that huge trust. They’re getting us the trust with the binge listeners who it matters with, with the most active listeners out there. What can you do with this? How can you show your skills? I was talking about some of those coaches and consultants who have complex things to share and to demonstrate.

When you demonstrate integrity by doing what you say you’re going to do and build that trust, people will more become your client. Click To Tweet

We tend to spout off and we hear it all the time, the health and wellness world responding off all of our scientific skill sets and all things like that. The reality is that it’s a lot easier if we show listeners where we are and how we work with people. This is one of my favorite podcasters I’ve met in a long time. Kim Seltzer, we have had the most wonderful conversations. I did an interview with her on The Binge Factor. She has a love and relationship podcast. She’s charismatic. She’s been doing it for a few years. She maybe even longer than that. She’s got a lot of shows on her belt. She does three shows a week. What’s brilliant about is each one of them demonstrates tremendous value, caring, integrity, and skills to her listeners.

It does all of it. It’s no wonder her trust factor is off the chart. She’s able to convert them into clients easily and quickly. Her first show is topic-based. She’s talking about a topic, something serious that they’re struggling with, questions from our audience so she’s a deep understanding of where they are now and she’s addressing the topics for them. The second episode in the week that she does is she interviews a guest because she knows that guest exchanging, that relationship building, and the guesting community and that audience exchange is a growth builder for her show. She doesn’t want to miss out on that.

She does something interesting. She frames her show with the guest on air. She does an introduction that starts with framing the topic in the relevance of why she’s bringing this guest on and what they want to talk about to keep her guests in the lane, to keep them giving value and not go moving off and start selling their thing to her audience. She stays in authoritative control of her audience from the beginning. That’s an interesting model because when I interview my guests, I don’t do an intro or a close with my guests on air and that’s because my guests, I want to become my listeners.

My strategy is a little bit different. I purposely tell them when they come on the show that I’m going to do a separate intro and a separate close, and then I’m going to rave about their show or I’m going to talk some more about their binge factor. They should listen to the show after it’s aired. That gets them hooked on the show itself and said most of us who go on podcasts, we don’t go back and listen to it ourselves. We’re like, “I was there. I did the interview. I’m not going to go back.” My way is to tease them and drive them back into it. I’m doing that. I’m working on building a little bit of guest value at the same time. Listener value and guest value go hand in hand.

The Ego Bait

We also want to show our guests value and skills right along the way. It’s an interesting model to look at, but when I started my income, I would get these pretty famous brands and people, getting me to write features. They would solicit me. I’d interview them. I’d write a feature about them. Sometimes I do a podcast with them, but I get back to the point that they didn’t share the article properly afterwards. It would drive me crazy. I created a process and I call it Ego Bait™. There’s a whole episode on Feed Your Brand called Ego Bait™. You can go out there and find out more details about it. What I discovered over time out of sharing hundreds and hundreds of articles and then thousands and thousands of episodes on my behalf and tens of thousands on the behalf of our clients. What we’ve seen is that by creating our graphics in a very certain way and by choosing what it says, we can get our guests to be smarter about how they share things and how they participate in the value creation process. We get everyone to up their skillsets together. We show them the skills.

FYB 93 | The Binge Factor

The Binge Factor: 72% of podcasters quit their show; only 18% stick it out.

I interviewed Pat Flynn. It hasn’t aired yet. You’re getting a sneak peek at the graphics that we’ve created. The one on this side says, “Guest podcasting is the new guest blogging.” It’s a quote of what Pat said on my show. Normally, that’s what most podcasters would do. They’d highlight a big quote out of what this great guest said. They put their picture and the guest’s picture. They’d make them about the same size somewhere on the art. They’d share that out on social media. Most times, the guests will to heart it, they’ll love it, they’ll thank you. They don’t then go and share it to their channel. They don’t then go and share it with their audience. There’s a reason for it. When you email it to them, they still don’t share it. They feel that this is a little too self-serving for them to share with their audience. Why do I want to put into my audience a quote I said when it’s already my audience? I want quotes from other people. I want quotes from what people say about me. That’s what we’ve done on the other side here. This is what a true Ego Bait™ quote is. It’s something I will usually say in either the intro or the close. In this case, it says, “Pat Flynn is one of the best teachers, not just for podcasting but for creating a wholly digital business.”

That sounds like an endorsement of his entire company. He’s not only likely to share this out on social, which shares the episode that he was in, shares on my show and me strategically here because his picture is smaller. He’s also likely to do what I tell him to do in my follow-up email to him, which is I give them an embed code to properly put cross-links back into his website. His site is linked to my site. My site is linked to him and we’re moving through this process. Keep in mind, I have even more as we go through this process because I take my whole process for what goes on in The Binge Factor is that I start with giving my guests, giving the great podcasters in the world, publicity by being on The Binge Factor, talking about their bingeability, talking about their show, which is something that they want to talk about.

I go from there to write an article for Authority Magazine. I create this infographic for them. This is Erica Blocker, Moms with Dreams, fabulous story, amazing show. She gave great tips about how she handles getting great guests, increasing listeners, producing like a pro, encouraging engagement, and monetizing your show. These tips are what become a part of a Buzzfeed roll up in the future. Buzzfeed’s slow at taking them. Not every single one gets picked up every single time, but we work hard to work with them to try to get the right ones picked up. When we are building these infographics, it’s a way to get them to not only share that they were on my show again but share the article, which links to the video, which links to the show.

We’re creating this through, but we’re also not pushing them out like, “Please share our show again. Please share the show we did again.” We’ve given them something new to share. That’s why this is working for us. We go one step further. If we were to do the Buzzfeed roll up, we would give them yet another different one that shows that they were featured in Buzzfeed. How would you guys like to experience the process? Would you like me to show you how it works? When I show you how it works when I show you what this experience of, how I bring you through, how I demonstrate skills, how I demonstrate integrity by doing what I say I’m going to do with you and how I build trust with you, guess what’s going to happen in the process?

You’re more likely to become my client. Why is that? If I went out there and said to you, podcasters out there, “I’ve got the best hosting and production company in the world. You should come on and you should be a part of my show. I’m going to give you publicity and I’m going to do this.” If I said, “I’m part of the biggest hosting company in the world,” you’re going to go, “She’s going to sell me something. Is this a sales call? This is publicity.” If instead I say, “I serve you. I never once sell you. I let you decide for yourself that I’m the one that you want to work with.” That is going to show you and demonstrate it to you. You’re going to move up that trust factor all on your own. That’s how I’m going to create value. I’m going to create an ability for you to be on my show.

Not every one of you out there is going to qualify because you don’t maybe have a show that has 25 episodes or more. You haven’t achieved a certain level of listenership. You may not qualify for The Binge Factor. I didn’t love that. I don’t want to leave any part of our audience behind. I don’t want to leave podcasters behind. I don’t believe in the free model. You’re going to hear that from me again and again because I want you to have skin in the game. I want you to make sure that you are committed to this because there is too high of a pod fade rate, 72% of podcasters quit their show and only 18% stick it out. That is not the case on our platform.

We have less than 12% pod fade rate on our platform over the few years that we’ve been doing this. It’s because we make sure that you’re committed to it. We make sure that we’re committed to you at the start and all the way through. Here’s my commitment to you new podcasters. You, podcasters, who haven’t gotten the appreciation and the audience that you deserve. I’ve partnered up with the UK Giving Tuesday podcast and Australia Giving Tuesday podcast, and we’re partnering up and we’re all bringing out these Giving Tuesday shows. Every Tuesday, there will be shoutouts for great shows, little clips of the shows, little reasons why they’re going to be bingeable in the future. You’re getting more than a shout-out. You’re getting an opportunity to hear my analysis of your show as well.

You can apply for that at TheBingeFactor.com and you can go to The Giving Tuesday Podcast page. Anyone can apply. I have to tell you. I put a feeler out to see what people were interested in this. I did it on social media, which was such a mistake because I got over 600 podcast shows to apply. I got a backlog of them. My team and I have decided we have to amp this up. We’re doing at least five a show to try to make this and we’re putting in some criteria to make sure. You may not qualify right away, but maybe we’ll be able to give you a shout-out on our website and do some things in the meantime. I still don’t leave any show behind.

The last thing I want to leave you with, the things I want you to think about is that if all that thinking and focusing on the binge factor of your show and focusing on that trust-building model of care to integrity, to showing skills, to getting that trust. If all that that did for you was to get ten more listeners to give you a shot out of the gate, to go from the Apple listings and choose you because they were like, “This looks like intriguing.” Would that grow your audience? Would that build your show for you? If you got one more guest to share with you on social media, instead of ignoring the fact that they were on your show.

If you got one more guest to recommend you to great guests if you got publicists to send them people so that you could refuse some of them and be pickier about your guests, would that grow your show? If you could get listeners to quote you, share your stories and rave to their friends because they were binge-listening onto your every word, then would that help you go from start, to grow, to build? If focusing on your care factor showed listeners the value of working with you, would that grow your business? If focusing on your integrity factor demonstrated that you could deliver week-after-week and you were worth doing business with, would that grow your business?

If focusing on your relevant skill factors and demonstrating, showing those skills, would that show people that your skills were valuable and useful to you? If all of those things are in place, does that go quickly from know, like, to trust, to buy in that process? Is that the best way for you to build not only the binge factor but build the business factor, that success factor we talked about at the very beginning. The one thing that you consider to be important, is that going to build that for you? I want you to start your binge factor now. I want you to grow your trust factor. I want you to build your monetization power through the binge factor. I’ve got some gifts for you. There are all kinds of free stuff. Our bootcamps are free. All of this publicity opportunities are free. My publicity tips are free for you. We’ve got tons of stuff. We give it away because I want you to be successful. I want this marketplace to be successful.

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