Michael Stelzner Is Doing Another Podcast - The Podcast Report Episode #31

Why is Michael Stelzner doing another podcast? And more importantly, why isn't he doing it in his own voice? It's the podcast report, episode 31.

It's the podcast Report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul.

I just interviewed Michael Stelzner for the how to Podcast book because he's doing something that not everyone is doing, and he took a brave step in doing it. Now it's his second podcast. Yes, but he's launched a podcast not in his own voice. He's not getting in front of a microphone. He's not recording his own thoughts and ideas. He's building content.

And then he's got a machine in.

Place to make it a podcast.

It's an exciting model that needs to.

Be examined, that more podcasters need to consider, and I'm thrilled to share it with you. If you would like a transcript from.

Today'S episode, go ahead and text Ep.

31, the show hotline, 503-897-1290. More about the Podcast Report can be found@the podcastreport.com all the social links, past episodes, subscription information, all that stuff is there. With that said and done, let's get to Michael. I am on the Skype line with.

Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner.

Michael and I met a long time.

Ago at an event in San Diego. In what hotel was it, Mike? It was like a Holiday Inn or something.

Oh, yeah, that's right, man. That was before I even launched Social Media Examiner. I can't remember. Somewhere in Hotel Circle. But you were. You blew me away back then, and I knew nothing about social media. That was probably 2008. Late 2008.

Yeah, yeah. The video from that event still gets played on YouTube a lot. And it's funny because it's 4, 3.

It's not 16, 9.

You know, that's how long ago this was. And so it feels like. Like the old days. Mike has. Has just everybody knows him from Social Media Examiner. A runaway hit on.

On a lot of levels and.

And exciting to watch, exciting to. Just as. As a friend to see Mike's success. It's a blast. But then at the same time, I know whenever Mike does something, Mike is going to do it with the. Not just the enthusiasm it deserves and not just the gravitas it deserves, but he'll spend the money he needs to spend, he'll spend the time he needs to spend. He won't launch until it's done. And these are things that I really, really admire about the guy and what Mike did Was Mike launched a second podcast. Now, podcast Social Media examiner show is. What's the right name on that?

The original show that's been around for about two and a half years is called the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

That's right. Social Media Marketing Podcast comes out once a week. It's. It's a blast. Good stuff. You know, you keep up with the jungle theme. You know, I don't know what the numbers are. You don't even necessarily need to share them, but any look at itunes will tell you that Mike's doing quite well with the show. And I remember at last year's Social Media Marketing World event, at the keynote, you know, it wasn't by any means a scientific experiment, but you asked the audience to raise their hand if they listened to the show. And it was about a third, if I remember it right.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, and we found that a lot of people feed it the. Well, if you will. Right. Of our weekly show. And they are the most faithful, loyal fans that we have. And, yeah, about 30% of the people that attend most of our events are weekly listeners to our show. And for us, that's. That's a huge, you know, benefit of a podcast.

So not satisfied with that. The other thing I love about Mike is his hunger. You launched a daily show, but in just realizing the realities of the space time continuum and the fact that you want to see your kids, this is not at least the voice of Mike. This is not you doing a daily show. You brought somebody else out, you know, so tell me, what's this new show? Why did you launch it? And what's it like doing a podcast without ever talking into a microphone?

Well, you know, this is actually our third show, Paul. I don't know if you remember, but I did launch a show called Parenting Adventures, and we did 12 episodes of that. And running those two shows back to back was really challenging because I was doing the interviews on both of those shows. Very different audiences. We sunset that project in the fall of last year. But this time around, here was the thought, Paul, we have millions of people that are reading Social Media examiner, and we put out articles that are pretty detailed. They tend to be 1500 words or longer. And one of the things that we started to see with some of the smaller blogs in the space was they were getting some of their content and they were translating it into audio. And when I say smaller blogs, these are people that are thought leaders that have their own blog and they do their own voice. So I thought to myself, man, you know, we're Sitting on a gold mine of content here. I wonder if we could select some of the best content and abridged it, if you will, and create a show without telling anyone what we're really doing, but create a show that is a daily 10 minute show. And we call this show the Social Media Examiner. Shows like the snack and the Social Media Marketing podcast is the meal, right? Because it's a 45 minute weekly show where the Social Media examiner show is a 10 minute show. And as of this recording, we've only been about two and a half weeks into this project.

Now, you're not the voice. Who's the voice? Where'd you get the voice?

Well, I am not the voice for a reason because first of all, as you mentioned, I'm not very scalable. Secondly, we hire professional voice talent. So we put out the word and a lot of people applied and frankly, it's very hard to read something and not sound like you're reading. We found this gal named Chelsea and, and I purposely don't put her last name on there because I'm not trying to establish Chelsea as a thought leader. She's nothing more than a voice. She's nothing more than a verbal conduit for our content and she does a great job because she does not sound like she's reading. And I can talk a little bit about this, Paul, if you want to, but to get our articles ready for her is a pretty significant undertaking.

Yeah, yeah, please, let's chat about that. But first I want to make sure everybody gets this because we got a show comes out every weekday, existing content from the archives read by somebody else. Now, one of the things I love is your, your editorial process, your, you know, crap detector and eliminator, you know, that makes sure that the stuff that comes out is good. What do you go through to get content that Chelsea can read that makes it sound like it's not being read?

Well, first let me tell you what we're striving towards. Currently we're publishing four days a week. We're striving to five days a week. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to get the process down to be really, really fast. And what I mean by that is like we have audio. We would love to have the audio for the articles of this week that publish on social Media Examiner. It's just too early for us to be able to get to that point. We would even love to have last week's articles available in audio for this week, if you follow where I'm Going with that, what we do do have a lot of data, as anyone does who has Google Analytics on their website. So we can look at the articles from the past few weeks, and we can see which articles tend to perform very well for us on the metrics that we care about. And those tend to be traffic to the site, social shares, and email conversions. So we look at the ones that convert really well for us. And then what we do, Paul, is we say, okay, will this translate into audio? Like an article on Google Analytics is probably not going to translate into audio because you got to show a lot of screenshots, right. And you've got to explain things with visuals. So what we've decided to do is pick the articles that work really well in audio. And then what we do is we have one of our editors who literally goes in and scrubs the article to prepare it for audio. She removes content that will not translate into audio. She puts in verbal cues in there, like, hey, at the end of this show we're going to mention a link. Or if there's a screenshot of like a Heinz Ketchup campaign, she translates what's happening in the picture into verbals. So, for example, a great example is Heinz ketchup and how they used Instagram. And here's what they did where we would never say that in the article because it shows it with a visual. So essentially, it's kind of like an audiobook, an abridged audiobook.

There's two best practices. First, best practice number one, you actually tracked what you were doing and you figured out which articles people were interested in, what your audience wanted. Wanted, for lack of a better term, more of. That's the stuff that you pick to do. And then you recognize the medium difference of what worked great in an article. It's going to need a couple of adjustments to work in audio.

Exactly. And it's more than just a couple. It's a lot. So, yeah, that's absolutely true. And surprisingly, it works really well. And then we give the voice talent some freedom because there's things that the editor who does the preparing of the article for the. The Voice, you know, there's things that she can't think about because she's not the voice talent. So we allow the voice talent a little bit of creative freedom to alter from the script, as long as she doesn't change the intent of the message.

Oh, very cool. Very cool.

And that probably gives her a little bit more freedom. It's not just a gig. She begins to kind of show her personality. She Begins to kind of bring a little bit of herself into it.

We also chose two voices. We've got a male voice that does the opening introduction to the show, that mentions the name of the show, and then the female voice is the one that does the show. And we purposely chose younger voices. I am, you know, 46. And we wanted to appeal to a younger audience because we also knew that a lot of the next generation of podcast listeners are young, hip, 20 and 30 somethings, you know, mostly in the 20 something era. They don't have a lot of time. So the goal of keeping this thing to 10 minutes for them is extremely palatable. And, you know, we're getting messages from a lot of people saying, I'm listening when I'm in line at the checkout, or it's perfect for when I take my kids to school. And it's been really, really cool. I mean, I was kind of surprised and frankly a little scared that it might cannibalize my other show.

Well, let's chat about that. Has it, I mean, have you seen any decline in the other show?

We've seen zero decline. We've actually seen an increase, surprisingly, we have actually seen a dramatic increase in the downloads of the other show this month. We cannot attribute to what it is, other than maybe just the fact that we've been evangelizing our podcast and maybe some people are discovering both of them in the same swoop, you know, but it's actually gone up, surprisingly.

Are you cross marketing the two shows between each other?

We're not cross marketing the original longer show from the new show. We're only cross marketing the bigger audience. The social media marketing podcast does promote the smaller show, but we've only done it once. What we did was we came out with a special episode we normally publish on a Friday. We came out with a special Saturday episode where I introduced the new show, said who it was for, and then literally took the first episode and put it in the other show. You understand where I'm going with that. And then I said at the end of the show, if you want to subscribe to this show, here's where to find it. And we were expecting to see declines, as you always do when you do a launch. But in reality, it's been extremely steady. It's been pretty impressive. Now, I will tell you in the itunes algorithms, the first week of the launch, the older show bumped down in the ranks and the newer show came up in the ranks. But now that we're in the second and a half week, the old show came back to its ranking typically top 10 in the marketing category. And the new show is probably now in the top 50 in the marketing category. So we're okay with that because one of the things, Paul, that we're discovering and what's really fun about what we're doing is we are embedding the show into the article before it goes live on the podcast. So what I mean by that is we already have a bunch of articles on social media examiner that have future episodes of the show live that someone can listen to.

Okay.

And then what that does is it gives us a chance to promote our conference because we have an ad for our conference in the middle of every show. And it also gives people that come to our website a chance to realize that we even have a daily show and can subscribe off of the web browser, if you will. So it's really cool because frankly, I've instructed our editorial team that the second we get the final recordings, immediately embed them into the articles because we've seen in some articles thousands of listens before the actual podcast has even gone live.

I wouldn't doubt that at all. And the whole nature of the mobile device, now, if I'm reading your site and there's an article I'm interested in and there's a click to play button, I'm going to do that immediately. And I might not even subscribe, you know, especially if I don't know the first time and listening to it that there's even a subscription option. So that might twerk the subscription numbers that, you know, many of us believe is part of the itunes algorithm anyway. So I think that all. I think that all comes together quite intelligently. And of course, the itunes numbers, I mean, that's. That, that, that's one number. You know, the true number is the downloads, you know, Absolutely. The true number is the consumption. What are you seeing? What do you like? I mean, you're early in the game and this is something that a lot of people are following so you don't have the benefit of too well.

I'll give you the number. I'll give you the number. We've had about 34,000 downloads in the first two weeks and a day.

There we go.

And that's a pretty good number. And of those downloads, pretty significant portion of them are definitely coming from itunes, But a also significant portion are coming from our actual website itself. I'm searching while we're talking to try to find the actual source stats. But going off of memory, I remember that it was probably about 55% was coming from some sort of an itunes related audience, and 45% was coming from elsewhere. And a big chunk of those were from browsers like Chrome and Firefox and Mozilla. So I know that our blog itself is driving a pretty significant portion of the total downloads. And for us, we don't really care. Right. Because here's our strategy, Paul. We're going to find new people in the itunes directory and we're going to find new people that come looking at our articles and realize they can consume an audio version. So the hope would be that they do hit that subscription button and we do tell them how to do that right there in the article, how to subscribe. We even link to a video that shows them how to do it in every single article right there after the play button. But in the end, it increases our time on site. For those that are there, our average time on site is three minutes. This is increasing it dramatically for those that are listening.

There we go.

So there's a lot of benefits all around to doing this audio or repurposing this content, if you will, into audio.

And that time on site. The more time on site, the higher rankings in SEO. I mean, that's a huge thing now. And so the more chance that they're going to bring new people to you who are going to click the play button to hear the audio for the first time, to eventually subscribe. So it's, it's a neat little loop, if you will. I wanted to have this conversation because what's, what's so vital here is you are doing a strategically thought out, purposeful, you know, SOP driven process for a podcast where it's not you getting in front of the microphone.

Absolutely.

And this is key because a lot of people think that podcasting must be all of them, all the time. And you even tried that with the last show and doing two at a time, and that wasn't the only variable by any means, but doing two at a time was just, you know, a lot. And so what is it like knowing that another podcast is happening in the office and you don't get to speak every word? You know, is it hard to give that away? Is it.

It's so liberating. You don't even know. There we go.

There we go.

I mean, I'm not. We're not a one man show, obviously. Right. We've got a pretty nice staff, which affords us the ability to do something like this. And it's not cheap. I mean, there's a huge amount of labor that goes into doing this. But it's really nice to know that my editorial team has handled 100% of this and I don't need to do anything but just listen every morning when I'm shaving. It's taken us a long time to get to this point. I mean, it was at least a couple months in planning, but we've got the complete system and it's working. And my hope is that it continues to grow over time and that we tend to grow an audience. And for us, we see the big benefit to this is the ability to promote our shows, whatever our conferences or online shows, right in the middle of our podcast. It's huge for us because if people love it, they're going to keep listening. And a little 30 second blip in there about the show is only going to help us, you know, communicate to our audience that, hey, we've got. We're more than just content here. So down the road we might sell sponsorships into that thing. I don't have any clue, but it is really intriguing. I don't know if we'll ever show back up in the top rankings for this show, but if we don't, I'm okay with it. We have many different places on our site where people can discover more about the show. For example, in the nav bar at the top, we changed it to say podcasts. And when you click on it, we show both of our shows with a sample audio clip from each of the shows and all the different ways you can subscribe. We put banner ads on the side. We'll eventually add an email into our autoresponder campaign to feed people the show that have been email subscribers for a couple weeks. For us, all the signs are very, very positive.

So if I am an existing podcaster, I've seen great reach. I'm looking at the possibility for a secondary show. Maybe the. I once heard Jim Lauterbach from Revision 3 call the shorter episodes snacker. Sodes, I heard you use the word snack, so I went back to that. You know, some people are considering this. Others. One thing that has stopped people from podcasting is, you know, the fear of their own voice and a microphone. Now, you and I both would respond with the loud, get over it. But if you can't get over it, I mean, is it viable? You know, we hear about podcasting and how, you know, it needs to be personal, it needs to be intimate, it needs to be our own voice. Is it? I mean, the answer is obviously yes with what you're doing, but.

But it doesn't need to be, Paul, because look, just look at all the, all the popular podcasts, like serial and all the other things that are coming on the horizon. Right. They're about telling other people's stories. Good. And you know, technically the personality behind it is irrelevant. Right. As long as the personality has a good voice and can the flow going, it's really about, it's really about the content. And so many podcasts today are just people blabbing non stop about their opinions. And there are very few shows out there that are, that are rich how to kind of stuff. It's almost unheard of, frankly. Like almost, almost all podcasts are interviews or are someone talking into the microphone for like 30 to 45 minutes, sharing their thoughts on things. There's very few shows that I've come across or at least that I subscribe to, are very short, under 10 minutes and actually have a lot of really high end tactical stuff. And what's unique about Social Media examiner is we put $1,000 in development after the article comes in on every article we publish on Social Media Examiner. That doesn't count. Whatever it costs to pay the writer. That's just all the development we do once an article comes into our editorial process. Our articles are so good, that's why millions of people read them. That I just finally came to the conclusion, man, if we could translate this into audio, we could come up with that's frankly never been done before. So what I would say to your listeners is that if there's some really, really rich stuff out there that you know and you can figure out and you write articles about it all the time and those articles tend to go really popular. Why not figure out a way to translate it into audio? Because you know what, it only takes about 10 minutes to, to read a thousand words.

And it can be 10 minutes of someone else's time.

Correct.

So it's even less if you hand it off. You know, it's, it's.

I'll be honest, it's very hard to read and not sound like you're reading. You have to be extremely well trained to do that. Yes, I can do it, I can do it, but I can only do it for so long, you know, and to do it for 10 minutes straight is extremely hard for almost anybody. Like if you've ever been in front of a camera and you try to do a 10 minute photo shoot, video shoot without any takes, it's almost impossible, right?

Yeah, exactly. You know, but the beautiful part, you.

Know, that's where talent comes In, Right, Exactly.

And talent needs to be paid for. But the great thing is, is, you know, you're promoting a show with a, you know, a reasonable but respectable ticket price, you know, where you can actually pay for this stuff. Do the profits of what it is.

That you are doing.

Is this kind of play only for a big guy? I mean, can a small person do this, you know, or do you have to have $1000?

It depends if. Well, no, I'm not spending $1000 for each episode. I'm spending $1000 for each article that publishes on social Media Examiner. So our actual cost of this show is about a 30 to $40,000 annual investment. Okay. Okay. So in our case, that involves the cost of the editor to translate the audio into. I mean, the text into audio. That'll work. The cost of the voice talent, the cost of the production company to sew the whole thing together, the cost of the crew to go ahead and encode and upload everything and to add them to the articles and all that kind of stuff. There's about four or five people doing little pieces, if you will. So that's our cost, you know, so 30 to 40.

But an existing content library that you're pulling from.

Well, and if you divide that by five times 52. Right. I mean, you divide that by 250, it's pretty reasonable if you can develop the kind of audience that you want to develop. And in our. In our case, this is a media place, so we are developing a brand new media channel. And if we can get to the point where we have hundreds of thousands of downloads a month, which I think we can very easily get to in the next few months, you know, and said another way, if that equates to, let's say, 10,000 listeners per episode, that is something we can do enormous things with. Yes. And, you know, every time we have something, anything to promote, you know, these are people that every day are snacking on this content. And that just gives us an incredible opportunity to be able to sell more of what we care about.

Absolutely. What's next?

Well, this is all for podcasting in the near future, at least, other than. Other than social media marketing world.

Well, of course, of course. But I mean, you're going to try to go to five days a week?

Oh, yeah, we're trans. Okay, so by. It's late January, as of this recording in February, we hope to get to the point where by the middle of February we're publishing five days a week. And that's. Excuse me, that's where we'll rest. We don't want to right now. It's Monday through Thursday, and then my other show is on Friday. We want to get to the point where we're Monday through Friday. You know, I don't really know what percentage of the other show is watching this show. It'll be interesting to see in the grand scheme of things, if it hurts us or if it helps us. But this is a grand experiment, Paul, and I've never really seen anybody do what we're doing. So my hope is that it works and we'll keep doing it, and hopefully a lot of other people will see what we're doing and they'll try it out themselves.

Well, I haven't seen it either, and that's why I asked to do this interview with you, because I wanted to pick your brain. You know, it's funny, so many podcast interviews, sadly, or why are you doing this? And it's like, well, you know, we just thought. We try to see what works. And, you know, you've got some thought and you've got some purpose and some attention in this. That is. That is. That is fun to watch. And execution is. Is always such a big part of it. And, you know, you know, I know that you'll take this as far as you need to go and experiment with what. And the beautiful part is, Mike, your decision on whether or not you keep it Friday or if you decide that it gets in the way of the other show will be a business decision, not an emotional decision, you know, or not a voting decision from. From, you know, an informal survey to people on Twitter or something like that. You know, you're building a business here. You've thought it through, and you're rejecting some of the traditional expectations, what a podcast is, but seeing some great results from it. I really appreciate your leadership in the industry. I really appreciate what you're doing here, and it's fun to watch. And, you know, now I, too, have something to listen to. I shave. So thanks so much. Any final words to the audience here?

I hope they'll check it out. It's called the Social Media examiner show, and let us know what you think.

And that was Michael Stelzner. Great job, Mike. More of you need to consider what could happen, what it would mean, what the options are if you started doing a podcast that wasn't necessarily in your own personal voice, you might have a story to tell. And if something like your voice, your.

Microphone, your audio production was getting in the way.

What Michael represents here, what Michael shared with us, is something really worth thinking about. Don't assume anything. It doesn't have to be in your voice. It doesn't have to be 40 minutes long. It doesn't have to be anything. That's the beauty of podcasting, and I appreciate Mike sharing that with us. You've been listening to the podcast report@thepodcastreport.com this is episode number 31@thepodcastreport.com 31. All of the typical sites itunes, Stitcher, Facebook, Twitter. They can all be found@thepodcastreport.com iTunes or Stitcher or Twitter or Facebook. We love interaction with you. Would love to have you subscribe and follow the show. We've got a nice little back catalog and we've got some great stuff coming for you in the future. Mike's interview will be part of the how to Podcast book coming out on February 24th. You could pre order that now at Amazon@thepodcastreport.com howtopodcastbook.