Eric Siu breaks down how to use podcast tours to drive book sales. He covers outreach tools like Mixmax and Chartable, response rates you can expect, and the math behind hitting bestseller lists like the Wall Street Journal. He names shows with Anthony Pompliano, George Gammon, and Jordan Belfort as examples.
Alright, so today we are going to be talking about if you should be doing podcast tours to grow your book sales or just sales in general. So, right now I'm in the midst of doing a podcast tour, which means I'm getting on a bunch of podcasts right now for my upcoming book called Leveling Up. And you can go to levelingup.com if you want to get a free chapter of the book. But Leveling Up, you know, I did a podcast on why I'm even doing a book right now. In our— in today's day and age. It's always, are books antiquated? No, you can check out that episode if you want to learn more about it. But one of the things I learned from people that I talked to, a couple bestsellers, is that podcast tours have worked really well in terms of generating sales. So there's a couple things you can do. And usually what happens in the book game is the publishers want you to do bulk sales where you might go speak at conferences and sell $10,000 to $15,000, $20,000 worth of books. And that— there's the podcast tours, and then there's You can run Facebook ads to an offer, and I'm happy to talk about that as well. You can tweet at me if you actually want me to talk about those, and I'll think about those. But right now, the podcast tour piece, I was like, man, that's a lot of manual work, because I— one of my friends, he got on 80 podcasts before his book launch. And actually, my goal now is to get on 100, and so far we've done about— we got 25 confirmed. And just about 2 weeks ago, I was on Anthony Pompliano's podcast, and he gets about 2.5 million downloads a month. So there's good awareness because the deal is this, if he and I are talking, people already like him for him and then they're starting to get to know me a little bit, they're building a relationship with me and I'm doing this at scale. And so the idea here is if I've given some good information and they like who I am and they think they're gonna learn from the book for $20 or so, maybe they might go pick some up. And then I get to promote the book and the podcast stays there forever and it's also on his YouTube channel as well. And so it's not a lot of work for me because it might take me 45 minutes to an hour to do the podcast. Excuse me. And for that time spent, and my other friend, he said podcast tours have really helped him push books. If you think about it, you get on a couple big podcasts, they're going to help you with book sales, right? And let's say you want to get on a bestsellers list. Right now, I'm targeting the Wall Street Journal's bestsellers. You need to get— you need about 9,000 copies or so to sell. And right now, this whole presale period leading up to February, that's when I get to have a lot of movement, right? You know, right now what I've done that's worked for me, just to give you a sense, is— so A, I think podcast tours are very valuable and a lot of other people are hearing about me now. I do have an advantage, so this is something that's hard to duplicate, but I have a lot of these relationships with people. So, George Gammon, he's got a pretty good podcast. Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street, he's got a top 100 podcast. I think both of them are top 100 for either entrepreneurship or business. Anthony Pompliano, he's got a top 100 business podcast as well. And I'm talking to a whole host of other friends. So let's say I'm able to get 10 to 15 of those, that's going to be good because they have an audience that's already built in and they might hit their email lists and they might hit their social media channels as well. And so that's good, but you're like, okay, Eric, how do I actually do that? Like you have those relationships, good for you. So what I would say is I use a tool called Mixmax and it's a sales enablement tool, just fancy word for just email sending email tool. And what I do there is I would just basically say, hey, I'll keep it very— try to keep it very short and brief, to the point. Hey, I might say, hey, are you interested in doing a podcast? Or I'll say, hey, here are some of the topics I think are relevant to your audience. And I'm not gonna try to give too much information on me. So ideally, I keep it to 2 to 3 complete sentences. Hey Eric, hey Eric, I'm just thinking out loud right now in terms of what we did. Would be keen on getting on your podcast right now. I can talk about a couple things that would be relevant to your audience. And then here's a little more info on me, right? Maybe I'll have a link to that. So that's 2 sentences right there. And I might include like maybe the last quote unquote sentence is maybe 3 or 4 bullet points on specific topics to their audience. And that way I'm at least personalizing a little bit. And if you want to personalize it one step more, I would say Mixmax actually allows you to personalize each email. And I wouldn't try to hit like thousands of people because they can tell you, they can tell when you're not personalizing. Maybe the first sentence is, Eric, really love your podcast or loved your episode about this. And you'll name what the podcast talked about. And so that's worked out pretty well. The Open rate is about 50 to 60%, and some cases 80%. And the response rate in general has averaged above 10% and somewhere above 20, sometimes above 20% or so. So in general, when you're sending out emails, if you're above 10%, you're actually in a really good spot. All right. So that's how I would do the podcast tours. I would use a tool like Chartable to check out the top charts and then look at your industry and then start to branch out from there. But you got to break out also what the numbers are, right? If you're trying to get on 100 podcasts, you got to think about what's the conversion rate going to be? What's the response What's the bounce rate gonna look like? And then from there you can back out how many podcasts you actually have to reach out to. Those are my thoughts around the podcast tour. I think it's gonna be good. And also the unintended kind of benefits from it is more people are hearing about me and they're looking at all the other stuff I do. And the ad agency that I own, Single Grain, that actually has gotten some leads as well from doing these podcast tours. So you never know what's gonna happen. What I would say is, yeah, definitely wanna take advantage of other people's audiences. If you have the relationships, now's the time to call in the favors, call in the asks. I usually don't try to ask for a lot of things, and I think that's why people have been more receptive for this. So I would say wait for your ask until something big, and then this, and then go for it. All right, that is it for today. Don't forget to hit the like and the subscribe button. It really helps us grow. Okay, wherever you're coming from. And yeah, levelingup.com, get a free chapter of the book, and we will catch you. We'll catch you later.
