Mike Stelzner Of Social Media Examiner Killed A Podcast - And His Business Is Better For It - The Podcast Report

Mike Stelzner killed his podcast because that let him do bigger and better things. When should you kill a podcast? It's the PODCAST REPORT Episode 117Show notes, links, conversation and more at the podcastreport.com 117This episode brought to you by Fireside Way back in episode 31 of the podcast report had an interview with Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner. We were chatting about his second show and and how cool it was that he was launching a second show. The transcript from that interview were very popular elements of the how to podcast 2015 book. The how to podcast 2016 book. I continue to market the episode on social. It continues to get clicks and retweets and likes and all that stuff. But here's the interesting thing. Mike killed the show. The show is no longer even though it's getting downloads in excess, it's getting rankings in itunes in excess of of what many so called podcast gurus charge 2000 plus dollars for their course for. He still killed it because it ran the numbers and he realized that if he didn't focus on this, he could focus on something else with a greater impact. I think this is key. As podcasters, so many of us, we think, okay, we're going to do great business with our podcast. That means it has to get out there. But part of doing great business is running the numbers. Part of doing great business is realizing what works and what doesn't. Mike realized that this new venture wasn't working and killed it and I respect him more for that than actually launching the show. There's a lot to listen to this episode and I think you're going to love it. Now Mike and I also chat in the spirit of Big Picture and the spirit of this is a show I love his Social media Marketing World 2017. Now I did that at the end in case you listened to this after the event. But Social media marketing world 2017 is going to be huge. I'll be there again. I've got a very, very cool panel with Rob Walsh from Libsync, John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire, and Gary Leland from the Gary Leland Show. We'll be chatting about what's working in podcast advertising, what's working in monetization. Should be a ton of fun. If you pick up your ticket to the show@the podcastreport.com 117 I will take note of that. Reach out to me through any of the help desks or whatnot and we'll use some of that affiliate revenue to buy breakfast, get together, chat do that kind of thing. So two part interview Mike on why he killed the show Ageless and then Mike on what's happening with Social media Marketing World 2017 routine which is interesting if you are pondering going with that said and done. A quick update from our sponsor Fireside and then we will get to the interview. Today's episode is brought to you by Fireside. Fireside is a podcast hosting and analytics platform created by Podcasters for podcasters. It was started by Dan Benjamin, the founder of Five by five and my guest next week taking everything he's learned since 2009 for making podcasts for a living and he's turned it into a platform for podcasters everywhere and at any level of expertise. Fireside has it all. Unlimited uploads, unlimited downloads, massive amounts of real time data analytics about the unique downloads, superfast CDN for the best download speeds, multiple podcast support, one click podcast importing free from platforms like Libsyn, Feed Press, Simplecast, Soundcloud, etc. Custom domain mapping, beautiful responsive website with your own artwork, host guest pages, ton of advanced features like sponsorship integration, chapter markers, bookmark lists for links, auto posting of future episodes, timecode linking, and a bunch more. You can try Fireside for free for seven days, during which time you can import an existing podcast for free while taking advantage of every feature Fireside has to offer. The unlimited plan start at just $19 per month and there's no commitment or long term agreement to worry about at all. Visit Fireside FM Fireside FM PodcastReport today to take the tour, use the code PaulSentMe for 20% off the standard plan for the next three months. Fireside by Podcasters For Podcasters the links to everything we chat about today is@thepodcastreport.com 117 that'll be the link to Fireside. That'll be the link to the episode where I chatted with Michael previously. That'll be the link to Social media marketing world 2017 and a bunch more again. Thepodcastreport.com 117 please subscribe to the show if you haven't already. Getting this thing automatically is the power of podcasting, and if you're not experiencing that, you're not experiencing the power of podcasting and not getting the business from it. The subscriber is the backbone of this. The subscription is the hidden key to podcasting. It makes it so different, makes it so powerful. And if you're not experiencing it, my goodness, start experiencing it. Lepodcastreport.com Twitter lepodcastreport.com Facebook will do the social thing if you want to do that again. Two parts of this episode one, why Mike killed the show. Two, social media marketing world. So if you want to drop off, if that's past the event, I completely and totally understand. It is an insight to the different events, why they do what they do, what's important, what isn't, and you might want to listen. Anyway, here is Mike. I am on the Skype line with Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner. I had Mike back in episode 31 because Mike did something interesting. Mike launched a second show. This episode was well received, well liked. It's still being promoted in social media. It's still getting retweets and likes on social media. It is still in the book. Funny Mike. My 2016 had a podcast book. I think I've sold more in January and February of 2017 than I think all of last quarter. And the transcript for that interview is actually in the book as well. So Mike launched a second show and Mike ran the numbers and Mike did it. And he realized that time was an issue, so he moved out to everybody else. I still think it's worth listening to. Thepodcastreport.com 31 now, here's the thing. Mike shut down the show. August 26, 2016 was his last episode. Now we're recording this in February 2017. So we've got September, October, November, December, January. So we've got five full months plus some times. And here's the funny thing. Even though Mike shut down the show, he's 92 in management marketing, and there are people below him who are charging $2,000 for how to podcast course, who are ranking less than Mike is for his course that he killed. Russell Brunson's, who we had last week on the show. The old version of marketing in your car, which he hasn't transferred over yet, is only a few behind him. Also above a lot of these guys selling $2,000 courses. So the course, the podcast obviously was successful. The podcast obviously had numbers. The podcast obviously had downloads. Why did you stop it?

Well, first of all, thanks for having me on, Paul. It actually was my third podcast. There was another one I shut down, which I don't know if you remember. It was called Parenting Adventures. I don't know if you ever knew about that one. That was part of my Kids Adventures project.

I did. I forgot about it.

Yeah. So the simple question is, we should always ask ourselves, why do we do what we do? And if we do it because we've always done it there's a reason to call it into question. Through 2016, I had come across the concept of essentialism by McEwen and throughout the company. We've been doing a lot at Social Media examiner, and I believe that the only way to innovate is to stop doing things that are no longer doing what you had expected them to do for you. And what ended up happening was the original idea for starting the Social Media examiner show was to have a show that basically was professionally produced based on the content that we publish in our blog posts. So it was a daily show running, I believe, five days a week, might have been longer, I'm not sure, can't remember. But the idea was that our best performing articles would be sent to a special editor who would voice edit them, meaning get them ready to be spoken. Because how to. Articles don't all translate to spoken words, so we'd have to edit them. Then it would go to a professional voice talent. And the professional voice talent was good enough that she didn't sound like she was reading. And then it was professionally produced. Somewhere along the way, the voice talent decided she didn't want to do this anymore, and she quit the world of voice work. And we had to find a second person. And going through that process of trying to find that second person was a painful process. The voice, the ability to translate, the reading to the voice wasn't working as well. And I just decided, you know, let's go ahead and let's analyze how much does this actually cost the company and whether or not it's achieving our business objectives. Stop me at any point if you want me to keep going, I can.

No, no, this is good. This is what my audience wants.

So we spent $30,000 over 12 months to produce this show because of all the different people that were involved and all the work that was gone into doing this. And by the way, we embedded these shows back into the article so that when someone came to Social Media examiner, they could listen to the show instead of reading the article. And of course, we have the itunes feed. The main reason we decided to do this show, Paul, was my main show is very successful. It's called social media marketing. And, you know, we were getting about 300,000. Still are about 300,000 downloads a month on that. And the daily show was getting about 150,000 downloads a month. But realized there's a big difference between doing something daily versus doing something weekly. Right. So when you begin to pull out the math on that and you multiply that and divide that out it wasn't really as much as we thought. It was actually a significantly smaller number. And considering what we know about podcast listenership and how people binge download podcasts and stuff, I just kind of said to myself, it's not growing. And for six months, our listenership was kind of flatlined, and a big part of our listenership was actually coming from the blog posts themselves, not from the itunes, directories and such. So I had a long conversation with my team and I said, you know what? How much time is this going to free up from the various teams? And on top of this, how much money is this going to free up? Turned out it was going to be $30,000 in hard costs. So we just went ahead and stopped it and freed up our editorial team to work on other things. And surprisingly, I had a final episode of the show where I said, hey, this is why we're shutting down. And here's an example of my other show. I only had about five people reach out to me. I told everyone what my email address was and I said, you know, reach out to me. I only had five people reach out to me. That said, I just loved the show. I'm really disappointed that you let it go, but I had like 10 to 15 reach out to me. That saying, you did the right thing. I didn't think the show was very good anyways. And surprisingly, I was just looking in the Lipson metrics, and we have had, we still have just in the month of January, 66,000 downloads on that show. And I know that's bigger than a lot of the tiny shows. And this show has been technically dead for quite some time. So pretty crazy.

Nature of the beast. When should someone. I mean, okay, there's the obvious spreadsheet answer here. If it's costing you more than it's making you and it doesn't have a future, you should kill it, obviously. But, you know, I look at itunes right now. I'm looking at the management and marketing top 200. There are some shows in here. Well, first of all, that have died a long time ago that are still in the list, which is a whole pet peeve. But there are also a number of shows that should have died 50, 60 episodes ago. When should you kill a show?

Well, first of all, realize that the show is going to live on and whether or not you like it or not. Some shows, like Seth Godin, did a show years ago with about 15 episodes that is probably just as valuable today as it was when he put it out there. So if you think about Itunes, like Netflix, and you think about it as just content that someone might want to listen to it hypothetically, could last for quite a long time. But the real question for me is, why did you start a show in the first place? That's the first question you have to ask yourself. I knew why I started the show. I wanted to build an entirely new audience that was going to be consuming our content while they're in their car instead of reading our content, because I knew there were readers and there were listeners. It just, for me, wasn't really working. And I just said to myself, we had commercials, if you will, for our products, and no one was clicking on them. I mean, literally no one. There was no activity at all. No matter what we did, there was literally no activity. And of course, we can acknowledge that podcasting is a passive medium, and it's hard for people to be active when they're on the go. But literally, I had more activity the day that I said I was going to cancel it than I ever had ever in the entire history of the show, as far as people emailing, reaching out, clicking, anything like that. So I think that there's this fallacy that we have in our brain, Paul, which says that we have to create content, and if we do not create content, we will not be successful. Now, I will tell you that I do believe that those that are successful create content, but I think that the fallacy is we have to create all sorts of different types of content across all sorts of different types of mediums to be successful. I've canceled a YouTube show. I've canceled another podcast prior to this one called Parenting Adventures. I stop things all the time because here's the deal. There's only so much of Paul Culligan to go around. There's only so much of Mike Stelzner to go around. And in the end, if you don't stop something, you can't start something. And this is what I preach to my team all the time. You want to start something, what are you going to stop? It's like with my kids, they want to add something to their iPhone. Okay, you delete two apps and you get one.

That's good. That's good. The audience for this show, the avatar, if you will. I mean, obviously, anyone can listen to it, but the avatar for the show are those who spend the type of money that you're chatting with. 30,000 as a budget for a podcast is unheard of in some circles, but for the audience of the show, it is standard and sounds about right. Some bookkeepers Some number crunchers would say, well, I mean, how many downloads did you get this month?

66,000 in January.

So 66,000 times a $40 cpm. I mean, there's a few bucks there. Could you have brought this show down to, say, a 10k budget, given it to someone else, and kept it running? Why didn't you go that path?

Well, here's the reality, okay? When you do a daily show, it sounds like a lot when you hear 66,000. But I'm looking at the numbers right now. The 227 on the last show, 78 on the one before that, 40 on the one before that, 62 on the one before that. We're talking really, really small numbers distributed across many, many episodes. So would you be willing to pay anything to get to 60 to 200 people a month when you hear the number 66,000? See, the deal is, it's lots and lots and lots of episodes. We're talking hundreds of episodes a year. So the reality is that the numbers are just, you know, I'm sorry, that's February. So for January, we're talking 490, 600, 790. Pretty small numbers for me and pretty small numbers for an advertiser. Most advertisers want to be in front of a much bigger list. And by the way, we don't accept advertising. We're not in the business of doing any ads on our podcast because we produce all of our content exclusively for our sole sponsor, which is our company, Social Media examiner, which has two products, and one of those products is a conference, and one of them is an online society. That's it. We're not in the business of creating content to basically allow someone to pay us pennies on the dollar. We'd rather create it to sell what we have. And that's another thing. We only invest in creating audiences that are specifically drawing the kinds of customers we want to draw to ourselves, or people, if you will, a subset of which should become customers. And if they do not, then the content always must be called into question.

You brought up Essentialism. It's funny. One of my clients in two weeks will be releasing an episode with the author of Essentialism, and the person who's doing the notes for me emailed me earlier today and said, thank you. I should be paying you for this. No, she's still charging me, but that's a whole other story. And focus, purpose, reason. Good stuff. Thank you for that, Mike. I think anyone listening to this would say, yeah, why did I do this show? What was I Looking to get. And is there a better way to do it? You know, one of my other most popular shows in this is the forums of podcast monetization, which was, you know, what's your market? What's your message? Where's the money? And then what's the media? And sometimes, sometimes podcasting isn't it? And what's really interesting with you, Mike, I just kind of realized this as you were chatting was the market, the message, the money was still the same. You just realizing that the podcast media wasn't the way to get these articles. You're still doing the articles. You're still doing the blog. SocialMediaExtemper.com is still a machine.

There's millions of people reading that stuff. Yes, exactly. We just knew that this wasn't working. And by the way, some people might be asking, what are the signals? When I should stop. Well, I'll tell you what, our signals were really horrible itunes reviews, first of all, which was part of the feedback that we got from people. Secondly, the download numbers just didn't match with the other shows that we had done or specifically the main show that I do. And the positive feedback was completely absent with my main show. Social media marketing. I get tweets almost every day from people saying how it's changed their life. So, you know, it's not about the numbers, the quantities. It's about the impact for me. And I just knew, like, we care so much about quality at social Media examiner that if we're not, you know, I would be fine with the numbers if I knew it was truly impacting people. Because in the end, we don't need a lot of the millions of people that consume all of our content. We just need thousands, you know, to be successful, and we're getting them. But this medium for this show, for this type of content was not working. I am still a very strong proponent in podcasting, just not that particular one.

One of the big rifts for this show is impact, not downloads. Said in a past episode that if you had. Of course I said that when the political climate was a bit different, but I, you know, once said that if you had a show that was only downloaded by one person, but that one person was the president of the United States, you'd still do the show.

Absolutely.

So let's talk to your core business, because that's both a theme for this show as well as why I brought you on here. You're doing social media marketing world again. I love the event. It's a ton of fun. I always tell people not A lot of events where I network on an aircraft carrier. That's just. Everybody always wonders how do you get people to show up and, well, network on an aircraft carrier. That'll do it.

Absolutely.

You have podcasting elements. You have, I don't know if it's, I guess, okay, it's an official track. You haven't done a workshop this year, but you got a whole track.

Yes, exactly.

I'm on it. I'm doing a thing with, I got John Lee Dumas, I've got Gary Leland, and I've got Rob Walsh, and we're going to be chatting about monetization options. We're going to have fun because we're actually going to use real numbers. Not a one day in the future we will comma. But here's what's happening. We've got all the usual suspects are there. First of all, what's the goal? What's going to make 17 different than 16, other than probably a lot more people?

Well, first of all, we never had an entire track with 10 sessions on podcasting. And we actually do have some workshops like Michael o' Neill is doing one on how to conduct killer interviews. Interviews to grow your business. Now, somebody might, might say, well, that could be video or audio. It's true. But he, he is specifically a podcaster. And we've got David H. Lawrence talking about how to create videos that build authority on a moment's notice. But understanding how to do the video could also apply to audio. I mean, there's, there's a lot of that kind of stuff. So, so here's the.

So are you saying the podcast world bleeds into the social media world?

Absolutely.

Ok, keep going.

If you look at my speaker lineup, I'll bet you that of the 150 to 200 speakers, at least 50 to 100 of them are podcasters. And this has always been the case. Those that are actively, every week teaching or interviewing experts are excellent communicators. They can teach themselves. And a huge swatch of the presenters in many different categories are actually active podcasters. So in addition, a lot of people are trying to figure out how to exert influence or they want to become an influencer. So influencer marketing is a key strategy for social media marketers. And one way to do that is to start a podcast. Content in general is a huge part of what we do. We have more than 40 sessions on everything from blogging to podcasting to live video to YouTube and video in addition to all the standard social media stuff. So at social media marketing World what we're trying to do is we're trying to the umbrella to all genres of creators. But what makes this different than, for example, blog world that doesn't exist anymore and other events that might be just specialty for podcasting is that these are business professionals. This is not like people that are hobbyists. Right? These are people that have real businesses because this is not an inexpensive conference. So it's almost like a different level of podcasters. You have a lot of people that are in the corporate world that are trying to start podcasts. You have a lot of people run successful businesses that are trying that podcasting is a part of the strategy that they use to grow their business. So that's kind of the distinct unique thing about this event that you're not going to find anywhere else. And you know that. Paul, you've been there for years.

I want to chat a bit to the phrasing that you use because I don't know if it was on purpose, but I think it's key. These are business professionals. Now some of the other podcasting shows would say, well, we have the business, we have professionals in the business of podcasting, not necessarily the business professionals, but, you know, but the business of podcasting. And I think that subtle difference is part of what is, is necessary and kind of, kind of missing from this industry. Like I said a little bit earlier, you're not going to stop writing articles just because the podcast went down. You sat and you made a decision, okay, this is how we're going to influence. This is who we're going to reach. This is how we're going to bring more people to the event. This is how we're going to bring more people in our membership site. And podcasting is not part of it. You made a bigger decision than a podcast decision. You made a business decision.

Correct.

And I think someone can go to. And this is the nature of events. This isn't that Mike necessarily discovered something that nobody else has. This is just sort of the nature of a broad ranging event versus a tight event. But I think it's really important. I've always been frustrated with people who have their marketing plan and then their podcast plan because it doesn't work when podcasting becomes part of your marketing plan, when social becomes part of your marketing plan. I had a. Oh, Mike. I had a conversation with a client. We were talking about tracking and I said, you know, well, let's track how many email addresses you get because let's face it, nobody sells anything on Instagram. And there's this awkward Pause. And I go, okay, awkward pause. What's going on? She goes, paul, we've sold everything off of Instagram. Every dime we've made has been through Instagram. Like, oh, well, there we go. Look at that. The world is bigger than even Paul realizes. So I didn't necessarily get that gig after a statement like that, but, you know, it's a big world. And when you are able to look at the world in its entirety, I love the fact that Lawrence is coming in to chat about that outside of the podcasting space, because outside the podcasting space is where it's really important. And the cool thing is Lawrence will speak to a video that will work great on a video podcast, will work great on a YouTube show, which has its own industry event, which will work great on a Facebook Live, which would have its own industry event, which worked great on a DVD series, which could have its own industry event. But when you get a chance to see how it all fits together, you're in an interesting place. So how does podcasting and social media mix?

Well, I think content and social media are like brother and sister. And there's a lot like content marketing world, obviously, is the big corporate enterprise conference that I've been to every single year for the super gargantuous corporations. I don't know if you've ever been there or not, but it's very, very big corporation run by my good friend Joe Polizzi. When I started working with him and got inspired to start this conference, it was really kind of an easy decision because you can't really be successful without content, and it's hard to be successful without social. So it does make a lot of sense. The difference between social media is that it's forever in flux and content is a craft that you can master and is not constantly changing. So we just learned early in our journey that we really started with blogging, because that was my area of expertise, that bloggers were super interested in social media marketing, and eventually YouTubers and video creators were, and podcasters are too. So it makes a lot of sense to attract all those people to our event, because in the end, the overarching thing that they all care about is how do they promote, how do they grow an audience, how do they do whatever they need to do to better sell their products and services using all these different mediums. I don't know any successful podcaster that's not actively thinking about a social strategy. That's the reason we do it, because we see that they're interconnected.

Let's be Very clear on specifics for the audience. You have a podcasting track and if someone wanted to just do the podcasting thing, you've got a session for every single.

They could sit nonstop and podcasting stuff.

They could sit nonstop, podcasting.

Okay.

Now if they wanted to dip their toe into the, you know, you know, go to one workshops or live video, that kind of thing, they could not only do that, get a bigger picture, but as part of the investment in the event, they get the recordings for everything so they can go home and catch what they missed once the videos come out. Is that correct?

Yes. This is definitely not a small conference. So we have 12 simultaneous sessions going on. You can pop in and out of all of them. It's kind of a Disneyland ticket kind of experience. But you get recordings of apps. When you come to the event, you get recordings of literally everything. And if you can't come to the event, we do have a virtual ticket which will also give you the recordings to everything. So, you know, we're a believer that, you know, we don't want to, you know, I've experienced this. You and I met at one of these kind of conferences where you had to pay a premium to get to access to certain stuff, you know, and nobody was in there because nobody paid the premium. You know, we just, at this point at least, it's just kind of go wherever you want, you know, because, you know, we know that so many people are interested. You know, whether you're in the corporate track, you still might be interested in learning about podcasting for your big old corporation, or if you're a just beginning blogger, you might want to add a podcast to it. So, yeah, you go wherever you want, whenever you want.

One of my. And you and I have chatted about this a lot offline and I've been glad the recorders haven't been running. One of my biggest frustrations with the industry is I get clients who go, which event should I go to? And I get a little scared because some of the events are so inside baseball and so narrow minded and so focused that it's almost like if you're not podcasting five days a week with this style, you're a bad person. And I get a little scared. But I've never been scared to invite somebody to social media marketing world. And I think it's because it is the entire picture. There's a balance between sometimes you go to an event and the first person stands up and says, to successfully run an email campaign, you must do this. And then the next person stands up and says, if you've ever done this, which is what the first guy recommended, you're an idiot. Then you get all these conflicting messages. There is that at times when you get a bunch of people on stage. But I think what you've got at your event, Mike, is you've got so many voices that you're forced to kind of choose your own adventure. You're forced to kind of choose your own path. Nobody's ever going to walk away and go, the only thing I got away from this event was session three, track five.

Yes. And by the way, every single person that's speaking, we have some sort of a direct relationship with. We build, you know, with the exception of maybe a couple panelists, but we know the person running the panel really well and we trust them to put that panel together. So we are very carefully recruiting people that we know are excellent teachers, are smart, are willing to be there and not just leave. We don't bring the super high profile celebrities like other events do. And then you listen to them and all they do is talk about their success and leave. And you're like, well what did I just get out of that? You know, these are actually all marketers. It's all 100% marketers by marketers, for marketers. And we do networking like nobody's business. We really do. And that's kind of the fun part of the whole thing, is that you can meet a lot of people that are just like you on your journey. And so many mastermind groups and business relationships have happened as a result of kind of the way we spin things. And you know, it's just, it just came out of Paul years of me going to all these other events and being really disappointed and giving and giving lots of feedback to the event organizers and it falling on deaf ears. And I just said, you know what? I'm going to start my own.

Yep, I'm going to give a social media marketing world tip to anybody who's attending or. Every year, every year it ends at about 5, the keynote. I go to my hotel, it's been exhausted, there's a lot. I usually order a meal every year. I relax, I sit down and then I go. I want to see who's down in the bar and then I go downstairs to the bar and the power users are there. And there has not been a time when I've gone to social media marketing world where the post event networking wasn't worth the price of admission alone.

The pre event networking is the same. You know, we have slack groups going on right now, months before the event. And actually, funny enough, last year, like two days before the event, we had a meetup and 500 of the attendees met up in one of the bars and we practically closed the place down. So it's just, you know, this is a unique crowd. It's almost like a summer camp experience. I don't know how else to. And what's really cool is these speakers are always hanging around. You're going to bump into them everywhere. It is a unique thing. I'm really blessed, honestly, that so many amazing people say yes every year to come back to this thing.

I want to be careful not to make this too much an ad. Although, obviously with two big fans, you're going to get the pro stuff. But I want to go back to the circle of this conversation because I think it's key. Several years ago, I brought Mike on the show. Mike had launched another show leveraging his existing content, multicasting, whatever the term is. He does it, he's excited about it. We call him visionary. A lot of people talk about it, a lot of people mention it, it. And then, you know, a little while later, he, he shuts it down. And he doesn't shut it down because it's doa. He shuts it down because it doesn't make sense to the larger business at play. And I think that message is huge for everyone dealing with content and dealing with business and trying to figure these things out. Now what's interesting is, is this podcast still ranks higher even though it's been, I don't know, dead is the right word.

Because like you said, let's just say it's gone.

It's gone. Even though it's gone, it's ranking higher than some shows from gurus who teach you how to do shows that make you all the. All sorts of fascinating implications there. And then I said, but Mike, run the numbers. You could just throw ads on this. And again, back to essentialism, back to the focus. Sometimes it makes sense, but here it.

It doesn't.

What it is.

One more thing, Paul. One more thing, Paul. Because we stopped it, we were able to start something new that we've never done before that's revolutionary. We are now doing these NPR style audio documentaries at the front of our show that people are going nuts over. And we couldn't have done it if we didn't have the resources and some of that money available to invest to create these behind the scenes stories of how we do what we do at Social Media examiner that people have been going gaga over. So just always think to yourself, man, if I stop something, what's out there on the horizon waiting for me? Because I'm never going to get there if I don't stop.

There we go. A chance to put all this together. I'm going to be chatting about some of the other events in future episodes, and I do go to some of the other events, but if you want an opportunity to see how it all comes together, I would. I would recommend it, like Mike said. And I, from the very beginning, told Mike, make it available. Make it available, make it available. Mike have known each other for a while, obviously, and the home pass is definitely awesome. And it was funny. I can't remember who I was chatting.

With, but at the end, talking about the virtual ticket.

Yeah, the virtual ticket, exactly. And so at the end, so he's freaking out, I go, we'll just get the virtual ticket. And there's like, there's this exhale. So if the contents, which need. You've got that. But the place is a buzz. You know, a lot of people don't know this, but it's the same place where they hold Comic Con. And sometimes it's that. That same kind of buzz and same kind of excitement, I'm going to be there. My affiliate link to it is out of the podcastreport.com118, which is also this episode. And if you pick it up through me, I will. We're getting together, doing a little breakfast for anybody who comes in through my account. Really? Paid for directly by your own money, but that's kind of the fun of the game. Doing my session with Rob from Libson, John from Entrepreneur on Fire, and Gary Leland, who you may not know, but you will love, and I'll tell you, his vision for business and his vision for how it all comes together is going to be pretty fantastic. Mike, you've been doing it for a long time. You've been doing it well. I've always appreciated your enthusiasm for podcasting and looking forward to this year's event. And I'm going to give you the last word.

Just keep up the good work, Paul. And to everyone who's listening to Paul's show, I love his new focus, and I think this is the way to go. I'm very excited. I've been an avid listener ever since he started this show, and I would encourage you to, if you're new, listen to Paul. Listen to Paul. He is a bright mind, and I've known him for years.

Thank you, Michael. Take that, man.