Accelerate Your Podcast Growth: Ed Rush's Success with Paid Audience Acquisition

It's the Podcast Report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul. Hey, everybody. This is Paul Calligan. And this is the Podcast Report, episode eight. Can you buy an audience for your podcast? That's right. Can you buy an audience for your podcast? I've got a guest on today's show who. Well, gosh darn it, bought an audience for his podcast. It's a great story. It's one that is so far out outside of what we think of as podcasting, but at the same time, so close to what we know is direct marketing. What we know is audience development. That kind of stuff is just a story that needs to be told. So you heard him laughing on the background. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to introduce you to my good friend, Ed Rush.

What's up, Paul Culligan. How are you, man?

I'm doing great, man. I'm actually recording this in a hotel at Disneyland. Went to Disneyland with the kids yesterday, forgot to bring the big mic, but they're downstairs in the pool, and I wanted to get this one knocked off. So, you know, I am. I am a half a mile away from the happiest place on earth, so it doesn't.

So I get it. So that's why when we went to schedule this, you told me how you had an urgent meeting afterwards.

Exactly.

Yeah, it must have been with Mickey.

Or Goofy, you know, but, you know, really, truth be told, most of my meetings are with Goofy, so.

Yeah, this one is really no exception.

Exactly. So you launched a podcast, and most interviews. What mic did you use? What hosting did you use? What RSS schema are you testing your code up against? Yeah, this episode.

I don't care.

What you did was you literally, on no uncertain terms, you bought your audience. I want you to speak to that. How in the world do you buy an audience?

Even the lead in to what you just said is interesting. I was listening to a seminar that was old Gary Halbert seminar. If you guys don't know who that is, really well known, Direct Copywriter passed away about three years ago. And when he went to the seminar, he started teaching, and people started asking, hey, how do you set up a business, structure an llc, and do you have any recommendations on how to set up your bank account? And he got so frustrated, he said, listen, let me ask you a question. If I gave you a million dollars right now and said, by tomorrow, you have to have your business set up and your bank account set up, he said, you'd do it, you'd figure out how to do it, and so it's interesting what you mentioned about microphones and recording and editing and all those other things because we end up putting them first in our list of things that we need to figure out on our podcast. But really they're second. The first question is, how am I going to get people to listen to this? And how am I going to get people to engage with this? And what I did, I started a fishing podcast. As you know, it's called the World's Greatest Fishing Podcast. We're just passing. I'll give you the exact number in a second, just for statistical accuracy. But we're just past 30,000 downloads this past month. We're growing extremely fast. I haven't bought every single one of our listeners, but make no mistake, I've bought a lot of them. And I think we use that term bought. It sounds like shady and underhanded and unethical. The bottom line is, what we mean by bought is I used advertising dollars to get in front of my market using advertising platforms, and I would have ended up getting them anyway. Let me just tell you, if I had done it organically, they would have eventually found out about me. It just would have been two or three years later by word of mouth. And my rule is, why wait three years to get to something that you can do in three months?

Now stop. Because that's all fine and dandy for hyperactive Ed, but if you could have got them for free, why in the world did you spend money?

Well, you know, interestingly, I mean end up getting the benefit of both. So there's some. There's some posts that I've taken some screenshots of, and I'm happy to share with you if you want to, Paul, if you end up putting these in your membership site or something like that, but I'll show you examples of places where we spent money promoting. By the way, the number I just pulled it up this month so far, 31,455 downloads of the podcast.

And I'll list. We're recording this on the 30th of July. So we're looking at 1000 downloads a day of your show.

Yeah, a little over a thousand a day. Yep. Which is. I'm obviously pretty happy with at this point. And so how many episodes are you into it? How many what?

How many episodes are you into it?

About 43ish, something like that, if I had to take a guess at it.

Okay, how many are live?

That many.

Oh, wow. Okay, good.

Yep. Yep. And we. We've got another five or six that are Recorded that. That we go every Tuesday, at least right now. So, yeah. So anyway, back to. Back to the interesting. So we use a lot of Facebook marketing. We do some Twitter. We do also do a lot of Instagram marketing. Now, Instagram we haven't paid a dollar for. I do have a guy that I actually pay to do inst for me, but that's just a lot of sharing and interaction. We do get plenty of traffic from Instagram, and that's very encouraging because essentially it's free. The traffic we get from Twitter essentially is free. The traffic we get from Facebook is a little bit of mix of free and paid. That's also a mix of who we paid to get as likes who end up coming over to our list and originated with an ad, but now they're organic. But one of the coolest things about Facebook is we've been using, we've been posting specifically. So I'll give you an example. We did an episode with a guy named Jim Sammons, who is a kayak fishing expert. And Jim Sammons has a pretty big following online and particularly on Facebook. And so what we did with Jim is we actually ran an ad with a picture of Jim, a picture of our podcast, and then a line that said something like, is it possible to fish and kayak at the same time, question mark. And when we ran the ad specifically to the people who followed him, now, the cool thing that happened is we ended up with 45 shares of that particular ad because they were all Jim Sammons fans that saw that in their newsfeed. And one of the shares was him. And so I had asked him previously, hey, could you post something to your social media and tell us about the show? He didn't do it. I don't hold it against him. I think he just forgot or he was busy or whatever. But when he saw that ad that I ran, which looked like a really. Just looked like something in his newsfeed, he ended up sharing that back with the rest of his audience. And so we ended up getting and an escalation of our ad and essentially a bunch of free traffic on our ad simply because of sharing.

Okay, so let's speak to the buying of customers. So you are buying customers by buying mindshare on the social networks. And you're either doing that through paid advertising inside of Facebook or paying somebody to post on Instagram. Your market is fishermen. And so you know, you know exactly who they are, the avatar for your show. You know, the audience for your show is absolutely clear. What are you spending? How much Is it costing what's. What's best bang for the buck?

So we started out originally. Actually, I didn't even have a show. I knew I was going to have a show, but I figured, well, I'll just build a following first that way. And Paul, you and I spent all day together on chat and instant message and email. On the day I launched this actual. This podcast back in March, I already had. I think at that point, I already had 20 to 22,000 fans on Facebook. And that made a huge difference when we launched that particular day.

Right, right. 42. How many fans at Facebook when you launched?

Someplace between. About. We have about 28,000 now. It was someplace between, say, 20 and 22,000 at the time.

Okay, so 20, 22,000 at launch. And you had started that page when and for how much?

In the end, last week in January, I started the Facebook page with two likes. By the first week in March, we had over 20,000 people on that page. For the most part. Not, not. Not everyone, but for the most part, those folks were. It was paid. We just did what's called a like campaign, where you're simply running ads on the right hand side or in the newsfeed. And it was super easy to target folks who are interested in phishing because most people on Facebook who like fishing in their interest say that they're interested in fishing. That's how we targeted them. And we just targeted them with ads that we thought would be appropriate for fishermen. When they clicked on it, that meant they liked our page. They came over to our page and started interacting with us. And. And we were doing that anywhere between, say, 5 and 15 cents, sometimes a little bit more, but usually about 5 to 15 cents per. Like, average it out to about 8 to 10 cents. What that roughly means is we built a little over 20,000 people for a little bit less than $2,000 in ad spend.

Now, I want to make sure the audience. This is not an offshore. Give me 20,000 people with a foreign IP address to click, like, for $5. This is, this is 22,000 people of their own volition who identified themselves as liking fishing. Who clicked fishing to like your show.

Yeah, I mean, so, exactly. So there are, as you know, there's folks who will go out and just to build the likes on their page and make it look like they have a following. We'll, you know, folks in like, Cambodia or Vietnam and. And then their following is basically completely worthless to them. And so what I needed more than the numbers. The Facebook and numbers really don't do very much. For me in today's day and age, what I really needed were downloads and subscribers to my podcast. And to get that, I needed real life, actual people who are, who are interested in fishing. So our demographics, mostly United states, some Canada, UK and Australia, mostly all English speaking, 90% male, ranging in between about 25 to 55 years old. If I had to take an average right in the 30s is where we really get big. Average time on Facebook is they're almost there all day. Two thirds of my market spends basically they're 9am to 9pm at some point. Logged into Facebook spikes around 9pm we know a ton about our market and we know who they are. They're actual fishermen, which is part of the fisherwomen, I guess, as you would say. But part of the reason we did that, that really precise targeting is because we absolutely needed folks who would respond to follow on marketing messages for us.

Okay, so this is good. And right now people's minds are just flying all over the place. So a couple things everybody.

That was the idea.

Well, exactly. The show number is 503-897-1290. That's 503-897-1290. You have two options. Number one, just text in EP8 as an episode eight and the show notes for this episode will be@the podcastreport.com 8. If you text that or visit us, you'll be able to get access to the transcript of this episode. I'll get it transcribed and then those screenshots that Ed was chatting about as well as all the links will be in there as well. So you can just enjoy the conversation at this point. I'll give you the number again at the end of this but so $2,000 for your initial batch of likes. 1,000 downloads a day of the show. We'll use John Lee Dumas Number of 40 CPM. 40, you know, and CPM for those of you who don't know and most of you listen to the show do. CPM is a thousand downloads. So you know at this point $40 a day, but you divide that by 30, you multiply that by 30 days, that's $1,200 a day. It's $1,200 a month. So in two months you're going to make back your audience that you bought. Now of course at this point, with 22,000 people liking you in Facebook now, the shares and all these things start to kick in organically. What is your total ad spend at this point or. And ad spend probably isn't the right term, what is the total amount of money you have placed towards building your audience?

You know, I would say if I had to, I haven't looked at it recently. It's just, I would say right now it's just shy of $10,000 total. That's basically six months all. And I don't know the exact number, but on launch day, I probably put about $1,500 into my ad account. Just that one day, just because we were trying to make some waves on itunes. And by the way, it was sufficient to get. You were there watching. We ended up number one in outdoor, number one in sports. We hit new and noteworthy number one the next day. We also were number 24 overall, beating Rachel Batto, Dave Ramsey, a whole bunch of ESPN shows. And so for me, that was a little bit of proof of concept too. So that's why I spent a little extra on launch day.

Beautiful. So grand total so far again, for everybody?

Yeah, just a little less than $10,000.

A little less than $10,000 a day or 1000 downloads a day and growing. And you've given me access to your stats, so I know the peak. But let's just say, let's just say 1,000 a day. Let's go the 40, you know, let's go the 40 CPM model that Johnny has set for all of us. So, you know, let's do $10,000 divided by 40, you know, so with no growth, 250 days. So two thirds of the year and your investment is back and everything is cash after that.

Yep. And what we're seeing too, which I think is really interesting, first of all, this last week, I'll give you the numbers this last week. 1900 downloads, 1800-1600-1300-1600. 1600,000. 1900. So we're averaging about. This week, we're averaging about 1600, which is nice.

Oh, yeah, you're going to be in the black in less than six months.

Well, and the other thing too, and this is really the point of the entire thing, which is I've dialed in the last two weeks, even though our numbers are spiking, I've fairly significantly dialed down the spend on Facebook. And in part of it is because we're getting, we're getting the benefit of a lot of organic reach now. So with the folks we got on Facebook and Twitter and also who are on Instagram, we can kind of cross pollinate a little bit on those things and get enough, you know, organic reach to be able to move where we need to move Just by talking about our episodes at this point, which is nice. Not to mention the fact that we build our own email list, which also helps because when we syndicate episodes, we can hit our list as well.

Oh, yeah, and the fact of the matter is the 40 cpm number we're giving. I mean, how many ads are you going to be doing a show once the flow is all perfect?

Oh, three or four.

Yeah, exactly. So the 40. The 40 per thousand downloads is really 100 per thousand downloads. And I know you well, Ed. You're going to be making a lot of money from the list and the website and all those options as well. As a matter of fact, I'd Recommend everyone the podcastreport.com 8 make sure you sign up for Ed's mailing list just as a. A way to swipe and see what's happening. You know what I like here, Ed, and I want to move away from podcasting for a second. Even though this is all about podcasting, this.

You're going to ask me about relationships?

Yes, exactly. Yes, yes.

You know, I'm really qualified.

This was never about podcasting for you. This was about market, message media. Speak to that for a second.

Yeah. I mean, the bottom line is. Well, the first thing is I literally have no idea why I started this. It just was a whim. I think I am really interested in fishing. I love the idea of not just doing something, but being awesome and well known in the marketplace for it. And so. And so a lot of it was just sort of to see what we could do if we just did something in a market that I really don't know anything about. And I didn't know anyone in the marketplace until just recently. And so, I mean, some of the results of this, and this is why it's really cool. Like you said, it's not just about podcasting. Some of the results of this. Our first show I did with a guy named Michael folks, who's the executive producer of a show called Inside Sport Fishing. Their own Fox. Right after the show, we started talking. Ends up, he has a book. I was going to help him a little bit with his book. We ended up having lunch together here in Milton's in San Diego. He walks in, sits down and says, man, I love your stuff. I want to do a TV show with you guys. One and a half months later, we're sitting in San Diego Bay on a boat that we borrowed from Doug Kern at Fisherman Landing, which is one of the biggest fishing stores in San Diego, and we're filming a show for Fox Me and this other guy. And a year before, I had barely ever caught a fish here in town. Next thing you know, we're on tv. You know, we created a course together. We're actually, we're actually launching that next month on how to catch halibut, which is the fish we catch here in San Diego. That's another stream of income for us. I got a call yesterday from a guy named Dennis Ispister who has a show on World Fishing Network called Wild Fish, Wild Places. Really, really cool show. He goes all over the world. He called me yesterday and said, hey, man, I want to pitch a joint sponsorship deal with you. And so it's a way essentially to penetrate a market in a way that no one else knows really how to do. So, for example, the biggest and brightest names in phishing right now have all have television shows. It's safe to say basically none of them, maybe one or two have a half decent idea. And I found a couple of them, but pretty much none of them understand online or digital marketing. And what's happening in that world right now is all the sponsors are starting to ask real number questions. So for someone who's on tv, they'll say, what is your, you know, what's your subscriber base? What's your follower base? And they'll say, well, the Nielsen, Nielsen says that we have, you know, roughly 7,70,000 viewers per episode. And the sponsor will look at them and go, yeah, but we don't really believe those numbers. What are your real numbers? And so the cool thing about having a digital marketing arm like podcasting or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or a following there is you can actually show real, actual, real life numbers. For example, when you get a podcast download, that's a real number. And when I was talking to this guy on the phone yesterday, he remarked at, yeah, that's totally true. That's what they're looking for. They're looking for real numbers. And so part of the play too is being able to combine media with media to create bigger deals and bigger sponsorships. And that's where I'm moving in the direction of right now.

It's fun. I think Dave Jackson's segment that he does at the school podcast about the. Because of my podcast, some of my favorite stories in podcasting, of course, been monetization. But when you get to play your passion or play your hobby, it's, you know, even more fun. And yeah, you know, you had spoken to the fact that, you know, knowing the audience and having fun with this, you probably could have built this in three years. But the fact of the matter is, the three year slow build would not have gotten the attention of these big guys and these numbers and these channels. So, you know, this is a. This is a, you know, an inspirational story, cautionary tale, you know, all these. All these things at the same time. First of all, podcasting is not dead, obviously. That's why I started this show. That's why you started your show. The numbers are crazy, you know, and the numbers, you know, the real numbers and not just downloads, but the stuff we're getting in Stitcher about how long people listen to the show. And some of the stats that we're getting from some of the other organizations are just fabulous. I was at last week, I was at the REAL Summit in San Francisco, and, you know, Nielsen was on stage and Jim Lauterbach from Revision 3, which is now Discovery Channel, you know, he was doing a panel and asked Nielsen, you know, hey, what can you tell us about the 18 to 33 demographic? And the basic answer was nothing, you know, you know.

Well, because they didn't put a box in their house.

Well, exactly. Well, and the sad thing was Jim had given Nielsen's, you know, these. He'd actually given them the questions about a week earlier, so it wasn't like they were even tongue tied.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and so, you know, and what you did here is so much fun because, you know, when you hear about buying customers, you think about click farms and downloads and all these people. But I mean, you actually bought people who listen. You know, the ads are going to see great conversion, the email is going to see great conversion, sales are going to happen, real numbers are going to be played. You know, the great thing about podcasting is, you know, really, when you buy offshore and you buy clicks and you buy, you know, fraud, you know, you have to do it every single time. And it's not real. You know, you're using Libsyn. We can see where the download stats are. We know what countries they are. And the fact of the matter is you're getting them to subscribe. You're doing a great job there. So it's coming on a regular, consistent basis, and this is it. This is sustainable. And, you know, there's no inventory other than, you know, maybe some hard drive space for you. And, you know, there's really no licensing that had to be done. You know, we're not going FCC for this, you know, is part of your large organization. So not even necessarily legal fees and that kind of stuff. But this is so Doable. This is so real. And you pick fishing because you like it, but the podcasting space is so wide open. If done strategically, spend some money on buying it and then mash it up, mix it up with real entities. You've got your halibut fishing book, you know. You know, the whole multicasting thing is a huge part of what you're doing. So as we close this up, you know, what does someone dipping their toe into the podcast waters, you know, have to learn from you here, Ed? And what does someone maybe a little bit more advanced in the podcasting space have to learn from you here, Ed?

Yeah, I mean, okay, so the first one, it's just really, really simple. If you're just starting out or you've got a concept or you're just thinking about launching your own podcast, the first thing is essentially podcasts. Podcasting, as you know, is free. It's not free for your time, but if you want to get something syndicated on itunes, you can do it with very little expense. And so what I recommend. And Paul, as you know, we've both been teaching podcasting for a while now. What I recommend, I recommend this. Look, Just get it up and going and get it started and get it out there. So folks go, oh, but wait a second. I got, like, only eight weeks to be on New and Noteworthy, and I need to have it all. No, no, you don't have to have it perfect. In fact, I'm getting ready to start probably two more shows, one of which very likely could end up being my big marquee show. But I did that because I started to learn, man, there's so much interest over in this area of fishing, and I never would have known that if it wasn't for this particular show. And so you learn a lot. You do a lot. You know, you learn a lot faster. You implement a lot faster through motion, not meditation. So if you're thinking about starting a podcast, now's the time to start. Grab a microphone, do a recording, do a couple interviews, get it up there. Don't worry about the name. Just get it up there on itunes. You'll learn more from doing it than you will from thinking about it for months and months and planning and months and months of thinking and planning and scheming. Now, if you're experienced, most of us get to the point where we get started, and then we realize, man, there's not as many people listening. There's not as many people interacting, you know, and. And. And. And, you know, get almost to the point at which you get A little frustrated, frankly. And I was there the first two months, I think at 7,8000 downloads, that those first two months we were growing. I'm like, oh, man. It's like just we're trying so hard, and then all of a sudden, it really kind of took off and exploded. And so for you, what I would recommend for everyone who's doing a podcast, for that matter, any show, or for that matter, almost any business, here's the only thing I'd recommend every single month, just put in one more way to get new leads, new downloads, or new subscribers. So, for example, when I started, I started, all I had was Facebook and a blog. I didn't even have a show on itunes yet. Then in March, we launched our show on itunes. Then in April, we started on Instagram. Then in late May, we started on Twitter. Those were things that we started. Add one at a time, and you start to see what happens is not only do they start. You start to really figure out what's working, what kind of interaction, what kind of posting, what kind of commenting that starts to work, but you also begin to realize that you start to get this build that happens, so your Facebook followers become Instagram followers, and vice versa, and you end up getting sort of the value of this multimedia thing where you now have an email list. You got a following on Facebook, you got a following on Instagram, and if one person follows you in all three places and you hit all three places when you syndicate an episode, the chances are they're not going to see all three, but they're going to see one, and you wouldn't have gotten them before. And so if you've been doing this for a while, only thing I say is every single month and a new way to get new leads, new downloads, new subscribers into your marketing plan. Give it a shot. If it doesn't work, that's fine. Don't do it anymore. But if it does, you might find that you go from 8, 9, 10, 15,000 to 30,000 in one month, like I did, because you just start to find new ways to engage your lead base.

Beautiful. All right, Ed, I'm going to close this up. I want to make sure everybody knows how to get ahold of you. First of all, thepodcastreport.com 8 we'll give you all the links, everything we chatted about here. If you want to text hashcode ep8 to the show number, which is, of course, 503-897-1290. Or of course, Ed, give them one place. Don't you love it when somebody gives you, like, 37 places to find them online, like they're going to write down all 37. If somebody wants to find Jed, where do they look?

Just go to. If you're. I mean, I've got a bajillion websites, but the place to go for this is worldsgreatestfishing.com there's plenty of contact information that's on that website. So it's worldsgreatestfishing.com that's where you can see all the stuff that we're doing with the show.

Beautiful. Thanks so much, Ed. Thanks so much, everybody. This is the podcast report at thepodcastreport. Com. We've been listening to Ed Rush. He bought an audience and he did it smart. You can do the same. Thank you so much, Ed. All right, talk to you soon, everybody.

Bye.