Therapy Sessions 👥 The Massive Podcast Wave That's Coming

Boom, boom, boom.

Boom, boom. What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Float Shark podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. Good morning, Joe.

It's not morning, sir. Oh.

It's two in the afternoon. This day is going by very fast.

Feels like the morning my head's not on.

All right, I'm awake now.

You're awake now? Yeah. So who do we have on the show today?

We have me today.

I'm interviewing Joe Fear.

Oh. It's just the two of us just.

Making castles in the sky.

Yeah.

We've never made that joke before.

We haven't? I'm surprised, actually.

I'm pretty sure we have.

We probably have. I'm sure someone will correct us. We need, like, one of those Conan o' Brien fact checks at the end.

I know.

Armchair expert.

Yeah, Armchair expert.

That's what it is. Not Conan.

I was thinking about doing that, in fact, when we did a. We recorded a few episodes last week on our botch. Botch. No. Batch recording day. We have had botched recording days, but no. Yes, last week. Usually batch recording day.

Usually the botched recordings would just put them out there anyway. Screw it.

That's true. That's true. But we had our batch recording day and there was, like, a few things mentioned throughout the day. That thought crossed my mind that I was like, we should really have, like, a little fact check section at the end of the episode because we had one guest on that mentioned. Like, you. Yeah. Reddit is like the number 7th most downloaded or most visited site on the Internet or something like that. Right. And I actually was like, I'm curious about this. So I actually went and looked it up, and based on what data you pull from it ranked anywhere from, like, 7th to, like, 15th most visited website on the Internet. I was like, it would be kind of cool to have like, a little, like, at the end. Here's some of the stuff we mentioned, but might have gotten wrong and then.

Shared the facts, but could come in handy.

It could. I just. I don't think we're going to do it.

I don't think we need to do a lot of extra effort. And let's be honest, if we're closing enough, it's probably good enough for everybody.

Well, part of why we do podcasting and this is gonna actually be what we talk about today. Part of why we do podcasting is we've got this system dialed in that is just, like, so simple and so duplicatable, and we work on our podcast two days a month. I can't really say we don't think about our podcast more than two days a month. I think we think about it and try to grow it and try to promote it and stuff like that pretty much every single day. But as far as the actual technical doing of the podcast, it's only two days a month.

Focus ye. And that is what we're gonna talk about today.

And if we did the fact check thing, which I do think is a cool concept that actually just adds complication to our system, which is why you're probably not gonna see it, at least not for a while.

Unless someone just wants to do that on our behalf and send it our way, then we're more unhappy than include that in our companions or something like that. Yeah. Or in the. Probably not in the recordings, but. All right, moving on.

We could make little mini Hustle and Flow Shorts where we're like, hey, fact checking some of our episodes.

And that's a good little time for a shout, by the way, because we haven't really been talking about that Hustle and Flow Shorts show too often. We have like a total spin off short mini clip version of this longer form show. So Hustle and Flow Chart is basically chopped into like these bite sized chunks that you can find at a whole separate podcast on itunes or Stitcher or Spotify, wherever the hell you're at, called Hustle and Flow shorts.

And actually hustleandflow shorts.com is a thing now.

Oh, is it? I didn't know that.

Yeah. So if you go to hustleandflowshorts.com here, I'll actually.

My computer just sleep as his computer just went to sleep.

I didn't time that well. Yeah, but Hustle and Flow Shorts, it's like the thing that I like about Hustle and Flow Shorts is you get like little bite sized chunks of our show. Right. They're like 10 to 15 minute clips for those who just won't listen to the longer form episodes. But what I also really like about it is that it kind of goes back into our archives from time to time and, and pulls out stuff that is like really killer content and still very, very relevant. But because it was like an older episode, some of our newer audience members may not have heard some of this stuff yet.

True.

Like I really, really like some of the stuff that we talked with like Billie Jean about, for instance. But I feel like we kind of had Billie Jean on in an early portion of our show before we had as many listeners as we do now. And that show and some of his like, amazing content got buried. And I could say that for so many other people like David Allen and Mike Michalowicz and, and some of these other like guys that just everybody. Phenomenal content early on.

Yeah.

Anybody we had up like prior to, you know, six months ago or something, the episodes start to get kind of buried and you're really only paying attention to the newer stuff. And that Hustle and Flow shorts show helps us like bring stuff back to the surface that may have actually gotten lost a little bit in all the mix of things.

True dat. So, yeah, that show is amazing. And we're going to talk about why or how we maybe we'll touch on how we do that one. But yeah, the show is like a standalone show. It's actually run by Steven on our team, so we're actually not even involved in it. It's like basically a content repurposing play.

But obviously that came from our work here on this show, which we were going to talk about. Well, okay, so the reason we're going to focus on podcasting today, you hear us mention it pretty often, but in about, what, July? We don't have a date yet, but in July we're going to have a virtual summit around podcast podcasting, but mainly on some interesting ways on how to grow podcasting or grow your podcast or even if you want to leverage podcasting, it'd be good to learn about if you just want to go on other people's shows or however you want to deal with podcasting in your business and life, but also how to make money with podcasting in interesting ways. And not the standard I need to have sponsorship approach. There's so many ways and I think that's like a big mission of yours and I is that like, let's smash this whole concept that you need to have a crap ton of listeners to actually make money with your podcast. Yeah, that's not true.

Yeah, I mean, the working title of the summit is the Pod Hacker Summit. Just because we're going to be talking about these like, unconventional things like you were talking about. But yeah, I think that is the biggest thing. I think so many people avoid podcasts because a, they think they're too complex, too complicated to run. Like I mentioned, we focus on actually running the podcast two days a month. That's it. And those are just us recording. We'll get into some of our systems around it a little bit. In fact, one of our first podcasts ever, like episode one or two was actually about our system for podcasting, but that was two and a half years ago now. So some things have evolved a little bit. So we thought it was a good time for us.

We're still batching then?

We're still batching it. Yeah. I mean, some of the systems have changed. Some of them are still the same. So we'll talk about that and how things have evolved a little bit. But I think most people, they think podcasts are really hard to run. They're really time consuming. It's something that they have to, like, put a lot of focus on and.

You can't make money with them.

And I think people think they're hard to monetize. We thought they were hard to monetize. We've had multiple podcasts before this one that we never quite got that element dialed in. Never totally figure that out. And I think those are really two roadblocks that people have.

Yeah.

And then from the opposite perspective, being on podcasts, once you hear some of the stuff we're going to talk about around podcasting, you're going to see how powerful it is to actually be a guest on a lot of podcasts as well. Because on both ends, whether you're interested in starting a podcast or whether you're just interested in being on more podcasts, it is a growing, growing.

It's a hugely growing medium.

Medium. So I think that's probably a good place to start on our little podcasting rabbit hole here. Let's talk about some of the crazy shit that's been happening in the podcasting world and some of the data and some of the stats and some of the stuff that like. So you and I, we're very immersed in the podcasting world. Right. We're in like Reddit, following, like all the latest on podcasting. We're subscribed to a newsletter called podnews.net if you're interested in podcasting, definitely recommend subscribers.

It's a good one. Daily email.

It's a daily email that kind of gives you news that's going on in the podcasting world.

Chartable, gives you good info too. They have an email, but they also have a good blog with a lot of content on there with the latest stats and trends. There are a lot more data driven, which is really cool.

But between these resources, we're very, very in the loop. And I'm kind of making the point that you don't necessarily have to be super in the loop on everything that's going on in podcasting. We're just super in the loop on everything, which seeing all the data and information that's Flowing our way every day around podcasting. We just get more and more and more bullish every single time we talk about podcasting. So I thought it'd be kind of cool to let's chat about some of that shit that we're seeing right now in the podcasting world.

It's also, selfishly, this is a preparation, not like this is a presentation, but in a few days, we're actually going to Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills Rodeo Drive.

Rolling down Rodeo with the shotgun.

No.

Yeah. Roland Frazier invited us to speak at War Room on this exact topic. And how we basically have kind of taken a completely different approach from typical podcasters, and he kind of dubbed us podcast marketers. That's how Sami was getting. Introducing us to folks that way. And that got us to think we're like, yeah, this is a totally different perspective and way of approaching this medium of podcasting, because you could definitely go about it all different ways. But this is our method, and it seems to be working out all right, and it's highly leveraged.

Yeah.

Profitable.

So some of the things that have been kind of like writing on the wall, in my opinion. I'm not going to get into numbers yet, but, like, one of the, like, sort of, like, events that have been sort of milestones in the podcasting world, not too long ago, they started kind of making jokes on, like, Saturday Night Live about podcasters. They did, like, a mock podcast award ceremony where they, like, awarded people from, like, the show serial and stuff. And they made fun of podcasting. There was a show called Alex Inc. Which I think only made it one season, but it was based on. Yeah, yeah, maybe like a year ago, year and a half ago. And it was based on the podcast startup by Gimlet Media, which. We'll talk more about Gimlet in a minute here. But so there was actually a TV show around a guy who was trying to get, like, a podcast company off the ground, and that kind of was a little bit more of a catalyst to make it more mainstream. I think the original thing that sort of made podcasting really mainstream was the serial podcast.

That was a huge part.

I feel like when that podcast came out, so many people went, ooh, this is really interesting. And people started to learn about, like, oh, you can binge podcasts like, you binge Netflix.

That seemed like the catalyst for this most recent boom of podcasts, because podcasts have definitely had, like, these spikes in the past, but nothing to this extent where it's now taking up, you know, now there's, like, listenership is going Crazy and exploding. There was some stat that said like it's gonna increase four times the amount of listeners within. I think it was within a year or a year or two, which is crazy if you think about it. And yes, there's a crap ton of shows. I read some stat that there's 700,000 podcasts right now.

Yeah.

But still, if you compare that to.

Like blogs, there's something like only 5% of them actively add new content frequently.

And they all pod fade, which is basically a dead show after a while.

Yeah, most of them can't seem to keep up with or they just do one season. I always think saying, oh, this is season one is a bit of a cop out because I think that's people's way of basically saying my podcast faded, but I want to bring it back around. So now I'm calling it season two.

Well, partially.

In this episode, ideally we'll give you some ideas on how to not pod fade. We're not going to get into super deep details of how exactly walk step by step. You can kind of refer to that previous episode. Actually batching is a huge part of it. Just scheduling your time and then with your guest time.

Yeah. And then so recently also Spotify has been making some major, major waves in the podcasting world. So Spotify, maybe it's, I don't know what, maybe two months ago, six weeks ago, two months ago, they acquired Anchor and they acquired Gimlet, which is actually the company that made startup which that TV show Alex Inc. Was on. And I don't know, I don't think it's been disclosed how much they invested in each, but it was something around 300 million for the both of them.

Right.

And if you're not familiar with Anchor, Anchor is like a real simple podcasting platform. It's like a web based podcast platform. You go to like your Anchor FM account, you create an account just like you would like a Facebook account or something. And then there's like a record button and you can just record audio and then your podcast goes out. It's just like a super, super low hanging fruit way to like create podcasts online. And then Gimlet Media was a podcast production company that had like really high quality, really like well published and produced podcasts. Like that startup show.

They're still around. They just now got acquired by Spotify.

They're just owned by Spotify now. And so you know, what we're seeing kind of happen is that Spotify is they're kind of trying to seemingly take like a bit of a. Almost like a YouTube meets Netflix model. Like, YouTube is really easy for creators to get content online that anybody can see. Well, anchor is that same thing. Like in the audio world, anchor makes content really easy to get online. And then YouTube has this YouTube Red, which is like their premium monthly membership, where you get exclusive content from YouTube and they remove the ads. Well, that's Spotify's model already, Right. Is they have premium monthly membership that removes the ads and then they have some Spotify exclusives. So they're trying to push the podcasting world into that place. And then they also just acquired.

They just did one more for, I think another 100 million. So I think total. I don't know what it was. I think it's another production thing.

Yeah, they were. They're trying to own network, start with.

A P. They're basically. It seems like they're trying to own networks and owning the assets, but also owning the process, the production. It's from start to finish, if you think about it. And it's kind of like Netflix, if you compare that or even Amazon with how they're doing these like Amazon and Netflix exclusives, that's kind of what Spotify is doing. Except for, you know, I think the majority of the shows are still distributing them everywhere. They just happen to really own the asset and probably all the monetization, everything that happens in there. Yeah, I believe they said Spotify claim that they're going to invest up to 500 million within this year. In the.

True. They've already. They've already invested.

They're almost there. Yeah, yeah, I think they're at 400 right now. But still, it just shows you the amount of money that's getting thrown around.

Yeah. I mean, hey, Spotify, if you're listening, we will take that last hundred million off your hands if you need us to.

You know, we're a production house. We have content like crazy. Got great networks. We of people around us, and I'm sure we can wrap up some other shows within this podcast network if we wanted to. We can roll this thing up for you if you'd like. All right, thank you, Spotify.

But, you know, just seeing like, what Spotify is doing and like this is like a, you know, a. A unicorn Silicon Valley kind of company going and taking all of this investment capital and buying up other podcasting companies, and that's sort of a sign on the wall that they're very, very bullish about it. And then right around the same time that this stuff happened, itunes was actually sort of frozen For a while, right. You'd log into itunes and they had like a section called New and Noteworthy. And that section was frozen for like a year, probably even longer than a year where you logged in and like the New and Noteworthy shows, some of them were shows that had like seven episodes that were a year old and they hadn't made anything new or noteworthy in the last year, but they were still sitting in New and Noteworthy.

And basically you're saying that Apple just took their foot off the gas podcasting. And then it was frustrating as hell as a show owner too. You're trying to get in this spot and you're like doing everything you can because we've been in there before with a previous show, but this time it was like impossible because the entire length of our current show, up until like literally the last month or two, that thing's been frickin frozen as a rock for like two years.

Yeah. And then just right around that, within like a week of Spotify acquiring anchor and gimlet, all of a sudden the New and Noteworthy started popping new shows up in there and they started actually like updating the itunes, like interface with new shows. My understanding was there was actually a like a literal person who was moderating what was going on. New and Noteworthy. That seems like a lot of effort to me. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's something you think Apple.

Would be smarter than that. But let's automate this with an algorithm.

Supposedly they had somebody actually moderating the new Noteworthy shows, but I don't know if that was true. But all I did notice was that as soon as the Spotify anchor gimlet like sort of acquisition happened, the oh shit factor popped.

Popped up in Apple's brains.

Yeah, itunes went, oh, maybe podcasting is something we should pay attention to again. And then just recently, this is something I read in POD News is they just actually hired a new like head of podcasting at itunes. So they actually have like a person in charge who used to work for some sort of podcasting media company. A gimlet type company. Yeah. Somewhere else. I can't remember the name of the company. They actually hired somebody from one of these media companies to come in and actually like head up the podcasting area of Apple. So now Apple starting to take notice. So if anybody's wondering why do we talk about podcasting so much, why these guys have such a hard on for podcasting? It's because of all this shit that we see happening. We're like, what the fuck Like, Spotify is investing tons of money in these companies, and Apple is all of a sudden turning their attention to these companies and doing a bunch of shit. And Conan o' Brien now has a podcast, and Saturday Night Live is talking about it, and there's TV shows about podcasting.

Well, the Nielsen, Nielsen, whatever the rating system from the radio station, is now talking about moving over with, which is super ironic because they're like we were talking about earlier. It's a very archaic way of just gauging stats and listenership, and now they're applying it here. It's like, dude, we got a technology that ideally it should be trackable, and it kind of is, kind of isn't. But let's be honest, the technology is very archaic in the podcasting space. And there are some gaps right now to make advertising in this whole thing. Not a traditional thing like radio is, which is what Nielsen is kind of managing or heading up, you know. But it is a sign of the times, though, seeing that they're moving over because they could see their listenership moving away from radio, even moving away from probably things like Sirius XM and all that stuff, to podcasts that are free, which is a. And you can access it anytime you want.

Yeah. Such a joke that, like, Nielsen is, like, getting involved in podcasting.

It's. Well, let's be honest. I think monetization as a whole in podcasting is kind of a joke.

Yeah.

If you think about it. Because, like, most people don't know about it, but it's all based off of cost. Per thousand.

Yeah.

So it's. It's per thousand listeners for each episode. You get paid as. As a podcaster, $20 to $30 per thousand listens per episode.

Yeah, but I mean, like, even just like, the concept of, like, the Nielsen, like, rating system. Right. Like, the Nielsen, they basically, they tried to figure out what shows and what, like, radio shows and things like that were popular by, like, getting a small sample, like, a subset of, like, the population. So they would have, like, Nielsen families where there was, like, a thousand Nielsen families, and they would pay attention to what those people watched. And then they would say, okay, this small sampling of people watch this. That must be what is popular among the larger population. And it was just like, taking samples. But with podcasting, I can literally get in and see what the most popular podcasts are. I can literally get in and see which the most downloaded episodes are. Can, like, the data is there. Why do we even need a fucking Nielsen in the mix?

Yeah. And see, this just shows how Archaic again, podcasting is because everything's so splintered and fragmented, there's no good way to track. You can track in our host. And this is where it goes into, like sponsorship is that it's kind of a trust system because. And we haven't taken on an official sponsorship, but this is what we've heard and you know, we've talked to some different agencies, but it's essentially, it's like, okay, how many downloads do you get? Show me a screenshot. Yeah, really, that's it.

That's literally how they do the sponsorship ads is like they ask you, have you heard of how many downloads you get? And they ask you to screenshot it. Some ask you to screenshot it. Not all of them even ask you to screenshot it.

So it's a total trust system. And obviously, yes, you want to do well for any advertiser that you have on your show. Any offer, even if. If we're doing like affiliate offers or own offer, we're only gonna do things that really work out and we're gonna continue with the ones that do work out. So you wanna ideally treat your advertisers right. Cause they are the ones paying for you or paying you. But at the end of the day, it just seems like this is such a. It's an uphill battle for any new podcasters, or probably 80 to 90% of podcasters as a whole, to make and to ever make any money off of podcasting. Whereas that's not the approach we take. That's what fires us up. It's like our quote unquote enemy, I guess, you know, when it comes to podcasting, like, the enemy is kind of this traditional way of making money. The traditional way of treating podcasting. A lot of people will take it as a. Use it as an artist approach, which is cool. That's fine. If you're not. If you're not looking to actually back this out, make it a part of your business, or make money from it somehow or directly or indirectly. There's so many ways you can leverage podcasting if you kind of think out of the box and start applying some direct marketing strategies to it. So we apply everything that we talk about in this podcast to our podcast in some way. Even direct mail. We're talking about direct mail and podcasting, like, huh. And I don't know, that's. This is what lights us up about podcasting. It's not saying you got to do everything, but we choose to approach it with this different way because of the momentum that's growing because of the gaps that are out there. And we're realizing, like when we went to PodFest in Orlando, we're just talking about how, hey, instead of traditional advertising, you can actually do, you know, affiliate links and partnerships and do some shoutouts that way on your show instead of waiting for you to get thousands of downloads per month.

Yeah. Well, when you have a podcast, even if. Even if you have like one episode of your podcast, you just started, like, I've heard a lot of advice and wisdom from people about, like, oh, you shouldn't go get sponsors on your podcast until you're getting 20,000 downloads a month. And some people even said, don't get sponsors until you have 20,000 downloads an episode. You know, shit.

It's a lot of shit. You know how hard it is to get that many people on your show, like without you pod fading.

Yeah. To get to that. That kind of download numbers.

Yeah. Like, if you don't have the system in place, like, for us, we batch record and we make sure that we are not the bottleneck. Like, that is the number one thing, the approach we took from the very beginning of the show. So in that whatever number episodes, maybe it's the second episode or something. I don't know. Whenever it was.

Yeah, it was one of the first three.

I don't remember which one. Like, that hasn't really changed much at all. Maybe slight tweaks here and there, but.

Yeah, it went from one day a month to two days a month. That changed.

That's the only difference, really.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because we up the amount of times that our episodes get released based off of demand and because the systems allowed us to record more, because we're like, yeah, it doesn't affect us.

But going back to the statement about, even with your first episode, why don't even think about getting sponsors? Okay. Yeah, you're probably not going to get any sponsor to have any interest in you, but what's to say you can't pick an affiliate product, mention that affiliate product, this episode's on the Internet forever. Theoretically. So, you know, you could be potentially making sales off that affiliate product that you mentioned 10 years from now. Why would you not, like pre monetize that episode? I don't understand the thinking behind it.

Like, traditional thinking.

You gotta figure, like, if I have a podcast and which I do.

If it became a really, really popular podcast, don't you think some people are gonna go back to episode one and go, I wonder how this started.

I wonder.

I wonder how they sounded the first time away. I wonder if they, like, they had the same confidence in their voice the first time, I wonder if their interview questions were as good on the early episodes. I want, like, people go back because they want to see that journey. People will go back and listen to episode one. We're two and a half years in now. We still get downloads on episode one every single month. So why the hell would we have like, you know, why not monetize that? Why not mention an affiliate product on it? Why not like, you know what might even be interesting for sponsors is sponsors could go around and for super, super, super, super cheap leverage, go and buy up shows that have no following yet with the idea that a percentage of them will be big. Right? Think about like the startup world. The whole, like, philosophy behind investors and like angel investors and venture capitalists in the startup world is they're, they're, they're going for volume, right? They might go and invest in 20 different companies at any given time, knowing that maybe one or two of them might be unicorn numbers and make up for all of the losses on all the other companies. Right? It's a numbers game.

Yeah.

Like that could be a philosophy for sponsors. Go and find the really, really, really early shows that are like, I have no idea how to monetize this and offer to pay them, like, hey, you know, I'll pay you 50 bucks to mention our product on your first episode. Right? Do that for a hundred podcasts. You end up paying, what is that, five grand or something? Yeah, but you're on 100 podcasts and, you know, maybe 10% of those podcasts go on forever and build a huge audience. You never know.

It's a long term approach. But yeah, it's like, shoot, if you got the money, if you're, if you have a brand out there and like, maybe a niche that's not too expensive to advertise, maybe it's not the marketing niche. But, you know, you go to horses. You know, we heard that there's a horse network that's like super popular. I think we met someone at PodFest or heard someone speak that was a nurse. And she, I think she, she was an older gal, which is super cool because she had her systems dialed in. She had batching, recording all that stuff. And I think it was just her and she was getting something like 30,000 listens a month. Yeah, I'm like, damn, go like in the nurse. Some like, abstract nurse niche. Like, it wasn't just nurses broad. It was like a very specific type of nurses. But like, think about if you had a brand in that space. And you saw someone like that, like, dude, how more targeted could you be? And if you get in there early, it's probably super cheap, too.

Yeah.

Lots of ways to make money with this bad boy.

Yeah, there's lots of ways to make money. And I would think if you. If you're someone who thinks you're going to eventually monetize your podcast, just start doing it from day one.

Maybe.

Maybe sponsorship isn't the route. From day one, you're probably gonna have a hard time getting sponsors. But you can always use this concept that we've always talked about called mock sponsorships, where we just find an affiliate link and we mention them as if they were our sponsor. Right. Like, we've done that with GenM on several episodes.

You don't even need to call them a sponsor. You just say like, hey, we really like this thing.

Yeah, no, it's the same thing. Yeah. You don't say we're sponsored by. Just say. You could. You could say we're supported by, you know, because that's. That's the same. It's the same thing. Look, we're supported by GenM. If you go and sign up, we get a little kickback. They're supporting us. They're not necessarily a sponsor that we never signed a sponsorship agreement, but they're don't need to. If you go and use GenM through our link, which is evergreenprofits.com GenM, we do get a little kickback from them. It's not huge, but it's a little kickback for them saying, thank you for sending us a new customer their way. You can do that on episode one of your podcast, even if you only have six downloaders and two of them are your parents.

Downloaders. Yeah, it's true. So getting into. So I would say because we have this whole thing, we actually made a little chart for this presentation we're going to do, but it's a comparison chart to typical podcasters to us. And the way that we approach it and batching is huge. The way that you just mentioned there is mock sponsorships is huge. And just that alone can be. Should give people. Aha. That. You don't have to take this traditional approach. You being a marketer, listener, business owner, like, you probably think like, oh, that's a good idea. But when we took that to like the podcaster space and people who don't really think that way and like, hey, you can insert your own thing. You can have control. Their minds were blown. Yeah. Which just shows you how like the podcasting space, there's a lot of growth to be had right now in there. So if you. I don't know, being a marketer there and looking for gaps, like you listening, I mean, there's no way we can fill all these gaps, but there's a lot of opportunity in the podcasting space right now.

Yeah, I mean, we were actually just another. Here's another shout out. Both you and I just listened to a book on Audible called How to Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital by Nathan Lotka. Great, great book. Highly, highly recommended. But, oh, shit, I just totally lost my train of thought. I mean, he had some great concepts around podcasting.

Well, he had a concept of bringing on because he has a daily show called the Top, and it's a daily show that he talks to business owners and he brings on CEOs onto his podcast, and he follows up with each one of his CEOs to basically thank them. It's all that stuff. We do the same thing, but he pitches them every single time on becoming a sponsor. And there's actually a script in the book. I don't know off top of my head, but he's like, hey, have you ever thought about or experimented with podcast sponsorship? I got like a cool little package if you want to give it a shot. Very light email. But he sends it out 30 times a month because he has 30 people on his show, and he said it's always filled.

I think his conversion rate is pretty good too, because people are like, oh, yeah, that sounds interesting. And we've even thrown that idea out because we haven't done it yet. But you can create a package that's unique. It doesn't have to just be your show. Like, in our case, we have a platform, we have that. We have email lists, we have direct mail, we have, you know, our blog banners, all sorts of different things, videos, stuff in Facebook, Google Ads. You can build that into this kind of sponsorship advertising package and then put a price on there.

Yeah.

And when you make it something different, it now you're not stuck on that CPM thing. You kind of create your own little beast. And obviously there's more advantage if you're doing stuff that's a little bit more direct response. You know, when you take it to our blog email ads, then you can kind of start tracking conversions and all this cool shit where you can't do on a podcast unless you have some link. You know, there's.

There's something else that is really cool that he's doing. And I. And I was going to bring it up and then it just like popped out of my head. Right.

I was guessing that was it.

But yeah, that is something that he's doing. That's really smart. Is he is. He's bringing on CEOs and basically trying to convert them into sponsors after the show.

He's also doing Patreon stuff. I don't know if that's what you're like premium content.

And yeah, he's doing. He's doing a. I'm trying to jog.

Your memory right now.

So I don't know, it'll come back to me. We could just keep on going and if it pops up again, then I'll bring it up again. But it's a great book. He talks a lot about like various podcast strategies in there. He leads his business. The content aspect of his business is all podcasting, just like it is for us. So that's. He's got some really, really interesting concepts in there.

He spun off a whole different company, remember, based off of the stuff. Stuff that he was getting. He was getting stats or something from these guests and he actually made like a. Some separate website from the data that he mined from his face from his podcast.

Yeah.

I don't know. Basically like what you just said, everything starts at the top with this podcast. No pun intended for the top.

Podcast is called the top.

But the idea. And just like us, it's our content creator, like from that top thing, we happen to just be. Repurpose our content in all different ways, including a whole separate show.

Yeah.

And he happens to do it in the forms of gathering sponsorships, Patreon getting. Creating a whole different website that I think it's a continuity website. So that now he has recurring revenue based off of everything that the podcast brought into him. And his network has probably expanded like a madman.

Yeah. He's leveraged his podcast to invest in other companies and to, you know, find people that has invested and bought some like companies off of him. And just like he's. He's used it as that insane network tool too. And we may have already touched on what I was thinking of. I don't know, like, it's lost now, but. But there's. There's so many different ways to monetize a podcast. And one of the ways that we're actually talking about doing it through like direct mail is, you know, one thing that nobody was doing we're at Podfest is nobody was actually using podcast to try to grow an email list. Right.

Yeah.

It seemed like pretty interesting.

It was like foreign to them. When we were talking about this, we're like, how is this a foreign thing? Follow ups.

So we had this idea of every time we do a podcast episode, let's have one of our team members take notes on it and then we'll use that as our opt in. Anybody who listens to this show can then go to our website and opt in. And basically, if you're out driving or whatever right now, you don't have to be sitting there taking notes. You can just go download our notes later. And so we started doing that and it just made our list growth explode. We started growing our list really, really fast on the back of that. So one of the ways we're actually thinking about experimenting with direct mail as another monetization strategy. And we'd love your feedback. If you're listening, send us an email over at infovergreenprofits and let us know what you think of this idea. But those actual notes that our team member Steven is taking, we're actually thinking about selling print version of those notes where every month you get like a little digest in the mail at home with all the notes from the prior month. So you don't have to keep re opting in for the notes. You just kind of get them delivered and they're kind of top of mind all the time. One of the things we're thinking about doing is actually selling those notes for a very, very low ticket price. And that's just another monetization path that we might travel down.

Yeah, yeah. And low ticket meaning like 10 bucks? Under 20 bucks? Yeah, 10 to 20 bucks or so. Let us know if that's something that would be interesting to you. Yeah, send us an email infovergreenprofits.com because we've been tossing around different ways that we can expand.

Just the content that's on here in these shows, because we have these notes like you say, and these notes are like two to three pages long or so, and these things are like legit notes. So that's what we study.

It's a perfect distilling of everything we talk about with the resources and all these highlights that are noted in a procedure type format. So if you ever want to actually put something in action, these are the things that you follow. It's easier than just you trying to write your own notes. It's like just add to those notes if you need to. But if we can figure out a way to make these things a little bit more accessible because we're noticing people might get one and Then that's kind of it. It's like, dude, these things are gold. And we have, I think, close to 100 of them.

Yeah. I don't know how many we have. We're working through the backlogs. Like all the newer episodes, like this episode will have notes pretty close to the date that this is released. But all the backlogs, we're still working through a lot of the older notes.

There's a lot, man. And that's the thing is we want to put some attention on these and we want to do it in a way where it's easy for folks to actually see. Hence, we were thinking direct mail, because, let's be honest. You're going to open it. Yeah.

You're going to open it and probably read them, or at least read to some of them that are really relevant to you.

Yeah. So let us know. Unless you have another idea of a better way to make these things accessible and top of mind. But I think it's, at the end of the day, it's just going to help you further. So the idea is to get this thing out to more folks to actually put in action.

Yeah. And then before we wrap up real quick, let's quickly rattle off some of the growth strategies that we're experimenting with.

I don't have my list in front of me, but we can rattle some off.

We'll rattle some off. I mean, part of the pod hacker summit that we're going to be doing is sort of behind outside the box sort of growth strategies.

Growth and monetization strategies.

Yeah. Not your typical things that you hear of, like, oh, get seven episodes in the can before you launch and get new and noteworthy and then you'll get a spike and get all your friends and family to write a review. Like, all that stuff is not going to move the needle that much in the grand scheme of things.

It'll help you for maybe like a couple days. Yeah, that's about it.

So we've been experimenting with a ton, a ton of different strategies lately. The, the most recent paid strategies we're experimenting with are Reddit ads. Very, very new, where we haven't really seen the panda pinning out yet, but we're paying roughly. I think we're paying 49 cents a click right now, which isn't horrible. Like, that's probably what we'd pay for clicks on Facebook ads to something similar.

But you can get super targeted on Reddit and actually target subreddits, so you can, you know, your target market's pretty damn interested.

Yeah, yeah.

We've already had a couple of buddies. Our buddy DK shouted out to me over the weekend. He's like, I love seeing your Reddit ad because no one's doing Reddit ads.

Yeah, nobody's doing Reddit ads.

Probably hop and test some stuff on there.

And we're still like, very, very new. Like we're just, just scratching the surface and experimenting.

But we've heard from other podcasting friends that Reddit has absolutely crushed it for them in the past as a growth, growth lever. That's pretty damn cheap.

Yeah.

So Reddit is a big one, or it's a new one, that is.

And then Facebook ads. What we're starting to do with Facebook ads, if you're following us, you're probably seeing these, is we have a lot of like little video clips from our podcast interviews. So we had Perry Marshall on and we actually did a video version of that show. We had Kurt Molly on, we had Paul Clifford on, we had Scott Carson on. There's all these different guys that we've had on that we decided, hey, let's just flip on the camera and record a video version of this interview. And then we've been taking little like five minute clips from those videos, putting them on Facebook ads, giving people little teasers into our episode. Then ideally they're going to want to go listen to more of the episode by subscribing and downloading that show. So we're starting to experiment more with that. And then the other thing that we've been doing a lot of experimenting with is actually advertising directly inside of podcasting apps.

Yes, there's so many of them out there and they all have their own way to monetize or to advertise.

Some of them even make you sign NDAs. So I can't even go too deep into how some of them work. But, you know, we've been experimenting with overcast ads, and there's an app called Podcast Republic that we've experimented with buying ads on. And there's an app called Podcast Addict that we've been talking to about potentially advertising on their platform.

There's a lot of other, a lot of ones just like that. And basically the way it works, and this is what we're realizing is that each platform, so the platform that someone listens to the podcast on, there's a way usually to advertise in there. But again, it's all super segmented. So you gotta like kind of pick and choose which one's gonna be the best fit. Some are just on Android, some are Just on iPhone. Again, this is where it gets confusing, but word of mouth and, you know, that's kind of how we go is like, oh, our buddies from this show said they got good results. Okay, well, let's give it a shot. You know, that's kind of what we've been doing and just experimenting.

Yeah.

Overcast did really well for a while, but got a little bit more expensive.

Yeah. Their pricing has gone up because it's gotten so popular as an advertising platform.

Yeah.

And as far as, like, mass, like, subscribers, it wasn't super impactful.

I was. Every time.

Every time I think we run an ad, we'd probably get another 500 subscribers to the show or something.

Right. And for the price we were paying.

Back when we started, we were paying four or five hundred bucks or paying, you know, roughly a buck a subscriber.

Which is a good target number. Yeah.

Now it's. It's inflated to where you're paying like 1200 bucks.

Yeah.

And we're still. And you still get the same amount of subscribers. So now you're paying. You went from like a dollar subscriber to, like $3 a subscriber, which that math doesn't work out for us quite as well.

Oh, really quick. I wanted to touch on our show notes because this is a witness, a main way that we monetize. And if you're comparing our show to a lot of even business podcasts, which blow me away, please. If you have a business show, for the love of God, make good show notes pages, and actually have lead captures, multiple options, referral link, whatever you got to do. Pixels, all that fun stuff, we do it all there. So if you just go to our show notes page, you'll see this in action. But that is how that's like, instead of itunes, a lot of podcasters will rely on itunes for growth. Well, screw that. It's great. Yes. It's good for discoverability, but it's hard as hell unless you have a crap ton of subscriber growth, because that's what really pushes you up the charts. From everything that we've heard and seen. Yeah.

Reviews don't mean anything.

Just subscribers. Yeah. And the momentum of it all.

Yeah. A lot of people. You hear a lot of people on their podcast at the end saying, hey, if you like this show, go review it on itunes. Reviews do not help you with the algorithm. It's. It's a social proof thing. But, you know, we were even talking to one of our. One of the guys that we work pretty close with with Kurt Molly and he was basically arguing with us the other day that social proof actually does not really have that as big of an impact as you might think.

Right.

And so reviews on itunes doesn't really help you get any.

I wouldn't worry about them. Yeah, now you want to Subscribers have some, but they're going to come naturally. And I'd say, yeah, focus on subscribers first and then you can always ask for, yeah, go leave a review if you want, but don't expect that to climb the charts for you.

Yeah.

And so a lot of podcasters will rely on itunes. And we deliberately, from day one of this podcast, we had the choice like, okay, call to actions. Do we send them to itunes or do we send them to our show notes page? And we thought about it, we're like, okay, on our show notes page, we have control for follow up email. At a very minimum, we can get them opted in for like a companion or a transcript. Those are the two easy gimmes right there that any podcaster can do or a cheat sheet, whatever. You gotta do something sexy there for the free opt in and then have your pixels. We have Facebook and Google at a minimum on the page, so we can retarget folks depending on just them landing on the page. And then we have push crew on there. So browser notifications, affiliate links to make money directly that way. I mean, all of these.

And then we also have banners that lead them deeper into our content too. Like, one of the things we've recently been doing is we've been writing articles about affiliate products that we use ourselves and really like. And so I've actually been creating banners that when you click on those banners, they link to the articles about the affiliate products that we like. So you actually start getting into our little affiliate marketing rabbit hole by just viewing our show notes.

Yeah, I mean, if you just think about that, that was our thought pattern. It's like take them to show notes, not itunes. But still, if you go to, I guarantee you the most the podcast, if you listen, just look at your podcast player where you're listening to right now and check out some of these other shows and just go peruse their show notes page if they have one. I bet most of them will be just the basic page that was given to them by the hosting provider or something that just has maybe a handful of bullet points. And the player, it's like, dude, for the love of God, everything we do, it gets our episodes ranked SEO. What do you know? We have a whole massive list of text there, plus the audio, sometimes even the transcription we can rank for most of the guests that come on the show. Even the big ones, for sure. Big name ones. So I don't know, it's very interesting, all these little levers that a lot of podcasters will ignore. And then this is why we have nowhere near the amount of listeners compared to some of the people we know, yet we are able to back out much more revenue because of that. And it's interesting because it's a systems thing, I feel like. But saying that every show that's out there, that has a lot of listenership can change this for their own regard. And I think it starts. We were talking about it the other day. It's really just have a good way to grow a list.

Yeah.

Like, if you can. If you could just apply that to podcast and then follow up with whatever strategic offers more content and, you know, ways to purchase something. Or maybe it's just another way to have your sponsorship money go further. Maybe you can charge more, demand more for your show.

Well, right now. Right now, most people make about $30 per thousand downloads. So if you're making. If you have 10,000 downloads a month, you make, what, 300 bucks a month off a show that gets 10,000 downloads a month?

Yeah.

Right. So we've actually backed our own math out to where we make about $3. Yeah, we make about $3 per listener, so.

Exactly. So we created a little calculator because we're like, we're just curious.

Yeah. So if you got 10,000 downloads per month, would you rather make $30 per thousand or 300 bucks per month? Or would you rather make $3 per download, which checks out as $30,000. No, 3,000amonth. 30,000amonth.

30.

$30,000 a month. $30,000 a month versus. What did I say originally? 300.

300.

Math is hard.

I don't know. It's either 300 or 3,000. I don't know. My brain is fried either way.

It's. It's. If you go the angle that we're trying to say here, you have exponential growth. Yeah. I mean, it's simple math, really. Obviously, podcasting, there's a lot.

Not for us today, apparently, but.

Yeah. Well, simple math, when you write it down.

Yeah.

Have a calculator in front of you.

It's all right, guys. You don't need to email us to tell us what the actual number is. Just trust me. It's better to have $3 per download than $30 per thousand downloads.

It's just the math of thousands, basically. So it's it's that whole traditional approach. I'd say that that is the thing that excites us the most out of this whole medium. And the way that you can approach it and anyone can do this, like, it doesn't have to rely on you. That's another thing. Most podcasters think they have to do it all.

Yeah.

It's like, why in the. Why would you think you should be recording and editing your own stuff? Yes, you're probably more than capable, but guess what? Someone on Fiverr is also extremely capable. How much is your time worth?

Yeah.

And just imagine all the other stuff that's involved in podcasting. There is the marketing of it and all the stuff that a lot of people don't think about when they say, hey, I think a podcast would be really cool. Hey, you should do a podcast, you know, because you hear that talk a lot more.

At least.

We do. Yeah. And people don't see the bigger picture that will actually make the bigger moves. If you focus an ounce of that effort on follow up. Maybe talking to any of these guests for sponsorship opportunities or thinking of how you can do all this marketing here that we've been talking about. That's a better way to position yourself or use your time. That's where we spend our time.

Yeah.

Okay, so we got to wrap up here, but the last little point that I want to make before we go ahead and call it on this one is that when you have podcast listeners, they are the best possible lead that you could get in your business. Would you rather have somebody that maybe, like, Googled something, clicked over to your website, read it real quick, and then, like, disappeared? Or would you rather have somebody that literally just listened to you for an hour long? Right. These are the most engaged possible people that you can talk to because they're.

In your ear for, like, for our case, it's almost an hour each time.

Yeah.

Yeah. Usually not this episode.

Not this episode, but usually. Usually our episodes are over an hour or right around an hour. And you're getting people that are listening to you that feel like they know you, that feel like they have a relationship with you because they've listened to you so much. Like, the average consumption on, like, Facebook was what, 6% or something?

Is like, Facebook video is only 6%.

Yeah, our low end. Our, like, our shitty podcast that didn't do that. Well, our consumption's 60%.

And see, that was without us knowing what the hell we're doing. And it was probably kind of shittier audio quality than this.

Yeah.

And, yeah, on average, what we're looking at our show, and obviously there's valleys and peaks and all that stuff, but on average, we sit around 70 to 80%, something like that across the board. If you're saying, but we were looking at one episode that we had, there was an hour and a half and it was 99% consumption rate, we're like, holy crap.

So the people that started that episode listened to it for a full hour and a half. Now just think about those people being your potential customers. Like when you get them on a sales call, if that's the business model you choose, they've already listened to you for hours and hours and hours. They're already sold on your value. The selling becomes so much easier.

Everything does.

If you're trying to sell somebody a course and send them to a sales page for, let's say, a $300 product, do you think it's easier to sell somebody who's listened to you for hours and hours on end and are already privy to your value? Or do you think it's easier to sell somebody that came in off of Facebook ad that had never heard of you prior?

Right.

This is why we're so bullish on podcasting and this is why we're so passionate about it. And this is why, like, we can literally make hour long episodes talking about why we're excited about podcasting.

Yeah, yeah, we definitely get fired up about this. I think it's just like the potential that's there and we're just like, yeah, how are you? Like, we just look at these shows or people that just run into a wall with podcasting and obviously it's an opportunity for us because we're like, oh, okay, don't do that. Made. There's a lot of ways you can get creative with this whole thing too.

We'll save some of that stuff for the summit.

Yeah, we won't get in depth now. We should probably wrap this one up. We've covered a lot already.

And we also have another call that we're already late for.

That's. But we'll get to it. But yeah, hopefully you can see how. And this isn't, again, not all about you starting your own podcast, even though it's probably a good idea because just of all these reasons and the engagement factor alone will allow you to just. Even if you don't make a cent directly from the podcast, the fact that if you have this business with follow up consulting, coaching, even if it's something, doesn't seem direct at all. Like, we have our buddy Chris Martinez is just starting a podcast, I think now because he's been. He probably hears us often on here, and he's gonna see it direct. And what, each customer is worth thousands of dollars. I mean, how many customers do you need to have listening, or agency owners, in his case, listening to your show to actually make a good return on your time on the podcast? And it could just be like a 20, 30 minute episode. Doesn't need to be a big old hour thing. We just do this because we love fricking yakking and I don't know, we just can't shut up.

Imagine just even if you had just 100 subscribers, 100 people tuning into you every month, and you had a weekly show that was an hour long, that's 100 people listening to you for four hours a month.

I don't know where else you're gonna get that.

You're not gonna get that anywhere else. Now those hundred people, when you need to get them on a call, you need to direct them to an affiliate product that you recommend. You need to sell them one of your own courses. You need to sell them on agency services. These people that are listening to you for four hours a month, potentially, even though it's only a small pool of 100 people, those are going to be the easiest people to convert into a sale that you've ever seen in your life. Because these people know, like and trust you because they've spent so much time with you. And I think if there's like any one concept that I can sort of drill into your head around podcasting, it would be that the value of somebody spending this much time with you.

Please don't drill into my head. That hurts.

Yeah, I'm just going to kick you in the head.

Damn you. That's actually not as bad, though. It's not. Probably I'll take the kick rather than the drill.

I'm going to go switch into my steel toed boots, but we should probably wrap up.

Razors on those things are brutal. All right, well, thank you so much for listening. Keep a lookout for in July. We don't have a date specifically announced yet, but it will tentatively be called the Pod Hacker Summit.

And we'll be making announcements to it a little bit prior to July.

Trust us, you'll hear all about it. But this is something we're fired up about. And for the love of God, if you feel like you have some inkling or you think podcasting can help you at all, give it a shot. Reach out to us. If you have any Questions at all? No, we do not have a product or anything on that yet.

That's what the summit's gonna be.

That'll basically be the summit. Yeah. It'll give you the perspective of not just us, but a whole ton of our peers who are doing amazing things in this space. Because I feel like there's a movement happening right now, and it's like this uptick, but the general public hasn't noticed it yet. And just us being in the stats, seeing the investment money, seeing the growth of listeners moving from other mediums to here.

Although I do think the general public is catching on more.

Starting to.

Our barber today was literally started a conversation with me today about podcasts.

Our barber, I will see him tomorrow. I'll continue that conversation. Matt's all prime cut for this war room presentation. I'm like, look like a hairy beast. Wow.

Even when you cut your hair, you.

Look like hairy beast. Let's be honest. All right, let's get out of here. Thank you so much for listening. Check out where should they go after this?

We have a little outro.

We have an outro. Yeah. It just shows you how much I even know our process. Yeah. How do we go check out the.

Companions for this episode if you didn't take notes on it or you want to get some more details about it?

Yeah. Go to evergreenprofits.com get that stuff.

Yep.

You dig? Thank you.

And now I'm gonna go play our outro, which is gonna tell you to do the same exact thing.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address, and we'll send you the notes.

Thanks for listening.

Go get it, Wiki Wiki. We love you.