Is it Too Late to Start a Podcast?

In this clip, we're going to talk about if it's too late to start a podcast. But before we do, whatever channel you're coming from, don't forget, don't forget guys to subscribe or hit the bell button if you're on YouTube or just subscribe in general to help us grow if you enjoy these clips on entrepreneurship and marketing. So let's jump into it. My name is Eric Siu and I have 2 podcasts. One is called Growth Everywhere and the other one's called Marketing School. Now the Growth Everywhere podcast, Uh, that one I've been doing for about 5 years, maybe coming up on 6 years. And then Marketing School has been 3 years. Wow. It's been quite a while. There are 700,000 podcasts right now, um, around the world in the podcast ecosystem. Just keep in mind though, there's over a billion websites out there. So a billion is 1,000 million, right? So 700,000 podcasts, it hasn't even hit a million yet. So a lot of people are like, oh my God, podcasts have become saturated. Now podcasting, I'm not gonna lie, it's not easy. The average podcast gets, I believe, maybe I think at this point 210 downloads a month or so, which is not good, right? For me, when I first started out, this was 6 years ago when I was doing the Growth Everywhere podcast. I was only getting 9 downloads a day and this was while I was trying to save my company, Single Grain. It was completely on fire. I should have not done the podcast and I started it at not a good time. I mean, it's, you know, I was only getting 9 downloads a day and I'd spend a lot of time on it, a lot of time and efforts like, oh my God, I would be writing the content, I'd be finding the guests, I'd be researching the guests. I'd be, you know, I had to get— this was a video podcast too at the time, so I had to get my hair ready. And this is while I was trying to figure out, you know, how do I save the business that I was just tasked with saving? If I had anybody else, let's say if I had a spouse or if I had like a business partner looking at it like, haha, look at that, you should probably give it up. After the first year, only $9 a day, I was spending 6 hours a week on it. Um, a lot of time. And so what's the ROI on that? Not a good return on investment. So now that podcasting is even tougher, there's even more podcasts and a lot of people, people are saying it's getting saturated. Based on those numbers, you would say probably shouldn't start a podcast, right? After the second year, I was only getting 30 downloads a day. So that's, you know, I went from 270 downloads a month to, uh, basically 900 downloads a month. Still, I was investing a lot of time and 6 hours a week. I could have spent that prospecting. I could have spent, um, trying to, you know, recruit. I could have spent trying to fix areas around the business. And after the second year, I probably should have thrown in the towel. But I didn't do that because my ROI, my investment, what I was trying to get my return was learning. So if you're doing podcasts to be famous, maybe not a good idea to do that because it's a huge time investment. But I felt like I was learning. I felt like I was getting better. The fact that I learned how to interview people better, I learned how to articulate my thoughts better, I learned how to kind of find my voice. That was worth it to me because I was playing the long game. So I think if you're going to invest in podcasting, if you want to play the long game, It's not too late to start podcasting. You know why? If you look at where the podcasting industry is, the ecosystem, a couple of years ago I think it was about $300 million or so. That was the total US podcast ecosystem. Then it jumped up to about, I believe, $481 million. Now next year, uh, in 2020, I believe it's projected to go to about $681 million. Some numbers are around those range. Now you have Spotify, who spent a couple hundred million dollars. They bought Gimlet Media, they bought Anchor, a couple of acquisitions in the podcasting space because they know podcasting is getting bigger and bigger and they can make more revenues off of that. Pandora is putting more effort into podcasting as well. You got all these other companies. Google Play is focusing its search results now. If you use Google, I believe it's Google Podcasts, in the search result pages you can actually see the episodes. Those are actually coming out. So is it too late? Well, the fact that these big tech companies are putting money, these are publicly traded companies putting more resources into podcasting and you know, the, the, the market's getting bigger and bigger. More and more Americans are listening to podcasting. That's just, that's just America. Okay. If we look at the entire world, the podcasting market in China is over $3 billion a year versus $300 million. So look at the discrepancy right there. China has it down already in terms of like consumer apps, Um, the US will eventually catch up. I'm hoping the US will catch up and the market will get bigger and bigger. So it's not too late to get started in podcasting because A, the market is growing. B, 700,000 podcasts. You just gotta make sure that you can stand out. So what can you do exactly? One option you have is going out there and interviewing people. You can interview people, you have different perspectives. Sure, you can do that, right? Problem is everybody has an interview show. How are you going to stand out? If you think you've got really good perspective, if you really think you can beat out people, in, uh, in their industry around interviewing, or maybe nobody's doing any podcasts around your industry. Let's say you're doing something on, um, I don't know, carrot juice or something. Okay, maybe you've got a niche for yourself. You should do that. Go ahead and focus on that because you're probably going to be the best. But if you're going to do another interview business show, there's already a lot out there. I mean, I have one. Okay, everybody has an interview business show out there. With the Marketing School Podcast, what we did was we only make them 5 to 10 minutes every single day, so we batch record 20 episodes at a time. And usually we'll be ahead by a month, but you have a new episode coming out every single day and we have a lot of frequency. We cover things, it's short, to the point, and it's, um, my cohost and I, Neil Patel, we just kind of go back and forth on it versus my Growth Everywhere podcast. There's a new one every week. It's about 30 to 40 minutes or so and it's an interview podcast and we take repurposed content from YouTube and then we'll put it on there too. So basically we're having a couple of new releases every single month and that's how, or yeah, a couple of new releases every single month and every single week actually as well. And that's how we're able to kind of, um, you know, maintain a good balance. So it's an interview podcast and then it's just me for a little bit. And then, uh, Marketing School is just, it's, um, myself and Neil every single day. I started Growth Everywhere 6 years ago. That's even before, um, you know, Tim Ferriss started his. And so you might say, oh, you started before everyone. That's unfair, right? You know, sure. Like we started at a good time, but what did they say? They say, well, the next best time to start something is right now. So you have an opportunity to start right now. Um, don't wait until later. If you think you've got something to say, if you think you've got good perspective, like one of my friends started a podcast. And they were just saying, oh, we only get $2,000 a month. And I said, I said, that's amazing because you just started out. It's going to take time to compound. It's like when you start a new website, it takes time to compound. When I look at this YouTube channel, it takes a long time to compound. If you stick with it, just like if you stick with the business, eventually it's going to compound. It's going to grow into something big and you're gonna be able to do really amazing things with it. So just to reiterate again, podcasting, there's only 700,000 podcasts out there, so it's still really, really early in comparison to everything else. The market is getting bigger and bigger. It's huge in China already, getting bigger and bigger in the United States. A lot of Americans, if you're in the US, have listened to a podcast. Even people around the world too. When I look at my analytics, a lot of people around the world, I got people in Japan, people in, uh, people in Europe, everywhere, people in Mexico listening, people in Brazil listening. Um, it is amazing. It's an amazing way to work with people at scale because you create one, one episode, you create more and more. It's not going to take you much more effort. You've got a system going and you're able to, you know, do really good things for the world and do really good things for yourself. All right, so I want to go a little deeper on this topic, so check this out. In this video, we're going to talk about how to get listeners for your podcast through paid advertising. A lot of people, even the 2 podcasts that I have, we've grown it mainly through organic, through our email lists, through our social channels, kind of what we have already, but there's other ways to grow it too. So we have ran paid ads in the past, so you can use Facebook, for example. And a really good example of this is Marketing in Your Car. So this is by Russell Brunson who runs a company called ClickFunnels. Here's the amazing thing about ClickFunnels. I believe they do north of $40 million a year in revenue. They have raised no venture capital at all and it's because they're really good at marketing. If you look at his podcast, it's called Marketing in Your Car. He has a podcast stick and what he does is he drives, he drove Facebook traffic to to that page. And once you got to that page, if you wanted the stick, you paid nothing for the MP3 stick, but you paid $9 for shipping and then you'd get the product. This was amazing to me because basically he was controlling the growth that way. What happened was this, for every single podcast or podcast stick that he sold, which he basically gave away for free, he was able to get 5 subscribers, right? 5 subscribers. And then people are going to rate, review. And so he was able to kind of manipulate the growth that way. He was spending about $15 per acquisition for the stick. He was actually profitable on that acquisition. So I think he was making about $32 or so. And that's the beauty of it. It's a no-brainer, right? So he's making money, he's getting more subscribers, and this isn't even factoring into his backend where he's selling $25,000 masterminds. He's selling other courses. If you can build some kind of funnel like that, which I highly, highly recommend that you look into, you're able to kind of control and manipulate your growth. There's a podcast app called Overcast. That's what I use right now. It's faster than a regular podcast app and you can actually run ads on there. You can do paid ads on Overcast. You can also do paid ads on Spotify as well, and try to look at other channels too. People are listening to Marketing School and Growth Everywhere right now through Alexa, and I suspect that we might be able to run ads in the future through Amazon's kind of paid advertising system on Alexa, for example. In this video, we're gonna give you the 2-minute guide to getting your podcast on the New and Noteworthy. All right, so let's dive in. What you have to do to get on the New and Noteworthy is you have to get as many ratings, reviews, and subscribes as possible. You gotta do that in a quick manner, right? So think about it as a PR bump. You get this really big influx first and it kind of goes down. There is a community called Podcaster's Paradise by John Lee Dumas. It's actually a podcasting course where people can help you rate, review every Friday or so and they're all helping each other out. That's a really easy way to do it. And there's other podcasting communities out there that can, where you can help rate each other. But also if you're talking about online marketing for example, or if you're talking about interior design for example, you can definitely just join a community and do that. Second is blast your email list, your social channels, et cetera. People tend to forget about the assets that they have. Your email list, social media channels. These are people that know you already, so it's in your best interest to try to get that influx going, right? You can even retarget these people by using paid advertising, or Overcast is a podcasting app that I use. You can run ads on there as well. You can also go to marketinginyourcar.com. That's from Russell Brunson, and he has an MP3 funnel that he used, and it was very strategic about how he basically, for every one person he got to buy his little MP3 podcast stick, 5 people subscribed. So you can see how it scaled really quickly that way. The other solution is to get on other podcasts as well. So get on other podcasts in your niche, in your industry, whatever. Try to get that big bump. When people are doing book launches, they get on a bunch of different podcasts. So think about how you can get on other different podcasts. And the final thing I'll say is use Libsyn. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N. That's the podcast host that I use that allows me to blast my episodes or promote my episodes to multiple channels at once, to LinkedIn, to YouTube, to SoundCloud all at the same time. And that makes my life a lot easier. Let me know if you are planning to start a podcast or what ideas you have in terms of starting a podcast in the comments below, uh, whatever platform you are coming in from. Don't forget to check out the next clip over there, uh, if you're watching on YouTube and don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell button and don't forget to rate and review and subscribe if you're coming from a different channel and we'll see you tomorrow.