Making Media With John Lee Dumas - The Podcast Report Episode #30

Making Media with John Lee Dumas. It's the podcast report, episode 30. For a transcript of today's show, text Ep. 30 to 503-897-1290. It's the podcast report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul. John Lee Dumas is a force to be reckoned with in podcasting. His show, Entrepreneur on Fire, is not only fabulous, but it's also an extremely profitable podcast. He's done it right. He's got strategies, he's got systems in place. This is a guy to model. Now, I've spoken about him in past episodes and we've chatted about some of the ways the industry responds to him and some of the things that people have done as a result of him. But in today's episode, I have an interview with him about making media, about his approach to getting all of these interviews done and why he does it and how he does it. And it is fabulous, fabulous stuff. This interview is going to be transcribed, modified a little bit, and put into the how to Podcast book as one of the bonus chapters. But I wanted to get this to you now because it is so good. If you head out to the podcastreport.com forward/30, I've got a link to John and everything he's doing. And again, he'll be in the how to Podcast book at as well. If you want to get the transcript, if you want the transcript of this and nothing else, go ahead and text EP30 as an Episode 30 to the show hotline at 503-897-1290. We'll do the interview with John and then we'll close a couple things up and we will go from there. But anyway, here's John. I am on the Skype line with John Lee Dumas, entrepreneur on Fire. Sir, you've said it so many times. Are you ready to ignite, Paul?

Let's set this place on fire, my friend.

All right. I am impressed with what you've done. And it's funny because some of the things I'm impressed with are not the things that others are impressed with. Now, maybe that means I've got bad focus, but it's my show, so let's, let's get to work here. First thing is you produce a considerable amount of content. Now you've got a model that makes it easy. I've been on your show. You sent me the questionnaire. You asked the same questions to everybody. Everybody's familiar with the questions. They like the questions. They're familiar. How much additional time do you spend on your show producing content other than the interviews that you do.

So not much is the answer. What we have set up is really a system that does flow just like you share. So we have our studio days, just those Tuesdays with eight back to back interviews. By 6pm that night, I not only have interviewed eight people, but it is edited, it is produced and it is, you know, for the most part uploaded to libs and ready to go. On that one day from that point, it's my virtual assistants, they take over. You know, they're the ones that, that set up the processes, the follow ups and the marketing and the social media side of it. They keep that machine going. So it really was a system that I set up at a, you know, at large cost and a lot of time, once and now it just hits rinse and Repeat.

So a 40 minute show takes you 40 minutes to make.

I say a 40 minute show takes me 50 minutes because there is, I do drop markers throughout the interviews. If there's a swear word or something a little excessive and I might go in and kind of splice that out, but super minimal. I'd say no more than five to ten minutes per show.

Awesome. This is something that I think gets missed. Now you spoke to the batching and a lot of people know about it, but there are like three people left on the planet who don't know about you, my friend. And so you said something, you said that you tape all of your shows on Tuesday. Did I hear that right? And this is obviously a leading question. You do eight interviews on Tuesday?

Tuesday, yes. Well, first off, I hope those three people that have not heard about me are listening to you, Paul. And starting at 9am every Tuesday, I do an interview on the hour, every single hour until 4pm and that's when my last interview starts. So by the time 5pm rolls around, I have eight interviews complete. And by the time 6pm hits, I've edited those at an average of five minutes a clip for those eight. And I'm done for that week plus one day of interviews. And as we sit right now, I'm actually booked out every single Tuesday for the next three and a half months. So I know that that Tuesday is a full studio day.

So one day, and I won't say 1/5 of your week because I know you work like a Madman, but 1/7? Yeah, you know, one eight hour session and all the shows are done.

Done.

Does that exhaust you? How do you have the energy to do that? Talk to me.

So I do equate it A little bit to training for a marathon. I'm not a great runner. I do jog every now and then, but, you know, two miles, I'm done. Put a fork in me, and that's pretty much it. But I have trained for half marathons and marathons before, and I could never run either one of those right now, but I could train and then eventually be able to run one. And when I first started, Paul Entrepreneur on Fire, I was doing three or four interviews a day, a couple to three days a week, and I was toast at the end of those. And I saw how much time it took me to set up for each one of those, to break down for each one of those. And it was becoming my weeks. And that's when I just had to put the fork in the sand and say, it's got to be one day, and I've got to build up, basically, energy for this. Just like you can build up running energy. I wanted to build up interviewing energy. And it hasn't come easy. I mean, it's definitely been a process where every single month that's gone by, it's gone a little bit easier. But, you know, there were times at the end that I was near collapsing. I was just like, okay, like, I need some spaghetti. I need to, you know, I need a blanket and some Downton Abbey. And like, that's it. Like, no more. And now, honestly, like, I can do eight interviews and be like, all right, what's next? Let's do a live webinar. And it's gone to that point. But it did take. It did. It did take a while, and it was a process to get here.

Would it be easier to do two sets of four interviews, take two half days or something like that?

I think it would have been when I started. And that's probably where I should have stayed longer, to be honest, because it would have resulted in higher quality interviews. Because back in the three hundreds and four hundreds of my interviews, back when it really still was a strain for me, by episodes six and seven and eight, like, I was flagging mentally, and my energy was. It was just hard to kind of conjure up that same type of energy. And it's pretty funny. Quick side note, I just interviewed somebody for episode 872, and I also had interviewed her for eight for episode 61. So I went back and just listened to a couple minutes of it right before I kicked into our second interview. And I was like, wow, I was so uninspiring. Like, I was so flat. I had no energy in that interview compared to what I have now. And that came with feeling more comfortable and doing it more often. But also, she was probably episode seven or eight of the day, and I was just flagging at that point. But to be honest with you, now I look forward to each interview of the eight, and I get really fired up just getting into these conversations. So I'm at the point now where I. I love my eight interview days. Number one, because I can do it without a sweat, but number two, because it doesn't take up blocks of other of my other days where I'm doing other things, creating courses, writing books, doing all the cool things that need to be done.

That's good. That's good. Now, again, for those three people who haven't heard of you, and I'll have links to you in the show, notes and all that good stuff, so we don't have to worry about that. But every episode follows a format. You send the interviewee a batch of questions, you ask the questions, and you do it. And it's a brilliant move because a, it makes it easy for you. You don't have to do a tremendous amount of research. You know, I was listening to an interview with Tony Robbins, and he said, like, he does 18 hours of research before he meets with somebody. It was like, oh, my goodness. And, you know, you don't have to do any research, and you can probably do all the questions by heart. Now, I imagine your first 500 shows you had a cheat sheet. You know, after that, it's probably just second nature for you. And what I found is interesting is there are a lot of podcasters, unfortunately, who have decided that if they just have a batch of questions and if they just do eight a week, they'll see the same success that you've had. And it's a bad concept and it's a bad idea, largely just because this is the formula that works for you. This is the model that works for you. This is what makes your nature happen. I mean, it wasn't that you stumbled across this. It was that you did a heck of a lot of work, a heck of a lot of planning, a heck of a lot of strategy before all this happened and said, hey, this is a formula that makes sense to John. What would you say to somebody who's trying to create content, trying to come up with a formula that makes sense to Fred or to Becky or to Frank?

Love the question. And to kind of go back just to reiterate how correct you are on the initial point that you made, which is, when I wake Up Tuesday mornings. Paul I don't even know who the eight people are that I'm going to be interviewing just because I haven't opened up my spreadsheet that my VA creates and she updates. It's literally sometimes 10 minutes before my interview start where I pull up and I say, okay, here's my eight people. Oh, I know that person and that person a little bit and I've heard of that person and, and I don't even know who I'm going to be interviewing because of the system I've set up. It doesn't require me to know anything before the interview starts because I have that format of questions. And in a way too, I like not knowing too much because it makes me curious and it makes me, in my opinion, ask the questions that, to follow up their answers that I would want, that I would. That I hope and want my listeners, Fire Nation to be asking. So, so that's just kind of a little reiteration of the point that you made. I definitely want a second because that's huge for me because it just takes away so much mental bandwidth of what you mentioned with Tony Robbins. I can't. 18 hours. I mean, I don't even take 18 minutes for eight interviews to prep. I don't. It's just. That's all right there. All I know is their 50 word intro that I'm reading over once right before I introduce them when I usually have them on Skype, you know, so for someone that's listening right now, you know, to your, to your last question there, and they're saying, you know, I want to create something, but, you know, how do I know what the right frequency is? How do I know what the right content is? How do I know this? How do I do that? Know that I created Entrepreneur on Fire because it was what I wanted. I was so tired of listening to a great podcast episode with an aspiring entrepreneur and then getting so much out of it and then knowing that I had to wait two more weeks or another week for that next one interview to be released. And I also hated those interviews where it was people that were going on and on about cats, or maybe they were talking about sports one day and they weren't getting to the meat. And I said to me, the perfect podcast would be seven days a week. And I knew that if I press the play button, I was going to hear what I wanted to hear, that I was going to hear an actual journey from a successful entrepreneur who is going to be sharing their failures, their lessons learned from that, their Aha. Moments. The steps they took to turn that into success, and then, of course, why they're successful right now. And so I said, I want that. I want to give that to Fire Nation. Boom. Entrepreneur on Fire was born. That was how my show came about. So if you're listening right now, that's how your show needs to come about. You need to really get angry or frustrated or depressed because that show doesn't exist. And you know what that show is, and then you go out and give birth to it and create it. And that's going to ensure that you're drawing in the audience, is going to resonate with you as the host and your content as a whole.

Two things I love about you, John, and there's a lot, but we're just going to list two in this one. You know, number one, you have a crystal clear understanding of who your avatar is. And you've said that from day one. I am the avatar. I'm making the show that I want to listen to. Now, not everybody has that opportunity. Not everybody has that gift, you know, for lack of a better term, but you're crystal clear about it, and that's something that anybody can take away from this. But then, number two, the thing that I really love is really the secret to your success. One of the secrets to your success, one of the many secrets to your success, is not the formula, is not the excitement, not the fire part of it, but the fact that. That you have such a close and intimate relationship with your avatar. You know, you know exactly who you're creating for. There's no doubt why your podcast is what your podcast is in your mind, and that clarity is phenomenal. And that clarity is worth a million bucks. So what would you say to people struggling to figure out their avatar or spending too much time on content creation and editing because they're not quite sure what they want? I mean, maybe we can't have the intimacy that John has with his avatar, but how can we get that kind of intimacy?

Avatar is everything, in my opinion, when it comes to creating a podcast. And I think one thing that a lot of people do miss is that they think that their avatar has to be, in some way, shapes and forms, broad. And I say that because it's every time I speak at a conference or I'm talking and get asked this question on someone else's podcast, then I always turn the question around and I say, who out there has a podcast? Okay, raise your hand. Okay. How long have you been podcasting for? Oh, you have a hundred episodes. A year. You must know who your one perfect listener is, who that avatar is. Stand up and share with the world. And sure enough, they'll puff their chest out and they'll stand up and they'll say, my avatar is males between ages 25 and 45 that like to drink coffee and. And watch football on the weekends. And I'm like, that's barely a targeted demographic, and that is not an avatar. And you don't know who your avatar is. Like, I've given my avatar spiel a lot. My avatar is Jimmy. He is identical to who I was when I launched Entrepreneur on Fire. And so I know exactly who that person is. And so whenever I come to a fork in the road, I don't make that decision. It's not my bandwidth, it's Jimmy's bandwidth, because he knows left or right, right off the bat. So if you're listening right now and you're saying, I'm struggling creating my avatar because, you know, I want so many people to listen. I want to grow a big, large audience. Remember that if you try to resonate with everybody and make a vague avatar and just really what turns out to be a targeted demographic, to resonate with everybody, you're going to resonate with nobody. It's those people that say, you know what? I know exactly one person who would be perfect to listen to my podcast, and I'm going to create my podcast for that person, get a niche in there and actually just get a handhold and start building just a little momentum, and then start having that momentum work outwards. You can expand the scope outwards from that point and then grow a bigger show. You can go from niching down to bringing it back out, to scope out and grow a bigger audience. But so many of us, Paul, are afraid to start small because we think if we start small, we'll always be small. But the problem is we have to start small to get big. And if we start big, we'll never even get going because we'll just get lost in this ocean. And I've seen it time and time again. I mean, there's over 1900 people in paradise, and I watch their launches and I watch their trajectory. And those that are still crushing it 6 12, 18 months later are those that just say, you know what? This is the perfect listener. I'm going to podcast to that person. And until I've dominated that niche, then I'm going to take one step back out, and then I'm going to build this larger audience as I continue to move outwards Those are the people that have found success. So don't be afraid to get specific, to start really focused in and just be that avatar if that's you, or create that avatar if it's somebody else.

Who do you think? And you probably know a lot of them, especially with 1900 right now in podcasters paradise. You said you probably know a lot of them. So pick someone that maybe we'd have a better chance than others to recognize. Who else out there do you think really understands their avatar?

I should actually just pull up our Facebook group because that's so cool to see these discussions, because of these conversations that I've had and these hangouts that we do and how focused the actual word avatar is in my community paradise.

To.

To see these people going back and forth about, you know, that's not niche enough, that's not focused enough. But, you know, one that I love talking about is Paul Blaze. He has a podcast called Potter's Cast. It's about making pots. Like it's handcrafted pots, like picture the Movie Ghost. Paul.

Yep, yep.

Paul Blaze is like, it's a podcast for people that like, do that. They actually make pots like that in the movie Ghost, like hand crafted pots. And his podcast is so specific, so focused, if he gets 600 listens per episode, it's a good day. And it's a great day because 600 people that are listening to a podcast about how to make pottery, hand blown pottery, that is a massive audience for that niche. And so he knows that exact avatar. He knows the age of that person, he knows where that person's going to their local college at night to take the courses. So he knows how he can reach out to colleges and have them talk during their courses about this podcast. And he brings those teachers that actually teach these college courses at these state universities in community colleges around the country onto his show, and then they spread it with their students, and then it starts to spread like wildfire like that within that community. So there's an example of a guy that does a podcast about making pots and he's having a great time doing it because it's his passion and he's very successful with it.

Beautiful. And I will get that in the show notes and in the transcript. We'll get a link for that to happen as well. I want to close this up. I want to be respectful of your time. Do you have any final words? I mean, part one of the book is Make Media. That's. That's the first step. And you out of the gate just started Making media like a machine. And, and, and I love that because I've met people and I'm sure, sadly, you probably met them too, you know, who six months later, have yet to hit the record button. You know, what would you say to someone who's just deer in headlights when it comes to making media, has yet to hit that red button? What would you say to them, John?

Paul, I love this. I love make media that you're starting. Because my favorite quotes that goes right in with this and really just underlines and puts an exclamation point on my journey thus far is if you want to be do. I wanted to be a podcaster, Paul. I had zero experience. I had zero online presence. I had never spoken into a microphone before or interviewed anybody, but I wanted to be a podcaster. The only way that I was going to be a podcaster was by doing that thing, was by podcasting. And I was willing to have the courage, because it does take courage to be bad for a decent amount of time, slowly getting better by practicing the craft, by pressing that red button every single day, talking to somebody that was so much more successful, so much more eloquent, so much more polished, so much more impressive than me bumbling around, acting the fool, stumbling over my words, trying to have a coherent conversation, but every time being like, wow, that was bad. But I did a little bit better on that or on that. And just doing that every single day. And now I'm at episode 835, and, you know, that is the reality of just doing so. That's why I love make media. It's just so blood. It's like, what are you doing? I don't want to hear anything you're about to say. 10 reasons why you're not making media. Make media. That's all that matters. And that's why I love that message.

Do we have an attribution for if you want to be due, or does that come from the story?

I've googled it. I've googled it. I've looked everywhere and like, brainy quote seems to have it for everything, but now I just can't find the attributes of that quote. I'm tempted to take it, but I know that I've heard it from somewhere else.

Very cool, John. Thank you so much, man. It's about making media. You do it with an enthusiasm and do I dare say fire that I see nobody else do it, but you do it with a great amount of strategy and understanding and empathy towards your avatar that gets the results that it's a great formula. I'm glad you're doing it. Love the show. But but it's your understanding of what it is that you're doing that produced this formula that I think is such a testimony to what you've got there. So thank you so much for the interview, man. I want to be good to your time. So thanks Paul.

With those words, I can die happy, my friends. Thank you kindly.

There it is. John in all of his glory. I love this guy. I love what he's doing, I love what he's done, I love the model that he's created and I'm thrilled to share him with you. The Podcast Report Audience this has not been a traditional episode of the Podcast Report and so we'll close this up pretty quickly. But if you want more about the Podcast Report, you can head out to the podcastreport.com if you want this specific episode, you can look at 30. If you want to follow up with me on social media of any type, you do that@the podcastreport.com Facebook, Twitter, and that will take you to the right places. I love reviews. I itunes, Stitcher, any of those places would be great. If you like the Podcast Report and it's helped you out in any way, you can find the podcast report@thepodcastreport.com iTunes or Stitcher or Pocketcasts, TuneIn, Spreakers, iHeartRadio we're pretty much everywhere. We're not at SoundCloud yet. That's coming soon. Don't worry about it. If you haven't subscribed yet to the Podcast Report, please do. Getting a single episode of a podcast is fine and dandy, but the power of podcasting is in the simple fact that you click once and every time a new episode comes out you get Automatically updated in 100% spam free type of delivery system. So go ahead, follow the Podcast Report at itunes or Stitcher or any of those places that you are listening to podcast and we will go from there. If you've got any comments or thoughts on today's episode, go ahead, head out to the podcastreport.com we'd love to take your comments there. Of course, any of the social options I provided are there as well. If you're listening to this the Week this came out, the how to Podcast Book is coming very soon. If you're listening to this a couple weeks later, it is there. It is available. More information about the how to Podcast Book can be found@thepodcastreport.com how to podcast See you next week Bye.