The Keys to a Profitable Podcast: Niching, Formats, and Production Tactics with Hector Santiesteban

Hello, hello, hello, everyone, and welcome back to Agency Journey. My guest today on the call is Hector Santia Esteban, founder at Amplify Media. Hector, how are you doing today?

I am excited to be chatting with you on a Friday.

Oh, yes.

I couldn't think of a better way to do it.

Yes. This is basically the last thing I've got on the agenda for the week. And this is also my most favorite thing to do is to interview cool people. So I'm really glad we got to have this conversation.

This is our. Our second or third conversation recording. And I don't know if you. I've always tried to, you know, be professional and call you Yaku, but can I. Can I officially ask to call you Kuba? Are we there yet?

Yes, you can. That is actually preferred. So Kuba is okay.

You want to step on any and on any toes, so great. It's great to be with you, Kuba.

Your inner circle, Hector. No, no problem at all. Alrighty. And, you know, we can share a little bit of the context behind us maybe a little bit later in the episode. A lot of people are going to be through this episode for the first time. Watchers and listeners might be in a similar situation. There's certainly in the agency space, a lot of podcasts and, you know, we see it, I think it's often seen as a way to build new relationships, make new connections. But the snag a lot of people hit is how to actually either tie it to revenue, attribution is an issue, but also, like, how to run it. You mentioned something really interesting, like how to run it in a way that actually, I mean, being blunt makes money. Can you lift the veil on that a little bit? I know you also did some writing about that. Like, what are the techniques here?

Yeah, well, I'll start by saying that we used to focus a lot on getting more downloads, getting in the charts, getting in the rankings, these vanity kind of sexy metrics. Because, you know, early on that's what people wanted. They said, hey, we want to grow our show. And like, okay, what does that mean? We got more downloads. Okay, cool. So we're going up thousand more downloads a week. Okay. You know, we look up and we've doubled the number of downloads for a show. We've done this a number of times. And then we look at and they go, but it's not actually creating any more money. It's not actually creating any more revenue for. For, like, the business. And so we knew that there was a break, you know, there was a gap kind of missing. So that over the last, I guess four or five years that's been our mission to try to figure out what that is. And, and so that's all to say that downloads are not, they don't determine revenue. Right? I don't, I think that that's something that people have to, to throw away. I mean we have shows that have generated, it's been out for three or four months and has already generated multiple six figures in revenue and contracts. And there's only about 150 people. No, I think they, they just crossed like 500 unique listeners. But there's about 100 or 150 people listening a week. Now this industry though is in an industry, it's in the kind of cybersecurity field field. And so they're working with huge, I don't want to say huge, but, but large Fortune 1000, Fortune 5000 companies that are, are signing these, these larger contracts. But there's not, there's not a lot of those people in the country. There's maybe only a few thousand of those decision makers in the entire country. So you're not going to have a massive, you know, groundbreaking chart breaking show.

Right.

But they have enough of the right sort of people listening and their sales cycle went from, you know, they would be working people for years. Like it was like a two year sales cycle and they were, they were, we got a call because they, they were surprised or confused. They're like people just called us and, and within a couple of weeks we signed these contracts and like we don't, they said we don't know what's going on. We're like what. We know exact, like we know exactly what's going on. But it's those sorts of things where if you do it the right way, you can sort of, you know, tie it back not to a download. And it's often the challenge coming from the Internet marketing space is, is it oftentimes can't be tied to a click or there's, there's no way to trace it through the funnel like so many Internet marketers love to do where they say we click. We got them here, they went through this phase, they came to this page and site and you can really track that funnel. Unfortunately, the technology, I mean it may be getting there but, but it's just not fair to be able to do it. But also that they, the, essentially the downloads don't, they're not indicative of revenue. So that's not what we focus on. Okay, so the other side of it though is we Have, I guess, three paths that we really focus on. The first is the, well, let's just call it the sales development path. What's nice about having a podcast is it can get you in the door with people that you are very unlikely to get in your foot in the door with. I have a buddy who is a loan officer, and their entire business model is asking realtors to get coffee with them. That's their entire business model is reaching out and calling a realtor and asking, hey, do you want to get coffee? Because if we can connect over 15 minutes, I might be able to develop a relationship with you. You'll like me, and then you'll send me business because we like each other. And so they will schedule and they will drive how many coffee connections they can have in a week, because they know if they have 10 coffee dates with realtors, they're going to get two referrals from those Realtors, and they do that every single week. They know that their pipeline is going to get filled up, and that's essentially their sales process. Well, the problem with that is that who. Asking someone to get coffee with you is like, that's a, that's a very high ask. That's, I mean, like, at least for me and I'm sure for you, Kuba, you've got a, you've got a child or children. I'm not, you know, I know you've got your father. You're, you know, you have a job, you have a life, you have all these things and you just want me to. There's this random person that.

But you're talking about like a physical coffee. A physical coffee in physical space. That. Yeah, that is a, that is a hard ask.

Yeah, that's a hard ask. Right. And so, and I'm, and I'm sure a lot of these, you know, loan officers and realtors are doing these over zoom, but essentially that's what they would do is they would go and they would sit in a coffee place and they would just have people coming in, you know, and sitting down, and they'd have these coffee connections. And that's how they drive their, their, their pipeline. That's how they drive their, their leads and their referrals and such. Well, going back to the tall, ask if you can all of a sudden, instead of saying, hey, can you go to coffee if you can instead say, hey, do you want to come on my. All of a sudden? I mean, we, we've seen numbers and, and opt in rates go from something like 5% to like 70%.

Okay.

Meaning that 1 out of 20 people will go and get coffee with you, whereas 7. We found that about 70% of people, if you do the right way that you ask to come on your show, will come on your show.

Oh.

Because most of the time in these.

You'Re saying right way. So I was. Can you, can you unveil a little bit of that? Like, I assume you do a lot of pitching, right? So how. What's the secret there?

So, so back in my first, my first job out of high school, I mentioned I was in sales, and we found that, like, for me, like, it was all about numbers, right? In the sense of you can track your numbers. And, and for me, I. My daily goal was to make 32 phone calls a day because I knew if I made 32 phone calls on average, it would take about 16 phone calls to schedule an appointment. So if I made 32 phone calls a day, on average, you know, seven days a week, that means that I would have 14 appointments. If I had 14 appointments, I'd probably sell on 10 of them. If I sold on 10 of them, I would, you know, make X amount of dollars. So that was the numbers that I would be driving.

Right.

And so going back to that same thing, for someone who is in a sales sort of world, and a lot of times these kinds of things are, are commodity, they're commoditized services. Think about a, a loan officer, a realtor, a lawyer, an accountant. You know, these types of people where they are, the service is, is, Is not, is essentially the same. The differentiator is the individual, their expertise, their perspective, the cert, you know, their, like the experience, that sort of thing. The trust factor. Right. And so that's what we found is that if you can get your foot in the door with more people in those types of industries, it's likely to lead to more business because they've already have the downstream sort of process place to turn that into revenue. And so back to that example, if it took me 16 people to drive, you know, an appointment, if I had to do 16 touches or 16 actions, whatever it is, that's. I don't know what the percentage is. Right. Seven, 8%, something like that.

Yeah.

You know, whatever that may be, whatever that number is. Well, all of a sudden what we found is that when you're, are, instead of, you know, asking someone for a sales appointment, if you're asking someone, or an intro call, if you're asking someone to come on your podcast, we found the numbers to be up to 70% in terms of People that are saying yes to that. Right. And that 30% might just be because those people didn't actually see the email. So it could, you know, of the people who are actually, you know, open to it, it's actually much higher. Because when you offer, said the opportunity to come on a podcast, it's. It's much less of an ask. It's actually a give. You're giving them publicity, you're giving them, you know, potentially content, you're giving them backlinks, you're giving them all of these resources. And all someone usually has to do is just, you know, show up, maybe even not even to a physical place, but like we're doing now, they can even do it remotely.

Yeah.

It's also, that's what we found is.

You know, what I find useful when I'm a guest on podcasts is like, it's an opportunity for me to build my pov, even discover, you know, what my take is on certain things. Like, I come with certain experience, I come with a point of view on things. But then I get a question that maybe I didn't expect or didn't think deeply about before, and all of a sudden I discovered kind of more that I can give. And that is a very useful exercise. And this kind of podcast context makes it really, really rewarding to do something like that. Let me hit you with another question then, if I may. We are like, right now, we're looking at kind of the beginning of the, of this whole flow, right? You're reaching out to people. I understand that it's a much higher conversion rate to, you know, so people are more inclined to agree to be on a podcast where.

I want to make one thing clear, Kuba. This is. There's one, this is one path. There's. We found that there's like three, three distinct paths that can kind of overlap a bit.

Okay.

This is one path that we deploy for a business that is really trying to drive their pipeline.

Okay.

So that's because when you do that, then it's directly traceable to revenue. Because it's. You met this person on the podcast, you had a follow up call with them, they signed the contract. There's the, there's the revenue right there. Right. It's like you can directly trace, oh, I reached out to this person who I would have otherwise not had a connection to. We put them through our sales process, they converted. Now there's trackable revenue. It's not through clicks or it's not through, you know, like that sort of thing. But, but at Least you can trace the revenue.

So. And I wanted to focus, kind of stay still within the first path. Eager to hear about the other two as well. I feel like, at least in my experience, I've done a few of these. Right. I think I might have done personally, like over 50 episodes right now, or maybe closer to 100 right now. The part that I hit a snag on is usually we stop recording and there's a time to have a, you know, a conversation kind of off the back of it, feeling good about what we recorded. And that's usually where, you know, you, you, you. You're talking about putting people in the sales process. But I wanted to get some more detail on that. Like, is the, Is there a trick, an art to this where, you know, you actually manage to get from a conversation that's like purely giving them value, getting, you know, featuring them on your platform, on your show to gently leading them towards, you know, kind of the benefits of what you offer, like, you know, trying to, to actually get them, well, bluntly in the pipeline. Like, what have you found works here?

Yeah. I have to give credit to one of our, our former partners, Lupus Capistani, because this is his genius. But in that exact thing that you're talking about, we just get people to opt into a training or opt into our funnel, and all we do is we say, I don't know if it would be helpful, but we've got this thing. It's a free training, it's a PDF, it's a, A walkthrough, it's a demo, it's whatever your lead magnet is, it's a scorecard, it's a whatever. I don't know if it'd be helpful, but we have this thing. You obviously are in the, in the market. Who would benefit from it? And here's what it does. Would, does that, like, would you want to hop on that call? Should I send it over? Would it be helpful for me to send it over? Would you. You know, like, and that sort of small little thing, because you don't. What we, what we don't want to do is we don't want it to be a bait and switch. We don't want it to be a, like a timeshare sort of thing.

Right?

So, so that's why we're now. It's the opportunity to just present value and then the, the sales conversation, the sales. Something happens in a, in a different segment. Even if that segment is, well, hey, do you have 15 minutes right now to just like, stick around and I can just demo this thing for you. Yeah, it could be as simple as that. But now it's a different. It's a different part than the recording, right? Because, you know, you've transitioned. So that's what we found is at the end to have something helpful and just to. In the same way that you would have a landing page and have someone opt in, you just had verbally have them opt in. And then you work the sales cycle or the spam funnel, just as you normally would.

That's interesting. So basically, within this model, kind of the giving continues. You're positioning it as, you know, something of value, like an individual training or potentially something.

Remember, for these types of people, trust is so important, right? Trust is really, especially in the agency space. That's what I think most clients are buying, is trust. And so I had a client tell me recently. They're like, I just, I love. I think they said love. Like, I don't know what they said. Like, I, I love knowing that I have a guy like, that I've got a guy for my podcast, right? That like, they've just, they, they feel that they can trust. They're like, I don't know how it happens, I don't care how it happens, but there's a trust there that it's going to happen. And trust is only built through time. It's very hard to build trust through any other mode. Of my first, my first job out of high school, I mentioned I was in sales, and we found that, like, for me, like, it was all about numbers, right? In the sense of you can track your numbers. And, and for me, my daily goal was to make 32 phone calls a day because I knew if I made 32 phone calls on average, it would take about 16 phone calls to schedule an appointment. So if I made 32 phone calls a day, on average, you know, seven days a week, that means that I would have 14 appointments. If I had 14 appointments, I'd probably sell on 10 of them. If I sold on 10 of them, I would, you know, make X amount of dollars. So that was the numbers that I would be driving, right? And so going back to that same thing for someone who is in a sales sort of world. And a lot of times these kinds of things are commodity. They're commoditized services. Think about a, a loan officer, a realtor, a lawyer, an accountant. You know, these types of people, where they are, the service is, is. Is not. Is essentially the same. The differentiator is the individual, their expertise, their perspective, the cert you know, their, like the experience, that sort of thing. The trust factor. Right. And so that's what we found is that if you can get your foot in the door with more people in those types of industries, it's likely to lead to more business because they've already have the downstream sort of process place to turn that into revenue. And so back to that example, if it took me 16 people to drive, you know, an appointment, if I had to do 16 touches or 16 actions, whatever it is, that's. I don't know what the percentage is. Right. Seven, 8%, something like that.

Yeah.

You know, whatever that may be, whatever that number is. Well, all of a sudden what we found is that when you're our. Instead of, you know, asking someone for a sales appointment, if you're asking someone, or an intro call, if you're asking someone to come on your podcast, we found the numbers to be up to 70% in terms of people that are saying yes to that. Right. And that 30% might just be because those people didn't actually see the email. So it could, you know, of the people who are actually, you know, open to it, it's actually much higher. Because when you offer, said the opportunity to come on a podcast, it's. It's much less of an ass. It's actually a give. You're giving them publicity, you're giving them, you know, potentially, you're giving them backlinks, you're giving them all of these resources. And all someone usually has to do is just, you know, show up, maybe even not even to a physical place, but like we're doing now, they can even do it remotely. Yeah, it's also, that's what we found.

Is, you know, what I find useful when I'm a guest on podcast is like, it's an opportunity for me to build my pov, even discover, you know, what my take is on certain things. Like, I come with certain experience, I come with a point of view on things. But then I get a question that maybe I didn't expect or didn't think deeply about before. And all of a sudden I discovered, you know, kind of more that I can give. And that is very. A very useful exercise. And this kind of podcast context makes it really, really rewarding to do something like that. Let me hit you with another question then, if I may. We are, like, right now, we're looking at kind of the beginning of the, of this whole flow. Right. You're reaching out to people. I understand that it's a much higher conversion rate to, you know, some People are more inclined to agree to be on the podcast.

Where I want to make one thing clear. Kuba. This is. There's what? This is one path. There's. We found that there's like three, three distinct paths that can kind of overlap a bit. But this is one path that we deploy for a business that is really trying to drive their pipeline.

Okay.

So that's because when you do that, then it's directly traceable to revenue. Because it's. You met this person on the podcast, you had a follow up call with them, they signed the contract. There's the, there's the revenue right there. Right. It's like you can directly trace. Oh, I reached out to this person who I would have otherwise not had a connection to. We put them through our sales process, they converted. Now there's trackable revenue. It's not through clicks or it's not through, you know, like that sort of thing. But, but at least you can trace the revenue.

So. And I wanted to focus and kind of stay still within the first path. Eager to hear about the other two as well. I feel like, at least in my experience, I've done a few of these. Right. I think I might have done personally like over 50 episodes right now, or maybe closer to 100 right now. The part that I hit a snag on is usually we stop recording and there's a time to have a, you know, a conversation kind of off the back of it, feeling good about what we recorded. And that's usually where, you know, you're talking about putting people in the sales process. But I wanted to get some more detail on that. Like, is there a trick, an art to this where, you know, you actually manage to get from a conversation that's like purely giving them value, getting, you know, featuring them on your platform, on your show, to gently leading them towards, you know, kind of the benefits of what you offer, like trying to actually get them, well, bluntly in the pipeline. Like, what have you found works here?

Yeah. I have to give credit to one of our former partners, Lupus Capistani, because this is his genius. But in that exact thing that you're talking about, we just get people to opt into a training or opt into our funnel. And all we do is we say, I don't know if it would be helpful, but we've got this thing. It's a free training, it's a PDF, it's a, a walkthrough, it's a demo, it's whatever your lead magnet is, it's a scorecard. It's a, whatever. I don't know if it'd be helpful, but we have this thing. You obviously are in the, in the market. Who would benefit from it? And here's what it does. Would, does that like, would you want to hop on that call? Should I send it over? Would it be helpful for me to send it over? Would you, you know, like, and, and that sort of small little thing? Because you don't, what we, what we don't want to do is we don't want it to be a bait and switch. We don't want it to be a, like a timeshare sort of thing.

Right.

So, so that's why we're now, it's the opportunity to just present value and then the, the sales conversation, the sales. Something happens in a, in a different segment. Even if that segment is, well, hey, do you have 15 minutes right now to just like stick around and I can just demo this thing for you? Yeah, it could be as simple as that. But now it's a different, it's a different part than the recording.

Right?

Because you know, you've transitioned. So that's what we found is at the end to have something helpful and just to, in the same way that you would have a landing page and have someone opt in, you just had verbally have them opt in and then you work the sales cycle or the sale funnel just as you normally would.

That's interesting. So basically within this model, kind of the giving continues. You're positioning it as, you know, something of value, like an individual training or potentially something.

Remember, for these types of people, trust is so important.

Right? Right.

Trust is, is, is really. And especially in the agency space, that's what I think most clients are buying is, is trust. And so, you know, the, the, the I had a client tell me recently, they're like, I just, I love, I think they said love. Like, I don't know, they said like, I, I, I, I love knowing that I have a guy like, that I've got a guy for my podcast, right? That like, they just, they, they feel that they can trust. They're like, I don't know how it happens, I don't care how it happens, but there's a trust there that it's going to happen. And trust is only built through time. It's very hard to build trust through any other mode of, of than time. And that's what's great about having a podcast because people can listen to it, obviously. But yeah, if you can continue to give value by the end of it, they're like, a lot of times they're like, how. So what do you do? Okay, how do like, you know, like, there's so often where that conversation, when you have that, it turns into. So, like, tell me what you do. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten to the end of a recording. And if you do it sort of the right way, they ask that question on their own. And, and then it gives you the opportunity to, you know, go into whatever pitch that you, that you have.

Right, right. Okay. So multiple threads to pull on here. But you left this kind of unclosed loop in my mind where you said, there's three paths from podcast to revenue. Let's explore the other two before I pull on anything else.

So the quick one is just content. Right? That's the third path. Because if people have social platforms or a website SEO strategy that they want to drive, it's the best thing for that because you can repurpose it. It's Instagram, it's TikTok, it's YouTube, Re, you know, shorts. And then what's nice about it is you've also got the, the SEO content because now you can take the podcast, you've got the YouTube video you make, you put it on your blog, you've got chat GPT, you write a little, you know, blog post underneath it, and it feeds that engine so that, that if people have those systems already in place, so they're already leveraging it, it's great because now you've got real source content where, as opposed to most SEO, you know, people are just pulling stuff out of their butt. Right. Because they're trying to make stuff up.

And about SEO, actually, have you found it relatively easy or relatively hard, or does it depend on the structure of the episode to turn podcasts into SEO? Let me tell you about my experience. What I found often, and maybe this is down to the way I interview people, is we touch upon, you know, we start a podcast and we touch upon, like two, three, maybe four kind of topics within that podcast. So we talk a little bit about business development here, we talk about personal branding here, and we talk about writing as kind of our third thing. Right. So this one conversation doesn't easily map to any single SEO keyword. So then. And again, this might come down to the structure of the show, but what have you found to be the easy, the difficult part or the trick in terms of turning that into SEO content?

Yeah, so the, the, the suggestion that comes to minors when I, when I hear that, I'm like, okay, that's, that's multiple different posts. Because the, the easy, simple thing is you just take your show notes, your podcast, your YouTube player. Boom, that's the blog post on its own. And just by feeding your, your domain with more, just more pages. I mean, I'm no SEO expert, but it can just do it in that regard. The second thing, when you're talking about, in terms of formatting it for SEO content, I think what's also helpful is taking those individual subtopics and making those individual posts for your blog. Right. To feed the SEO, and we've, you know, we rely heavily on AI and, and, you know, chat GPT and things like that because we'll take the transcript, we'll feed it into chat GPT, we'll. And then, you know, we'll. We'll kind of massage it a lot. It's not like we're just taking first things out, but we really use ChatGPT to extract and create those sorts of, you know, drafts for those individual articles. So I think those four subtopics are their own article. And then you can take, you know, you can create the clip from the video, put that on the page, and it all kind of juices itself together. So I think that it takes a little more time, but if you're willing to split it, that episode into multiple posts, you've got, you've got a breadth of content there.

Okay, so, so how I'm understanding what you called, I think the third path is all the different opportunities you get to repurpose the podcast content, turn it into. Into SEO content, more traffic, traffic converts, and thus revenue. Right. So is there a second path in between or where does that go?

The second one is thought leadership.

Okay, Right.

This one is a little bit different of a, It's a little bit longer of a play. But the difference is instead of getting our. Using the show to directly drive our pipeline or our sales funnel, we're using the show to get in front of businesses, organizations, associations of people that we would otherwise not be able to get in front of, to get on stages, to get on shows. Right? To get in front of, you know, you use it to all of a sudden become the, the person in an industry. I'll give you an example. We have a show that is a biotech podcast, and they are, they're actually a marketing agency for biotech companies. So they started a show about the biotech industry, and they highlight different companies that are doing cool things in that space. It's actually not really a marketing show. They're Just talking about the cool things that. That are happening in the space. It's really. For people in that industry.

Okay.

So when they go to these conferences or they go to these events, it's not like they're getting mobbed, but, like, almost in the sense that people are coming up to them and they're like, oh, my goodness. I. You're the person from this show, right? Like, you're. You're the host to grow everything. You're that, like. And they're getting. They're like, can I take pictures? With, like, people are coming up to them as if they're kind of these mini celebrities. And I was on a call with them the other week, and they're like, we were so busy at the event that, like, we didn't have any time to. To do it because, like, people wanted to book meetings with us. People like, they were. They were like a celebrity of. Of the event because the. The industry is not. It's not huge, it's not small, but. But, you know, there's a. There's a.

Not.

There's not a lot of people who are creating content and media in that way. And so all of a sudden, they've used that to speak on stages. They've used that to, you know, they've gotten different partnerships with other companies. You know, another example that comes to mind is that we. We had a pharmacist who. He was a. He was a pharmacist coach. He was also a pharmacist, but he. He was basically a coach for other pharmacists. Interesting.

Okay.

We started the. We started the show and what they're called, buyer's organizations, but basically all these pharmacists, like, form coalitions against the insurance companies or the pharmaceutical companies to get better rates or whatever. So it's. It's. There's these. These associations of thousands of pharmacists that, you know, reached out to him and they were like, hey, we're doing this training for our people. We saw you have a show that is talking exactly about what our training needs to be on. Can we pay you all this money to do the training?

Yeah.

And I. And what the cool thing is, we were only like 12 episodes in. And so in. In these. A lot of people think that, like, things are saturated and, like, there's a lot of podcasts and yada, yada, and you can look at the stats and. Are there a lot of podcasts? Sure. You know, but what I would say is there's. If someone asked me this other day, they're like, is it, is it too late for me to, to get started? And I, I responded that if you are just coming in and creating a general business show or a general entrepreneurship or a general marketing or a general, you know, whatever fitness, like, pick it and you name it and you want to go really broad, I think that it's not too late. But that's much more difficult than if you come in and you say, I serve this industry. Here are the people, or here's the ways in which I serve this industry, and here's the types of people in the industry that I serve. Well, now all of a sudden it opens up the opportunity for you to partner and collaborate with everybody else who serves people or different, in a different capacity or serves different people in that industry.

Okay.

And so when, when you really, you know, you hear it all the time, it's cliche when you niche down, but when, when you do that, it opens up opportunities and, and all of a sudden in a, in a very, you know, in just a few months, you can be like the person in an industry.

So I would love to dig a little bit deeper here. You mentioned shows, like you said, in kind of niche spaces and biotech. I'm thinking of somebody listening to this who's looking at their business and they're thinking, okay, I mean, we're a marketing agency and we don't do anything groundbreaking in terms of like the range of services. We do SEO here, content here, maybe some performance, maybe some, some brand. It's not, you know, that differentiated yet. And worst of all, we also are not yet specialized in terms of the niche that we serve. Some people are going to admit in front of themselves and in front of the world, there are other agencies like us. There isn't still this unique thing. Is there still a way to have a unique show though, and to be able to break through even though other marketing agencies are running their shows themselves? Like, what would your advice be here?

My advice would be to still just pick like a niche. Like, we looked at our. When we were trying to figure out how to, how to, you know, grow our business development side, we were, we looked at who is our best customers because we realized that we had some, like, we were getting clients, but then some of them were churning. Some of them were problem cases. And we're like, who are best customers? Who are the best ones? They stick around forever. No head, no headaches. Like, they're just, they're easy. They like us. We love them. Like, who are those? And we started to look at, like, we started to realize like they fit this group of people. And so we said, okay, let's just start there. Let's, let's pick there. And, and, and so we dove into that and we just made that our niche because we're like, this is who we want to work with. So we're just going to go. And with media, we just said, what do they want to hear? What are they, what are they interested in? If I can just, and if I don't have those answers myself, I can go find those answers. I can go interview people who do have those answers. And so that's what, that's what I would say. You know, when I think about the classic example is Hormozi. Right? I mean everybody kind of has seen, you know, Alex Hormozi these days, but his, the name of his podcast at the beginning was like Gym Launch Secrets or something like that. Like it would just. And then he just changed it to. He just changed it.

Right.

And nothing happened. Like literally nothing. Nothing changed. And that's what's nice about a podcast specifically is you can do however many episodes that you want and whenever that you want to change it, you can change the name and you can change the picture and you can change everything. You keep everything else the same and nothing changes.

Right.

So you just want to pick a new niche. Just pick a new niche. Yeah.

You gradually expand within the same show. I remember.

Yeah, well that's a good point too, to like niche and then expand. Right. I think that's something that, that you can do as well. Which is another good, good idea.

I was meaning to mention that I remember from our spin off podcast agency Breakthrough, I had a chance to co interview with Graham McKenzie. Our guest was James Carberry from Sweet Fish Media. And he also mentioned that like initially his show Interview Based was all about inviting sales leaders. And only after like I think he mentioned like over 100 episodes, he realized they should be inviting over marketing leaders instead. And speaking of James Carbury, what he's been putting out on LinkedIn and what I wanted to confront with you is a new narrative where, you know, he used to do, and Sweetfish used to do a lot of interview based shows. Right. So I want to talk with you about four masses for a second. What is your take on interview based shows versus like one popular format that's been kind of on the rise is like co host commentary. You don't have a guest on each show, but you kind of build up the personality of the, you know, of the hosts a little bit more like Are you seeing a trend here? Are you seeing, you know, what works in certain situations? I would love to know more about that.

Yeah, the, the, obviously the e. I don't want to say the easy, but a simple way to grow your show is to bring on guests and leverage their promotion to grow your show. And that's obviously why a lot of people lean. Lean on that. The challenge with that is that if you only bring on guests and you only conduct interviews, and I specifically say interviews specific, like I use that word specifically, then the problem is, is that you give all that sales equity to your guests. You know, I had someone tell me the other day, they're like, I used to interview people all the time. And then all my audience would come and sign up for my guest lead magnet. They would sign up for my guest offer, but no one was coming to me. And I told her it's because you're. You're. Have. You're doing interviews, you're not having a conversation, because if you're conducting an interview, all of a sudden it subconsciously positions the guest as the expert. And if the guest is the expert, then by default, the host is. Is something else. Kind of a student. Right, Right, right. Which is, which is fine if that's your Persona. Because there are times where, like there are some shows that I host where I, My, my intro says I come with no answers. Like, I am only here to ask questions because my role is to be kind of alongside the listener, not in front of them in any sort of way. Right. Now, if you're listening to this show, it's because you want to gut. You're. You're the guide. You're not, you're not in the same seat as, as your client or your, or your listener, or you're the other, you know, as your client. You're. You're coming at them to, to lead them in some sort of way. Right? And so if you're going to do that, what we tell them to do is to instead have conversations. And you do a great job of this, where you inject, you know, your perspective and your opinion, and you, you just add to the conversation as opposed to a lot of newer hosts. And this sometimes comes from nerves and anxiety and things like that, but they just feel the need to ask a question.

Right?

And you don't, you don't always have to do that. You can interject and you can add your perspective, and in the same way that you, playing tennis, you just, you volley it back to, you know, the other person. And by the by Thus you still get, you know, to keep what we call the sales equity.

So right now, if you were starting a new show for a typical client, would you steer them? You're probably going to answer it depends. But then I want to know what it depends on. Would you steer them in the direction of a co hosted show, more of pick two big brains from your company and comment on the newest events or would you still go in the direction of guest based? Is it a mix? What would you recommend?

I would say yes and all because I think yeah, if a client is willing to do the solo sort of episodes, 10 to 15 minutes where they just share their expertise or give some commentary, news updates like, you know, current events, that sort of thing, I think that is the, that's the best way to establish that sales equity because it's just you and the listener and they're listening to you for 15 minutes, just you and you can build more sales equity in those 15 minutes than you would get doing an interview for an hour and a half with a guest. Right now what we've seen really work though specifically with that cybersecurity company is they have the cast of founders on. Sometimes it's two of the founders, sometimes it's the founder and a guest, sometimes. But it's a good mix of all of that. So that way we're still able to leverage the networks of the guests for the promotion, but we also mix in quite a few of just two of the founders and they're able to build that sales equity in the company all on their own. And so we, if we call it like a cast because I think of pod, you know, I think of all this like media and like, you know, my, my idol is Walt Disney and Ted Turner and so I'm, you know, like, like a cast of characters is what we always would, would that would be ideal because it gives the listener the opportunity to connect with whoever they relate to most. And that's, that's sometimes challenging with just one person.

Yeah, that's a really cool takeaway. I haven't thought about it this way of, of like a cast. And what I'm getting from you is a bit of more of a loose and flexible approach. Like if something makes sense to discuss on a solo episode, let's do a solo episode. If it makes sense to bring on a guest, let's bring on a guest. That makes perfect sense to me. So look, I'm thinking like in terms of how much time we also have here for today, I wanted to ask you a general question and One where I'm really curious where you're going to go with this, because obviously this topic is really broad. There's a lot of details to dig into here. So let me try and cut to the chase, right, with the podcasts that you see right now kind of, that are around there, especially in this niche of the B2B space, the agency space, what is something that you typically see that's like, common mistake, something that these, that you just wish these podcasts would stop doing, either in terms of the content or, you know, the technical aspects of it or the promotion. Like, what is the, the pitfall that you see people fall into time and again?

Yeah, well, the big thing is that interview conversation thing. I mean, most. That's such a nuanced sort of thing. There's so like, I don't even approach that with a, with a client until they're 25, 30 episodes in because so much of it is just getting past the nerves of being on camera and what do I say? And, you know, like, I don't know, sorry. But like that, that, that sort of thing. So, so that conversation is first. The second thing is that if, if someone is bringing on guests, the next step is to like, really create what we call, like a great guest experience. And, and I've been, I've made the mistake of not doing that, of, of just bringing someone on, interviewing them, great buying and like, not even telling them when their episodes live just because I'm, I'm so busy and doing whatever I'm doing, and I'm just so caught up. And, and, and really, you know, you raise your eyebrows because it's like, you see the value of it. Like, you, you know that there's value in there. And for me, it was so early in our process, we were trying to figure out what things moved the needle, what things didn't, you know, what things matter and what things, you know, perhaps. Perhaps did it. We realized that, that, that was huge because one of the big things, if you're gonna bring on guests, well, they've, they've got to share it or else it doesn't really work. So so much of it was like, how do we get our guests to share? And it's like, well, if we. Let's just go on that spectrum, right? Like, okay, let's start there and start figuring stuff out. So we, we make it really easy for them to, to share. We write sample, you know, posts for them where they can copy and paste. We provide all, like, the media and assets on a nice notion page that they can just download and you know, from. Because a lot of people will just send a Google Drive link.

Yeah.

And that does not work. We found that that just it's. Or some people will go through it. But Google Drive is such a pain in the butt to like, there's just so many steps, it seems you got to click here, there, download, like. And for some reason we put it all in one sort of promo. We call it a promo page. And that seems to, you know, people really respond to that and they actually share it because it's easy and it's accessible.

Yeah, I think it's a huge opportunity for people to be more proactive and take kind of more response. I think I might have done personally, like over 50 episodes right now, or maybe closer to 100 right now. The part that I hit a snag on is usually we stop recording and there's a time to have a, you know, a conversation kind of off the back of it, feeling good about what we recorded. And that's usually where, you know, you're talking about putting people in the sales process. But I wanted to get some more detail on that. Like, is there a trick, an art to this where, you know, you actually manage to get from a conversation that's like purely giving them value, getting, you know, featuring them on your platform, on your show, to gently leading them towards, you know, kind of the benefits of what you offer, like trying to. To actually get them stability. Because I've also fallen in this mental trap of, okay, I sent the clips and they didn't post them. I guess they're not a very engaged guest or, you know, they don't. They don't really care that much. But the reality of it is, you know, if you make it easier for them, then the proportion of people who actually do share raises, you know, rises dramatically. And it is on you. It kind of is. Is within your control here as well. I wanted to add on top of that, a little tactical thing kind of my finding. And this goes into larger content strategy even beyond podcasting. But here's something that I would recommend to anybody listening to this. Like, you're talking about the guest experience, Right. One thing that I found in the past to be difficult to untangle is like, okay, I've had somebody on my show once, what do I do now to kind of re. Engage them, to keep this as a long term relationship? Maybe there isn't something to collaborate on right now, but I want to kind of keep them in the loop. What I found is great, is kind of to Move them from a podcasting strategy to like an event strategy afterwards. So recently for Zenpilot, for example, and this is on our YouTube channel right now, if you want to see it, I invited a few of our past podcast guests in the agency space and I ran an event with them called the AI in Agency Operations Roundtable, bluntly in the pipeline. Like, what have you found works here?

Yeah, I have to give credit to.

And basically told them, okay, you're getting a 13 minute speaker slot. It's not an interview. You get to present what you want. I know you've got great insights. Kind of come again to our platform in a different way for a different topic. And it was a big success on our end. So, like, just wanted to add that in, in case, like, because it really meshes with what you were talking about here today. As you know, it's one of my favorite tactics, like, people should be doing that more. And if I was on a. If somebody's listening to this and I was on your podcast and you're running an event, I want to speak. Reach out to me. Okay, that's my plug. Speaking of plugs here, Hector, I wanted to ask you because we're kind of reaching the end of our time here, unfortunately, could you tell the watchers and listeners where they can learn more from you, follow you and kind of see your work?

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Hector Santia Steban. I'm not the doctor. So that there's not. There's another Hector Santia step on who's a doctor? Yeah, he's an md and he, that's why he wins in Search Google Search, because he has all these MD pages and it kills me. I'm not the doctor. On Instagram. You can find me at Hector Underscore podcast that has all my. And then on both of those, there's a link in there where you can see all my shows. And also there's a bunch of resources on there for wherever you're at, in, in your podcasting journey. And if anybody wants to hop on what we call a, a podcast profitability session, I'm happy to. To hop on. Just because so many people, they don't, they don't have that blueprint to, to know, you know, they've got a show or they have a show idea, but they're like, I, I need to make this make sense or else.

Right.

I can't do it. It's gotta, it's gotta have a return to my business or else it's not worth the time. And so we really help to map that out so that way they can go do that or obviously we can, you know, help and support with them as well.

Podcast profitability session. I really love the branding on that. Well done. Kudos. Okay, awesome. So I'll leave the links, the relevant links in the show notes, of course, for our watchers and listeners and you can go there to learn more from Hector or work with him and his team in terms of agency journey. Don't forget to follow us, don't forget to rate us on the relevant platforms. All the links are going to be in the, in the description as well. Don't forget to subscribe to ZenPilot on YouTube as well because we'll be dropping more episodes there and ClickUp tutorials and agency operations, webinar recordings and a bunch of other stuff. We tried to be generous with our content there today. That's it for our time here today. Unfortunately, Hector, really nice conversation. Learned a lot from it. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yeah, it was great being here. Thanks, Kuba.

Thanks. Yeah. And to you watchers and listeners. Bye bye. And we'll see you in the next one.